So be careful if you activate S3 bucket logging, your the PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests will be higher and you will be charged for them, although your are logging within the S3 infrastructure to another bucket.

At this point i want to recommend a nice S3 GUI tool for managing your S3 infrstructure: S3 Bucketexplorer

Bei der Wahl zum 17. Deutschen Bundestag am 27. September 2009 sind etwa 62 Millionen Deutsche wahlberechtigt. 3556 Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten bewerben sich am 27. September um einen Sitz im Bundestag. „Wen wählen?“ fragen sich heute noch viele Menschen, denn immer mehr Wähler entscheiden sich immer kurzfristiger. „Etwa 40 Prozent beschäftigen sich erst in den letzten zwei Wochen mit der Wahl und entscheiden dann, für welche Partei sie stimmen – oft auch erst am Wahltag“, sagt Prof. Dr. Frank Brettschneider, Politologe an der Universität Hohenheim.

Eine Analyse der Volz Innovation GmbH zeigt, dass 3050 Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten der Bundestagswahl 2009 (rund 85%) im Internet präsent sind und so die Meinungsbildung der Wähler zusätzlich zu den Internetpräsenzen ihrer Parteien unterstützen. Die „Online-Quote“ der Bewerber um die Mandate unterscheidet sich allerdings erheblich zwischen den Parteien selbst. Die CSU ist die einzige große Partei, bei der alle Kandidaten online zu finden sind. Unter den kleinen Parteien trifft dies nur für die PBC (Partei Bibeltreuer Christen), die Freie Union und die Freien Wähler Deutschland (FWD) in Brandenburg zu. Die Schlusslichter bilden die Kandidaten der Deutschen Kommunistischen Partei (DKP) und des Zentrums, von welchen weniger als ein Fünftel Informationen über sich im Internet bereitstellen.

Informationen über die Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten der kleinen Parteien können oft nur über Kandidatenverzeichnisse wie abgeordnetenwatch.de gefunden werden. Dies ist bei über 80% der Kandidaten der Bayernpartei (BP) und der FWD der Fall. Die besten Informationen zu rund 190 Kandidaten der im Parlament vertretenen Parteien finden sich bei wahl.de. Über 60% der zur Wahl stehenden Personen nehmen den Aufwand eines eigenen Internet-Angebotes in Kauf, welches dann entweder unter eigenen Internet-Adressen oder auf Unterseiten von Internet-Adressen ihrer Partei zu finden ist.

Die einzelnen Internetauftritte sind oft nur schwer zu finden. Dies zeigt auf, dass nur wenige Bundestagskandidaten eine Suchmaschinenoptimierung vornehmen, um bei den großen Suchmaschinen unter den ersten Suchergebnissen zu stehen. Zur Demonstration des neuen Internetdienst KNOXOS (www.knoxos.com), der sich auf die Suche in selbstdefinierten Teilen des Web konzentriert, hat die Volz Innovation GmbH die Liste der Kandidatenwebseiten zusammengetragen und deren Inhalte in KNOXOS durchsuchbar gemacht.

Damit steht eine präzise Suchmaschine für die Informationen auf den Startseiten der Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten zur Verfügung, welche die eigene Wahlentscheidung unterstützen kann. KNOXOS zeigt darüber hinaus immer aktuell auf, welche Anstrengungen die Kandidaten in dieser letzten „heißen“ Woche vor der Wahl auf sich nehmen. Viele Kandidaten berichten online über Ihre öffentlichen Auftritte und nehmen Stellung zu Fragen der Wähler.

KNOXOS (www.knoxos.com) ist ein neuer Internetdienst, der interessante Inhalte im Web für seine Nutzer beobachtet und durchsuchbar macht. KNOXOS zeigt gefundene Aktualisierungen in einer Änderungsansicht sofort an. KNOXOS hilft dabei, im Web nichts mehr zu verpassen und alles wieder zu finden.

KNOXOS ist ein Internet-Dienst der Volz Innovation GmbH (www.volzinnovation.com) und wurde im Frühjahr 2009 im Gründerwettbewerb Multimedia des Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie (BMWi) ausgezeichnet. Die neuartige Suchtechnologie in KNOXOS wurde zum Teil im Forschungsprogramm THESEUS entwickelt. THESEUS (www.theseus-programm.de) ist ein deutsches Forschungsprogramm mit dem Ziel, eine neue internetbasierte Wissensinfrastruktur zu entwickeln.

Both protect and clean your mobile device
We came up with the idea when we noticed that touchscreen devices, such as digital cameras, iPhone, etc. become dirty quickly due to grease spots and finger prints on the touchscreen surface. Currently available bags and boxes only have limited support for cleaning mechanisms, e.g. a bag with microfiber lining. Such bags suffer from lack of stability and robustness of the outer shell and do not protect the device from physical damage. Therefore, our cleaning mechanism is targeted at boxes, such as belt pouches, which can be equipped with a hard shell that protects the device.

If you are interested in learning more about our patented mechanism or would like to get in touch to purchase a prototypical belt pouch, just drop us a line.

