Dave Levy's Weblog

Au Revoir

2009-08-30T15:06:42.000Z

This is my last blog article here; Friday was my last working day at Sun Microsystems, and Monday/tomorrow is the last day they're paying me. Its been fun, most of the time, but I am looking forward to something new. I have not yet set up a new blog, and am unsure what I am going to do about it. I hope to set up a wordpress blog inside the http://davelevy.info domain, where I have a place holder at davelevy.info/blog. but until then you can follow me at http://friendfeed.com/DaveLevy.

Interestingly the English have difficulty with “Hope to see you soon”; unlike our European colleagues we don't have a single word but I am sure this is not Goodbye, merely Aurevoir.

Thanks for reading this blog over the last five years. I wish my friends who are staying to work for Oracle and Sun's customers all the best over the coming future. Finally, thanks to all the customer's I've worked with in making their IT better than it was.

tags: aurevoir ciao aufweidersehen seeyousoon people news topic:[davelevy]

Free, the right price for software

2009-08-30T14:48:50.000Z

Economic systems are about how to use scarce resources and the Price Mechanism is the way in which a optimal resource allocation occurs. Economists use a branch of theory called “Welfare Economics” to analyse and model the efficiency of the productive economy, and a theoretically maximally efficient set of states can be defined within a model, known as the Pareto-efficiency frontier. A perfectly competitive market meets the efficiency requirements, imperfect or distorted markets do not. Distortions can be caused by the existence of monopolistic markets, taxation, externalities or missing markets.

Traditional Welfare economics rarely considers how copyright and patent law create barriers to entry to markets and thus husband the growth of monopolistic markets, where supply is restricted and prices driven up. It needs to be born in mind that overpricing products such as software which are inputs to the economic process as well as output, means that some otherwise efficient goods will not be produced; they cost too much.

It should also be born in mind that the majority of the world's software is not licensed or charged for, although much of this free to use software is not traded at all, remaining the proprietary goods of their owners who use them to produce other goods and/or services. Benkler in his book, “the Wealth of Networks”, suggests there are nine business models for pursuing value in software, of which only three of them involve trading rights i.e. charging for software. If there was no software copyright i.e. copying was legal and free the only price, software would still be written. The overpricing of software distorts both today's market and the innovation creating tomorrow's. The price mechanism should ensure that resources that are scarce and consumed should be payed for. Software is not scarce, although the people that write it and the machines that run it are. Resources such as software should be free.

This was meant to be an essay based on some slides I have been trailing inside the company, but I discovered how hard it is and how much time it takes to actually put ideas into essay form while preparing the paper behind what became Monopoly & Prices, see below. So this is more of an abstract, I shall upload the essay when finished to my personal site downloads page.

Thanks once again to Beggs, Fischer and Dornbusch, whose Economics 8^th Edition reminded me of my Welfare Economics.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[software] topic:[free]

Three dimensions of Virtualisation

2009-08-30T14:38:09.000Z

Another piece of, what I hope is wisdom, coming from my last three months of customer conversations is that virtualisation has three dimensions.

We use virtualisation to make large systems small. I call this “Atomisation”. We can also use virtualisation technologies to make many components seem as one, this is of critical use for horizontally scalable services, and I call this “Aggregation”. The third dimension is “Longevity”. Maybe I should play around with “Age” as a word, so each dimension has a mnemonic starting with “A”, but by using a Type II hypervisor, one can protect old software against platform innovation and continue to run it until its business case changes or expires.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[cloud] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[virtualisation]

How new is Cloud Computing?

2009-08-30T14:26:52.000Z

I have spoken to several of Sun's customers over the last 3 months about Cloud Computing and have often used the following quote.

“When we build a distributed computing platform and run one application on it, we call this HPC, when we build a distributed computing platfrom and run many copies of one application on it, we call this Web 2.0, and when we build a distributed computing platform and run many applications on it, we call it Cloud Computing.”

Who said it? Me!

Its not quite true, but the difference between the platforms is not necessarily as great as some might like to make it seem. Web 2.0 platforms are rarely as economic as running many copies of one application but its a pretty small portfolio often supporting only one end-user application. I accept that elasticity and metering are important, unsolved, or not well solved problems in the cloud world but I think the quote is worth publishing here and repeating and offers insights into planning an evolving the next generation of IT platforms.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[cloud] topic:[cloudcomputing]

url aliases

2009-08-30T13:20:23.000Z

I mention in the last article, that url aliases/shortners make calculating an inlist sort-order harder, it's curious to me that Google don't have a url shortening service. (I suppose the domain name google doesn't lend itself well to being part of a short name.)

tags: topic:[silly] topic:[google]

Are blogs losing their infuence?

2009-08-30T12:42:11.000Z

Richard Morgan sent me this article, "Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?" dated March 10th 2009, which argues that while blog authority ranking according to Technorati remains fairly static, the scores of the various blogs are declining. Technorati uses an inlist scoring algorithm which may be part of the problem, but it would seem to me that micro-blogging is impacting the strength of the voice of blogs as a communications tool, which is what the article argued. In some way's not just micro-blogging, but the various places where people can and do record what they do and think. When I started this blog 5 years ago, I chose to restrain what I put here but other media have grown in popularity, and so people's ability to express themselves have grown. There is a diversification of publication sites which makes following people harder, although technorati only set out to capture blogs, not people, blogs seem no longer to be at the centre of how the internet records what people think. I know that I have been writing less frequently.

Internet messaging is built on a growing distributed architecture, consisting of

publication,
distribution,
aggregation and
consumption.

Different sites and technologies seek to perform and excel in different parts of the chain. The aggregation stage permits people to view people, if they permit it, or subject matter and most importantly control their own entry points to the mess that is today's content, by which I mean choose to follow people of look for specific expertise. I think that authors should seek to co-operate with this consumer control of the reading process. It should be noted that the behaviour of individuals and corporations will differ. In particular most media companies want to capture the reader/viewer but individuals have no need to copy this behaviour. I try to post content and let people find it; I hope I have developed a reputation for expertise in some subjects over my career.

By keeping the architecture in mind, one can try and avoid annoying your readers, who, if one has any, are likely to be your friends. Bad habits I see are people who syndicate their tweets into facebook, so I, and others, get to know about their breakfast twice, and I am not a fan of syndicating one's del.icio.us feed into blogs using the APIs. This latter habit annoys me because I don't see the blog as an aggregation tool, but a publishing tool, and so I expect original work, of some description in people's blogs. This can be even worse when people then publicise the blog, containing bookmarks using a micro blog. That's three clicks to read something written by someone other than the person who's views you've subscribed to, and if using a wireless device that's a real pain. NB This is also true if you subscribe to Digg feeds, you get to 'interesting' content via the Digg page, so three clicks, three tabs or windows to read content you want. Another offence which I wish I could deal with more easily is the microblogging incontinent. The only way I have discovered how to deal with those, is to unsubscribe.

One can, and I do aggregate my feeds into one place. I originally created a personal planet, which aggregates some of the feeds I create. I have tried to create an everything feed at http://friendfeed.com/davelevy, which also has a nice key of the feeds I contribute to. This means that my readers can construct a feed that interests them. I know that some friends are interested in the technology, but not the politics. I commit the offence of subscribing my friend feed to face book, but I consider Facebook to be mainly a consumer. I need to think about this. Its not great, but I don't syndicate my tweets directly to my face book statuses (sic), nor do I copy them back into friend feed. Manging my facebook feed is not easy and is compounded by Facebook's desire to perform all roles in the architecture while being 'open'. Its this open-ness which has enable site specialisation around, for instance, travel, books, restaurants and even at living social, iphone apps.

I suppose I am appealing for people to consider what tools they use to perform a specific role in the the personal content architecture. Don't over aggregate, if people are interested in your thoughts they'll find them. Don't shove it down their throats.

When I first considered writing this little essay, it seemed interesting to consider, “Is the status-sphere replacing blogs?”, others including Tim Bray have written about this since and argue Not. I hope that the evolution of easy micro-blogging, will free blogs to become deeper and more interesting. I know that I have produced less frequent blog article since I took up with Twitter, but I also considered my del.icio.us feed, to be a microblog of sorts. Another key development is that the use of sites like del.icio.us has turned in-list search ranking from a vote of web authors, where you needed the technology skills and resource to have a web page in order to influence the sort order, into a vote of web readers and authors. The ease of micro blog adoption means that an even large crowd should now be participating in the construction of in list search orders. I am unsure how url shortner's impact the search engines in-list calculations. They make it harder, I 'm sure, as does the fact there's more than one. Many argue that Twitter's best value is as a search engine and that it, and other micro-blogging systems won't replace blogs because there are too many subjects that can't be accurately discussed in 140, characters. Techcrunch published further thoughts on twitter, and it chances of supplanting the blogs, however it takes less time to tweet, rubbish gets lost easier, and twitter in particular is designed to be used by handheld devices. (I don't think I'd like to have written this on my new Nokia 5800, or even my ipodtouch.) It should be noted, that while its very easy to create a 140 character message, it should be easy to create a podcast or even a video, but its not. They are both difficult to create, especially if you don't just record a chat amongst friends but try and 'deliver/perform' a report. This is a skills issue. They wouldn't pay Steven Fry all that money to make audio books if it was easy.

One final thought is that communitarian aggregation is not well done at the moment. One of the strength's of Peter Reiser's approach, 'Community Equity', to knowledge management systems that at its heart is a personal rating engine. (See also http://socialadoption.com/ They don't yet have this as truly n-dimensional, which I think is needed, so you can rate your own content, rate other author's expertise, rate & describe their interest to you. I may play with a Google App or Zembly, to experiment with some of how to make some of this work. A very rich inter-personal network with sophisitcated popular and machine calculated relevance scoring is something that can add value. Content could flow through your colleagues votes moving closer and further away from your viewing window and your friends and colleagues advice and hints would influence or determine what you find. Google reader's share facility is quite close, but there's only one dimension, you can have friends, and they can recommend stuff for you to read. (I think more can be done.)

I hint that one of Technorati's problems is its reliance on in-list. Searching the Workplace Web, written by Fagin, Kumar and McCurley, which I commented on, on this blog in an article called, The Shape of Internet, write about a number of relevance and ordering tests that could be used and specifically argue that within the corporate intranet other sorts and relevance tests may be more appropriate to help solve a number of questions such as authority. They also argue that intranet URL naming is less search friendly and it is clear that the dissipation of people's voice and advice over multiple sites with different naming conventions, often using surrogates or numbers and URL shortners means that the internet is catching up on the early intranet in the chaos of name space. It may be time to review in-list and begin to weight votes for relevance and sort-order.

Are blogs losing their relevance, maybe, maybe not. Well written opinions by disinterested experts will always be valued. As the dross moves to the microblogs, this may liberate the blogs to re-establish themselves as clear voices of expertise. Some of what was observed Richard's post to me may be failures in Technorati, its initial insights are aged and its being out innovated.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[twitter] topic:[tags] topic:[feeds] topic:[architecture] topic:[search] topic:[internet] topic:[blogs] topic:[microblogs] topic:[blogging] topic:[news] topic:[technorati] topic:[inlist]

Re: Are blogs losing their infuence?

2009-08-30T14:16:53.000Z

I would`t necessarily say blogs have lost their influence since great bloggers will generally garner attention, just like great authors using any other platform (newspaper, book, radio, television, etc). However, blogs are not good platforms for having conversations in a community environment. Heck, just a simple mailing list blows away blogs for community-building and conversation-building purposes. To me, blogs are just individual journals. Nothing more. In mine I pay no attention to readers or advice about numbers or anything like that. I publish what`s on my mind at any given moment, I do it for my own purposes, and I don`t think of it as a conversation with anyone. Instead, I have conversations on mailing lists and in social networks because that`s where the people are and the tools are so much better for connecting. Some bloggers never got this very basic concept: conversations flow across tools and you have to go where the conversations are, you can`t ask that the conversations come to you. I also agree with you that the emergence of other platforms will enable bloggers to focus on the strengths of the blogging platform. And to me, that`s journaling.

Monopoly and prices

2009-08-27T09:51:26.000Z

Monopolies restrict supply and offer their goods at prices above equilibrium price, the opportunity cost of the resources used to make the goods. I am writing a short paper about this since it is a piece of thinking I revisited while developing my thoughts on free software, but is not central to those thoughts. There remain those who still think that monopolistic domination of markets is a legitimate business goal and that public policy and regulation should not inhibit this "free" market tendency. A review of the theory of the firm shows that monopolies restrict supply, raise prices and make super-profits.

Firms seek to maximise profit. As prices fall, demand increases. As output increases, average costs fall and then may rise due to economies of scale and then diminishing returns. In a "perfect" market, all firms are price takers. Business failure means that expensive suppliers leave the market, and super-profits caused by the difference in a given price and superior cost structures of the survivors encourage new entrants to bid down the price. In a perfect market, there are no super-profits and prices are equal to average costs. In a monopolistic or imperfect market, defined as where a firm's output decisions affect price, a firm's maximum profit occurs where its marginal cost is equal to its marginal revenue. No matter if dis-economies of scale are trivial or important, this will always be a lower output and a higher price than the opportunity cost price/output position.

I am writing a longer essay about this, which I hope to post on this blog, but I shall mirror it on my personal site downloads page. I doubt that there's anything original in the essay, but having it one place is useful to me and it'll help me write my essay/presentation that I promised Dominc Kay on "Why free is the right price for software?".

topic:[economics] topic:[microeconomics] topic:[monopoly] topic:[pricetheory]

Little Big Adventure

2009-08-06T15:37:37.000Z

I have been struggling to get VRDP from Virtual Box working on my home network, of which more maybe later, but I took a break to install one of the greatest games ever on the home machines with the help of my younger son. We finally found a copy of Little Big Adventure that'll run on modern machines. This is hosted at LBA HQ. It runs native but recommends running under DosBox. So that is what I did...

I now have two programs that run under DosBox and so place my command files in the Windows shortcut as -c arguments. For more see my bliki articles DosBox and Lba & dosbox. The downloaded archive contains a .iso but I have not worked out how to fool DosBox into thinking the .iso is a CD, but its probably possible so one wouldn't need the CD to be loaded into the cd reader, but unless you sort this out, you'll need to burn a CD.

Long time readers may remember that I put LBA2 on the machine a while ago.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[games] topic:[LBA] topic:[twinsen] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[dosbox]

Using Cygwin to manage script Virtual Box tasks

2009-07-31T13:58:27.000Z

The Virtual Box GUI doesn't do everything one needs and so I have been experimenting with using cygwin, a free to use bash shell library. Having installed CYGWIN the first thing to do is add the Virtual Box program folder to the PATH, in my case,

    export PATH=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Sun/xVM\ VirtualBox:${PATH}

I want this placed in the .bashrc so its always invoked, and thus need to test if is already in the path. I use this code,

    type -p VBoxManage.exe > /dev/null
    case $? in
    0)   # Its already there
         : ;;
    1)   # Add Path
         export PATH=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Sun/xVM\ VirtualBox:${PATH} ;;
    esac

Now I need to associate a script file type with an execution program. I have tried to use the distributed batch file and binary and neiter of these work, so I have copied cygwin.bat to bash.bat and amended it so that it reads as follows

    @echo off

    :: Dave Levy (c) 2009         Is this GPL?
    :: bash.bat                   Version 1.0

    :: Wrapper to run *sh scripts from windows explorer/desktop

    c:\ksh\bin\bash --login %*

I have deleted the -i flag from the bash line, I have made the bash program call absolute, %* is the DOS batch command file syntax equivilant to $* i.e. all the command line arguments, so the command line invokes bash.exe in login mode to force the execution of .bash_profile and .bashrc and appends all the other command line parameters including the script file name. :: is a neater comment delimiter than REM. I have associated my batch file with the file type .ksh as the open method using explorer.

Much of CYGWIN is distributed under the GPL and I am unclear if the batch file is included, If so, its GPL since I created the file by copying it.

keywords: howto invoke cygwin scripts from the windows desktop, write a dos batch file to invoke shell

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[shell] topic:[scripting] topic:[cygwin] topic:[windows]

Good British Universities

2009-07-31T13:48:55.000Z

The ranking list begins to struggle to distinguish between the institutions beyond No. 99, and groups the lower ranking into large groups. The University of Sussex is in the first of these groups, 102-150, LSE is in the next group 151-202 and Warwick in the next, 203-304.

If one examines the methodology we begin to get some explanations. One of the categories measured in the methodology is "Articles published in Nature and Science". This is one of the indicators measured to assess the quality of an institution's "Research Output". The points for this are allocated over the other categories, but I have not discovered how. There is a problem here. Firstly, these are both English language publications, and thus may bias high scores towards institutions in English speaking countries, helping the US & UK dominance, and possibly being part of the explanation of Canada's 5th place position. . (It might be interesting to calculate the distribution of the top 100 by language). Secondly, a number of institutions would not consider these publications documents of record for their primary research focus. Shanghai Jiao Tong University have developed a work around for those institutions specialising in Humanities and Social Sciences, which it applies to the LSE.

I have examined the base data, and cannot apply the published weights to the published scores and get the same total score as Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The University publish its scores and weighting so I have recreated the summary scores for the purposes of my analysis. I have also designed two alternative weightings, one which allocates the 20% points allocated to the publication of articles in Nature & Science across the remaining categories in proportion to their contribution. The second method, seeks to keep the "Research Output" score at 40% and allocates the missing 20% to the second RO indicator score, "Articles in Science Citation Index-expanded, Social Science Citation Index". The original weights by category are as follows,

	Quality of Education	Quality of Faculty	Research Output	Size
Weights	10%	40%	40%	10%
Factors	1	2	2	1

The final problem with having two calculation methods is when do you apply the second method i.e. when is Articles published in Science and Nature an irrelevant indicator. ( I am sure there are some who'd argue never ). I have calculated scores using both schemes, the original and my Research Output orientated scheme. This allows me to compare the effect of the different weights on the ranking. I have applied these techniques to a number of the UK Universities, and also applied the Guardian's teaching quality score to those Universities to see if there was much of a difference. The Guardian's teaching quality score is departmentally based, and I chose to use the ICT departmental scores. Applying my revised "Research Output" score doesn't have much of an effect on the position of the LSE, there are one or two some interesting differences, but it would seem to me that we are back to asking how good the indicators are. I noted in my previous article that the methodology favoured science and anecdotally universities with large medical and bioscience faculties. It might be interesting to look at the big movers and examine the methodological causes of the changes.

I have come to the conclusion that the Shanghai University method's indicators are too narrow to easily answer the questions I am asking and the Guardian's research cannot be used to rank the institutions. They only evaluate departments, and aim to evaluate they undergraduate teaching experience. In their notes on their methodology, the Guardian says

To use the indicators' absolute values would make it virtually impossible to produce an overall table for the institutions, since their position would be dependent on what subjects they teach, rather than on how well they teach it.........

and added that

Note that we don't include research funding, figures from the research assessment exercise or data in that line - this is supposed to be a ranking for undergraduates, not a health check for the university as a whole.

Tediously, it seems that I am repeating the criticisms made by sufficient others to have made it to the University Rankings page on Wikipedia but looking into the data always improves one's understanding.

So the survey may over estimate English speaking institutions success, it probably devalues non pure science teaching, and it uses very few indicators. These factors may explain why the 'wisdom of crowds', market evaluation of entry grades required, comes out with very different answers about the LSE. My final conclusion is that this survey is seen by the EU, the Commission and its advisors as too important. Someone should do another one, but what is really needed is an economic, or political model that defines a successful University. These are issues for public policy makers, and increasingly in the UK the people funding tertiary education which is becoming the students and their families. But if looking to attend a UK University, I'd thoroughly recommend the relevant Guardian Guide. They are published each year to help the school leaving cohort, and it helped me advise my children over the last 5 years, to the extent they let me.

Notes

The UK Universities in the 100-150 group include Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Sussex.

Those in the top 100 are Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, UCL, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, Sheffield, Nottingham, Kings College London and Birmingham.

The Guardian does not score the LSE for teaching ICT.

Canada is 5th beating France, Italy and Spain, all with more people and with similar or greater per capita GDP. I am not looking to denigrate Canada's tertiary education system.

tags: topic:[education] topic:[univeristy] topic:[uk] topic:[british]

Twitter grows on me

2009-07-28T15:33:04.000Z

I have been unable to resist twitter and so have become regularly in breach of my original manifesto. I still make posts which imply my location and that I am not likely to be online for a period but have become involved in conversations and more recently I have been trying to build karma on lazytweet. As a result I have removed the twitter widget, which displayed my most recent tweet from this blog, and replaced it with a twitter button, which takes you to my twitter page.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[blogging] topic:[twitter]

And Google's Android

2009-07-17T07:41:16.000Z

In case you havn't heard, Google have ported their mobile phone OS, android to x86, and made a live- cd version and so it can run inside Virtual Box. It looks like this..

Since the hardware to make calls isn't available the functionality's a bit limited :)

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[google] topic:[android] topic:[livecd] topic:[x86]

Re: And Google's Android

2009-07-17T08:54:16.000Z

Does the Android image have a network connection? If so could you use it to test how well a web page will render on a phone?

Re: And Google's Android

2009-07-17T10:05:23.000Z

Yes it does and the browser works.

Another Virtual Box screenshot, this time Windows 7

2009-07-17T07:22:27.000Z

This is what Windows 7 beta looks like running inside a Virtual Box.

I have downloaded objectdock and opened a sticky window. Its not very quick, but my first suspicion is that its a bit short of memory. That's the problem with using a 32 bit host.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[windows7] topic:[screenshot]

The personal is the professional, using Google calendar

2009-07-13T12:44:01.000Z

I have been using Google calendar and the Sun calendar for a while now, and ideally like to read them through one viewer. Today I had to upgrade one of the laptop's I use to connect to Google calendar. The best viewer I have found is Thunderbird via the Lightning add-on. This also needs a second add on, the Provider for Google Calendar. I had to reinstall these earlier today and found this blog post entitled How to integrate Google calendar into Thunderbird very helpful. The other tricky bit is how to find out the login credentials and while one should be able to remember one's Google login and password,the URL of the calendar is a bit trickier. (You need to use the web interface and examine the calendar settings, which the article above describes.)

