the stinkin’ blog

This article. is a straightforward method for creating a envelope template in OpenOffice without trying to find the envelope wizard.

Woohoo!

I forced a brief hiatus of my server whilst I upgraded it to a new server distro. Can you guess which one? Ubuntu Server, of course. I ended up learning a lot about debian distros and am now almost 100% running again. What fun!!!

I plan on posting a few items here that need some documenting shortly.

When I moved to my new position with Canonical one of the immediately noticeable items was the lack of a collaborative system (never really had a need due to their size). I am used to using a collaboration system of some sort even if they really suck. So I needed to figure out how to bridge a few gaps and be able to use my crackberry with thunderbird and allow my fellow employees to view/share my calendar.

The solution, tie Google Calendar with Thunderbird through Lightning and the Provider for Google Calendar. My first attempt failed because I was missing a library - libstd5++. After adding gcc 3.0 to my system, I had libstd5++ installed. I then added the latest Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar add-on and I was good to go after restarting Thunderbird.

The next step was simply creating a new network-based calendar, choosing Google and adding the private XML URI (from the Google Calendar settings) to Thunderbird, entering my credentials and voila, shared calendar shows in Thunderbird!

Now I can use Google Sync on my crackberry and sync it all together very easily. May seem difficult, but in reality it just required a bit of setup and I can now enjoy the freedom of Thunderbird running on Ubuntu tapping into the wonders of Google Calendar. Need to see what I am doing today, tomorrow or next month? Just ping me and I’m happy to show you!

The Ubuntu Server team has requested the assistance of anyone using Linux as a server in their environment to fill out a survey. Canonical, Ltd. (the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu) is diligently working to understand how the enterprise is using Ubuntu as a server and what needs to be done to make the server usable in the enterprise.

The announcement can be found here.

Stop over and spend some valuable time. If Ubuntu’s desktop is a sign, the server will be well worth the effort spent.

In this blog entry, Chris Brogan has some straightforward and downright good ideas about how to use Twitter in your business.

Now here is an interesting view. A writer on GigaOM writes that he feels cloud computing will be vastly different in 2018. Ok so that is a given since it is 10 years away. I sure hope it is different. While I agree on some points, I have to digress on a number of points.

I do agree that cloud computing vendors (those that are providing the “space”) will change dramatically in the next 10 years. They will need to address the needs of the “end user” no matter who that person or organization serves. They will need to be easy to work with, provide significant service and be available to everyone. The best ones will be able to charge premiums for value added services and the worst will fall by the wayside. That is easy to see.

However, I do not agree that the user experience will be an “Apple type” of experience. While I agree that Apple does well with eye candy on their Mac and iPhone, I despise iTunes. The author seems to think that iTunes is elegant and successful. I am so sorry to inform you that the only reason iTunes is successful is because the iPod is successful. You see iTunes is REQUIRED for the iPod. It is forced upon anyone that wants to use the iPod or iPhone for that matter. So one can hardly say it is successful by itself. The other term used is “elegant” and while I agree that the iTunes application itself is fairly pretty, it is not altogether very useful and it is a pain in my rear. Why do I think that? Well, every time I go to use it, Apple forces an update on me and with that update they require quicktime (which does not save my settings!!!) and keep pushing Safari on me - I only have one windows box in my house, no macs and I HATE how Apple hawks their wares on my useless windows box. I only want iTunes and I only want it because they force me to use it to make my (free) iPod shuffle work right. Ok…so much for my complaining.

While I do not agree with the Apple user experience notion, I do agree that cloud computing will be vastly different in years to come. I know that users will force companies to change their experience and I also know that the cloud vendor with the best user experience, best presence, and best service will win. That is a given.

The question will be who will that company be? Just like we are waiting in the wind to have a better virtualization experience we will be waiting for the consolidation of the cloud computing environment for several years to come.

A writer on OStatic writes an interesting point. One that I have been pondering for a while since doing some catching up on the emerging trends around cloud computing. If open source is such a win for the cloud computing infrastructure and those that are building apps, why then are we seeing so many proprietary “clouds” which offer no interaction? Federation of clouds is the key to maintaining an edge by ISVs.

A ISV cannot afford to put all of their eggs in one basket. A great example is for those that use Amazon and S3. When S3 went down a few weeks ago everyone using S3 went down with it. Nine hours of downtime for a small company could run it into the ground quickly. The question is how do you prevent outages from affecting your application? Federation would be an answer.

Most cloud computing vendors like Amazon, Google, and others do not interact together at all. If I want to host on Amazon ECS and on Google Apps I am forced to write two different “standards”. While there are open standards that are being built for cloud computing collaboration we need to devise a way to allow cloud users to distribute applications amongst a number of providers. The best providers will stand up and can charge a premium whilst the worst ones will go away (either through acquisition or simple death).

But there is more than simply calling a cloud federated. There are a number of issues that need to be addressed such as authentication, data storage and syncronization, and application communication in addition to being able to run the application in a number of unrelated cloud instances.

Interesting issues. Time to find out more.

With all of my power monitoring research I have moved back to an interest in 1-wire application. I found a cool lightening detector project that I want to save for future reference. 1-wire is so cool.

And I found a online store for 1-wire stuff.

Found a one wire power management device. Interesting.

Wow. I finally found it. This guy built what is just a simple Circuit Monitoring system that allows him to gain statistics on his power consumption!

I have not gone through it all, but I plan on trying to do this and will definitely document it!

Update - 31 July 2008 - 1639 ET
It did not take long to find a lot more information regarding power consumption. Amazing what using the right term in your search yields. I was chasing down the wrong path in my searches earlier this week. I have found a ton more information.
Nice tool for gathering stats