If Twitter Consisted of 100 People [Gorgeous Graphics]
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If Twitter Consisted of 100 People [Gorgeous Graphics]
August 17th, 2009http://1.abe.nu – yet another Url Shortener built with Google App Engine
August 16th, 2009Since Twitter and other microblogging services became so pupular, url shortener (e.g. bit.ly, tinyurl.com, ow.ly, etc.) are experiencing an other renaissance and are very popular again.
To build your own URL shortener within minutes you only need:
- a fancy URL
- Google App Engine
- wmshorty
wmshorty is an Url Shortener for Google App Engine. You only have to follow the fews steps described on the project site, to set up wmshorty with Google App Engine. I used my own domain within Google Apps as described here. You have to configure your own domain within Google Apps. There is no other possibility to do that – for me a, at that point, disadvantage of Google App Engine – the PaaS of Google. Maybe in the future there will be other ways to configure own domains within Google App Engine…
If you are using WordPress you might be interested in this related article “WP.me — shorten your links“. This article is about WordPress own url shortener “wp.me”. I will use my own url shortener http://1.abe.nu , built like desrcibed above to get some performance results within Google App Engine which results (if these are meaningful) will be used in my Master Thesis research.
TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense
August 16th, 2009Would it not be awesome to have a “Sixth Sense” ? Read the interesting article TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense — Video and get impressed how a “Sixth Human Sense” might look like in the future.
The research project site is available here.
What The Hell Is Cloud Computing?
August 12th, 2009A classic: IT’s “enfant terrible” – Larry Ellison explain Cloud Computing in his irresistible nature (found on youtube):
If you ask yourself, is Larry Ellison really anti-cloud computing? This good post by William Hurley gives you a possible answer:
… Larry’s comments about cloud computing remind me of the times he bashed virtualisation back in the day. Everyone spread similar rumours then, and the transition from hatin’ to embracin’ looked almost identical.
In other words, Larry didn’t have an informed opinion the first time he was asked about virtualisation. Once he did, his story quickly changed from disparaging virtualisation to announcing Oracle VM, and eventually acquiring companies like Virtual Iron. So far my sources say the alleged cloud computing reversal is the same situation…
John Willis Guest Blogging at Force of Good – Government’s Gone Cloud
August 12th, 2009John Willis posted a cool guest article on Lance Weatherby’s weblog. The introduction to the post:
Last week the first sentence of an article in the InformationWeek periodical specifically targeted at IT employees of the U.S. Government read as follows:
‘The General Services Administration has issued a Request For Quotation for cloud storage, Web hosting, and virtual machine services.’
You can read the whole post here.
Scalr 1.1.0 – getting in touch – Part I
August 6th, 2009Today my friend and business partner Raphael pointed me to the new release of Scalr. I knew Scalr from the past, but i did not get in detailed touch yet. Scalr released version 1.1.0 under the GPL v2- and now I thought about to give it a detailed try.
Scalr promise alot of value within Cloud Computing and the use of Amazon EC2.
Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment using Amazon’s EC2.
It allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI’s for load balancers (pound, nginx, or Amazon’s load balancing service), app servers (apache, rails, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.
The health of the farm is continuously monitored and maintained. When the Load Average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes a new machine of that type is inserted into the farm to replace it.
Multiple AMI’s are provided for load balancers, mysql databases, application servers, and a generic base image to customize. Scalr allows you to further customize each image, bundle the image and use that for future nodes that are inserted into the farm. You can make changes to one machine and use that for a specific type of node. New machines of this type will be brought online to meet current levels and the old machines are terminated one by one.
Under http://www.scalr.net is also a pay service available, but i want to build my own environment.
If you want to install Scalr the wiki is a good starting point.
I droped some lines here in my blog to document my installation on a Ubuntu 9.04 Server.
Systemrequirements are definied on the project website as follows:
My server installation was build up with a LAMP. A good How-To for LAMP installation you can find here.
I had to customize my PHP5 installation for the required PHP extension listed in the project wiki. I searched for the plugins with following command
apt-cache search php5-*, and installed the required extensions manually.
Furthermore I created a database for scalr and a valid user for it.
# mysql -u -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 41
Server version: 5.0.75-0ubuntu10.2 (Ubuntu)
mysql> CREATE DATABASE ;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON .* TO ""@"localhost" IDENTIFIED BY "";
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
mysql> EXIT
Bye
List of VC Twitter Accounts: Are You Following the Funds?
August 5th, 2009Found a nice article on O’reilly’s Under The Radar blog.