I found this useful and its not something that one does that often, I have bookmarked and digged or is that dugg the article. I hope you find it as useful as I did. Just doing my small bit to make this article easier to find and do.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[google] topic:[calendar] topic:[thunderbird] topic:[add-on] topic:[howto] topic:[connect]

You'd think I know where I am when at home

2009-07-02T18:09:51.000Z

Been mucking around with the ipodtouch having rescued it from the family for the last week. I have been subject to the "can't find your location" feature while at home. Google points me at Skyhook Wireless' site at GetSatisfaction and I discover that like Plazes, it uses a database solution, in this case run by Skyhook, who explain how it works on their site. This means that you need to be connected to the net to discover your location, but since that's true of the map application, its not too onerous a constraint.

For a 'touch, I need to find out my router's MAC address, which is harder than I'd like; it doesn't seem to display in the control panel. I was pointed at NetStumbler, but it has to run on an operating system it supports with wireless. NB this seems to exclude Vista 64 and obviously in retrospect my desktops, so on my third install I finally discover the address and use it to update SkyHook's database. I need my Longtitude and Latitude for this, which I have never bothered to record, so I used http://www.streetmap.co.uk to get this because its easy.

I had to wait ten days, but its working now.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[apple] topic:[network] topic:[skyhook] topic:[maps] topic:[location]

And now I have a Centos VM

2009-07-02T17:52:15.000Z

The reson for upgrading my Virtual BOx config is to install a Red Hat Centos image. I chose 4.7 because this seems jolly popular within the hosting community and I need a new host for my web servers. Two pieces of advice

Download the x86 DVD image, I couldn't see how to use the multiple disk images with Virtual Box.
It installs an SMP and uniprocessor version and grub is configured to start the SMP version as default. This thread, entitled CentOS 4.7 guest won't start, suggests that one should configure PAE/NX=on for the SMP image. This is not the default. Anyway works for me.

Now I need a manual to help through all those little differences between it and Ubuntu. Is been a couple of years since I played with Red Hat's Linux.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[linux] topic:[centos] topic:[guest] topic:[install]

Re: And now I have a Centos VM

2009-07-08T18:55:01.000Z

There's a bug in x-windows so screen auto resize doesn't work. I asked on virtual box forums in the Linux Guest forum.

Notice

2009-07-02T16:58:54.000Z

I have reduced the number of tags available in the banner. You can still use Google, or the Yesterdays Words page here which has a number of search tools for this blog.

Virtual Box 2.2.4 & Windows XP

2009-07-02T16:51:32.000Z

And with one might bound he was free..................

I downloaded Virtual Box 2.2.4 a couple of days ago, but when I tried to install it on my XP SP/3, the install process failed and rolled back. This trouble ticket, #3701 details how to fix the windows registry which was damaged at v2.2.0.

Thanks to those who helped me find it.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[windows] "topic:[xp sp3]" topic:[windowsxp] topic:[install]

Does knowing Stuff help?

2009-07-01T11:12:54.000Z

How important are Universities to the software industry productivity. One would hope fairly high. For various reasons, I have been considering this question and some collaborators pointed me at the Academic Ranking of World Universitiesis which is referenced at Wikipedia as well and I first referred to in this blog last November. This is produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in China.

I know that a discussion on ranking methodology may not be very helpful when considering economic growth issues, but there are some quite interesting and surprising results. One of the things that pointed me there is the domination of the USA, which has over 50% of the top 100 places as it was quoted for this reason.

Sadly I haven't kept in touch with this issue since I was asked to work on other things since Xmas. I am sure that basic research drives innovation and productivity; I think that research quality and output is part of an institution's organic capability and therefore its undergraduate body and its ability to attract top students is important. I have come to the conclusion that Joy's law

"Clever People work elsewhere"

applies to academia as well, and that a lot of innovation in, and production of, software happens, outside the research institutes and departments, and also outside the traditional software industry. This is one of the reasons why public policy makers need to look at their procurement policies as well as their subsidy policies.

The rest of this article looks at the 2007 results, specifically at the UK University positions and compares them with some data points from the Guardian's Guide to Universities 2007, together with some personal prejudice, some of it informed. BTW, I can't find reference to the 2007 Guide on the web, so you might like to use this link Guardian University Guide 2006, and the 2008 results are also available. If you're planning to apply to a UK University presumably for a 2010 entry, I'd recommend getting a copy of the next book, which should be published later in the year.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University have documented their methodology on their site, or at the Wikipedia page. It is based on Nobel prize winners and the publication record of alumni and staff. One thing from observation is that Universities with large medical faculties seem to do well. It seems to have been designed with a scientific bias and for the purpose of public policy planning. From my current research, I am not able to determine the role of ICT or Software Engineering in these results. It seems that this may be a piece of research yet to be done. i.e. the creation of a ranking table for ICT teaching.

The 2007 national results are published http://www.arwu.org/rank/2007/ARWU2007Statistics.htm.

I was surprised by the fact that the UK comes a good second to the USA. The UK has 11, which are

Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, UCL, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, Sheffield, Nottingham, Kings College London and Birmingham

Another view of UK University ranking comes from "Blackadder goes forth".

Blackadder:I then leapt on the opportunity to test you. I asked if he'd been to one of the great universities: Oxford, Cambridge, or Hull.
Nurse Fletcher-Brown:Well?
Blackadder:You failed to spot that only two of those are great universities!
Nurse Fletcher-Brown:You swine!
Melchett: That's right! Oxford's a complete dump! [elsewhere]

Looking at the Guardian University Guide 2007's Computer Sciences and IT page, gives a quite different view. One of the most important things to say is that the Guardian's ranking methodology is optimised for undergraduate choice and the relationship between undergraduate choice and the wealth creation activities of a university are not well understood, or at least not by me. The Guardian's score is based on assessing the staff's qualifications, what it takes to get in, spend, pupil/teacher ratios, a value add score, post graduate job prospects and inclusiveness. The methodology is discussed in the book, and in the newspaper. Their 2009 Methodology notes are on the Guardian web site. The 2007 Computer & IT top ten were,

Imperial, St. Andrews, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, York, Surrey, Durham, Bristol, & Glasgow.

with Nottingham 11th. It interests me that the Guardian, doesn't (didn't) take the research grade of the departments into account, or maybe it does within the calculation of the teaching quality index. Its not easy to produce a Guardian fact based 'Best University' since the book is aimed at helping Undergraduates discover the best courses for themselves and the analysis is both institution and subject driven.

Personally I am surprised at how low KCL scores in the World Rankings compared with the other UK universities. It's also curious to me that the LSE, Warwick and Sussex are missing. (I may look into the numbers and see where they are and try and see why these are as they are it is likely to be methodology based, and tell us something about the methodology.) I am most curious as to where the LSE sits, which from its high numbers of overseas students, and its ability to ask for very high entry grades seems to be internationally and domestically very popular. I suppose that it might be a reflection of the science focus of the methodology, or the biases of potential students in the UK.

Since the question I am looking at is how do or can Universities add to the value of the software industry, I wonder if under-graduate students are the raw material of universities. It seems reasonable to assume that good researchers and teachers want to work at renowned (& rich) Universities, and that a University's social agenda is harder to sustain in the UK than in the primary or secondary sector. My theory is that as students and their families take more financial responsibility for their education, an assessment of life-time earnings comes into the decision framework and traditional economic criteria such as returns on investment and payback horizons are consider in more or less formal terms.

In my regional chart above, Europe includes Russia & Israel, and the obvious non EU countries (Norway & Switzerland), otherwise they're EU member states, with the UK contributing 11.

Both Canada and Sweden are punching above their weight in terms of population and even GNP, although Sweden is the host nation for the Nobel panel, which may have some relevance.

The Wikipedia page, Academic Ranking of World Universities has a sort button so you can see the institutions in order of excellence, and now has the 2008 figures, and there are other ranking methodologies and publishers.

This was been written over a number of months, and the UK fact finding over a number of years as I helped and hindered my family choose their university courses. The article was originally planned to be about the value of research to industry, but has evolved into some thoughts about the UK higher education system. I hope its useful to someone.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[education] topic:[university] topic:[ranking] topic:[UK]

Syncing Google Calendar with the ipodtouch

2009-06-24T16:12:21.000Z

Milton Stephenson was boasting on Facebook about connecting his Google Calendar to his ipodtouch and I thought "Ooh, I want one of those.". Its not that hard. I had downloaded V3.0 of the appliance operating system a couple of days ago. First, use the ipodtouch's settings application and open the Mail, Contacts and Calendars tab, then select 'Add Account...'

The settings I used were,

Server = www.google.com
User Name = my username, which is not a gmail address
Password = my password

and it wrote the description and ssl parameters for me. I was advised that m.google.com works as a server parameter, but not for me. Maybe its the non gmail user thing again. This article called Google calendar speaks caldav to the iphone at http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/ was very helpful, and implies that V3 of the operating system is required. So I now have Google Mail available nomadically on the touch.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[apple] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[google] topic:[calendar] topic:[sync] "topic:[nomadic+computing]"

When WiFi's no good

2009-06-22T15:47:18.000Z

I installed Joikuspot on my new Nokia E71 and this works quite well as a portable gateway. It uses the E71's wireless chip to turn the phone into an internet gateway for wifi devices. Some services were restricted by my network provider in Greece, but definately an additional way to connect my 'touch and laptop to the internet when on the road. This was pointed out to me by Sean Harris.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[phone] topic:[network] topic:[internet] topic:[gateway] "topic:[nomadic+computing]"

Keeping in touch

2009-06-22T15:37:20.000Z

Like most 'touch users, I am looking for a "keep in touch application". I was pointed at Zensify, a personal network aggregator. Its not quite one network, but gathers the posts from your correspondents in several networks and ceates a feed and tag cloud for you.

I have just subscribed to several really prolific feeds on Twitter, and while I have also pointed my Google Reader at them, I have not yet subscribed to my twitter public timeline using Zensify. I use Facebook instead. I have come to the conclusion that Facebook is not only useful for keeping in touch with real friends but it can turn colleagues into friends, and here it is a way of keeping in touch with people.

I had come to the conclusion, that one should use these tools either as an aggregator or as a publication tool or as an end-point. I had made my twitter feed a publication tool, friendfeed as my aggregator and facebook as an endpoint. Unfortunately since we can't agree on what tool and what purpose, its a not very useful model. One really needs to consider one's readership and also assume they can find your stuff. It's not necessary to make everything an aggregator. By keeping a purpose in mind, one also makes it easier for people to find your referenced content. They don't have to trawl through several pages in your web space.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[apple] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[messages] topic:[socialnetworking]

Europe's largest supercomputer

2009-06-02T18:12:51.000Z

The Forshung Julich phase two super computer, now Europe's largest, had its formal opening session last week and Mark Hamiltion, Sun VP who leads our HPC team went to visit them, and recorded it on his blog, in a couple of articles dated as at the end of May, because it runs on Sun. He wrote three articles, several of them with lots of pictures.

This is Europe's largest super computer and runs on Sun's Constellation systems, Mark's article "Memorial Day in Germany" and the Forshung Julich web page, "Systems Configuration" talk about the technology, where they state, they have 2208 compute nodes, each with dual, Intel Xeon X5570 (Nehalem-EP) quad-core processors, running at 2.93 GHz. This has over 17500 cores with 207 Teraflops peak performance, hardly surprisingly they have also taken four of Sun's Data Centre Switches.

The EU's PRACE project funded the feasibility of this and I have been tracking it for a while since we knew that phase 2 was to be based on Sun's hardware. I have a link roll...

which records a bunch of pages about it and this page, the Juropa Supercomputer has a rather cool picture.

which I have linked to, but shrunk to get on this page.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[hpc] topic:[supercomputer] topic:[cluster] topic:[intel] topic:[Nehalem] topic:[europe] topic:[eu] topic:[PRACE] topic:[Germany] topic:[Julich]

For my HTML readers, more about Sun's Unified Storage

2009-05-28T13:02:26.000Z

I have just uploaded my notes from a meeting where Mike Shapiro presented on Open Storage to this blog, but backdated it to the time of occurrence. See 11th March

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[amberroad] topic:[storage] myblog

Are liberal licenses a better future proofing?

2009-05-11T18:37:36.000Z

A couple of days after the Kable Open Source conference, I looked up Gianugo Rabellino's blog and read his then most recent blog article, "Of Oracle, Sun and Open Development" about the impact of M&A on open source investment protection.

The conclusion I draw from his article is that open source adopters need to make investment protection a selection criteria. Its well understood that the vibrancy of the product community is crucial, so its just obvious that taking a view on the future is as important. Gianugo also argues that liberal licences enhance the ability of a community to survive M&A activity. I think he's probably right, and this means that licence terms might become important even to end user sites who have no intention of distributing software. It may also be worth measuring how diverse an open source development community is before adopting the software.

Its an interesting spin on Alisdair Mangham's comment on licences, (see below) but they didn't debate. Alisdair's comment was that if you don't plan to distribute, you don't need to worry about viral licences, he might well agree on the need to evaluate to protect the development cost.

This is another article that's been hanging around on my machine for longer than is smart. This one I have not back dated.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[adoption] topic:[community]

A short URL for the "Third Wave" slides

2009-04-24T07:32:04.000Z

I have created a short URL at is.gd for the slides I used on Wednesday; http://is.gd/ueDO is the mediacaster web page that hosts my slides.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[opensource] topic:[davelevy] topic:[slides]

Another intra-net community

2009-04-22T14:30:00.000Z

Another tip from midweek, by Miles Berry, the british education community is adopting a community software product called the learning landscape for schools, its based on code from http://elgg.org/. Schools have even more concern that they control access to their communities than business and one of elgg's advantages is that you can install it on your own server and place it behind your firewall.

This was written at the time, uploaded on the 7th May and backdated to the time of occurrence.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[security] topic:[socialsoftware]

You don't manufacture software

2009-04-22T14:00:00.000Z

Gianugo Rabellino of Source Sense and the Apache Foundation and presented a demolition of the need or inexorability of charging for right to use, he finished this demoltion by quoting Eric Raymond from his paper, "The Magic Cauldron"

"....software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry. "

Spot on in my opinion, creative workers need to get used to selling time and earning wages again.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[adoption] topic:[uk] topic:[publicsector] topic:[kable]

The Third Wave of Adoption

2009-04-22T12:30:00.000Z

I spoke next, the slides I used, based on Simon Phipps, current pitch are posted on my page at Sun's mediacaster. (I say based, this is a derived work, and I was pleased to be able to use his presentation). I covered how we have got to where we are, the Pioneers, the four freedoms, the geek community and the arrival of the enterprise. We then look at the compelling value of peer production, and the role of licenses in the community, and how to defend against trolls and vultures. One slide, developed by Simon and articulated in Sun's Free and Open Source Licensing White Paper posted at www.sun.com, classes the open source licences into Open, file based and project based licences. The slide I used is posted below

. It is clear there are some who think that only the GPL counts as Open Source, but despite its undoubted popularity, there are a number of people and organisations who think that its duty to publish is not always desirable, and the Apache licence. These are not restricted to organisations that pursue a rights based business model. The presentations and white paper talk about community roles and present a model of these roles. The presentation re-inforces the fact that Sun is the largest publisher of Open Source in the world and has a range of produicts and partners to allow open source adopters to what they want.

The slide above is available as a full size .jpg if you prefer it.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[adoption] topic:[uk] topic:[publicsector] topic:[kable]

Implementing Opensource

2009-04-22T10:19:00.000Z

Alisdair Mangham, the head of IS & Development for the LB of Camden argued from experience, as he presented a case study, that you need to own software development expertise to adopt open source and this became a theme for the rest of the day. Alisdair argied for an adoption led deployment, I was interested how yet again, he as do many others argue that Finance is a mission critical function. Its not always true, and becoming less so. Businesses compete on price or by differentiation. Its very hard, or illegal to innovate your finance processes, and price advantage is gained by efficient processes not innovative finance. Today, it should be at the front of the queue for outsourcing. Another GEM from Alisdair is that licence terms are not important to an End-User site and he knows, he's read a few. The point he makes is that unless you are looking to do business as a software house, the liabilities you incur through licence is not important. I wonder if he's considered aquiring indemnity.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[adoption] topic:[uk] topic:[publicsector] topic:[kable]

The importance of Open Source

2009-04-22T09:45:00.000Z

John Pugh MP opened the conference, with a review of the state of software procurement in the UK public sector. He suggested that ubiquity should be the trigger point at which charging for right to use becomes undesirable. I see no justification in this, although the behaviour of the drugs companies and their monopsony buyers is an interesting example of what might happen. I think his own references to Kant, and testing it as a natural law shows that its can't be done. When does something become so ubiquitous that it should be free to use. He also looked at a new tripartite demand for software, the civil servant, the consultant and the provider and wondered how open source providers and their ecosystem could get to the table. He also pointed out the lack of domain expertise often held by the civil servants, which is what causes the need for consultants. It reminds me of projects I have been on when assessing bid/no-bid decisions as to whether we had the expertise to manage the project's profitability. The project managers are easy to find, its people who understand what's going on that are harder.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[adoption] topic:[uk] topic:[publicsector] topic:[kable]

Tube across europe

2009-04-22T07:15:00.000Z

Crossing London on the Tube, to get to Kable's "Open Source in the Public Sector" conference reminds me of the weekend in Barcelona, both the prices and experience were better in Spain, although I didn't travel on the Metro during a rush hour.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[metro] topic:[London] topic:[Barcelona]

And a surprise on my arrival home

2009-04-20T15:45:00.000Z

Travelling home today; the hotel had one internet terminal in the lounge so I have been out of contact during the weekend. We visited the sites and some of my pictures, including this one are uploaded into my barcelona set at flickr.

I was in the air as the press releases about Oracle and Sun were circulating. I got a text message when I landed. Twitter had turned itself off while I was abroad and this is probably a good thing, but it was old fashioned SMS that let me know and now like you, I just have to wait and see what happens.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[barcelona] topic:[spain] topic:[m+a] topic:[sunw] topic:[oracle]

Nice People at Heathrow

2009-04-16T11:38:00.000Z

So off to Barcelona for long weekend via the marvellous Heathrow airport. I have never been so close to missing a plane...

I have actually, I have had people on the jump seat pulled off on a journey to Spain before now, but I must thank all those people who helped us through our journey across the airport.

Thank goodness for docs.sun.com

2009-04-07T15:13:22.000Z

Where's my screwdriver? I got a bit close to the 'tin' today. I have been trying to boot a lab machine, an x4600, that clearly hasn't been used for a while.

Its previous user had kindly documented the tcp/ip addresses used, but we couldn't ping either of them, so http'ing onto the ILOM server was right out. We plugged in a console into the VGA port and tried to boot from an Open Solaris live CD, this failed with the error messages zooming of the top of the console. So we tried S10 and the same thing happened. This meant we had to actually read some documentation. This is at docs.sun.com, and has a bunch of docs on the x4600. Having equipped ourselves with some knowldege,

We attatched a real serial terminal to the serial console port. This involved checking the serial comms port paramters. Its a very long time since I've had to do that. We then checked the tcp/ip settings, once we realised these were correctly set,
We checked the ethernet cable to ensure it was correctly connected and seated.
This enabled us to log into the ILOM using the browser interface. Everything seemed OK so
We used ssh to login into the ILOM service and started the console
We power cycled the machine using the browser

This allowed us to capture the errors as the Live CD image of S10 failed to boot.

The lessons of this story are

sometimes one should read the documentation earlier rather than later
check your cabling
the docs.sun.com x4600 documentation is good
sometimes systems do have hardware faults

tags: topic:[] topic:[] topic:[] topic:[]

A second look at Second Brain

2009-04-03T11:52:33.000Z

I have revisited secondbrain recently and decided I need to get to grips with its libraries and collections. I am not sure of the differences and whether I should be create broad large collections such as travel or software, or even something narrower but broad such as database, or use it for more project orientated collections such as specific journies or personal engineering tasks, a bit like what it takes to justify a new snipsnap page on my bliki. I quite like the fact they give me a domain name, and that I got their early enough to get "davelevy".

It now takes a much broader range of feeds, which was the criticism I made last time I reviewed it, and creates an aggregated tag cloud. This is neat, but I hadn't realised how many tags my picture collection generates. The tag cloud is dominated by the places tag and the geographic qualifiers. When you add the bookmarks created while planning the travel, it dominates the tag cloud, which I am not sure is what I want. (I wonder if they could or should permit us to weight the tags by feed.) Usability is also inhibited here because like most people, I don't tag a feed as belonging to itself, so my bookmarks aren't tagged as bookmarks. Also several of my feeds are not tagged at all. All-in-all, this is a feature I like, so I'd really like a tag cloud widget.

I was looking at second brain to see if I could make it my home page and consolidate the various sites I am using into one place, it could well be possible. I'd loose control of my look and feel, and I'd need to consider how to host original textual content but a blog might work for that if I have SB's collections and libraries. Perhaps I'll try and migrate one of my travel pages to SB and see what it looks like, and how useful I find it.

tags: topic:[secondbrain] "topic:[content management]" topic:[tagcloud] topic:[technology]

More news and where to find me

2009-04-03T07:48:18.000Z

Despite not writing here, I have been busy, you can follow me, if you really want at, my friend feed or slightly less completly at my secondbrain. You can see both there and here, that I am finding the tendancy to microblogging too strong, although twitter's discipline of 140 characters is often a challange.

I also aggregate some of my feeds at planet davelevy, and there is a mingle view, but that's not updated regularly. I really need to fix up a plazes filter for planet. DME has written some code but I can't seem to find time to implement it anywhere, and I need to get a dynamic hosting site and get off my qube.

News

2009-04-03T07:08:15.000Z

I have been busy writting a presentation on 'Why Software should be free?', it looks like it'll need an essay/paper as well. The economic theory doesn't lend it self well to a presentation. So that'll be fun.

tags: topic:[free] topic:[software] topic:[technology]

Open Solaris, the laptop OS

2009-04-03T07:06:46.000Z

Oops, a couple of weeks since I last blogged, but just wanted to point you at Jim Grisiano's puff for Toshiba's Open Solaris Laptops, I really have no excuse left. Do I?

tags: topic:[news] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[toshiba] topic:[laptop] topic:[advert]

Re: Open Solaris, the laptop OS

2009-04-03T08:06:58.000Z

No excuse at all Dave.

