April 18, 2009
Meuon
1 comment
keywords:
UtiliFlex
Juice
GPL
PrePaid
Electricity
| Proud Papa Again |
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Every once in a while you get to build something you are really proud of. The "UtiliFlex Juice PrePaid/Pay-As-You-Go Electricity/Utility platform" has become such a beast.
I'm standing next to a complete working system, including an awesome firewall, 2 Asterisk based IVR servers, SMS/text Gateways, and an Intel Modular Server. It's about to be shipped to Guyana Power and Light in South America and will help run a significant percentage of the utility. the screen shows only one of the compute modules, with 8 CPU's, 32gb of ram.. etc..
It will allow people in that country to do something they haven't been doing much of: Buy electricity. In their context, prepaid is an enabler. It allows people to purchase electricity as they need it and as they can afford it, without a penalty for getting disconnected because they can't afford the bill that came too late for them to do anything about.
There are some people that deserve some serious credit for helping me get Juice to this level of system:
Joe Gordon. My cohort in UtiliFlex, owner of UtiliSol He's been a pleasure to work with and develop Juice with. His vision, drive, insight, intelligence, tolerence and ethics are without peer.
Lucius Hilley, Programmer. The kind that does hex/ascii/cipher math in his head whle coding in 3 or 6 languages at once while putting up with a lot of schtuff from me.
Isaac Ingram, Programmer. While we aren't using much of his excellent mapserver/event-outage management code in this system, a little of his soul permeates.
Dave Brockman, SysAdmin. Helped me configure and setup the Intel Modular Server in record time, without laughing too much.
Catherine Colby, Tim Galbreth and Rob Shaw, UtiliFlex Sales and Project team. Lots of interface, code and functionality improvements and quality control, as well as a significant part of the documentation.
Oh, and Ben, Judy, Mark and the team at MicroTronics for being a great supplier of high end hardware.
Side note: Isaac did the original GeekLabs logo's back in 1998. I think I've grown to look more like my cartoon self over time.. |
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2009-05-04