Want an inside look into what VCs are doing and thinking? Wish you could get into their heads to know what they’re actually looking for so you can tailor your pitch “just so?”
Here’s your chance. Twitter provides a way to follow and communicate with many of the startup world’s top funders – and the social warmth it provides in being able to hear their insights and ask questions is terrific.
List of VC Twitter Accounts: Are You Following the Funds?
From now i am following some of those VC’s (e.g. Guy Kawasaki) – looking forward to get some cool and interesting informations about venture strategies and ventured startups via Twitter.
Ian Foster – What’s faster–a supercomputer or EC2?
August 5th, 2009I found this interesting article about a comparison today, you should read the whole article here:
- On EC2, I am told that it may take ~5 minutes to start 32 nodes (depending on image size), so with high probability we will finish the LU benchmark within 100 + 300 = 400 secs.
- On the supercomputer, we can use Rich Wolksi’s QBETS queue time estimation service to get a bound on the queue time. When I tried this in June, QBETS told me that if I wanted 32 nodes for 20 seconds, the probability of me getting those nodes within 400 secs was only 34%–not good odds.
ianfoster.typepad.com, Ian Foster, Aug 2009
These comparisons depends from my point of view always on experienced data and mainly on your various scenario Neutral declarations are hard to find. I asked Thijs Metsch for some experienced data of RESERVOIR project he mentoined in Twitter. Looking forward for an answer from him…
Does anyone else have some own experienced data for starting EC2 images in different environments and with various scenarios?
Fireside Chat with Greg Papadopoulos & Werner Vogels
August 5th, 2009I watched an absorbing discussion about Cloud Computing on cloudbooknet.
Former keynote speakers Greg Papadopoulos, CTO and EVP, Research and Development at Sun Microsystems and Werner Vogels, VP and CTO at Amazon.com, return to share their thoughts on the rise of Cloud Computing and what direction they see Amazon and Sun leading the evolution of the Cloud Computing industry and the opportunities it generates.
There are some more videos of Werner Vogels you can check out on cloudbook.net website – i can also recommend his nice blog All Things Distributed.
Seamus McManus: Beekeeper; Father of Cloud Computing
August 5th, 2009IBM is introducing in a funny video to Cloud Computing:
ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud: A Trusted Cloud Entropy Authority
August 4th, 2009Ruv Cohen posted in his blog an intersting thought about a “Trusted Cloud Entropy Authority” ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud: A Trusted Cloud Entropy Authority
Gordon says “How about getting signed entropy from a trusted server on the network/internet?”Gordon’s comments did get me thinking, maybe there an opportunity to create a trusted cloud authority to provide signed verified and certified entropy. Think of it like a certificate authority (CA) but for chaos. Actually, Amazon Web Service itself could act as this entropy authority via a simple encrypted web service call. I even have a name for it, Simple Entropy Service (SES).
This idea is very exciting and useful. However, if you are to classical CA’s thinking as e.g. “Web Server Certificate” field, then i believe only an independent CA guarantees in such a position, future potential of Cloud Computing without a provider lock-in. The provider lock-in here refers not only to the CA itself, but also to pave the CA by a certified Provider / Services. In my view, therefore the target must be to create a largely self-sufficient CA, which also allows small businesses and companies to be able to offer certified and therefore “trusted” Cloud Computing services and resources without an expensive certification process. If you think for example on Amazon EC2 Images, it should be possible in future to continue creating an own AMI image but then also free from Amazon certify it. That would be a real added value – for Amazon as IaaS Provider and for us as AWS user and enabler.
The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack
August 3rd, 2009Found another quite interesting article on TechCrunch about “The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack”
The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack
A short quote of author’s conclusion:
What’s the takeaway from all this? Cloud services are convenient and cheap, and can help a company grow more quickly. But security infrastructure is still nascent. And while any single service can be fairly secure, the important thing is that the ecosystem most certainly is not. Combine the fact that so much personal information about individuals is so easily findable on the web with the reality that most people have merged their work and personal identities and you’ve got the seed of a problem. A single Gmail account falls, and soon the security integrity of an entire startup crumbles. So for a start, reset those passwords and don’t use the same passwords for different services. Don’t use password recovery questions that can easily be answered with a simple web search (an easy solution is to answer those questions falsely). And just in general be paranoid about data security. You may be happy you were.
I totally agree with that point of view. From my experience most users (private and business) use weak same passwords for different services.
For choosing and creating good and strong passwords follow this guide.