Installing the Amber Road simulator on a Laptop

2009-03-19T14:39:42.000Z

Sun's Open Storage software comes as an appliance from http://www.sun.com. Currently available as a VMware image, and I now have it running on my trusty laptop.

The management panel in in the browser, the appliance console is the black window, I have started the CIFS service, mounted a file system using SMB onto my host image (the windows folder) and I have opend a file using notepad. It was easier to do than attach my Vista systems to my legacy home windows network.

I had to install VMware Player first and when the VM starts for the first time, you are offered a text menu to install the network identity and point to the network gateways. I was nervous about VMware because I wasn't sure about what VMware does to implement the network interface. This wiki page has been created by the FISHworks team to help you, which discusses how you configure each of the four netowrk interfaces and I advise you to think hard about the node name and domain name as I havn't yet worked out how to change it. The wiki's advice on the network gateways didn't work for me so I used 192.168.1.1 dor both the default gateway and DNS server. Anyway the boot screen looks like this,

I am off to install it on my home server and maybe I'll try the Virtual Box version and use the appliance to manage my home network storage, I think its legal, but in order to get the performance advantage at scale, you'll need to buy the hardware.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[unifiedstorage] topic:[simulator] topic:[amberroad] topic:[vmware] topic:[sunw] topic:[storage] topic:[howto]

Re: Installing the Amber Road simulator on a Laptop

2009-03-19T15:00:22.000Z

It works great on virtualbox... and with the forthcoming vbox 2.2 release (now in beta) there will be OVF support (for virtual appliances) and a new host-only networking mode (useful to run the demo when you are not connected).

Convergence

2009-03-19T09:09:32.000Z

There is a conversation on google groups, cloud computing [XML] about CISCO's plans to enter the server market, kicked off by this article at Business Week.

The dimension, only just, missed in that conversation is the opportunity to get design synergies on the hardware between networking and systems. Why do large scale users have to buy switches and servers as seperate procurements? Perhaps the next stage is to migrate the network functionality to a software appliance, so one buys a box and then decides what to do with it. (I know that a switch needs a lot of ports where a non-switch system only needs two, but modern blade systems are modularising this design area as well.)

The interesting questions then left are whether the data centre, or network can consolidate to one cabling standard and perfromance. When will the need for seperate networking (or interconnect) technologies between CPUs and Systems decline? (If ever?)

I know some computer scientists thinking about tomorrow's problems are interested in this sort of thinking.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[business] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[M+A] topic:[sunw] topic:[CISCO] topic:[networking] topic:[hardware] topic:[convergence]

Gambling with Finance

2009-03-17T12:12:51.000Z

CIO Connect, in their winter 2008 magazine, have published an interview with Robin Osmond, Betfair's CEO about his plans to utilise their software platform as a vehicle for trading financial products. They claim to be starting with spread betting, which seems available at http://www.tradefair.com/ but are looking to offer FX trading at some time in the future.

Spreadbetting for financial products has been around for a while and has already played the regulatory arbitrage by being considered as gambling and treated that way by HMRC. Betfair innovated the ambkling world by building a betting exchange, and removing the risk of running a book from their business model. Their software, and more importantly their information systems architectural skills might well apply to financial products exchanges but can they build the trust that'll bring consumers to their site, and solve the problem that the real money is in trading.

I expect that meeting a new group of regulators who in the UK at least have a reputation problem of their own will keep them busy. While it seems a simple diversification to many, I wonder if the difference in customer base, and regulatory environment will make this harder than it would seem.

Tradefair's CTO, Martin Thompson, was also interviewed and talked about building an integrated system, from business logic to silicon. It'll be interesting to see what they've done, if they ever make it public.

I have linked to CIO Connect, above, but they have a wayward re-direct rule set that issues some stupidly long URLs presumably to track activitty and they like to keep their stuff behind their firewall to protect their subscription revenue.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[business] topic:[financial+trading] topic:[gambling] topic:[exchange] topic:[cioconnect]

If you're travelling to Bristol

2009-03-14T17:00:00.000Z

The 'Hackathon' is at the University of Bristol, on Woodstock Rd., which charges for parking on Saturday, but is free on Sunday. We should have been cuter on that, and I got lost last night on the way in. Better research would have helped. I wonder if Google Earth would have helped, I doubt it'd have helped plan my car parking, but it might have helped me avoid getting lost.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[bristol]

Open Source, the price is right

2009-03-14T10:00:00.000Z

I shall be speaking tomorrow on "Open Source, Free the right price!" and shall be posting my slides here. I have been busy reading up my undergraduate economics to remind me of what I learned then and check that it hasn't changed. I borrowed Beggs, Fischer and Dornbusch's "Economics", since I got rid of my text books years ago and this seems to be the modern equivilent. I have also tagged it in my living social booklist.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[davelevy] topic:[davidbeggs]

Off to Bristol

2009-03-13T14:30:00.000Z

Off to Bristol, for the University of Bristol OSUM 'Hackathon'. I am staying at the Hotel Mercure Brigstow in the city centre. The area seems lively with a large choice of restaurants and pubs, but I was tired so ate in the restaurant. The one in Grenoble which I stayed in last year was, unsurprisingly, better, but tonight's meal filled me up. None of the city centre hotels in my and Sun's price list have car parks, so NCP win out again.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[bristol] topic:[osum] topic:[hackbristol] topic:[2009]

Squaring the circle, from disruption to trust

2009-03-11T12:00:00.000Z

Mike Shapiro is an expert in disruptive technology; he was working on Solaris in the early 2000s. He spoke to a number of us at Sun's Guillemont Park Campus about Amber Road, Sun's new disruptive file server technology. Sun and our customers have the opportunity to take advantage of the next big thing in network storage.

Mike explained that for a technology to be truly disruptive

it must be cheaper
it must be good enough
there must be a compelling reason for adoption

and Amber Road has two killer apps. Flash and Analytics. There is a small layer of functionality that Amber Road can't provide but the bulk of the market doesn't need it, and certainly doesn't need it at the price charged. Since storage is a trust business, Sun's storage sales teams and the customers need to understand very carefully the storage requirements. It is unlikely that any functionality not available is a universal requirement but in some cases, its not the right time for customers to move from their incumbent suppliers; they need some of the missing functionality. Talking to storage users about Sun's new storage concentrates the minds of everyone involved.

Over the last 10 years, there have been only two ways that the laws of physics and economics permit to make disk arrays faster, either increase the cache size, or increase the disk speed. The cost of Flash has dropped over the last three years, thanks to those of us buying mp3 players and pdas. The Amber Road box's software allow newly economic flash to do either or both. Sun is a leader in flash and certify enterprise flash for 3-5 years. and has additional advantages including the superior reliability of ZFS and the opensource pricing of the Unified Storage arrays. We don't licence a right to use. What we charge is based on what we ship, you don't get charged more as you turn on functionality. (This has nearly always been true of Sun, I remember when buying SunOS systems that one of the advantages was that network funtionality was bundled with UNIX where as I was asked to pay extra for networking and RAID functionality by my then incumbent supplier). Crucially Sun doesn't seek to tax its customer's innovation. The "no more to pay" approach also applies to the Analytics which come with the box and you can use them all. The software is available on a try before buy basis at www.sun.com and I ~~will be downloading~~ have downloaded it onto my laptop, see also Installing the Amberroad simulator above, to demonstrate to anyone that wants to see it. [ Sun's 7000 series storage simulator home page ].

Some of what is argued to be missing is FCAL support. Mike stated that the long-term winning strategy is to have only one cable going into the box. If there's to be only one winner, it ain't going to be FCAL; it needs to support Ethernet, and there's a demand for infiniband. Our proposed iscsi functionality release plans means that the Unified Storage boxes can offer block devices over the network and support for most enterprise data centres will only get better. Having said that, we propose to release FC target functionality in Q4 this year.

The value proposition for Amber Road is that its cheaper, good enough and offers game changing superior management. This often gets lost in a feature benefit analysis, which often seek to disguise what the features cost. Sun knows storage and can meet the trust requirements that customer's require, Amber Road shows that a trusted source can disrupt the economics, and its only the customers that win.

This was uploaded on 28th May 2009 and back dated to the date of occurrence, 11th March

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[storage] topic:[amberroad] topic:[flash] topic:[disruptive] topic:[zfs] topic:[iscsci] topic:[simulator]

You can't keep the Spies out

2009-02-27T09:15:17.000Z

While continuing to think about the privacy and regulatory issues that Cloud computing raises, I was point at this article in the NY Times, called "Does Cloud Computing Mean More Risks to Privacy?", which looks at the US legal position and points out that the US police and even civil investigators will find it easier to get data from third parties than from the entities orginally authorised to have access to private data. The article seems to have been categorised as news due to the release of the World Privacy Forum's latest report, "Privacy in the Clouds", which I have not yet read, but plan to.

Its probably true in the EU, and is certainly so in the UK, that a number of IT service providers have national security duties that are not well publicised and growing, but it seems that the basic principle of EU law is that data mustn't be shipped to countries with weaker laws than the originator country, although on the internet, how does one know which that is.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[privacy] topic:[law] topic:[legal] topic:[international] topic:[europe] topic:[eu]

For more about Privacy in Europe

2009-02-23T14:11:48.000Z

So what was I looking for? I found and was pointed to by a lazyweb search at,

The EU Commission's DG Info Home Page, responsible for the development of the knowldege economy
The EU Commission's DG Justice and Home affairs' Privacy Page and
The European Data Protection Supervisor's web site.

and now I have these three links collected in a single HTML page with a permalink, i.e here. The delicious links are tagged EU, but I might add a gov tag to the tag base as this seems sensible for this case.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[EU] topic:[privacy] topic:[gov] topic:[Europe]

Searching europa, is there a limit to Google

2009-02-23T13:55:40.000Z

Just some times I come across a piece of research which my search engines find hard to help me with. Since Google, they all seem to use in-list based sorting algorithms. Some resources, such as the EU's web complex don't seem to have enough sites pointing at it for this to be a wisdom of crowds solution and their own search engine doesn't seem to help me either. You'd think that the various News organisation feeds that specialise might issue permalink based pointers but querying the EU site remains hard.

A while ago, I reviewed , the research white paper, Searching the Workplace Web in my blog artice The shape of the Internet..., which argued that inlist based ranking is not necessarily the best sort order of an intranet query. Certainly the Europa site seems to have many of the properties of an intranet identifed by IBM research team. Is this true of all Government sites? Do they have to be their own in-list?

Are there any search engines that might do better?

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[search]: topic:[EU] topic:[europa.eu]

How to set up a USB Flash Drive from Windows to Windows in Virtual Box

2009-02-18T13:32:04.000Z

Read the User Manual, available on http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and think "all that stuff you need to know that's a bit poor". Then,

Make sure the windows guest is dormant
Plug the Flash Drive into the Computer
Edit the VM Settings
1. Enable USB
2. Enable USB 2.0
3. Create a Filter
  - move the mouse over the add filter button and the USB devices will appear in the display box. This box is active. Select the one you want. If this is not obvious, then you can test this by removing the USB In the example above I have also taken Sasquatch's advice and created an empty filter which will assign all USB devices to the guest operating system. This is however disabled.
Start the VM and wait for Windows to do its plug and play magic.

This process was developed using a Windows Vista 32 bit guest and a Windows Vista 64 bit host, and a patched version of Virtual Vox 2.1.3

I have left the "All Devices" filter disabled. It will do all devices and thus some system devices will become visible to the guest such as the fingerprint reader, and whatever Chicony Electronics provide.

Sasquatch is a regular correspondent at virtual box forums and offered his advice in a thread called "USB on Windows host and Windows guest".

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[usb] topic:[howto] topic:[FAQ]

A bitty week

2009-02-16T18:41:12.000Z

Last week was a pretty bitty week, dominated by the need to complete some mandatory, examined web training. I have recently completed similar training in Sun's Unified Storage Products which I found useful. This one is not so focused on technology and while useful in that I learned a couple of things, I really wonder if it was a good use of my time.

Prior to getting stuck in, I made some progress on my web estate including Laconica, planet and glassfish. I got a copy of mingle running on one of my Linux images but made no progress on installing Glassfish. I have taken advice and been recommended to use the Sun installer, but I am being stubborn and want to see if I can use the Ubuntu package installer.

Mind you I got fed up with bash & sh and installed the Korn Shell. I was able to use the package manager which is cool. I was expecting that some Linux religous view, or over zealous conformance with the various licenes would prohibit its inclusion, but it works fine. Since I shall only be using it for scripts, I don't need to write a global .kshrc and install it where ever it would need to be. What broke the Camel's back? I felt I needed $(). I had been lectured by Chris Gerhard about using this syntax a while ago because it supports nesting and finally came across a case where it was needed, or at least, coding speed and my skills meant that I decided to move over to it. (It does mean that anything I write may be harder for other Linux users to adopt.) So I'll write in ksh, and port to sh.

I ended the week on Sunday at the Chichester Smith and Western, where the atmosphere, decor and music are fun and the portions enormous.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ubuntu] topic:[linux] topic:[ksh] topic:[shell] topic:[scripting]

Re: A bitty week

2009-02-16T20:08:41.000Z

You had to do that mandatory waste-of-time training, too? Jeez.

If I'd have known, I'd have sent you the same Q&A cheat sheets I was given (and which are in wide internal circulation) so you'd only have had to waste a couple of hours' time clicking buttons.

Sorry, I didn't know.

btw, I agree that the Amber Road training was worthwhile, and I did it properly. However, regarding the other stuff, I don't consider it cheating, if the original mandate is unreasonable.

Trusting the customer in the hospitality trade

2009-02-16T10:44:06.000Z

Or where to get cheap food and drink. The Guardian last week seemed quite keen to publicise some bars and restaurants that offer you the opportunity to pay what you think they're worth, in London and Berlin.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[London] topic:[Berlin]

Influencing Planet's output name space

2009-02-16T10:39:10.000Z

Earlier, last week on the planet developers mail list, Fredric Muller writes

From the help file I read:
# The following provide defaults for each template:
# output_dir: Directory to place output files

Now I am trying to figure out how to have one of those template file
output in a different directory (like they all go into /var/www/planet/
and I would like one of them to go to /var/www/ ).

I can think of a couple of ways of solving this problem. My first way, which may not be the simplest, is based on the fact that I have several planet instances and for the most advanced and thought out installation I have answered this problem as follows. It is designed to answer another problem and so might be overkill.

I install planet into its own user and hence home directory.
I plan to run more than one planet so,
I create a sub directory for each instance
I create a Logs directory since I plan to run the planets from cron, pipe the logs into files and keep them for a while. Both the logs and the log name control files are kept here.
In the instance sub directories I place the config.ini file and the template sources; the index.tmpl will also be different as will any images used to decorate the planet html file such as feed logos or page decoration
In the home directory I create a shell script, which calls planet.py to act as the argument to cron and a crontab source file.
test the script for each instance of Planet
set the crontab using the source file

because I have multiple config.ini's and index.tmpl files, I can (and do) have multiple output directories and also ensure that the HTML pages meet my look and feel requirements. I do this at http://davelevy.dyndns.info/planet/davelevy and http://davelevy.dyndns.info/planet/g3 and on my development site have a standard planet venus and a mingle solution. I shall be moving the two planets above shortly so I suggest that you don't rely on them for a while. Within Sun's firewall, I have a community feed and one for me (like planet davelevy above) that uses this technique. The original requirement was based on the need for quite different config.ini files, with different input feed lists but Fredric's case is also solved using the technique.

I also have a script to tidy up the logs, maybe I should publish them all. (If you want'em comment or reply to the planet development list and ask. )

The second answer for Fredric's case, is that since I encapsulate ${HOME}/planet.py into a script, I could always end the script with an appropriate cp command, provided there was no contention for the name /var/www/index.html.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[planetplanet]

Do we need private community microblogging?

2009-02-04T10:16:48.000Z

Is twitter or microblogging a service that would benefit from more active community management? It would seem that the people at friendfeed seem to thinks so but the people at Laconica have produced a package that allows for the hosting of a microblogging community, which was pointed out to me by Peter Reiser and Scott Matoon.

Despite Peter Reiser’s statement (on his twitter feed at 1.41 am GMT 3rd Feb) that it installs on Solaris like a dream, I chose to install on Ubuntu Linux and there is a specific install page for Ubuntu at the Laconica site. It’s also useful to look at the >>README as it documents the pre-requisities and discusses the location of the site within the webserver's root namespace in more adult fashion than the Ubuntu install page.

I have written up my install notes on my snipsnap, and must try and get them adopted at the Laconica site.

But once its properly installed I made a post, changed my avatar and checked the RSS, and I did it all in a Virtual Box image.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[microblogging] topic:[laconica] topic:[community] topic:[install] topic:[ubuntu] topic:[virtualbox]

Critically you need Apache 2, MySQL Client Tools (& Server) and PHP 5, of which the latter two seem not to be installed on my version of Ubuntu (8.04 LTS Hardy Heron). Actually I didn’t document my processes well enough and not everything was necessarily done in the correct order, so PHP might have been there, but the extensions weren’t. I already had Apache 2 on my system, so I created a user to act as the Laconica administration user, ignored the web page suggestion to untar it in /var/www, the apache root and created a subdirectory.

It's at this point best to use the package manager to update MySQL & PHP, read the pre-requisites as you need some of the extensions which the Ubuntu package manager treats as separate packages. I found the Curl, MySQL and GD extensions. (I did this last and some stuff broke without the GD package.) I also re-installed the mod_rewrite package, as I had a problem and wasn’t sure of the cause, and am thus unclear if it needed to be done. Then its simple, wget and untar the package, edit the config file. N.B. The path parameter is relative so no preceding /, not ./

And then it snowed, a lot! (Picture Blog)

2009-02-03T14:00:00.000Z

On Monday, I woke up to the heaviest snow fall I'd seen in years. I live in the south of the country and we don't often see snow at all, and even less frequently in the cities. I tried to take some pictures which I have posted at flickr.

Fortunately, Sun's work from home policy means I didn't have to travel; since the bus and trains were both severely disrupted, travelling by car would have been horrible.

tags: General topic:[snow] topic:[winter] topic:[UK] topic:[2009]

About planet and some Python lessons

2009-02-02T19:17:59.000Z

I have some exciting plans for using the planet feed aggregator and have over the last couple of weeks using the “Venus” code line. I can now install on Ubuntu and the install passes all its tests. I want to be able to write a filter for the my plazes and also see how the foaf output might be used. I met up with my colleague, Dave Edmondson and we discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Python and planet.

The script planet.py runs two other python programs called spider and splice.

Spider gets the feeds defined in config.ini and creates a local cahce version, splice, reads the cache and generates the new formats from templates. The diagram below does not illustrate the template source files for the output formats and I shall probably need to dig further into the code in order to understand what needs to be done.

The diagram also indicates the location of Venus' plugin, where the plazes filter should be located.

We also discussed Python. I have been trying to write a game theory solver for a 2x2 formal game. I was representing the game as a dictionary so that I could retreive game scores using the strategy names. One problem is that two dimensional dictionaries get syntactically combersome. I had ended up with a list as the key. In theory it should make the programming easier, where game is a dictionary attached to class instance g.

i.e. score = g.game[('decoy', 'defend')]

makes great sense where decoy and defend are blue and red strategies, however, I have usually placed the evaluation of a score in an interation, and so coding the strategy names is rare e.g.

strategies=['heads', 'tails'];
for s in strategies:
# some iterated code

It is probably simpler to represent the game as a 2x2 matrix held in a list and to use the classic technique of holding the names of the strategies in an ordered list so we can translate the matrix cell location such as n(1,1) into n(tails,tails) by looking co-ordinates up in one, or two name lists.

strategies=['heads','tails']
score=matrix(strategies.index('heads'), strategies.index('heads'))

This would also have the advantage that I could look for and use the matrix manipulation packages that exist to avoid writing a lot of code. The code would look a lot simpler, and not just because I have put a lot of it in an external package; this is usually a good clue that the answer is correct.

Lesson 1: Be careful when using dictionaries.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[planetplanet] topic:[python] topic:[venus]

Mobile Schmapp

2009-01-28T19:43:30.000Z

I havn't put Scmapp back onto my laptop yet, but I probably will. They are good enough to re-publish some of my flickr pictures in their town guides. Frustratingly, they now have an Apple iphone/touch optimised application, but unlike the PC version, it is not nomadic. WTF? The ipodtouch is an ideal vehicle for their disconnected tourist guides, which is what they did for the PC. Download the map when connected, read it where-ever. Why have you crippled the application in this way? Its almost the wrong way round.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[schmapp] "topic:[nomadic computing]"

Laptop Diaries, 64 bitness & VPN

2009-01-27T10:58:41.000Z

Over the last couple of days I have been struggling to get my new laptop build up to the minimal level of functionality I require, using Vista 64 as the host operating system. I calculated that I installed 19 applications on the previous minimal build, of which only Scmapp could be considered unnecessary. My colleague, Kar Yang Ho recommended Windows Vista 64 bit as the host and after some experimentation, we chose Virtual Box as the VM manager, primarily because its much cuter about how it takes and reserves disk space.

We use CISCO's VPN solution to access certain services and have been struggling to get this to work from behind my Linksys Wireless-N ADSL2+ Gateway; the connection was failing. It needs to be installed within a supported 32 bit VM, so either Vista or XP. Firstly, we discovered on purchase, that one has to use a TCP carrier without NAT. I am seeking to install the VPN client inside a 32 bit virtual machine; CISCO don't have a Vista 64 implementation. Ho says that no one else with this router has the problems I had with it, although we have now fixed the connection by specifying the guest network interface as a “Host Interface” and not the default “NAT”. It seems that the Linksys only wants one NAT function in the configuration.

I am pleased that we have fixed it, as I can now use Virtual Box to boot up Linux and Opensolaris images for experimental work and demonstrations. I also use them as X Server's for remote systems work and I have a Windows 32 bit image for that software that can only run in 32 bit windows such as the CISCO client.

I installed the AMD64 version of Virtual Box on my Toshiba Tecra M10, with 4Gb of RAM on Vista Business SP1. I stuck with windows for short term financial considerations, and also it gives me rock solid suspend and resume, massive peripheral choice and good, if not the best desktop power management functionality. I am sure that ZFS will become a compelling part of the choice over the next few months as Opensolaris aquires new and appropriate desktop functionality.

