Well, my time has come once again to be gainfully employed. So much for the free life.
I am off to VMWorld on Monday (15 Sept) to work with Canonical and then off to SFO for some meetings with Sun on Friday. If anyone is going to be around and wants to hook up, let me know.
I’m staying at Treasure Island…woo hoo.
JP
It is now Thursday and nearing the end of my three weeks of freedom from work. A rather cloudy day and I plan on getting my garage to a point where I can at least park a car in it. Hurricane Ike is stirring up the Gulf, creating some cloudiness, and some giving us some wind so that makes working in the garage all the more bearable.
It has been a good three weeks. I managed to get a fair amount done. Completed a number of projects, managed to clean up a lot of the overgrown yard, researched some new ideas, and did some relaxing with some PS3 games.
Off to get the garage out of disarray and into a better state of affairs.
I continue to be amazed at the ease of use of Ubuntu. Of course, the changes made to support new hardware in the Linux kernel helps, but this project was too simple.
I had purchased a simple little Logitech notebook camera a few months back and recently upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04). I simply went to download Skype, chose Ubuntu 7.04+ then right clicked on it with Nautilus and installed it via Gdebi Package Installer. Gdebi suggested 3 other packages to install with it and after logging into Skype it simply WORKED. No tweaking, no fiddling, no manually installing other packages. IT JUST WORKED.
Now if you only knew my Skype ID you could skype me. I guess you will have to ask nicely.
Freaking RIM. They are pissing me off. Acting as if they are a monopoly or something in preventing me from using my phone the way I want to use it.
I am trying to get my Blackberry 8310 to allow me to use DUN via bluetooth to provide an easy way to gain access where I only have a cell signal. Proving to not be an easy task.
I have used this link and it was a good start, but this link has MUCH more detail. Unfortunately the kapsi.fi link has nothing about Blackberry, but some good tips for discovery. And finally, this link helped with Ubuntu, but led me to find that my Blackberry is not supporting DUN?
Not sure why, but my Blackberry does not have DUN working. It seems that others have DUN on their 8310 so I am wondering why mine shows nothing! Argh.
More digging.
In this blog entry, Chris Brogan has some straightforward and downright good ideas about how to use Twitter in your business.
Now that hurricane season is about to peak we are seeing a bit of activity. Currently we have FAY which is now coming over Cuba and into the Florida Straits (as of 18 Aug 0900 ET-1400Z). What fun. Fay isn’t expected to do too much harm although in the current forecast track we will get the brunt of it since the right-forward quadrant usually holds the worse weather.
There are a number of areas in the eastern Atlantic that forecasters are monitoring and the water temperatures at the National Data Buoy Center are in the mid-80’s. Nice temps for hurricanes.
As for FAY…the winds are on the increase and the pressure is on the decrease at the Sand Key Station. The buoys are fun to watch. I saw the highest wave height ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico by a buoy when Ivan came by and hit west of Pensacola in 2004 - somewhere in the neighborhood of 45′.
Weather - it is SO much fun.
UPDATE - they put a “floater” over an area (94L) of disturbed weather in the Atlantic. Fay seems to be a bit ragged after going ashore in Cuba. Two main areas of convection - one hitting the Bahamas and the other still over Cuba. Circulation looks to still be moving N-NW. Have to see how much FAY is able to re-organize in the time over the Florida Straits today.
JP
I always have a list of things to do. I think we all do. The problem for me is the fact that I am so inconsistent in organizing these thoughts. I keep saying I will stay organized, but I put that on my list and that list “get’s lost”.
So…how to do that? I need an app that will help me organize. Is it a specific product or a rudimentary php app? Hmmm.
Let’s add that to my list.
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.
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