Random Thoughts

As a side note…

I’ve also subscribed to an Amazon EC2 search at pubsup, technorati, and feedster. I’ll be watching the 3 to see which yeilds the most A) unique, and B) valuable results over time.

At the time of subscription
PubSub: 0 New Hits, 0 Good, 0 Bad
Technorati: 20 New Hits, 15 Good, 5 Bad
Feedster: 10 New Hits, 9 Good, 1 Bad

Here are some links which, at a glance, appeared interesting

over at Maluke Co. The Server spec’s are reportes as being "an instance is roughly equivalent to a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth (bursting to 1Gb)" — I have not verified this, but it seems to be corroborated by other blogs. Thats an interesting find.

Oh… And…

I would also expect that, to save money for their users you will be seeing FreeBSD, Gentoo, Redhat, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian mirrors by EC2 and for EC2… (e.g. no traffic allowed except inside the DC.) And if Amazon is *SMART* they will provide this service to the distributions at no charge. This will, almost assuredly, spark a large amount of interest, and probably gaurantee more users.

If not the person who mirrors all these distros and lets people use them for $5.00 per month will make a buttload of cash 🙂 (hmm… that could be me! :))

Time will tell.

The internet is all a-buz about amazon

And rightly so! Amazon has, quite simply, outdone themselves this time. However before we go running through the streets lets make sure the emperor really does wear clothes.

A very common configuration of server provided by hosting companies is: 1 Server, 1Gb ram, 80Gb HDD, 1000Gb transfer. This runs $70-$80 for low end hosting, and $150-$200 for middle of the road grade hosting (Both prices per month). For the sake of our first comparison lets assume you youse every last GB of your bandwidth every month, and not a drop more.

Amazon EC2

1 Server @ $0.10/Hr (31*24*.1) = $74.40/mo
80Gb Hdd @ $0.15/Gb (80*.15) = $12.00/mo
1000Gb Xfer @ 0.20/Gb (1000*.2) = $200/mo

Total Cost Per Month: $286.40

Which is a little bit more costly than you’re used to, to be sure. Obviously the less bandwidth you use the less you pay for it. Where the *real* benifit of the EC2 service comes into play is in environments which are not bandwidth intensive, but CPU intensive. How much of a benifit this will provide remains to be seen. I am unaware of the stats on these “machines” E.G. CPU horsepower available, and RAM (as well as RAM speed) will be determinant in how useful this service is. If those (CPU/RAM) arent directly applicable terms as far as “MHZ” and “GB” go in the way that we’re used to dealing with them there will have to be some QV measure other than “Feels pretty fast.”

I predict that there will be several strategies, in the near future, for limiting the amount of bandwidth to these services (as the main cost of the service is in raw bandwidth used) Storing static content elsewhere will (i’m sure) be a key ingredient in these strategies.

I also predict that it will be a relatively short amount of time before we see some sort of beowulf or openmosix style implimentation geared directly at this service. Mark my words 🙂

More to come when I find out more — I’m *severely* interested in this… and I’m sorely dissappointed that I missed the beta (probably by only a couple of hours too…)

The web already has the next office suite. Its called a blog.

I’m really suprised thateverybody is trying to create the “web based office” from scratch. We have a huge elephant in the room: the weblog.  Scrap the idea that we have to have a desktop app for the next gen of desktop tools. Scrap the idea that we have to make something which is a word processor. Take your head out of your butts and realize: we dont need anopther word processor! we need a REPLACEMENT for the word processor.

Take a blogging tool.  Create a content divide: public/private, add save and e-mail features (think PDF/RTF/ODF). Add some calendaring, A generic interface to mysql as a DB, and some spreadsheet and BAM. There you are.  You have your new e-mail client. Your new word processor, Your collaboration space, Your new callendaring tool. Youve got your 1:1 your 1:many and your 1:*.

Software companies need to realize that the blog is the next desktop.  We’re quickly entering the point in the evolution of the internet where the  user *is* represented in realtime by a digital avatar… sure its not the 3d one we saw in those terrible movies from the 80s (no lawnmowerman for you!) but we’re HERE. It’s NOW. People are living a connected life, and the gap between pushing, sharing, and publishing is shrinking each day.

The future is still tomorrow. But change is HERE.

Pet Project

I’ve started a pet project.  Its a remote tripwire like program. I’m doing it in python (largly because I want to learn python better.) I prototyped it in bash (heheh, so it cant be that hard of a project to make,) but moving it to something more real (and using sqlite instead of my “cat + grep” database)
The idea is to store all the files needed to actually preform the integrity checking locally, and then upload them to the remote server at the time that the scan is run.  It’s a pretty simple combination of find + md5sum + openssh + RSA/DSA authentication… add a store and compare and up-date of locally archived checksums… tack on an alerting feature… and run via cron… And you have the idea.

If anyone a) reads this, and b) wants to be in on it then drop me a line and I’ll put up an svn repo for it.

Cheers

A little easier today

There seems to be less friction between the dogs today… I think a lot of Buddy’s “I’m the head dog around here” message was delivered yesterday (which I liken to a hazing ritual) and today seems much lower key.  Banzai even got to play with some toys today (controlling resources — even toys — is one of the ways that dogs show their dominance over eachother.)

Banzai really took yesterday like a champ… With Buddy cutting him off constantly. Hogging all the toys. Not to mention the mounting… But in true puppy fashion Banzai being the younger submitted.  He wouldnt even let me cheat and force buddy to leave him alone to play with a toy…

This is a case where I think the dogs know better than I.  Hopefully in the next day or two the social hierarchy of the household settles down.  I’m really looking to being able to bring Banzai to the dog park next week (when his stiches are healed better.)  That’ll be a whole nother can of worms… 🙂

On client systems and virtual machines (prologue)

I think almost every techy guy has at least one “client” for which they do some sort of consulting work.  Iether its charity work for friends/family/church/whatever, or they know a guy who knows a guy who’s willing to pay a little bit to have something done.

And the great bane of these kinds of clients is that you set their environment up for them, and then leave it alone. Maybe you check the logs every now and again, maybe not. And who knows what you (or they) have put on it. Sure it was the latest version… lets see… when was that… oh gosh! almost a year ago… and nothings been updated!

You get a call.  There have been odd huge traffic spikes… or the machine has been used to send out span… or something… This is when the sky darkens. The clouds roll in.  And that sinking feeling — like you might be too late — sets in.  There are huge gaping holes in this machine… somewhere…  And there’s someone else lurking in this silent house.  All of a sudden theres a lot of work to be done… and while you werent paid enough to sit on this thing and check for updates in every piece of software you did (or didnt) know about… Suddenly this is your fault and you get to fix it.

But… Where to begin… And how to mitigate this kind of damage in the future?

I always wanted to be able to draw

DrawSpace is a pretty cool site (read: I havent actually “used it” but I “plan to”) which gives lessons on how to draw… Which is cool because although I’ve always wanted to be artistic… I’ve always proved to be sucessful as an artist in exactly the same measure that your standard brick attains while trying to preform the backstroke…
Perhaps now I’ll not only *NOT* be able to draw, but that I’ve studied and *STILL* can’t draw 😉