I may write about the 19 applications, but they're not that exciting. If you follow me regularly you'll have some idea, there's a couple of development and language implementations that I wouldn't require if I used Solaris, Opensolaris or Linux VMs.

Re: Laptop Diaries, 64 bitness & VPN

2009-01-27T11:01:44.000Z

To change the VPN protocols and turn off NAT, you need to use the 'Transport' tab in the Modify Protocols dialog in the VPN Client program.

Re: Laptop Diaries, 64 bitness & VPN

2009-01-27T12:37:03.000Z

I get rock solid suspend and resume on the M9 running OpenSolaris 2008.11 (all be it with a patch). I'm even considering installing the vpn client into a virtual box running windows XP as that has a version of firefox that will work with IBIS then I could vpn just the virtual machine.

Re: Laptop Diaries, 64 bitness & VPN

2009-01-29T21:01:17.000Z

Cisco is not going to support Vista 64-bit. Joe Harris (author of Cisco's little black book) recommends using NCP Secure Entry Client (www.ncp-e.com)

Re: Laptop Diaries, 64 bitness & VPN

2009-01-30T09:41:50.000Z

VPN Haus

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Fixed my planet bug

2009-01-14T16:02:00.000Z

I wrote about running up planet venus inside virtual box on my blog. It seems that it was a problem with test_foaf.py, the FOAF tests. With help, I have debugged the problem, written a correction and submitted it to the developer list.

This has been accepted, so I am now a content developer for Venus. Hooray for me!

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[planetplanet] topic:[foaf]

More about Digg

2009-01-13T10:12:41.000Z

One the one hand, it seems that rows about the influence of Power Diggers has been going on for ages, its just that I hadn't noticed it because I have not really been a great user of the site, although it seems that people are getting particularly excited at the moment.

On the other hand, I have just promoted Digg Technology to my '1st read' group on Google Reader, and also just discovered http://m.digg.com/technology,

This picture is taken by the ipod touch and I have started to read this again. It's chucking up a couple of interesting things/day, so less interesting than the Guardian and BBC, but about par with the Register. So maybe I am more in tune with digg users than I thought.

I find this look and feel pretty excellent for use on the ipod touch, all the buttons are finger sized, including the "Next Page" button and I don't have to muck around with resizing the screen. I am also interested how using the ipod touch is changing my attitude towards web page design, you'll see some of the changes here, if you browse the HTML view and also at i.davelevy.info

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[digg]

Busy Blogging

2009-01-08T22:06:02.000Z

Today has been one of my busiest blogging days for a while, which you'll see if you subscribe to this via a feed [atom | rss], since I have published a number dated today. I have also posted five new articles in November, finishing off my write up of ICT 2008, with articles on 26th & 25th about Managing Tomorrow's Clouds and european economic competitiveness. On the 19th, I comment on the EU's FP7 Call 4 for Projects and earlier in the month, finish off my notes for data centre ambassadors conference with articles on the 13th about the SuperNap, which has an embedded video about this amazing data center and on the 6th about Project Eucalyptus which is an open source implementation of Amazon's EC2. I have backdated these to the dates they happend and this is to let HTML readers know to go back to November.

tags: none

Consumerism & Sedimentation in the IT industry

2009-01-08T17:21:05.000Z

Is there an opportunity as we build the Future Internet for a convergence around the general purpose, and the development of software appliances which can differentiate their functionality. i.e. one hardware box which assumes a role depending upon the software it loads. What's happened with cars? I suppose the consumer dimension of cars (and home PCs) continues to permit non (welfare) optimal differentiation, so the economic history of car production is not necessarily a good predictor of the future of IT. People buy cars and even desktop/laptops because they're pretty or have status value. I have never heard of data centre manager influenced by these criteria for the contents of a data centre. However, cars are built from common components and the world class manufacturers' cars are beginning to look very similar

Will IT stay|move into the factory, so consumerisation becomes irrelevant? There is/will always be the developer/deployment platform feedback loop, but Mac has no server platform. The developers want Mac OS, but where do they deploy. Much of Apple's developer strategy is about using their eco-system as both attractive to developers, partly on their merits, but also because they have users. An example is that the iphone is developing a consumer/service user community which looks to mac.com for its software services; they're locked in.

T-Mobile, the mobile phone subsidiary of Deutsche Telkom launched a Google phone in Sept. Who are they're looking to escape from? Actually who makes it for them? Or is this merely a consumer play, trying to compete with the iphone and get the consumer conversation back. iphone users love Apple, T-Mobile G1 customers at least know who their Telco is, and Google might be one of the few brands capable of taking Apple on today.

This article was inspired by the R&D in Europe round table at ICT 2008 last November and blogged by me under the title Can Europe keep up?, which was posted today, but backdated to 25th November. Its been written from notes taken at the time and worked on sporadically since then. Since it is not immutably tied to the events of the time, but reflects ideas provoked by the event, I have posted it as at today's date.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[future] topic:[futurology] topic:[sustainability]

Oops, maybe a bit quick re Digg

2009-01-08T14:28:18.000Z

Despite my bitchy comments on Monday, the "Shouting in the DataCenter" video made it to Digg's front page.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[digg]

Re: Oops, maybe a bit quick re Digg

2009-01-10T06:09:16.000Z

Congrats on the front page of digg!

+1 to virtual box

2009-01-08T14:26:03.000Z

I installed a planet instance inside an Ubuntu Guest Virtual Box VM, and it failed the install tests. I was gratified to discover that a native instance of planet/ubuntu 8 failed in the same way. +1 to Virtual Box. Now onto fixing it.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[planet] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[vbox]

3D Worlds, Sun steps up to the plate

2009-01-08T14:09:28.000Z

Sun has some 3D acceleration software designed to optimise the performance of 3D Worlds, called the Sun Visualization System . This was pointed out to me by Constatin Gonzalez, who has written about it on his blog, "Making 3d work over vnc", and thought I'd be interested due to my articles on VNC and remotely accessing more business oriented 3d Worlds. He pointed this out to me after reading with my experiments with VNC Lite, which he has also played with. The Sun software runs on Linux and Solaris, so its no good for Neverwinter Nights, and I can't imagine it'd work inside a Virtual Box.

Anyway I have enough Virtual Box experiments at the moment without adding to them, so I doubt that I'll be trying this.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[visualization] topic:[network] "topic:[virtual worlds]" "topic:[3d Computing]"

Re: 3D Worlds, Sun steps up to the plate

2009-01-08T14:12:42.000Z

Actually, adopting this may depend on how quickly I can replace the Cobalt Qube with a hosted service. Once I have a decent Linux/Solaris platform, it may be quicker and easier to do some of these things.

Has Digg jumped the shark?

2009-01-06T07:45:00.000Z

The comments on the Digg post on "Shouting in the Data Centre" [ Youtube | this Blog ] disappointed me. I am not a great user of Digg and very few of my submissions have taken off. It is one of the feeds I subscribe to using Google Reader which is my first choice feed reader today. It seems that I am obviously not interested in the same stuff as most of its users, but to find the majority of comments about the provenance of the Digg takes self reference to the point of absurdity. It reminded me of a very recent a post 'openpeel', called '5 Ways to fix Digg', and it also reminds me of Simon Phipps' comment,

"When you invent a system, you invent the system that games it!".

Its a shame, but I suppose that the social software designers will have to become cleverer. It's clearly a fact that a 'karma' systems attracts people to contribute to the 'wisdom of crowds', but also trying to measure the influence, popularity or even innovativeness/leadership of contributors often leads to anti-social, even destructive behaviour.

I wonder if digg has jumped the shark as its user community has grown beyond an expertise focus and its designers loose the arms race with the gamers. Is there an alternative? I have considered for a while the use of 'clubs', where feed consumers, i.e. me and you, qualify the contributors to our feeds, or membership is gated. I use del.icio.us to keep my bookmarks and thus act as the original source of my contributions to finding interesting news. These thus become available through RSS, and then those I really think are interesting to others, I use Google Reader shares to share them. In the past I have used Slynkr, and have been using Digg to act as an entry point to my friend feed. The Google Share is a cute feature as the Google Reader makes my google friends' shares available to me. I use this to read other people's shared articles. The google shares I post may become my Digg replacement, but there's now no weighting or rating and my community is pretty small, since it is based on google talk/chat friends, which is not my first choice chat protocol.

The Google Share/Talk synergy is another interesting example of leveraging closed communities, and functional synergy by the software authors. Retaining the choice of internet participants against this new "lock in" could be open source's next big problem to solve.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[socialsoftware] topic:[discovery] topic:[digg] "topic:[google reader]" topic:[youtube]

You can't do this without "amberroad"

2009-01-05T10:30:00.000Z

Glenn Brunnette pointed this Youtube Video out to me

which struck me as rather cool in that it demonstrates the awesome advantage of the FISHworks analytics i.e. the management software that comes with Sun's Unified Storage systems. Its such a great way of seeing the power of the software I decided to bookmark it on del.icio.us and digg it, [here], I glad to see I am not the first. I was, however, sad to see that the digg conversation was so trivial, amusingly focused on the effects of shouting at computers, which we've all done, and less so about the track record of the person who submitted the story to digg. Has Digg jumped the shark?

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[storage] topic:[sunw] topic:[fishworks] topic:[video] topic:[youtube]

More VNC Lite

2008-12-30T11:19:29.000Z

I showed you VNC lite accessing Neverwinter Nights the other day. I finally got project wonderland working on one of my PCs, so here's a picture of VNC Lite accessing my project wonderland instance

and here's one of me accessing Second Life

I should point out that MochaSoft, VNC Lite's authors don't recommend these use cases. :)

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[vnc] topic:[mochasoft] "topic:[project wonderland]" topic:[darkstar] topic:[secondlife] topic:[technology]

Optimising a Roller theme for printing

2008-12-28T18:02:54.000Z

Inspired by Phil Harman's Trials with his roller theme I have wanted to create a better hard copy experience for you. I implemented this earlier this morning on my blog's roller files. It has been tested using Opera's print preview on the main weblog page and the comments view of an article and so should work on a view based on a tag, category, or date.

I have implemented a 2nd CSS file. Because my theme's base is so old, it is not conformant to the stylesheet/theme file structures of today's roller so I implemented it as just any old template file. The form lets you know/set the URL. It contains the following rules.

.noPrint
{ display: none; }
.noshow
{ visibility: hidden;}

It is introduced to the weblog using the following code in the weblog template file, in the HEAD section. The assignment in a LINK or STYLE tag with the MEDIA="print" attribute is what applies this rule only when printing.

I used the 'new file' form to set the url of the new file as above, but named it _printcss; it needs a preceding _ to become invisible to some of the roller macros such as #showBasicNavBar, and the form won't permit a .css suffix. It might be cleverer to call the file _cssprint, so that the css files are all adjacent to each other in an alphabetic sort, which you get on the 'edit templates' form.

I have applied the 'noPrint' rule to the Banner, the webCategoryChooser and Sidebar. I have not used the 'noShow' rule, which I developed to apply to objects that occupy vertical space in a table. The rules are applied to a DIV for the banner, P for the web catgory chooser and TABLE for the sidebar. Another pointer to the fact I must find time to remove the tables from this theme. I am working on it I promise.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[blog] topic:[roller] topic:[print] topic:[theme] topic:[printing]

Re: Optimising a Roller theme for printing

2008-12-29T08:39:03.000Z

Nice. I have stolen it. However while I can get the sidebar to disappear when printing my entries still do not fit the page which rather spoils the point (not entirely though as single page entries now only consume a single page of paper or at least they will when I work out how to get the "post a comment" bit to disappear.

Now how can you get the same things to happens when displaying to a PDA (iPod?)

Re: Optimising a Roller theme for printing

2008-12-29T12:51:52.000Z

I am now looking at how to do this for the ipod. I hope that media=screen will help. I am keeping my notes on my bliki at

http://davelevy.dyndns.info/snipsnap/space/Dave/HTML

Your space management problem is probably because your content pane is specified as a proportionate width. I have now got a fixed width blog page, try resizing the browser, and documented how to do it in an article called

http://blogs.sun.com/DaveLevy/entry/about_css_two_column_page

on this blog. This allows me to define the TD element containing the blog articles/entries as width:100%. This ensures that when the fixed width sidebar is display:none the content expands to fill the space. I know this because I had to change my code, which if you check the page source has the old code commented out.

Notice: New media=print rules

2008-12-28T17:35:26.000Z

All weblog views on this blog can now be printed, the banner and sidebar will not be shown in the printed version. This has been tested using Opera's print preview, and should work for the weblog, tag, category, date and comment views. It has not been set for the "About Me" page, nor "Yesterday's Words".

tags: none

How nomadic can one get? VNC for all.

2008-12-18T01:45:18.000Z

I have just been playing with Mocha VNC Lite for the ipodtouch. Its dead easy to get it to work. I downloaded Real VNC Free Edition and started the server on one of my PC's. The VNC Client connects straight away. Unfortunately the Lite version doesn't have mouse, function key, return or arrow keys, these are reserved for the "pay for" version, I hope they have arrow key support since I tried to use it to run Second Life and Neverwinter Nights. Both of these need the arrow keys. I took a picture of the Neverwinter Nights screen on the ipod, [here's how] but you'll have to take my word for it since it could be any old screen shot, the 'touch doesn't record a camera type for flickr.

I have done all this behind my firewall. I'll be experimenting with doing this over the internet some time. You might like to check the following links; Mocha VNC's FAQ and User Guide.

I also found that the logical size of the PC screen was too large for the VNC client and I got a 'window' on the screen. I wonder if this can be fixed.

This is the picture as taken on the ipodtouch, which renders larger than the 'touch's screen as an image and hence also in the the HTML view. I have left the picture as sized here, but other images in this blog I have re-sized to be closer to the real screen size.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[vnc] topic:[nwn] topic:[neverwinternights] topic:[secondlife]

Re: How nomadic can one get? VNC for all.

2008-12-21T23:13:49.000Z

Thanks for the screenshot tip!

More about Shanghai Jiao Tong University study on University excellence

2008-12-17T18:36:50.000Z

I have just blogged my notes from the first morning of ICT 2008, and backdated it to about the time of its occurrence. In it, I mention the Academic Ranking of World Universities, produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in China. This survey is also referenced at Wikipedia as well, and the wikipedia article has a table with macros displaying the table in different sort orders. The methodology they use is questioned by some.

Learnings from Lyon at ICT2008

2008-12-02T13:02:02.000Z

I have spent this morning looking at the leaflets and notes I took at ICT 2008 in Lyon last week. I have bookmarked many of them at delicious with the "myict2008" tag. These cover mainly grids, distributed computing and knowledge management, there are a couple of consultancy sites as well.

I hope you'll find them useful. I have posted them here, using their link roll gadget since you can't enter del.icio.us on a date and this blog entry has both a date URL and a permalink. The lack of a date query is probably one of the reasons that people post links to their blogs. This is the first time I have done it, although the linkroll is in my sidebar on this page and on my archive page.

I hope to write up my notes in a more narrative form, which I'll back date to last week, which is when the conference took place.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[eu] topic:[research]

Managing Torrow's Cloud

2008-11-26T13:00:00.000Z

An off agenda session on Cloud Computing, kicked off by William Fellows of the 451 Group. I quite like his stacks both of functionality, illustrating what needs to be done and the evolution of the cloud from its partly failed predecessors. The discussion then moved to management, with contributions from IRMOS and the Autonomic Internet project, which sounds a bit IBM'ish but isn't. There's obviously some thinking going on about Service Management for Clouds and networks, looking at life cycle issues (is this just job management, probably not because of birth and death), self functioning, SLAs and QoS issues. It seems to me that Robert Holt's experimentation with SMF is exactly the right thing to do. The features that Sun's Systems Management Facilty add to the operating system are a foundation on which a number of features can be built which meet the need of Cloud managers. The BREIN project which says about itself,

"BREIN takes the e-business concept developed in recent Grid research projects, namely the concept of so-called "dynamic virtual organisations" towards a more business-centric model, by enhancing the system with methods from artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, semantic web etc."

I love the etc. It always makes you think people know exactly what they're doing. They have published a white paper here.... Despite this, these projects and this approach might well enable the automated SLA negociation. Can we create a semweb for SLAs? It always been the fact that sustaining and management science comes after the invention stage, but this was a jolly interesting session, and addressing issues identified by both myself and colleagues at Sun and leading industry commentators as crucial. If we don't/can't automate this stuff, we are going to run out of people.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[research] topic:[europe] topic:[r+d] topic:[ict2008] topic:[SLA] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[future] topic:[ict2008]

Impressions of the Citie International

2008-11-26T08:15:00.000Z

Among the things to do better should Sun come to ICT again, is that the hotel should be booked in advance. Its a real pain being so far from my hotel room; I can't return to my room for either power or privacy. The commute is a time consuming pain; I am staying in Vienne which is about 30 minutes away, although the journey takes much longer. The journey in both directions was made harder by a strike on the trains, it was just like old time in England being picketed by the CGT. I hope it's easier today.

The Lyon convention centre is enormous and very good. If we could justify a Sun global training event in Europe, it'd be excellent, I wonder if they rent parts of it?

Even at this conference, they 'ushhered' people to sit below the main walkways when using the main auditorium for break out sessions. Having said it'd be excellent, are there enough hotel rooms in Lyon, as I said I booked late and AMEX couldn't get me in (to Lyon), but it could always be AMEX's fault. The number of breakout rooms might be a constraint and the wireless was poor in a number of rooms and unlike Palau de Congressos de Catlunya in Barcelona, there is no power available in the conference rooms and halls. They claimed 4500 delegates at ICT 2008.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[ict2008] topic:[lyon]

Can Europe keep up?

2008-11-25T18:00:00.000Z

I then attended a panel discussion on R&D in Europe, which given the attendees was pretty self congratulatory. HP's VP for Labs is a Brit, and was on the panel. The reason I mention this is that he was the only employee of a global IT company i.e. one not quoted in Europe, who spoke in a plenary session. They sort of said "Great Research, no IT manufacturing" , but why? We do have ICT manufacturers in Telco, including Alcatel, Ericsson, Nokia and Seimens.

Can the European NEP's maintain their leadership? What does Europe's computing hardware poverty mean? Can it compensate with a single market, a vibrant software industry and a well educated work force?

It was also shown that not all these advantages are enough. SAP does very little development in Europe these days, and it was said that innovation rate in Europe is too low, despite a world leading position in many areas.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[research] topic:[europe] topic:[r+d] topic:[ict2008]

Visions of Future Computing

2008-11-25T15:00:00.000Z

After lunch, with wine, it is in France after all, I attended a session called "Visions of Future Computing and Communication Paradigms". Frustratingly this was not video'd and nor can I find the slides on the USB stick they gave us. So you'll have to rely on my memory; I didn't take any notes. The first two speakers, although their presentations weren't designed to show the difference between IT people and computer scientists. Prof. John McCaskill, of BioMIP, the Biomolecular Information Processing Research Group presented on 'Constructive IT', which as far as I can tell starts from chemistry and is looking at new ways of building computers...beyond Silicon. I have to ask what sort of timescales they expect to do anything substantial. The need to change programming models because of large scale multi-threading is one thing, the abolition of silicon is quite another. This stuff just amazed me. He was followed by Micheal Wolf, who illustrated the insights that quantum physics offer to mainly software design. He was followed by Illka Tuomi also at Wikipedia, who presented on "Intellectual Property Processing After the End of Semiconductor Scaling", and his slides are available on his personal web page at meaningprocessing.com. He illustrates some interesting changes in system design after the end of Semiconductor scaling. The session was brought to end by Wendy Hall, who illustrated the holistic nature of ICT futures arguing for a 'Web Science' approach borrowing from many separate disciplines to build an understanding of the technical and social networks that are being built today.

tags: topic:[europe] topic:[future] topic:[ict2008] topic:[technology] topic:[eu]

ICT 2008, Lyon

2008-11-25T12:00:00.000Z

I got into the conference in time to hear the words of welcome from the Mayor of Lyon, and the opening panel discussion. The panel was chaired by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, and its participants were Luc Chatel, Secrétaire d'Etat chargé de l'Industrie et de la Consommation, France, Esko Aho, Executive Vice President, Nokia Corporation, and Former President of the Finnish Innovation Fund (SITRA), former Prime Minister of Finland and one of the key commentators on FP6, he chaired the group that produced "Information Society Research and Innovation: Delivering results with sustained impact", which was published in September. Also on the panel were Ben Verwaayen, CEO, Alcatel-Lucent, previously of BT, Harold Goddijn, CEO, TomTom and Michel Cosnard, CEO and Chairman, INRIA, representing a research view. The conference has a video link on its site for this session. The panel was called "Setting the ICT Agenda for the Next Decade" , has its own page. The panelists said little of controversy, with Verwaayen arguing that trust and security were keys with Aho arguing for a global dimension, starting from a green perspective to invest in productive knowledge. He also interestingly argued that US leadership was based on entrepreneurialism and commercial innovation. I was surprised, I am not yet convinced that european basic science research is yet competitive with the US. For instance, while researching NESSI's contribution to the EU's Software Industrial policy, I was pointed at China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University's study of Academic Ranking of World Universities. I, and others, have considered the methodology and anomalies, but it illustrates a world domination of scientific excellence in the universities by the USA. However Goddijn, who was there to tell the startup story, stated that his biggest problems in building Tom Tom were not technological, but regulatory compliance, specifically, VAT and patent registration. These comments got a round of applause, and Verwaayen weighed in specifically asking when it might become possible to register patents in the EU in one language. There were further discussions on the public policy dimensions of how innovation enters the economy, discussing public/private partnerships, educational/innovation clusters with much agreement about the short term changes in ICT.