Publication number: DE202009002049 (U1)

After Scalr was set up as described in my first post, some additional configurations have to be done to get in detailed touch with Scalr 1.1.0.
First log in as admin user to the Scalr frontend and create a new system user (”Client”) and activate it. After successful login with the new created and active user, you have to enter your AWS credentials and upload your public and private key from your AWS account.

The next screenshot show the configuration within my user.

Be aware to set this configuration right otherwise you will not be able to proceed.

If all settings are correct, you will be redirected to your dashboard view (which is known from the admin view).

In the next step we create a so called “Farm”. Within this option we assigne “Roles” – that means we will instance images (you can take a look for the available images under the option “Roles”).

A Server Farm is a logical group of EC2 machines that serve your application. It can include load balancers, databases, web severs, and other custom servers. Servers in these farms can be redundant, self curing, and auto-scaling.

If you receive an error while loading the site – “Error Type: LoadXML Description: Incorrect XML”, you will get a solution here in this blog post by Octavian Neacsu. You have to modify your apache settings as mentioned in Octavian’s post.

When the farm is configured and set up, scalr build it when you click the save button (I decided to launch the instances manually). In the farm overview you can now launch the instances you need. For that you only have to click under “Farms” on “Roles -view”. Under the drop down “Options” button it is possible to launch instances manually.

If launching instances throws an exception as “… \nFatal error: Class \’HttpRequest\’ not found …” this post in Scalr discussion group will help you out of that problem.

When instances are launched successful it should look like this screenshot.

As the screenshot above shows, within my workflow, I launched 2 instances.

Details are available under “Intances>View”. In my case I launched for the start one base www and one app“Farm role”.

As best know from connecting to EC2 instances, you can download under “Farms” your private key and login via ssh with the command:

ssh -i <nameofyourfarm.pm> <public IP>

Don’t forget to chmod your private key, otherwise you will get an error like this: "It is recommended that your private key files are NOT accessible by others. This private key will be ignored."

At this point I want to warn you about a possible issue (I reported to the mailinglist): launched instances are not shown in the AWS console under “Instances”. You will only see them at the frontpage of the AWS console dashboard. But you can terminate the launched instances within the Sclar interface under “Instances » View” > “Options” > “Terminate” (you can enable the option “Decrease ‘Mininimum instances’ setting” – the detailed instances settings you can modify under “Edit Farm” > “Shared Roles” > “Scaling options”).

At this point Scalr is installed and configured with an another system user as the admin user. It is possible to add Farms and launch instances through EC2.

In the next step I will deploy a grails application in my Scalr environment and will do some loadbalancing and performance configurations and tests – Iwill post my results in my blog under the title “Scalr 1.1.0 – getting in touch – Part III”.

Feel free to comment …

• Cloud Computing
• Grid Computing
• Distributed Computing
• Virtualization

The next screenshot shows my query configuration:

I selected all categories because google will list those for you automaticly (in my case, the categories were: Computers & Electronics, Reference, Local, Entertainment, Society, Internet)

The interest over time is displayed in following graph:

A nice feature at this point is the “Forecast”-function. You can select it and the baseline in the graph will end in the future.

Furthermore for the search term Cloud Computing is listed and separated into top searches:

and were listed and separated into rising search:

The “Regional interest” and the complete Web Search Interest is available under http://1.abe.nu/51a

Interesting are also the results of “Regional interest” – here India is with all search terms in the top two. USA is only on fifth position with search terms “Cloud Computing” and “Virtualiszation” (Germany is even never in the top ten – that also shows a bit the interest?).

I think this search query in Google Insight Search showed, that Cloud Computing is much more discussed than Grid Computing has ever been. Virtualization is still a main topic in IT and will be so for the next years from my point of view.

What’s about the Dasein Coud API?

Dasein Cloud provides a cloud-independent interface in Java for accessing cloud resources. If you are writing an application to manage your cloud infrastructure, you write the calls against the Dasein Cloud API without having to learn the specifics of the web services calls from different providers like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Cloud providers can then provide cloud-specific implementations of the API that simply plug in to your application without any need for changing your code. The model is very much like JDBC.

This approach sounds very intersting, but is from my point of view on the providers and players of cloud computing services. Georg mantoined that also in his article.

enStratus has made available its Amazon Web Services implementation both as a reference implementation and a working system for Dasein Cloud + AWS. enStratus will be releasing implementations for other providers, and hopefully providers will begin providing their own implementations.

I think about the motivation for providers to contribute to the Dasein Cloud API. Is it not likely that a provider focus on its own API sets first? I think only with a large distribution and from a certain awareness, a provider will be motivated to provide his own implementations. I’m excited about the Dasein Cloud API future progress and which providers would provide their own implementations.

It’s clear that a common standard for a independent Cloud API in general would have a positive impact for all players in Cloud Computing…

The following independent “Cloud API approaches” I have researched so far amongst others for my Master Thesis:

• libcloud (standard client library for cloud management)
• Dasein Cloud API (cloud-independent interface in Java for accessing cloud resources)
• Open Cloud Computing Interface OCCI (deliver an API specification for remote management)

What are other promising projects of this kind?

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