In between the opening sessions and the panel discussion, some video's from Futuris were shown. This focused on the use of ICT in health care delivery. I have argued previously that the UK's investment in i-health care has been too focused on record keepting and NHS cost control, so it was good to see a couple of case studies showing the innovative use technology in improving the ill and injured's lives. I can't find the specific video on the Futuris site, but Futuris is an EU sponsored TV show broadcast on the Euronews channel. Leave me a comment if you find it.

tags: topic:[europe] topic:[future] topic:[ict2008] topic:[technology] topic:[eu]

Vienne

2008-11-25T00:00:00.000Z

I am in staying in Vienne to attend the EU's ICT 2008 conference, to be held in Lyon which is a biennial conference of Europe's top IT researchers in commerce and academia, convened by the Commission of the European Union.

tags: topic:[travel]

Mobile Viewing

2008-11-20T07:22:47.000Z

I have just attempted to read a recent Guardian article, the Coolest Quartier in Paris. I was pointed there by my ipod touch's feed reader, Daisy Feed, and decided that the page is not well read even on the 'touch's screen, so checked it out on a laptop browser. I have been surveyed by the site owner and they asked some questions on the mobile internet, which since they didn't ask me all the questions I wanted to answer, I'll comment here.

I have struggled to embrace the internet on the phone. The screen has always been a problem and as I get used to the 'touch, which is so much better I am considering my static web site and how I present pages on the net. Much content is arranged optimally for reading on a computer hosted browser, and this is true for much of the Guardian's site as well as my own.

An example of changes I am considering include a long standing page which hosts my delicious tag cloud and a revised version optimised for the ipod touch. You can view the differences, just, by hovering or click though to view. The tag cloud is no longer just a vanity, its a quick way through to my bookmarks.

I shall be reviewing web site name structure and looking at if I can use CSS/Javascript to represent the same pages differently depending on the device. So probably best not bookmark the ipod links page, I am not sure how long it'll be there.

The mobile internet'd be a lot more useful if wireless was more ubiquitous, but I have plans to fix this. I'll use my phone, to connect the 'touch to the internet.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[guardianunlimited] topic:[internet] topic:[mobile]

Re: Mobile Viewing

2008-11-20T09:52:08.000Z

You should try google reader. It seems to work pretty well on the ipod touch.

Re: Mobile Viewing

2008-11-20T10:36:35.000Z

I have and its quite good, however my OPML list is very long and not well qualified. The article above is meant to be about mobile optimisation, and while google have done well with the look and feel of reader on the ipod touch, it remains unusable on my phone and my usage up till now makes it less than satisfactory. I am sure I can streamline and re-organise my feed list to make it more usable on the ipod touch. I suppose the problem is that the feed list is longer than my real interests, so its very cluttered with stuff I don't actually want to know about.

The EU's Call 4 for research projects funded by FP7

2008-11-19T23:00:00.000Z

19th November - The Commission of the European Union have advertised FP7 Call 4 [Press Release]. This is the opportunity to undertake collaborative research into ICT with financial contrinbutions from the Commission. The press release talks of seven challanges, "Pervasive and trustworthy network and service infrastructures", "Cognitive systems, interaction, robotics", "Components, systems, engineering", the comma's are theirs, I want to check up on this, "Towards sustainable and personalised healthcare", "ICT for mobility, environmental stability and energy efficiency" and "ICT for independent living , inclusion and governance". The call also looks to promote research in three new areas of Future and Emerging Technologies, one of which is "Concurrent tera-device computing", you'd think we might be interested in that.

An interesting set of priorities, the Call for Proposal is on Cordis, the EU's Community Research & Development Information site.

The SuperNAP

2008-11-14T01:00:00.000Z

I was invited to visit Switch Communication's Supernap facility. This must be the best datacentere in the world. It is purpose built, and designed to host new age high density computing. They set out to build a 35Kw/Rack data centre and every decision they took was to enable this goal. There is no compromise. For instance they have invented their air conditioning plant, since, so they claim, the industry leader wasn't interested in innovating for them, they pump cold air into the top, of the room, and suck the rising hot air out, leveraging the laws of physics. They have three power distribution systems, a fixed floor which supports the PDU system. If you require high density computing, these people are the people to go to.

The have a video on their home site that explains some more, and this video on Youtube, which explains even more.

I found this by querying youtube using the tag supernap.

They talk exclusively about cooling, power, and availability, and they summarise the offering this page. We i.e. Sun are quite good at fitting out data centres, but have rented space in their centre? If you can put up with US jurisdiction, its fantastic. It begs the question why anyone that's not a specialist would build another. Look at the videos.

This was posted in Jan 2008 and backdated to the time of occurrence.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[datacenter] topic:[datacentre] topic:[supernap] topic:[video]

What will the Cloud do?

2008-11-07T00:30:00.000Z

I was pointed at the Eucalyptus project, an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters, by a colleague and decided I needed to check out Amazon first. Several colleagues have given me this advice but have the University really written an open source grid platform conforming to Amazon's EC2 APIs.

If so its a fascinating example of the speed of commoditisation. It raises the question of where's the value in building clouds? If you can't innovate above the system components where can you innovate? Its obviously pointless to copy what Google did 10 years ago and if the assembly is available in Open Source you should probably use it. The space left by Amazon for a competitive threat is that they major on Infrastructure as a Service, although of ocurse given the operating systems available you can quickly turn it into a platform. I have just checked Amazon's EC2 Page, and they now offer a database query interface to their storage solution. The space left is to offer higher levels of abstraction, specifically by offering Java, Python or Ruby space to customers, and this is what Sun's Project Caroline does. Sun also innovates at the system, silicon and software layers. IT Systems are not really commodities and sedimentation means they will continue to change, the industry still needs innovators. IT isn't done yet.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[saas] topic:[opensource]

Billing for Clouds

2008-11-07T00:00:00.000Z

When considering the some of the issues related to building private clouds, the "Usage to Billing" problem was raised and I was reminded of Emlyn Pagden's Blue Print the Utility Model - Part II. I had been consulting with a mid sized European Investment Bank, and discussed the architectural problem with them, and Emlyn. Its a while since I have read Emlyn's paper, but he took the architectural decomposition

Measurement, what are people using
Aggregation/Mediation - accross the whole estate
Allocation - how many charges have they incurred
Invoicing - give us our money

and built a reference implementation using Solaris Resource Manager and accounting functionality and some third party products. At the time, he was working for a team that wanted to sell third party software, he had no engineering resources and thus a propensity to use 3rd Party software before building significant scripted functionality. With different resources and motivations, the reference implementation might look quite different, but the paper which was based in a real prototype exposes a working solution.I suspect that not all the companies he mention either still exist, or remain in the "Systems Management" business. However the decomposition should allow easy replacement and the advances in SOA may make this easier to do.

One of the key problems that inhibit adoption of these solutions is that end-user IT departments are cost centres and financially aim to spend or underspend their budgets. Their outgoing charging tariffs are based on cost recovery and they don't care how busy what they supply is; they have to charge for what they supply. If they don't do this they make a loss, and the CIO gets fired.

Neither he, nor I experimented with testing this on a grid, and it might involve having a global /etc/projects name space across the whole cloud, but with Virtual Box testing these things becomes easier. Sadly I have picked up enough projects from this trip already, but now I need to build a grid on a laptop.

We both agreed that the invoicing function was best left to the ERP system. Private cloud builders may not need to produce an invoice since they may not be using real money, they will have to make some entries into the Financials systems either cost relief transfers or something. Also new start ups of public clouds may wish to look at Open Bravo, an open source ERP package.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[billing] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[measurement] topic:[openbravo] topic:[Sun Blueprint]topic:[utility computing]

Talking about Cloud Computing

2008-11-06T23:30:00.000Z

The current technical state of systems, storage and networking and specifically the cost of broad band networking has created a tipping point. Over the last 10 years, organisations and people have been learning to build new distributed computing server complexes. It may be too late to copy the leaders, but certain design criteria and the regulatory constraints may mean that there is a slower commercial adoption cylce. The privacy, availability and response time requirements are for businesses are all different. In my mind, its commercial adoption that turns grids into clouds.

"One class of grid is where we locate one application, which has many identical parts on a distributed computing platform and we call this HPC; where we locate many copies of one application be it apache, glassfish or MySQL on a distributed computing platform we call it web 2.0 and when we locate many applications on a distributed computing platform we call it Cloud Computing"

Dave Levy

Its commerce that has the need for the Cloud, because they have usually have a large portfolio of applications, some of which behave like HPC and some of which behave like Web 2.0 and its the economics of utility that drives this. Sun's ERP solutions have leveraged our product portfolio and Moore's law to become a tiny fraction of Sun's IT estate, with the community infrastructure and the design support solutions being implemented on web 2.0 and HPC grids, now dominating Sun's internal network in terms of cycles, storage and cost.

Admittedly, there are other aspects of what makes a cloud different from the payroll bureau of thirty years ago.

Data Centres are expensive and as we are discovering in the last few years, they are best built for purpose. Building and running Data Centres also benefits from 'specialisation'. In "The Big Switch", Nicholas Carr argues that the efficiencies of the plant apply to IT. (I'm really going to have to read it). Historically, applications developers have tightly coupled their code with an operating system image, specifying the version, library installs, package cluster and patch state. This is beginning to end. Developers want to and do develop to new contracts, be it Java, Python or another run time. Also with virtualisation technology such as Virtual Box and VMware, deployers can build their utility plant and take an application appliance with an integrated OS and applications run time, this allows developers to choose whether to use modern dynamic runtimes or to tightly integrate their code with the environment.

A second driver is the amount of data coming on-line. This cornucopia of data is enabling/creating new applications, of which internet search is an obvious one. Google scans the web, but many companies and increasing social networks are scanning their storage to discover new valuable pieces of information. Internet scale also means the "clever people work elsewhere" rule of life is generating new questions. The growing number of devices attached to the internet is also discovering and delivering new digital facts. The evolution of the internet of things will make the growth in data explosive so its a good time to be introducing a new disruptive storage capability and economics. The need to analyse this massive new data source is what's driving the emergence of Hadoop and Map/Reduce. Only parallel computing is capable of getting information out of the data in any reasonable time. A fascinating proof point is documented on the NYT Blog, where Derek Gottfrid shows how he used Amazon's cloud offerings to convert the NYT's 4TB archive into .pdf using Hadoop. I'd hate to think how long it might have taken using traditional techniques.

One tendency I have observed from my work over the last year is that today building grids is now longer hard, and most dramatically Amazon and Google are turning their grids to applications hosting. A number of public sector research institutions have also been building publicly available grids for a wile, although they tend to share amongst themselves. In the public sector world at least, they have begun to address the question of grid interoperability, and everyone is looking at how to 'slice' resource chunks out of the grid for users, on demand of course.

In the commercial world the competitive positioning of various players has led to them competing with different services and different levels of abstraction. The offerings of Google's "google apps engine" vs "Amazon's EC2" are quite different. Sun believes that cloud computing offerings need to organise above the OS level now and that developers don't want to worry about the operating system, merely their run time execution environment. This is only possible because modern development and runtime environments can protect developers from both the cpu architecture and now the operating system implementation. I know that as I search for a new solution for the services I run on my Qube, I'm happy to configure the applications and their backups, but I don't want to worry about disk reliability and other system services.

Jim Baty made the comment that we're entering a Web 3.0 world which is chmod 777 for everyone. :)

So the economics are compelling, the state of technology is right, developers are ready to leave these decisions behind and the first movers are moving.

Can and will Sun play a role in this next stage of the maturing of IT?

This article is I hope the first of two, written from notes made during a presentation by Jim Baty, Chief Architect, Sun Global Sales and Services, Scott Matton, one of the senior architects in GSS and Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Network.com. The article is back dated to about the time of occurrence.

Tuesday on the night of Obama's election

2008-11-05T20:13:09.000Z

Last night was very quiet, I went to Kapps in Mountain View. I had left the office where a number of people were, oddly, watching the BBC web site report via a wall screen display. I had also enabled the facebook and multi-protocol chat applications on the ipod and discussed the elections with my son at home in the UK. This was pretty good as I had to stop using my laptop. The media seem to declare states as won very early, with the BBC and Guardian being earlier and more certian than the US sites. Also the polls also shut early in my british view, the west coast polling stations shut at 8:00 p.m.

McCain conceded at 20:15, I wasn't expecting it so early; in British elections, the polls don't close 'till 22:00 and the counts don't start untill the counting stations are open, which is usually at 23:00. The first results come through at just after midnight and the results aren't ususally clear 'till the early hours. I rember going to bed at 4:00 am on 1st May 1997, knowing it was good, and that Mellor and Portillo were looking for work, but the final results weren't known 'till later in the morning.

The CNN site was awesome and I used it to follow the results during the earlly evening, and I have followed the elections via realpolitics.com, the BBC page had a great feature to show the states in proportion to their electoral college votes. It looks something like this, which is much more accurate and powerfully descriptive than a geographic map.

In 1997, I had a page torn from the Guardian and ticked off results on the paper's 'Must Win' list. A pencil and paper, but nomadic solution, to go with the UK's pencil and paper voting system.

tags: topic:[politics] topic:[us2008] topic:[elections] "topic:[nomadic computing]" topic:[travel]

Re: Tuesday on the night of Obama's election

2008-11-05T20:30:22.000Z

I still struggle with the reversal of colours for the political parties between the UK and US. In the UK, the left, what remains, uses Red and the right use Blue.

News on the move

2008-11-04T03:00:00.000Z

"Free RSS" seems to have some problems, however, I chose to load itunes on a desktop at home so will have to wait 'till I get back there to remove it, or replace it. However, Google pointed me at a thread called "the best free rss application?" at http://www.ipodtouchfans.com. Meanwhile, I am still reading my feeds at Google Reader, both on the 'touch and on my laptop.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[silly] topic:[apps] topic:[rss] topic:[feedreader]

Building new age clouds

2008-11-03T20:00:00.000Z

Sohrab Modi introduced three presentations from the Sun Labs on Hadoop & Hbase, and Project Celeste. He also pointed us at http://opensolaris.org/os/project/livehadoop/. I have downloaded this and shall let you know how it goes.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[future] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[hadoop] topic:[filesystem] topic:[grid]

Back in the USA, part II

2008-11-02T22:00:00.000Z

I shall be in the USA for the election, which could be fun, but certainly interesting.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[politics]

Back in the USA

2008-11-02T21:05:43.000Z

Back to California for training and meetings. Sadly my Virgin ticket is so cheap that I would have to pay (money) to upgrade before I can use my miles to upgrade my seat. I should know by now, that loyalty schemes are designed to maximise the vendor's interest, but it now seems as I am in a position that I am now a member of another airline scheme where I can't spend the miles.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[culture] topic:[virginatlantic]

Getting started with my iTouch

2008-11-01T23:00:00.000Z

I have connected to my home network and checked that the Maps & Weather applications work.

I downloaded Free RSS and connected to the Guardian's News Feed. Also I have tried to configure the mail client to read my POP 3 mail, but it seems unhappy. It comes with some templates for the usual culprits, so this may take some work.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[apps]

Re: Getting started with my iTouch

2008-11-04T18:58:41.000Z

I returned the following day Free RSS seems somewhat unhappy, also the 'touch came with no protective case. Its probably best to buy one with the ipod, they're not expensive enough to get free P&P from Amazon where as the 'touch is. There are also some very cheap ones at Amazon, whereas I bought one from Dixons.

my first impressions with the ipodtouch

2008-10-31T07:00:00.000Z

I managed to spend a couple of hours on my new ipod touch today. I have loaded my music and selected a few applications. Scott Wilson showed me iPint on his iphone, so I had to go and get that.

Check it out, you can also watch this video which I found on You Tube. i.e. this neither me nor Scott, and it is fully accredited at its publication page on you tube.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[silly] topic:[ipint] topic:[video]

Using Virtual Box's shared folders

2008-10-29T11:10:25.000Z

I have taken advantage of Virtual Box's shared folder feature. I used the GUI to define one of the windows host folders as readable and then issue a mount command

mkdir /public
mount -t vboxsf ${vbox_folder_name} /public

proving this works, I then insert a line into /etc/fstab,

import /public vboxsf

issue the mount -a command. There are no errors reported and df shows the file system as mounted. I have rebooted the VM and the filesystem mounts fine.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[networking] topic:[sharedfolders]

Virtual Box 2.0.4

2008-10-29T11:01:10.000Z

I have taken the opportunity to upgrade to Virtual Box 2.0.4. The upgrade for Ubuntu 8 goes fine, although EZ-Web is barfing on the upgrade; I have forgotten some password I need. (Hmm, I wonder if I should try the command line, or closing the postgres service first.)

I have amended my proxy set up script. I had not read the documentation carefully enough and tried to set up the proxied ports while the VM was running. This is bad. The new script now displays the parameters set,


case $2 in
make)   echo $0 make proxy
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/Protocol" TCP
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/GuestPort" ${port}
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/HostPort" ${port}
         ;;
show|list|display) echo $0 list parameters for $key
        for property in Protocol GuestPort HostPort
        do
           ./VBoxManage.exe getextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/${property}"
        done
        ;;
rm|remove) echo $0 remove proxy
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/Protocol"
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/GuestPort"
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/HostPort"
        ;;
esac

I set the key variable earlier in the program. As you can see I have used two idioms now, i.e. iteration and sequence and I am sure a horrendous function could make the code much more economic. However it would have a non real name like act or do which is a clue to a design error. I wonder what it would look like in Python. Mind you, another reason this code is so repetitive is that the shell interpreter doesn't do associative arrays. Boo!

The program now takes two arguments one to define the service and one to define the action. This is why the example above uses $2 as the case argument. The previous version of the code was published earlier this month here on this blog.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[networking] topic:[proxy]

Sun M9000, the fastest SAP platform

2008-10-28T08:40:37.000Z

Back in Brussels for a NESSI meeting, the SAP delegate is new and points me to Sun's M9000 SAP Benchmark results which put's Sun at No. 1 again, although for how long who knows. There's no dount that the SPARC 64 CPU is great and that the M-Series systems are mighty systems. On a slightly more measured, and affordable note, Joerg Moellenkamp wrote about SAP Benchmarks on the X4600 yesterday.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[sap] topic:[sunw] topic:[sparc] topic:[sparc64]

Smoking in public

2008-10-23T22:15:00.000Z

It seems that the Dutch have adopted the european/west coast habit of banning cigarettes in public spaces, which now includes bars, restaurants, offices and shops. Of course there's a complication in the Netherlands. If your cigarettes contains cannabis you must smoke it indoors, otherwise, if they only contain tobacco you have to go outside.

Holland

2008-10-21T09:30:00.000Z

Back to Amsterdam again for meetings

Using a Virtual Box service

2008-10-15T22:08:36.000Z

I want to run a web service inside a Virtual Box container and consume it from initially the host OS, but later from other systems. This article describes how I accessed an apache served page from and Ubuntu 8 VM.

Using Virtual Box 2.0.2, I read the manual version 2.0.2 chapter 6.4 which talks about allowing the host to utilise port services on a guest. I have a windows host, and a Ubuntu Linux guest.

Despite the problems I have with the IT provided build, fortunately I have cygwin on the machine and so have an easy to use scripting language. Most importantly I have a rigourius 'cd' command with directory completion, my tcl and python shells are a lot fussier about the windows xp 16/32 bit name translation. So in the folder containing the program VBoxManage.exe, I create a script containing the following code,

# need to force the shell, wonder how you do that

USAGE="$0 [make | [rm|remove] | help ]"

case $1 in
make)   echo $0 make proxy
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/Protocol" TCP
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/GuestPort" 80
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/HostPort" 80
         ;;
rm|remove) echo $0 remove proxy
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/Protocol"
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/GuestPort"
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/HostPort"
        ;;
help)   echo $USAGE ;;
esac

exit

I run the script with the argument 'make'. The token "Ubuntu 8" agrees with the VM name, and the token apache2 is afaik, anything I want so long as it agrees. Having run the script, I can boot Firefox in the host OS instance and see the guests default web page, using the URL http://127.0.0.1. Oddly, http://localhost is resolved as something else, but I expect its the apache configuration file that does this.

What next, snipsnap?

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[networking] topic:[guest] topic:[proxy]

Re: Using a Virtual Box service

2008-10-16T04:39:50.000Z

I edited the original article to try and make its purpose clearer and narrative stronger. I also wonder if the use of cygwin another proof point that I should move on from windows as my laptop OS.

Madrid

2008-10-15T15:16:24.000Z

The rain in Spain, is somewhere else today. I am in what is probably the Uxbridge of Madrid, having just visited Sun's Madrid offices. Unfortunately dinner was huge.

Sound and shares with Virtual Box

2008-10-14T10:15:17.000Z

I have just upgraded from Virtual Box 1.64 to 2.0.2 and decided the time has come to turn the sound on and install shared folders.

These are both simple configuration changes since the manual is simple, well written and correct. [ User Manual 2.0.2 ]. Just to remind you, I have a windows host and in this case an Ubuntu 8.0 Linux guest.

In the settings panel for the VM, there is a sound tab, and there is a check box, which is defaulted to off. For a windows host, there is a choice of sound drivers. Since one of these is a null driver, its best to choose the other which is "Windows Direct" sound.

There is a another tab for shared folders, with a file system browser. The purpose is to designate a host file system to act as the target for a guest mount and so act as one route to allow data to exit the VM.

This is what I did,

Create a folder to act as the shared folder.
Use the Virtual Box control panel to specify the shared folder and its device name. I used a folder in 'My Documents' folder and called it hostfs, for host file system.
Boot the VM
Make a mount point, if you want, otherwise use one already there.
Issue a mount -t vboxsf share mount_point. The share is the device name declared in the control panel, in my example 'hostfs'. N.B. The fs type is suffixed with 'sf', presumably for shared folder and not fs for file system like many other file system types.

I then unmounted the shared folder, edited /etc/fstab and issued a mount -a command to test that my syntax works.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[sound] topic:[sharedfolder] topic:[share]

More protocols for pidgin

2008-10-10T15:46:06.000Z

Having upgraded pidgin, now its time to add Facebook and Skype buddies. These require two add-ons, written by the same person. I installed Skype earlier in the week, so

facebook 4 pidgin at code.google.com
Skype 4 pidgin at code.google.com

Skype seems to be working well, and the install process is well documented by Eion, now I just need to test the facebook connection. Who do I only know as a facebook friend?

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[im] topic:[messaging] topic:[pidgin] topic:[software] topic:[facebook] topic:[skype]

Re: More protocols for pidgin

2008-10-10T17:40:56.000Z

Facebook seems to work fine.

Google Talk and Pidgin

2008-10-10T10:51:07.000Z

The last but one fix is to reconfigure my google talk account as a service on pidgin. I was having problems with this on my desktop. I had joined in a thread at Google's self help forum to which I had no reply and is now archived. Google have also published instructions, which I discussed the other week. So here's the key for me, my domain is now "googlemail.com". I don't know if I changed my relationship with google or if they changed their server configurations, the xmpp parameters I use are,

Basic Tab
protocol : xmpp
domain : googlemail.com
resource : Home
Advanced Tab
Require SSL/TLS, Force old port (5222), Allow plain text .... : All Unchecked
Connect Port: 5222
Connect Server: talk.google.com
File Transfer Proxies : proxy.jabber.org

although I have not yet tried a file transfer. So as far as I can tell the Google documentation is wrong about how you choose between gmail.com and googlemail.com.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[im] topic:[messaging] topic:[pidgin] topic:[software] topic:[xmpp]

Re: Google Talk and Pidgin

2008-10-10T14:53:26.000Z

Mine is the same excepting:
Domain: gmail.com
and 'USE GSSAPI for authentication' is checked under advanced.

Re: Google Talk and Pidgin

2008-10-10T15:30:39.000Z

Thank you, the key point is that I should be a gmail user according to the google "howto" page. I don't see the GSSAPI parameter.

Laptop Diaries, about video drivers

2008-10-10T10:28:36.000Z

Recently I have written about problems I have had with pidgin xmpp chat rooms, however, I have also come across a problem where I can't switch between the Firefox 3 control panel and rendered page, so I looked to see if anyone else had a similar problem. I found this article, called Can't Click Inside Firefox 3 Window Without Losing Focus 1st at http://forums.mozillazine.org/, where yesterday, someone posted that new nvidia drivers had helped him solve the problem. So a quick visit to Toshiba UK's support portal and I discover that the most recent driver is over 6 months old, so I grab that an install it. I suppose its one of the problems in taking someone else's build. I now obviously need to wait and see if the problem re-occurs but so far so good.

Given I have new display driver, I have decided to re-install Pidgin 2.5.1 and its associated GTK library. This also seems to be working OK and I have not yet had a problem with the XMPP rooms. I also documented the problems here..., on my Bliki.

I am running a Toshiba Tecra M5 with Windows XP as the OS. I have Sun xVM Virtual Box to let me run Open Solaris and Ubuntu Linux. I take the windows build from our IT department.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[im] topic:[messaging] topic:[pidgin] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[software] topic:[windows] topic:[xmpp] topic:[toshiba] topic:[laptop] "topic:[video driver]"

Beyond con-calls

2008-10-07T09:58:25.000Z

I have been looking at ways of making virtual meetings easier, more effective and fun. As part of that I have looked again at secondlife, and one of my new correspondents pointed me at "The future is virtually here". This, despite being published last August, and while containing two fun stories about EVE Online, tries too hard in my mind to use language which proves the author's Yoof credentials. Also quoting IBM and World of Warcraft as the exemplar's of using virtual worlds is to my mind lazy. Many companies use secondlife as a virtual store front, although I admit that IBM's virtual data centre, (see also my blog report on the IBM virtual data center) is a quite a cute toy, but a number of people are on the trail of WoW, and its monthly subscription is high for school students.

The killer app. for virtual worlds seems to be training. Sun has just launched its "Solaris Campus" on secondlife, but its the truly compelling case for virtual training is where the where real life exercises are either very expensive or very dangerous, such as the US Marines' use of Doom, and its growing use in urban disaster relief planning. Its certainly dangerous training soldiers realistically. I have argued before that game fan forums helped develop remote collaboration techniques and the games world is now offering a lot to the infrastructure providers. Besides Sun 's very own Project Wonderland, it would be worth checking up on Torque, a science toolkit, & maybe Gaia Online, one of the virtual worlds. (Now in my del.icio.us feed, tagged virtualworlds). Another interesting arrival is Runescape, a british FRPG written in Java, with a free to play subscription option. The science engines are important as they potentially enable the extension of virtual worlds beyond social collaboration into prototyping problems for real world designers.

One interesting aspect about the juvenilsation of games is that actually it also seems to be true the 16-20's aren't there; they're busy 'Getting a First Life', however it could be an indicator that Dave's theory of Youthful Conservativism is true. Today's 16-20 year olds adopted their technologies before the virtual worlds came out, and they see no reason to use the virtual worlds because its too new, and offers them little beyond messaging. Another inhibitor for this age group is that these worlds don't have phone hosted clients yet. (Although iphone has a secondlife client.)

I know there is a lot of knocking copy about Second Life in particular, but con-calls often don't work any more, and training is a different application to e-commerce. Perhaps its only the virtual shopkeepers who are unhappy.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualworlds] topic:[sunw] "topic:[solaris campus]" topic:[mmorpg] topic:[collaboration]

About CSS, two column page

2008-09-26T17:25:35.000Z

I noticed that my home page web site suffered from the same problem that the public blog used to, it didn't have a width constraint and as the browser grew to full screen size the content pane gets wider and wider making paragraphs harder to read. Like this, if you look hard.

In the article Fixing my blog theme..., on this blog I described how I implemented automatic margins using a fixed width and <CENTER> tag. davelevy.info does not use tables for formating its page and for some reason, the technique didn't work, although this may have been due to a fault in my code. Anyway, I now have a better answer.

Bluerobot, suggests using

margin: auto;

as the technique for centering the document object. From my previous work, I know I want to specify a fixed width and reckon that 1000px is a good fixed width for the document. I havn't explored if amending the <BODY> rule has the effect I want, since while I did apply the rules to the BODY tag, I need a whole page encapsulating DIVision for other reasons and my current solution is to apply the CSS sub-rules to that DIVISION's rule. The old page had three divisions, a banner/header, main content and the menu. Apart from the exterior automatic margins the second part of the problem is to ensure that the positional rules for the three divisions work correctly, most importantly that the positional rules inherit the page constraints we are defining.

This tutorial at http://www.barelyfitz.com, explains how to use relative and absolute position attributes to do what's required. I tested it with the following code,

.outer {
    position: relative;
    width: 500px;
    margin: auto;
}
.inner {
    position: absolute;
     top: 10px;
    right: 20px;
    width: 250px;
}

The BODY section contains,

<DIV STYLE="background-color: gray" CLASS="outer">
<P>Outer</P>
<BR><BR>
<DIV CLASS="inner" STYLE="background-color: #0080C0">
<P>Inner</P>
</DIV>
</DIV>

and this looks like this,

the key thing I had to learn was that the encapsulating division needs to be defined as relative, and the interior object is then defined as absolute and the locational parameters in the .inner i.e. top & right are then absolute within the .outer division. Does this make sense? I have underlined the position attribute values above. The other key lesson is to learn that CLASS and ID attributes are different. On my home site, I use IDs throughout; I was advised to use them originally.

So I need a new DIVision, this is called #Page and associated with the division via the ID attribute

#Page {
    margin: 0px auto;
    width: 1000px;
    position: relative; }

I have moved the location breadcrumb into the Header/Banner division, but otherwise left the #Header division alone, it inherits the width from #Page; it is encapsulated bt tghe #Page DIVision. The #Content DIVision I have left alone, and is placed in the default location, which is within #Page.

The #Menu division rule has had the following lines added

position: absolute;
top: 75px;
right: 20px;

The page structure is as follows

which is what's wanted, a nice list of html content, with all the look and feel held elsewhere, just paragraphs, links, and division statements. Actually the banner is a table still, but now I have a fixed width, I can work on making an image file. The outstanding job is to work out how to create and name a rule for the paragraph containing the breadcrumb trail.

and this is what the index/home page looks like. You can see the two whaite space margins either side of the page. I have briefly tested it with Opewra, Firefox and Explorer.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[roller] topic:[theme] topic:[html] topic:[css] topic:[position] topic:[positioning]

More about Pidgin and XMPP

2008-09-23T16:50:37.000Z

I've spent the day struggling with Pidgin, XMPP and Google Talk. I am still using Pidgin V2.0.1 on Windows XP, with GTK+ 2.10.11. Today I tested Pidgin 2.5.1 and GTK+ 2.10.11 and discovered that I couldn't get it to work with Google Talk. I also discovered that the reliability of XMPP service was dreadful, although I discovered later that this may have been a server issue. I'll have to try again later in the week.

I have documented the state of my findings at Pidgin and Google Talk, at my bliki.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[IM] topic:[messaging] topic:[windows] topic:[xmpp] topic:[pidgin] "topic:[google talk]"

Re: More about Pidgin and XMPP

2008-09-25T05:09:21.000Z

Spent the whole day on an out-dated version of pidgin? I have been running 2.5.1 since its' release. Running it to talk on Google, Yahoo, ICQ, and Skype - There are occasionaly problems with reliability (takes a tail spin about once a week), but otherwise it does its' job.

Re: More about Pidgin and XMPP

2008-09-25T08:45:16.000Z

Ben,

What platform do you use i.e. Mac or PC?

I use the old version because of problems I (and others) have with xmpp chat rooms using more recent versions of pidgin on windows.

What are your Google Talk parameters? Can you document them here please? I can't seem to login to google chat using 2.5.1.

Braindead Browsing

2008-09-21T12:24:36.000Z

I wonder what it would take to embed browser awareness in this blog theme. I have been experimenting with creating pages for my phone's browser without much success but it might be a good idea to try and simplify the theme for braindead browsers.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[web] topic:[mobile] topic:[wireless]

Easy Peasy, ezweb and ubuntu

2008-09-18T17:03:49.000Z

I have EZweb, see also ezweb, fast new dynamic mashups, running inside an Ubuntu 8 VM on my windows Laptop.

The installation instructions were almost perfect, now I need to see how permit the VM to serve external systems. Also I am using Django not Apache, so I need to understand

how to invoke a start/stop script for it
or how to allow it to run in an apache server
or how to permit apache to act as a proxy for Django.

The later will hopefully be very similar to making snipsnap work behind apache, which I have done on the Qube.

Now to build an Application?

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[innovation] topic:[mashup] topic:[spain] topic:[telefonica] topic:[ezweb]

Re: Easy Peasy, ezweb and ubuntu

2008-09-19T09:32:05.000Z

Hello David,

I'm an EzWeb developer from the Juan José unit at Telefonica. Don't hesitate to contact me if you need additional info on any respect.

We normally have a reasonably updated wiki page. However, recently we have moved from django 0.97 to 1.0 so if you plan to install form de source code (using the SVN server), some problem can take place.

I have created a new wiki FAQ page, anwsering some of your questions and interests. You can find it at http://trac.morfeo-project.org/trac/ezwebplatform/wiki/FAQ

Re: Easy Peasy, ezweb and ubuntu

2008-09-25T16:50:12.000Z

Miguel

Can you mail me please? I need a bit more help in doing what I want.

Laptop Diaries, openoffice.org

2008-09-18T12:34:30.000Z

Before I start to install Open Bravo, I notice/knew that there's no personal productivity tools on OpenSolaris, I need openoffice. Its easy enough, a quick google points me at Chris Gerard's article on installing Open Office, on Open Solaris. As he recommends,

pfexec pkg install openoffice

does the trick, off it goes to opensolaris.org and downloads the package and installs it.

and it looks like this.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[opensource] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[howto] topic:[openoffice]

Re: Laptop Diaries, openoffice.org

2008-09-18T16:35:44.000Z

Seemingly a minor oversight but actually a major trademark-relate error: It's OpenOffice.org, not Open Office. The later is a completely different product. :-)

Re: Laptop Diaries, openoffice.org

2008-09-18T17:07:49.000Z

Is that better? I have changed the original post.

ezweb, fast new dynamic mashups

2008-09-16T20:00:00.000Z

The real reason for meeting with the Telefonica reresentative was to gain some familairity with the NESSI project they lead, called EZWeb. This is hosted on the Morfeo Project site, and these projects have significant support from the Spanish Government. EZ Web has an english language installation & documentation page and for Ubuntu there is an apt script, documented on the web. I am just booting my Virtual Box Ubuntu VM to see if it works.

It requires Postgres or MySQL, Python and Django, documented on itsother operating systems page, I'll may check this out and see how hard it is to install on my Open Solaris VM, or I may bring up another Nevada VM.

Juan Jose demonstrated the ease of use of the mashup tool, and it'd be cool to have a go. This may even by the tipping point/use case that gets me to move off the Qube onto something better.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[innovation] topic:[mashup] topic:[spain] topic:[telefonica] topic:[ezweb] topic:[NESSI] topic:[saas]

Re: ezweb, fast new dynamic mashups

2008-09-19T09:51:43.000Z

I have updated the from-source-code installation tutorial due to our recent migration to django 1.0.

Please check this link if you plan to install from the source code: http://forge.morfeo-project.org/wiki/index.php/Installation_on_others_systems

Cool Cool Iris, an image optimised browser

2008-09-16T19:20:00.000Z

I had a swift meeting with Juan Jose of Telefonica which while we had some important stuff to share, he just had to show me Cool Iris.

This is a browser optimised for image and video content. The screen shot above is a view of my flickr photostream. The one below, shows a selection which has been enlarged and has some 'go to' buttons, which takes you to the web page holding the picture, which is more useful if you use their pre-canned queries; we all know what a flickr page looks like, but if using it to browse a news stream, it can act as a very rapid filter.

It has a search engine interface which allows you to fire queries at the usual suspects, the picture below shows the response to a query on flickr for the tags 'beach sunset'

You can also see the screen shot [full size], and hovering over the link shows it via snap preview, which is now so small its a bit poor.

Another clever feature, is that it can be installed using a Firefox browser addon, which then has a button, on the button bar, that tells you if the site you're browsing in firefox is"cool iris ready". I wonder what it would take to get Roller sorted.

For various reasons, I created a tiny.url, which they offer a preview of depending on your settings.>/P>

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[web] topic:[3d] topic:[multimedia] topic:[browser] topic:[cooliris] topic:[roller] topic:[flickr]

Laptop Diaries, Open Solaris

2008-09-16T05:00:00.000Z

So while at the Lintlithgow EBC launch last week, I saw a demo'd copy of an opensolaris VM which looked really cool, and then Jingesh Shah, published this blog article on an Open Source ERP package, called "openbravo" running on Open Solaris. This has to be done.

I have downloaded the Open Solaris .iso from http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/, and this is how I did it.

Start a VM using the .iso as the boot device.

Follow these installation instructions to define the locale and users.

Shut down the VM

Using the Virtual Box control panel, point the CD/DVD drive at the VX additions .iso, which is in the installation folder and restart the VM, then as root,

cd /media
pkgadd -d ./VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg

I was using V1.6.4 of Virtual Box and for some reason, the "Add Guest Additions" on the Virtual Box command bar didn't work. The above trick seems to work quite happily, I have full screen mode working. Now to upgrade to Virtual Box 2.0.2.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[opensource] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[howto] topic:[openbravo]

Back to Brussels

2008-09-16T02:15:00.000Z

I am back to Bruxelles for NESSI steering committee tomorrow. I had dinner at the Bar à Tapas. Not particularly Belgian, but good all the same.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[bruxelles] topic:[travel] topic:[food] topic:[tapas]

Re: Back to Brussels

2008-09-18T11:26:12.000Z

I have backdated the article to the time it occurred so that the blog will have a diary narrative, but its a bit odd in that both my twitter and plazes feeds have reported my return two days ago.

Chatting

2008-09-11T18:18:23.000Z

I was introduced to IM by my US colleagues (& my children). Many of the former use AOL to forward IM's to their phones. This has become even easier to use with the advent of the iphone. Sun has also implememented an XMPP service and I came to the IM scene with a couple of YIM contacts as well. So I adopted GAIM and went with the pidgin people when that came along, because of Solaris so I only have to worry about the protocol I use for those colleague like me with multiple service accounts.

I have recently had a real problem with pidgin in XMPP chat rooms, and when my boss decided to open a permanent chat room, these problems had to be fixed. Basically, I have reverted to Pidgin 2.0.1 for Windows. I did experiment with using pidgin inside an Ubuntu Virtual box instance and it worked fine, an interesting use case for Virual Box. I propose to raise a bug/note at pidgin's site, but you can use the [READ MORE] button below to read my more detailed notes, which cover the failure symptoms, Google Talk and more about facebook.

I am using a laptop with Windows XP as the operating system. The basic problem is that once an XMPP chat room is opened the mouse pointer disappears from the window space displayed by pidgin and multiple conversations become quite difficult. I need to flag this at the pidgin site, I wonder how I'll discover when they fix it.

I have OTR and google facebook chat plugins installed. When reverting to V 2.0.1 of pidging, the installer asks if it should regress to the previouls GTK kit. I suspect that this is where the problem is. I regressed the GTK version and find that XMPP chat rooms and pidgin are much more stable. OTR regresses fine. The facebook chat plugin does not. I run the installer, it seems to work fine, and then when trying to create a facebook account, it doesn't offer me a facebook service. I have tried to install both versions 1.25 and 1.39. I shall pass this on to the author, but I hadn't fully got this working as most of my tests left one of us using the facebook browser. I need to make this work with both pidgin and adium clients. However, at least I can use XMPP chat rooms. One feature I dislike, with many I believe, is that when a broadcast message is sent to the room, pidgin does not alert the desk top unlike a 121 message where it writes an icon into the system tray and flashes the iconified buddy list icon. (It does change the font colour and style of the chat room title in the window tab, but you can only see this if the window is on top.) If a message is signaled as sent to you, it will write an icon into the system tray and the signal is to include the handle in the message. Pidgin aslo has handle auto completion to make this easy. (You don't need the @ sign in XMPP chat either, just type a couple of characters and use the [tab] button.

AS part of the XMPP testing I opened a Google Talk account and connected with Chris Gerhard. There is a Google help page on configuring Pidgin as a client, I have struggled through this since I do not have either mail accounts, so I need to use gmail.com as my domain. I claimed a "Google talk" handle using the talkgadget. This becomes my pidgin Screen Name. I used gmail.com as the Domain as advised by the documentation and my password for the google services I do consume. The connect server is talk.google.com and we need to use port 5222 This now seems to log me in. . More coming soon. 10th Oct 2008.Excellent, All well and good. Unfortunately its a bit of a waste of time, since Google's XMPP service doesn't support chat rooms so I can't test them. On the other hand I now have a google talk account for those of you who don't use the other accounts I have. Mail me for the handle, because I can't find the user dictionary server which is another XMPP feature.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[IM] topic:[messaging] topic:[windows] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[xmpp] topic:[pidgin]

Re: Chatting

2008-09-13T09:09:48.000Z

my name is mahesh pls join me

Extending Star and Open Office

2008-09-04T18:41:27.000Z

Ian Curtain wrote to me the other day in reply to a colleague that was trying to get up to speed on Openoffice BASIC and macros and offered the following sites as useful.

There is also the Open Office Wiki page as well. Hope you find them useful.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[openoffice] topic:[macros] topic:[basic] topic:[bookmarks]

Vbox 1.6.4, guest additions for Hardy Heron

2008-09-02T09:04:50.000Z

Another download of Virtual Box and the creation of an Ubuntu Hardy Heron VM, using a Windows host. I shan't publish a picture this time. I think I had a problem as the VM wouldn't boot from the Live CD. This could have been me of course, I may have misconfigured it. So I copied the ISO image onto the hard disk and booted off that. The good news is that the guest additions are better than previous versions, or they are for the screen interface. After installing the guest additions, the screen resolution opens @ 1280x768 and full screen mode works just fine. I hadn't got round to fixing the xorg config file on my previous installs but it wasn't as easy and I did need to fiddle with xorg.conf.

What I did,

Download the Virtual Box binaries
Copy the ISO image to a disk folder
Create a new VM, Linux 2.6, dynamic file limited to 8GB, 1024 Mb of RAM, CD set to an ISO image, boot from CD before disk
Start the VM of the ISO image and install the OS into the VM
Stop the VM, unset the ISO image
Start the VM and install Guest Additions

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[virtualization] topic:[virtualbox]

wordle clouds

2008-09-01T14:56:31.000Z

I was browsing sun blogs, when I was pointed at this blog, "Startups" which has an article on wordle. This produces word maps from feed URLs. You can see a view of mine below, it was taken earlier today.

Wordle is (cc) Attribution only, so I need to say the picture above is produced by wordle.net [site | faq ]. Its a Java App so sadly, I had to screenscrape the full size picture, and so generating one per article is too much of a fag, and hard to do ; they use the feed and so see many articles. Word mapping is becoming a powerful tool, but this needs to be licensed by the blog publisher to be included as part of the blog server functionality. I think we'd want clouds/article and clouds/blog. I thought I'd check out what happens if one uses a feed, so I also did one on planetsun.org. See below. It suggests to me that wordle has a fairly short view back in history.

Of course both my blog and the sun bloggers site have hyperlinked tag clouds, which again diminished the use of wordle to us. I wonder if it teaches us anything for other applications such as our "CEC Messaging Platform".

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[tags] "topic:[tag cloud]" topic:[wordle]

More in Budapest

2008-08-28T14:00:00.000Z

I walked down the hill from the castle heights, towards the Magrit Hid. There's a number of small alleys with steps as its quite steep. The views from the heights are quite dramatic as central Budapest is quite low and the old, i.e. very old, 'buildings of power' dominate the skyline. You can see the Parliament building(?) in the background here.

They are not as good as "Simon Phipp's pictures.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[budapest]

What's next for Virtualisation?

2008-08-28T07:30:00.000Z

In discussing virtualisation, a speaker this morning suggested that the two biggest inhibitors to using virtualisation technology are security and scalability. Both of these are opportunities for Solaris. A number of security conscious customers use Solaris 10 with trusted extensions, to run a container, with a virtual box instance, hosting windows. They're delighted because it allows them to protect their network from windows vulnerabilities (It also allows them to protect their data from windows vulnerabilities; you can prohibit the container from acquiring data via any i/o device). The new scalability problem is to scale on a CPU. Sun's Niagara processors are the most threaded CPUs in common use, but Intel and AMD are also pursuing multi-threaded CPU designs. They and their customers need an operating system that scales across the new architectures. Some users/customers are now evaluating work/kwatt, and thus being busy helps you score high in these tests. Scalability = Performance, and Performance = Eco. You still draw power even when not busy.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[virtualization]

Re: What's next for Virtualisation?

2008-08-31T08:51:00.000Z

I've been doing some research regarding the security implications of v12n, as Brian and I are booked to present on this to an organisation I have a long-standing relationship with, next week.

You might be surprised to know that some of the primary risks, particularly in an LDom world, can be mitigated by the judicious use of crypto.

If you're in GMP next Tue or Thu, let's catch up.

Fixing my blog theme for Firefox 3

2008-08-27T16:10:45.000Z

I adopted Firefox 3 the other week and it became obvious that there were several bugs in my weblog theme. These are now fixed, or I hope so.

So the weblog is now the width of the banner picture, we don't get the horrible repetition effect if the browser window is made too large. The weblog is also centre justified in the panel. In order to get this effect I have placed a <DIV style="width:1024px"> around all the content in the weblog file. 1024 pixels is the width of the picture in my banner. In order to ensure the html version of the weblog is located in the centre of the browser panel, I have surrounded this DIV with a <CENTER> tags. Interesting how easy the changes were, but the testing and clumsiness of roller's interface has meant that its taken me along time to get to this point.

I have discovered some additional problems with the theme, which I have fixed in my development environments, but not here yet. The planned end goal is to remove the tables from the theme and replace them with <DIV>s and CSS rules.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[roller] topic:[currency] topic:[theme] topic:[firefox] topic:[firefox3] topic:[html]

Building big grids

2008-08-26T14:30:02.000Z

A colleague of mine, Philipe Trautman presented on winning High Performance Computing deals. He produced some fascinating figures to describe the opportunity. Both Storage and Systems are forecast to grow at double digit rates for the next few years, where as commercial IT is expected to standstill at best. Over 30% of CPUs are going to be bought by HPC solutions during this period and at the moment, 65% of the HPC market is educational and/or research institutes. He outlined Sun's product portfolio consisting of systems, storage, operating systems and interconnects, which can be supplemented by partner products and people. He made the assertion that the real pain is no longer FLOPS, but elsewhere

Power & Cooling
Space
Cluster Management
Consolidation
Application Scalability & Utilization
Data Access including Filesystem selection

and presumably interconnect architecture and selection. Some of these are problems we have been confronting in commercial data centres for a while, albeit on a smaller scale but the last two are new.

Philipe introduced Dr Wolfgang Hafeman, of "Solutions for Research", a subsidiary of T-Systems and thus Deutsche Telekom, who have built and manage an HPC system for researchers in German commerce and academia, using Sun's products. I wonder if I can get the picture he showed, its quite dramatic. Again, this is an example of the right thing done well. Certainly T-System's people have added massive value to the proposition, although often the success of such a piece of business is based on the quality, drive and determination of the project teams. The relationship between the project teams supercedes the relationship between the companies. Its a great example of partnering for the end customer's success.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[sunw] topic:[grid] topic:[hpc]

Budapest

2008-08-26T09:30:00.000Z

Just arrived in Budapest. I am hear to attend a training event. This is for Sun's EMEA, Governement, Education and Healthcare team. My work on NESSI has opened my eyes to the tremendous innovation occuring in parts of these sectors, so I am really looking forward to it.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[budapest]

coolsign.net

2008-08-22T10:09:40.000Z

I was checking out some of the pictures from my flickr groups and came across some fantastic pictures of Santorini. On looking at the author's photo stream, I discovered they had created a "cool sign", to decorate their profile page, which I immediately had to check out. So here's mine...

Made with My Cool Signs.Net

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[html] topic:[branding] topic:[widget]

Laptop Diaries, don't do this.

2008-08-21T15:43:52.000Z

I feel a complete and absolute fool about this one. Longtime readers will know that I have from time to time mucked around with the operating system I use on my laptop, from single to dual boot, experimenting with various Windows, Solaris and Linux iterations. At home I have a couple of desktops running windows, (XP at the moment), primarily because they come with it, but it also runs games, and supports the UK education system's curriculum. I have been experimenting with Virtual Box; at home, mainly to give me x-windows access to my Qube. On my work's laptop, I have vm's running Indiana, Nevada and Ubuntu 7 & 8. I plan to do some pretty exciting things with it when I can find the time. At home, I installed an Ubuntu 8 VM, but i have a very important piece of advice for people using Windows as a host operating system, which I discovered on one of my desktops.

Don't use FAT or FAT32 file systems.

I made a mistake, I can't remember how, but my new HDD has a FAT32 file systems. This has a 4Gb file size limit, so while the virtual box manager will let you define the max file size as whatever you want, when the VM tries to extend beyond the 4Gb limit, the VM reports a disk full error. Fortunately I don't have very much on this disk yet, so the repair is fairly painless.

I documented this here at the virtual box forum, unfortunately the title's not so useful. As I said, I have been working with UNIX too long, I'd forgotten what 32 bits means.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualization] topic:[] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[windows] topic:[32bits] topic:[faq] topic:[howto]

Get Satisfaction

2008-08-21T13:36:38.000Z

I have written elsewhere about some colleagues have been experimenting with Plazes. This led me to raise bugs/rfes. So I bugged these using the plazes web form; they're usually really proactive and they replied but pointed me at their getsatisfaction site. I have raised the new items as topics but have discovered they have a web widget and so have used a personal tag and placed the widget on my snipsnap plazes page, which displays the last five topics tagged as mine. I thought you'd like to see the widget, I have decorated it with a <DIV style="..." statement and added a BORDER=0 attribute to the <IMG> tag.

Active customer service discussions in Plazes tagged "davelevy"

Get Satisfaction support network

I'm really impressed with 'Get Satisfaction', its some great rating and scoring tools.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[community] topic:[plazes] topic:[bugs] topic:[getsatisfaction]

Rethinking Twitter

2008-08-15T17:18:38.000Z

I have been arguing with Constantin Gonzalez about the best way to use twitter. He ended one of his mails to me with the advice to get a better phone and/or client. Yesterday twitter announced that they were terminating SMS transmissions in the UK. Oh Hoorah! So it looks like I need to take his advice.

I use a Sony Ericsson K610i, which I have also been advised to change and so I have the choice of using a WAP service or looking for a Java application. So far I have found

http://m.tweete.net/, which works on my wap browser. I loose the disticntion between follow on phone and read on the web, and as far as I can tell I need to go and look at my messages.
twitter have a mobile optimised site at http://m.twitter.com which suffers from the same problems as above.
http://www.tinytwitter.com/, is a java application, which was pointed out to me by an article on http://www.twittown.com/.
Someone at http://twitter.com/TweetTxt, messaged me offering an SMS forwarding service that I pay for. Some of what I receive is not exactly what I want to pay for to read early, but maybe its the answer.

The twitter blog article offers some other advice including http://www.cellity.com/, this looks neat but does anyone know what their business model is? It also suggests looking at a page on getsatisfaction, where a lively discussion is taking place.

I have had a quick look at the two wap sites. tweete.net looks OK, but how shall I get it to discriminate between those I want on the phone and those I don't. Its font size is smaller than twitter's, so harder to read, but more white space.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[internet] topic:[twitter] topic:[sms] topic:[mobile] topic:[client] topic:[sonyericsson] topic:[k610i] topic:[java] topic:[wap]

Re: Rethinking Twitter

2008-08-15T19:25:54.000Z

Dave,

I wrote about this very subject yesterday:
http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/no_outbound_twitter_for_europe

I appreciate your piece looks at the functional replacements for the service that Twitter suggest, and it's good to know how well these work (or don't as the case may be).

The focus of my article is that all of the options put forward by Twitter are "for cost" options. Either you end up paying for the individual SMS messages to come down to you or you pay for the datalink to the WAP service.

Both instances are barriers to adoption and yet both ensure that the Wireless / Telco. provider community involved effectively get paid twice (they already get paid for the inbound SMS service to Twitter, of course).

Twitter have rather set a precedent by providing this for free up until now and I genuinely wonder how many people will put up with having to pay for a service they have enjoyed for free for so long.

In the short term I suspect it's more likely people will try and subvert the Twitter service so as to continue to get a free outbound SMS service. The most obvious way to do this is by using a little bit of social engineering to spoof an account which receives the free SMS service (i.e. one in the US, Canada or India), but we will see.

Wayne

P.S.

Obviously your readers are more than welcome to have a look at my Twitter feed:
http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/follow_wayne_horkan_on_twitter

Laptop Diaries, more Bluetooth

2008-08-13T15:51:49.000Z

Over the last few weeks I have struggled to create a bluetooth 3G modem on my new Tecra M5. The Bluetooth drivers on this XP build have been provided by Toshiba and the big difference between it and my previous configuration which uses the Microsoft stack is that the special phone number code that the microsoft drivers require is not required when using the Toshiba drivers. It has a specific field for holding the modem configuration parameters and uses the default phone number of *99#. I should have waited.

You can also ignore the create the modem stage.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[laptop] topic:[vodafone] topic:[bluetooth] topic:[modem] topic:[3G] topic:[internet] topic:[sonyericsson] topic:[K610i] topic:[microsoft] topic:[toshiba] topic:[windows] topic:[xp] topic:[howto] should be 'how not to'

using twitter to share

2008-08-12T14:55:39.000Z

Some colleagues use twitter to notify their correspondents of their blogs. I have discovered 'twitthis' as a remote javascript and embedded it into this article. Actually it was pointed out in an article in the Guardian which suggest maybe twitter is losing its edgyness. I have changed the picture, to make it a better fit on the article affinity line, as a companion to technorati, digg, slashdot and delicious.

twit this:

You might recognise this picture better.

You need to be logged into twitter for this to work, maybe through the script. I have run one test and this article is part of the second test. If this works I'll add it to the 'share this' line, and let you know how it works.

It advertises itself at http://twitthis.com/.

I shall probably not add this to the 'share this' line; the script points at the blog, not the article, so I shall put this in the sidebar sometime.

Please let me know if you find the lag as it executes the script unacceptable.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[twitter] topic:[sharethis] topic:[blog] topic:[html] topic:[web]

Re: using twitter to share

2008-08-12T16:54:38.000Z

the addthis.com widget allows you to share via twitter too. I use it because it adds the social networks as they come online - you don't have to maintain your own set of icons and links. Also, it posts the article URL, not just the blog.

simplifying my roller blog

2008-08-12T11:05:25.000Z

I have removed the 'More tags and links' page from this site. I am looking to improve the theme in several ways and the the "More tags...." page only added only a view of my delicious tag cloud which can be seen at delicious.com, davelevy.info and sometimes at my bliki's tag page. The price of this was several theme files which I will be removing to simplify the task of moving forward. Both features require encapsulating everything in <DIV> tags, so the less to do the better.

tags: topic:[admin] topic:[roller] topic:[themes]

Roller theme revision

2008-08-08T13:23:10.000Z

The last article contained several javascripts and I discovered that the RTF editor on roller strips them out, so I am back to the raw text editor and writing in HTML.

Also it's the first article I have used sub-headings in for several years. I have amended the h1 and h2 css rules. I have assigned the h1 rule to the article title lines in the _day file and used the h2 tags in the article content fields. I am working on a major theme release which I'll contribute when finished.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[roller] topic:[themes] topic:[css]

Help with making a personal feed using SaaS

2008-08-08T12:42:23.000Z

Making a personal feed using friendfeed

I have for a while tried to create a personal feed of stuff I put on the internet, in the hope that someone might be interested. Historically this has been a planet but I now have a FriendFeed account. I am considering aggregating my bookmarks from del.icio.us into the feed and wonder what my correspondents, that's you that is, think. The reason I worry is that I issue a lot of bookmarks.

The current feed is at My Planet, (hover over the link for a preview). It has been implemented using an old version of planet planet, and so is available in RSS, ATOM and HTML (?). However it has a couple of problems (see below). One of my facebook correspondents pointed me at FriendFeed. Prior to finding this, Richard Morgan pointed me at secondbrian.net, (see below). One of the things that makes friendfeed so useful is that it has a generic feed service, so if their specific services, and they have a lot, don't suit then you can use the generic service, which is how I subscribe this blog, and my bliki to the friendfeed.

One neat gadget they offer is a weblog widget, ....

I am currently post into the feed from my blog, my bliki blog, my google reader shares, my flickr and my twitter. The Flickr subscription consumes both my photostream and favourites.

The ones I have syndicated at planet/davelevy and not yet syndicated on friend feed include my bookmarks at delicious.com, which is the nearest thing I have to a microblog. You have to work at it and it tells you what I'm reading on the internet i.e. what I am thinking about not what I am doing. I also syndicate my digg posts at my planet and have displayed it below.

The final feed consumed at my planet is my slynkr posts. I have decided to stop using this. See Au revoir Slynkr, below.

This leaves my plazes feed as unforwarded. Since I use the plazer, each time I move computer or network, it generates a new plaze. This can lead to many entries for the same place on a single day. I expect that people want to track location, and most importantly timezone, not my connections. The plazes feed needs a filter to restrict the feed to first of day and change of location and I have considered using planet or venus to do this.

The one feed that I think would add to the Friendfeed is my bookmarks. On some days, when researching something I may write number of bookmarks in quite short periods. Is this a burden to my correspondents?

When done, I can pump friend feed back through planet for any legacy users. Perhaps I should check its actually used by anyone other than me.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[web2.0] topic:[saas] topic:[internet] topic:[widget] topic:[friendfeed] topic:[socialsoftware]

Some comments about my sites and feeds

My twitter feed, I restrict to comments about my connectivity to the world wide web and location, I may use it to notify people about blog articles some time in the future, but decent phones should have RSS feed readers these days, sadly mine doesn't; Vodafone don't want us using RSS feed readers. I expect that most of my twitter followers know where the blog(s) are. (I quite like being notified of people's new blog articles so for those of you who tweet me about their blogs don't stop, and if I like it maybe my correspondents will also.)

I don't & never did use Digg that frequently. My current use of bloglines/google reader has changed the way I find this sort of stuff, but I rarely used it as a consumer, although the Digg Labs interfaces were pretty cool. With Digg, I need to consider if my use warrants syndicating it, although now I am using software as a service its all free to me.

The other feed I want to test is my Amazon wish list. My facebook experience is that the UK wish list is different in some way to the US & German one; the facebook application doesn't work for me since I have multiple wishlists on the account. Lets see how these feed aggrgators manage?

What's wrong with (my) Planet?

I use planet 2.1; it and my OS lack the BSD database. So I am missing any upgrades since that date. I know that the ATOM transformation is a a problem. the ATOM feed is broken on my instance. I may try and fix this at some time, but in the mean time, I must disable the hyperlink. Further more I have difficulty implementing Plazes and Twitter in the planet feed. For the plazes feed there is a formatting issue, and with Twitter I have a DNS resolution issue. Both these are problems with my configuration and not bugs in the feed services. Well, maybe the Twitter problem is some feature of the twitter platform but wget works well enough on a Solaris platform and Alec Muffet is developing a Sun people twitter planet, so it can be done.

Virtualising Sun Cluster, by Mike Ramchand

2008-08-08T10:20:22.000Z

Mike Ramchand has published a blog article about deploying a clustered pair of virtual box containers on a Solaris host,

tags: topic:[technology] "topic:[virtual box]" topic:[virtualbox] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[virtualization] topic:[cluster] topic:[solaris]

Reading Danilo Poccia's italian language blog

2008-08-08T10:18:01.000Z

Danilo Poccia has been experimenting with allowing his readers to use Google translate to read his blog. I, at least, will find this useful as Danilo writes in italian. This could of course be an advantage as the 'to english' translators may be stronger, since it looks quite good to me. It also enhances his hit count; its only available via the HTML interface. :) He categorises the blog, so finding his professional content is quite easy.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[blogging] topic:[translation] topic:[europe]

Rendering a feed into HTML with Grazr

2008-08-07T15:43:22.000Z

While researching this development of my personal feed, I looked for a generic client side javascript to consume and display feeds, a bit like the twitter and delicious widgets in the sidebar, although these gadgets are tightly tied to their authors own feeds. I found GRAZR, which has offers an aggregation service for its members and a widget against any feed for casual visitors. It has a bunch of themes, and I have illustrated one here....

I was looking to embed some of both my published feeds and those I wish to syndicate, having read, onto my HTML sites. This looks like it might do. The example above is my bookmarks feed from delicious and so doesn't have different icons nor different italicised feed names; it is only one feed. I expect one has to use their aggregator to get different icons.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[syndication] topic:[rss] "topic:[news feed]" "topic:[personal feed]" topic:[aggregator] topic:[grazr] topic:[html] topic:[widget]

Whats wrong with secondbrain

2008-08-07T11:50:59.000Z

Prior to finding FriendFeed, Richard Morgan pointed me at secondbrain.net. This is both a personal feed aggregator with a social networking dimension. It has a limited number of services, which given I blog on roller and snipsnap, causes me an issue in that I can't incorporate my blogs into a second brain feed; they don't have services for these blogs. ~~Its also missing a twitter service~~. Shame really, I wish them well.

See Jonathan's comments, it seems it does have a twitter service; I didn't look hard enough :( .

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[syndication] topic:[rss] "topic:[news feed]" "topic:[personal feed]" topic:[aggregator] topic:[secondbrain]

Re: Whats wrong with secondbrain

2008-08-07T17:42:35.000Z

HI and thanks for checking out Secondbrain. Let me try to shed some light on what you're discussing here.

You should be able to connect your Roller and/or Snipsnap blog through the Metaweblog API. To my knowledge both the platforms you mention support XML-RPC. We just added another 10 new services we support today (Qik, Goodreads, Diigo, Reddit, Mr. Wong, Mixx, Behance, Tumblr, Friendfeed and Facebook bringing us to a total of 30) and soon we'll finish the support for blogs through RSS and Atom which we've been working on. Also, we do indeed support Twitter, you can even tweet from within Secondbrain if you like.

Thanks for your support!

Johan Høgåsen-Hallesby
Product Manager

Re: Whats wrong with secondbrain

2008-08-09T07:44:33.000Z

No worries, Dave. If you couldn't find it, we must have hidden it too well. ;-)

Aurevoir Slynkr

2008-08-07T10:22:41.000Z

While researching an article on personal feed aggregators, I came to the conclusion that I will stop posting to slynkr; the service was built as a prototype/demonstrator, and has become too unreliable, its hardly ever available. I will continue to experiment with it as it remains a useful opensource project that can act as a community focus, having advantages that bulletin boards lack.

I liked its tagging feature, although the retrieval interface for tags was not as good as it might have been.

I may run one up on davelevy.info. Things I think interesting and want to share, I'll pump out via my google share, articles I want to tag, I'll use del.icio.us.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[syndication] topic:[rss] "topic:[news feed]" "topic:[personal feed]" topic:[aggregator]

HP folds Vodoo into its mainstream

2008-07-25T06:50:18.000Z

It seems that HP are merging their Vodoo line of games PCs into the mainstream. I wonder if Dell will follow with Alienware. The human synergies aren't so compelling. HP still knows how to design systems and possesses an engineering capability, this is not as obviously true at Dell, and the relative brand values are different.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[pc] topic:[hewlettpackard] topic:[vodoo] topic:[alienware]

A day at home, a view of Brussels

2008-07-21T12:13:00.000Z

I have been busy travelling the last couple of weeks and returned to my home office to do a pile of filing. You can see from my my del.icio.us feed some of the places I have been and also some stuff thats been on my desk waiting to be bookmarked or otherwise dealt with.

Over the weekend, I was looking at Firefox add-ons.

I was fortunate enough to stay at the Sofitel Europe in Brussels last week which was having a cheap week, or maybe day; it is close to my meeting's location, this is at the north end of the 'Place Jourdan', and the location of the finest chip shop in Bruxelles.

tags: topic:[food+drink] topic:[bookmarks] topic:[bruxelles]

Back on the Waves

2008-07-18T00:00:00.000Z

I spent the day on the Solent at Sun Sail 2008. Its the first time I've been. We didn't do that well, but it was fun all the same. You can see....

that we weren't exactly concentrating on speed all the time. If you were there yourself, or merely interested, there are more pictures at Sunsail 2008 Gallery.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[sport] topic:[sailing] topic:[solent]

Zoo Station

2008-07-04T02:00:00.000Z

I and some french colleagues caught the S-Bahn from Zoo Station to Fredriechstrasse Station, and took in the views of the Reichstag building and Bundekanzleramt.

We had a beer at Die Deponie nr 3, an exclellent and authentic beer shop (excellent service, thank you) then walked down to Potsdammer Platz via the Brandenburger Tor, the Tiergarten and the Monument to the Dead Jews.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[berlin] topic:[railway] topic:[zoostation]

Back to Berlin

2008-06-30T16:00:00.000Z

I am travelling to Berlin via London City airport for the first time. I am flying with Lufthansa. Its a longer journey to the airport than Heathrow but hopefully the airport experience is better and Lufthansa's flights to Berlin from Heathrow are somewhat limited. The overground journey is pretty OK. Taxi, Train and DLR, at least I am not driving. I leave at 6:20 am and arrive at City at 8:30 am. The queues are not well advertised; it seems you must use the automated check in machines so it may be best to do it online before you set out; Lufthansa have only two kiosks and today one was broken. The queue was longer than I'd hoped.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[lcy] topic:[lufthansa] topic:[london] topic:[lifehack]

An motd in tcl for Windows XP

2008-06-20T15:05:51.000Z

I bought an external disk from Amazon for my main home machine, which runs windows and have been moving various user's 'My Documents' folders onto the disk. It has a separate power supply and switch so its quite easy to start the computer and forget the disk, so I have written a program to check and remind people. I have written it in tcl/tk, my main documentation is on my snipsnap, but its a jolly short program, quick to write and easy to install.

Install active state's toolkit.
drop the icons into $tk_library/images, in this case info & warning.gif, I havn't tested if this verison of tcl/tk supports .jpg or .png yet.
write the program, I create a file on the E:\ folder and test for its existence
copy it to somewhere on the boot disk
create a shortcut in c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

The program looks like this,

wm title . {Disk Check}
wm iconname . {diskcheck}
wm geometry . 225x65+500+100
#
# Need some version control data and also like to make it bigger
#
frame .top
frame .bottom
if {[ file isfile "E:\donot.remove" ]} {
     set messagetext " The external disk has been turned on! "
     set buttontext " OK "
     image create photo infopic -file [file join $tk_library images info.gif]
} else {
     set messagetext " Please turn on the external disk! "
     set buttontext " Done "
     image create photo infopic -file [file join $tk_library images warning.gif]
}
label .top.icon -image infopic
frame .top.f -width 50
label .top.f.mess -text $messagetext

pack .top.f.mess -side top -fill x
pack .top.icon .top.f -side left

button .bottom.dismiss -text $buttontext -command "exit"

pack .bottom.dismiss
pack .top .bottom
proc exit {} {
     destroy .
}

The program is available as a download here.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[windows] topic:[programming] topic:[startup]

The last leg

2008-06-17T17:00:00.000Z

I returned on Sunday, and contrary to my twitter broadcast, Preveza airport was very efficient and friendly. We were into the departuire lounges in a very reasonable time. It was just 'First Choice Airways' who delayed us on our journey; we were travelling on by train, which meant we got home very late, I might organise my own transport next time.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[Greece] topic:[travel] topic:[delay]

Sailing in the Ionian Sea

2008-06-15T19:00:00.000Z

This holiday had been a long time ambition of mine in order to see Ithaca, the legendry home of Oddessyus from the sea. Actually I wanted to land there and explore, but for various reasons, this didn't happen, and at least I have an excuse to return.

I chartered the boat from Sunsail, as part of their Kalamos flotilla and flew from Gatwick to Preveza in North West of Greece. We arrived in the evening and had a meal in one of the local taverna's in Paleros, a nearby village which also has an ATM. Our route involved sailing from Vounaki to Port Atheni in Meganissi, then onto Kalmos via the north channel, out into the inland sea and back to Port Leone. We then sailed to one house bay and east of Ithaca north to return to Port Atheni. We then sailed around Meganissi to Spartkhori and then back to Vounaki. I prepared a google map...

View Larger Map

I had one of my best beers ever at Port Atheni,

not because it was a better beer, but because Port Atheni is such a pretty place, the sun was shining and we'd had such a great day. The rest of the pictures are in my Ionian Sea set on http://www.flickr.com/, my planning page is on my snipsnap bliki's Greece page.

This article has been backdated to the publication date. It was posted on 20th June.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[holiday] topic:[sailing] topic:[yachts] topic:[yachting] topic:[Greece] topic:[sunsail] topic:[ioniansea]

In the path of Odysseus

2008-06-07T14:22:52.000Z

I am packing for my holiday, I am off to Greece tomorrow, to sail in the Ionian Sea. I will have no access to the internet, hooray! You may catch me on Twitter as I shall have my phone with me. I thought about getting a Nokia N800, but havn't. So I'll have to wait 'till I get home to post my pictures and post about it.

Video Conferencing for free

2008-06-06T16:24:10.000Z

I was introduced to http://www.mebeam.com last year by colleagues in the US, and its a quite cool video conferencing feature. The lag in Europe is appalling, so I use the phone to host the voice channel. You can use whatever string you want to act as the meeting name, which you can enter on the home page, [ hover or click on the link above] or in your browser's URL entry box.

So I use IM and the phone to support the video channel. I was having some problems connecting up with some Mac using colleagues, so connected to Hans Joerg who is a bit of wiz with the Mac. I am on the left, and you can see the IM dialogue box.

and he explained that the configuration needs to be changed using the panel that is opened by pressing the 'settings' button on the bottom right hand side of one's own picture. Mac Users may default to 'DVD Video Class' and they require 'USB Video Class'. (The picture below was scrapped from my screen, and I am using a windows XP machine, which is why the text says something else.)

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[video] topic:[web2.0] topic:[videoconferencing] topic:[internet] topic:[Mac] topic:[howto]

Re: Video Conferencing for free

2008-06-06T20:56:22.000Z

My Company Great America Networks Conferencing offers simple cost-effective Video and WebConferencing usable anywhere there is an Internet connection on any type of computer.

You can see the software interface and sign up for a free 1 on 1 trial or a full featured demonstration free as well.

Compare to other popular products here: http://www.ganconference.com/gancnew/web.html

View the software here: http://www.ganconference.com/gancnew/quickvisuals.html

Feel free to contact me directly for a personal guided tour of the service.

Anthony Russo
Conferencing Consultant
Great America Networks Conferencing
arusso@ganconference.com
www.ganconference.com
Phone: 312-432-5377
Skype: anth.russo

Re: Video Conferencing for free

2008-06-07T13:57:34.000Z

Hmm! An advert, but it looks like its by a person, not a 'bot and it is an addition to the discussion. I may delete these in a month, or not.

Cheers Anthony, good luck.

<Disclaimer: I am not related, nor have used, nor recommend this stuff>

Re: Video Conferencing for free

2008-06-08T03:57:11.000Z

Hi Dave,

Ye4s it is an advert, but you are correct that I am a person and not a bot. I don't randomly spam, but do try to get my company's name out where someone is discussing conferencing because I think it is relevant and we have a good product.

I'd be glad to give you a personal demonstration of it so you can form your own opinion.

Anthony

Laptop Diaries, onto the internet with 3G

2008-06-06T10:00:26.000Z

I have just moved my laptop forward to an improved build. This proves that this article only works if the bluetooth drivers are the microsoft drivers on XP. I have written about the toshiba drivers at Laptop Diaries, more bluetooth on this blog.

My colleague at work Sean Harris, helped me configure my laptop and phone to use the phone's 3G capability to connect the internet. Sean was guided himself by this article at 'crackistan'. While that author writes about Mac OS, and I am using Windows XP, we both use sony erricson phones and vodafone as our service provider.

I really did this for times where I have no internet access, but as 'Bodoggy' points out, it may come in useful in airport lounges or other places where the wi-fi costs are outrageous, or their credit cards systems broken.

So the process is

Create a connection channel between the phone and laptop, and I used blutooth
Create a dial up agent for vodafone and select your new modem

The only tricky bit is that you don't use a phone number to connect to the internet, there is a special code instead.

Attaching the phone

Firstly, I opened the control panel and activate the bluetooth devices applet. This then advises you how to configure the phone, i.e. turn bluetooth on and make it visible. This assumes that it isn't already visible. There's nothing security geeks like more than displaying the fact that people have their phone's visibility turned on. I was quite surprised at the number of phones I found turned on. The 'add device' applet then displays all the bluettoth devices it can see, select your own, and you need to approve the connection on both devices by exchanging a password. Actually the computer challanges and the phone responds.

The add device will report which COM: port the phone modem is associated with.

The visibility menu is found on my vodafone SE K610i using [Menu] # [<-] 1,2

Creating a dialup agent

I then opened 'Network Connections' control panel applet, and used the 'create new connection dialogue'. This needs a name. I included called it "Vodafone 3G".

Note: The string in the phone number box, *99***3#. The number 3 needs to agree with the position of 'Contract Internet' in the 'Data Accounts' list, which can be found in the Data comm menu, in the Connectivity menu, in Settings, in other words

Menu -> Settings -> Connectivity -> Data comm -> Data Accounts or
[ Menu ] # [<-] 41

This worked, but I don't like the fact it prompted me for the connection; it doesn't do that for ethernet or wifi connections, so I opend the 'options' tab and turned off the prompts

So, now I can connect to the internet using Vodafone's Data Services, I wonder if all this works abroad. Probably; Sean's got more frequent flyer miles than I do.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[laptop] topic:[vodafone] topic:[bluetooth] topic:[modem] topic:[3G] topic:[internet] topic:[sonyericsson] topic:[K610i]

Python bites

2008-06-04T10:23:02.000Z

I wrote my first Python program over the weekend. I very foolishly ran out space in my root filesystem on my cobalt qube. This is v. stupid and had two causes.

I have installed an application in the root disk volume. While this is not unusual, it has a database and its log files in the same file system. An error caused the log files to grow and burst the file system. [ So RFE the app dude, the install should offer locations for the database and logs.].
The OS very sensibly mailed me quite a lot that I had a problem, but it mailed it to the administrator account on the qube and while I can access this mail account remotely, I didn't; I was busy.

So I decided to write a script that mailed me on my phone (via SMS) should this happen again. (I also need to move the data files and logs to sensible places).

I would normally do this in ksh, but the qube doesn't have this, so I started in bash. I quickly discovered that my version of bash doesn't have associative (or any) arrays. It does have the string handling facilities of the ksh, but I couldn't find them; I had forgotten the syntax.

line="/root=OK"; state=${line##*=}; echo $state
$ OK

actually works. NB I tried the arrays on my virtual box ubuntu 7 build, which I now use as a terminal host for the qube; I get them inside a re-sizable x-window. The arrays seem to work, but not associative arrays, so its another nail in the Qube's coffin; the Qube's bash has no arrays at all.

When I say I've written it, its not yet finished, but what I have done shows me that its a very powerful and economic language. Given that this sort of script, 90% of the code is string handling and enviromental discovery, with one command at the end of the script doing the work. I actually only use the UNIX 'df' utility and 'mail' program. I invoked the mail program via

os.system('./despatchmail')

where 'despatchmail' is an external shell script and it means that I can publish the program without stating the destination e-mail addresses. It could also invoke mail directly if I choose. I provide the df reply via a pipe to the program. (I did this because a coding example was more easily available it could be done in a number of ways.)

I am particularly impressed with python's dictionary feature and created one to hold the previous state, one to hold the current state and one to hold the utilisations. I can then use the file system mount point name as the retrieval key for all three arrays. e.g.

   >>>states={};      # states is an empty dictionary
   >>>s="/root=OK";
   >>>states[s[:s.index('=')]]=s[s.index('=') + 1:]
     # assigns the state clause to the dictionary, the filesystem name is the index.
   >>>print states
   >>>{'/root': 'OK'}

and the real one looks like

{'var': 'OK', 'home': 'OK', 'root': 'OK'}

and the utilisations from the df are held as

{'var': 9, 'home': 38, 'root': 77}

N.B. The utilisation values are held as integers and its now easy enough to write a test such that if a directories utilisation is above a threshold, then set the status code to something else

    for keys in states.keys():
        if utilisations[keys] > threshold:
            states[keys]='ERROR'

the first line ensures the tests are performed for each value pair in the states dictionary object.

So I was pleased to find a decent problem to test the language out on. When I have finished it, I might publish it in full. It might be useful to others, and you might be able to point out where my COBOL trained brain is still using tricks I learned 25 years ago. I know the parser is very powerful, and hence a line of code can perform a number of function, which means that what I would expect to take several lines can usually be done in one.

tags: technology programming language python linux utility

Outside the Box

2008-05-23T15:36:22.000Z

I have just finished writing up my last two weeks work, and thought you might enjoy this video showing what might happen if a virtual world knew where you were looking.

It is called "Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote", I have bookmarked it on del.icio.us and here in my bookmarks section.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[vr] topic:[virtualreality]

Discussing security and privacy in Italy

2008-05-22T12:17:21.000Z

CSI Piemonte, an italian public sector co-operative visited Sun yesterday to talk about today and tomorrow's Security with Alec Muffet and Dave Walker, and I had the honour of hosting and MC'ing the meeting.

While discussing data centre networks i.e the network inside the firewall and how to build the firewalls, a number of products and companies were discussed, these include CSE Piemonte themselves, Tripwire for intrusion detection, Zeus, traffic management, ActivIdentity, part of an SSO solution, Tier-3, leveraging Behavioural Intelligence, Sun's Access Manager, "Privacy on the Line" a book by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Endevours Technologies, Sun's Security Community's publications, Shibboleth, for single sign-on, and juniper.net/, looking at their virtual firewalls. Alec also spoke about some of the ideas he developed in his blog article Hankering For A World Without “Identity” or “Federation”. This latter conversation was very wide ranging and reviewed the significant differences between the UK and Italian data privacy laws, particularly in the field of medical data and records. The italian laws seem very citizen-centric, which is what we'd hope for in a democratic Republic. The CSI Piemonte people told us that

"The Italian Government is prohibited from asking for citizen's information twice"

which is really cool but it still has problems sharing it around the government between departments and bodies. In the UK, this is causing me problems with the Student Finance company at the moment. I'd like the Passport Agency and the Inland Revenue to pass my details on to them, so I don't have to collect all the stuff they ask for. I suppose that they can't ask the Inland Revenue because they want to know more than they do. Go figure.

I recorded these URL's as we discussed them on my del.icio.us feed in real time, i.e. as of this article's publication date, well, yesterday actually. (I suppose I should create a tag for the meeting, to ensure that all the URLs have a common and exclusive tag, but I havn't, and del.icio.us doesn't enable you to query a date range, which is why I repeat the list above, and I can't be bothered to write a script that displays how many days ago the meeting took place.)

I also think, or hope at least, that this is an article, where the snap shots add value to the article. If you hover most of the links above, you get a preview of the web page.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[security] topic:[politics] topic:[privacy] topic:[identity] topic:[italy]

tweeting your plaze

2008-05-21T12:39:00.000Z

Plazes now have a twitter feed for people to publish to. They contacted me, but I need to consider what I think about that. I have made promises to people about how I propose to use it. I hope that other Plazes followers wont be disappointed.

We're all off to sunny Spain!

2008-05-12T16:30:00.000Z

I am off to Barcelona to represent Sun at Gartner's Spring ITexpo in Barcelona. Given Barcelona's historic role as the centre of the world's ever largest Anarchist party, I wonder if the presentation "The future of Government is No Government" is knowledgeable irony, or ignorant co-incidence.

I remarked the other day that Terminal One at Heathrow is a much better place for BA having left it, however, they still use it for their Iberia ticket shares (as well as some other european ticket share flights.) So...hoorah, two hours late taking off, one hour late landing, hmm... don't tell me the airlines over estimate their journey times to allow them some leeway on the compulsory compensations they need to pay. We were told that the replacement co-pilot had been delayed arriving at the plane; there wern't enough buses. Meanwhile in Barcelona, despite the long walk to pick up my baggage, I was off the airport estate in 25 minutes, and checked into the hotel 15 minutes later.

Laptop Diaries, Goodbye to dual boot

2008-05-01T16:59:00.000Z

A month and a half ago, Sun & Innotek, the authors of Virtual Box, an open source desktop virtualisation solution announced that Sun was buying them Virtual Box is a free type II virtualisation solution permitting the configuration of a number of popular x86 operating systems to act as guests and hosts. I have just today configured a Linux VM running on my Windows XP Laptop, here's how it looks, when its not full screen.

I used Ubuntu 7.04 and this is how I did it. Firstly a friend cut me an ISO image on CD and I loaded it into the cd reader.

I then created a VM. This has hardware virtualisation enabled, I created a new .vdi file. This must be big enough, and defaults at 8Gb. This is a limit on the file size. It does not reserve this space at install time, however if you make it too small, the install fails. The boot device order is floppy, cdrom and then hard disk. The cdrom has to be enabled in the 'settings -> CD/DVD' panel. I also defined the VM as a host of a Linux 2.6 image.
I then started the VM using the virtual box control panel. This then boots a live cd of the cdrom, and I selected the 'Install' option. This then installs Ubuntu and offers you the opportunity to restart the system, i.e. the VM.
I then used the update manager to update the software. It downloads, works out dependencies and then installs the new software versions. At the end of this stage, I then rebooted the VM. This took some time, over an hour and half, but I was using a wireless connection to a not very quick BT broadband line.
At this point in time, it only offers 800x600 screen resolution, which is a bit pants, so, I used the VM window menu option, 'Devices -> Install Guest Additions'. This opened a nautilus window on the CD which exposes a script called "VBoxLinuxAdditions.run". I ran this from a terminal session command line in bash using root privilidge (see below). At this point, I then rebooted the VM again.
I then needed to check that the xorg.config was configured correctly. In order to amend it, one needs a root user shell. Its been a couple of years since I used a Linux, so I tried to 'su' to root, but it was having none of it. A quick google found me this article this article about default passwords for the ubuntu super user. So a quick 'sudo gnome-terminal' and we're away. This artilce at forums.virtualbox.org, about guest additions, and this article details the checks and changes required of xorg.conf to permit full screen mode on a larger screen. The Toshiba M5 I am using has 1400x1050. I only had to add the additional resolutions. The device name agreements worked and the virtual devices had been inserted.

I should also thank the Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, who posted an Ubuntu 7, install walkthrough, which while not difficult, helped me debug the initial install failure.

I have downloaded some backgrounds and installed them, but it seems as I shall not be trying to build dual or triple boot solutions again; I have also got opensolaris nevada and indiana VMs. I just wish it had all been installed on a single partition. I can run whatever OS I want on the laptop now.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] topic:[operatingsystem] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[virtualization] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[linux] topic:[ubuntu]

Re: Laptop Diaries, Goodbye to dual boot

2008-05-02T09:25:11.000Z

Dave, Several points:
1 - I removed the dual boot about 2 years ago and used VMWare Workstation.
2 - You do NOT need to cut a CD from the ISO image. In VBox, you can define the Virtual CD Drive to point to the ISO image on the host disk (or even on an external USB drive). When you boot the image the first time, it will boot from the ISO image.
3 - I spent a few hours this week and built a set of images for VBox: Ubuntu, SXDE, and XP. I use these as templates when I need to build a Demo or a small scale PoC for a Customer. I can then run IdM, Java CAPS, NetBeans, Any other named Sun Middleware, and NOT clutter up my Host system, or need to scream about need for TB of disk to hold it all.

Re: Laptop Diaries, Goodbye to dual boot

2008-05-02T11:46:44.000Z

Thanks for this, Ben

I chose not to use VMware, but I agree that Virtual Box is very easy to use. Did you see my article about DOSbox a couple of months ago.

Re: Laptop Diaries, Goodbye to dual boot

2008-05-04T07:21:56.000Z

No I did not see the article. Please send a URL or copy.

Microblogging

2008-04-24T11:42:14.000Z

In the article My Twitter Manifesto, I stated that I did not propose to use Twitter as a microblog, the closest thing I have to one is my del.icio.us feed, which since I bookmark nearly everything I read, gives you an idea of what I am thinking about at least. I nearly always comment on a site/page, although not always in my own words. But if your interested.... it's there. The most recent seven items are also in the sidebar on this page.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[blogging] topic:[tagging] topic:[microblogging] topic:[tags]

My Twitter Manifesto

2008-04-24T11:14:20.000Z

After my trip to Italy, where there was no broadband in my hotel room, I decided to reinvestigate twitter. So I am now broadcasting using it and also following some colleagues and friends.

I do not intend to use it as a microblog, but mainly to let people know about my access to the internet, "Will e-mail work?", and maybe the phone networks, since some places I may be visiting over the next couple of years may not have such great communications infrastructure, although how I do this without phone or web will be interesting. However, it might be useful, if I forget my charger lead. I do not expect to twit every day, so its not a major overhead for those of you who consume twitter on the mobile phone. I have also forwarded my feed to my facebook profile and I have a twitter feed URL, which can be consumed by any RSS reader, although not it seems my Sony Erissson's reader.

I am consuming those I follow's feeds using my phone. This is, as I said, a Sony Ericsson and has a pretty small screen and although it does have a wap browser, the browsing experience is not very satisfactory. If you are a frequent poster, you'd best stay interesting, as one of the reasons I first dropped twitter was that I found consuming it on the phone too intrusive. This time I shall probably stop following those who post to much. I have already tried and stopped using the sun bloggers twitter feed.

Another reason to be mannerly is that as a consumer, one only gets 250 messages/week, at which point one has to restart the feed. With twitter, we may have returned to the days of Usenet, where authors were asked to consider reader's bandwidth, but its now frequency, not verbosity that's the potential problem.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[twitter]

Re: My Twitter Manifesto

2008-04-24T17:00:53.000Z

I love this idea! I gotta do this, hell, make a page on my WP about it!

Re: My Twitter Manifesto

2008-04-24T18:09:23.000Z

I think you have a typo there - your twitter account is http://twitter.com/DaveLevy rather than http://twitter.com/Dave (unless you have two).

Are "Quants" suitable for grid infrastructure?

2008-04-22T09:38:35.000Z

Are "Quants" suitable for grid infrastructure? investorwords, a finance dictionary site, defines a quant as "One who performs quantitative analyses". Not so useful; while I have known people bet on horses because they like the name, I have not really heard of people investing in the stock market using this strategy, so evaluating the value of stock using numbers seems pretty basic, and in their eyes a Quant is a person. They define quantitative analyses as "The process of determining the value of a security by examining its numerical, measurable characteristics such as revenues, earnings, margins, and market share." If measuring the value of one stock, it is unlikely that, parallel algorithms are necessary. The data points are too few to warrant applying grid or parallel programming techniques. If analysing a portfolio of many stocks using these techniques, or a whole bank portfolio, then grids become more useful. It really depends upon the size of the portfolio, and the required response time.

A chartist on the other hand, performs "Technical Analyses", which investorwords, defines as "A method of evaluating securities by relying on the assumption that market data, such as charts of price, volume, and open interest, can help predict future (usually short-term) market trends. " Presumably the name chartist, comes from the fact that they use graph representations of the data series they analyse. However, the analysis of history increases the number of data points involved, and when one tries to apply technical analysis to portfolios, the problem of scale and the attributes amenable to parallelism come into the frame. The use of Grid software and hardware architectures probably becomes more useful earlier.

Neither of these techniques however are truly applications; they can be used to support trading decisions, risk evaluation, capital adequacy calculations, and pretty much any decision which involves evaluating today's and tomorrow's value of a financial instrument, be it treasury, equity or derivative.

investorwords is in my sidebar, and in my del.icio.us feed.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[economics] topic:[finance] topic:[grid] topic:[itarchitecture]

Revolutionary business, revolutionary I.T.

2008-04-18T00:00:00.000Z

My colleague, Ambreesh Khanna, presented on how the growing use of Microfinance, is changing IT architectural requirements, and the risk management criteria. [There's a number of references on google, or exalead, but the Guardian reported on how Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace prize 18 months ago.]

So while it costs a bank a certain amount to manage a customer, if its liabilities to its customers are small, then the risk can be managed in a different way. If a bank has 1000, € 500K loans in its book, only a small number of defaults cause a problem, whereas, if its portfolio is reversed with ½ million, € 1000, then many more defaults are required to cause a problems. It also changes the nature of the traffic. Many low volume payments, mandate an IT and banking efficiency that will need to borrow from the web 2.0 architectures. Ambreesh also wrote about microfinance on his blog.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[Technology] topic:[microfinance] "topic:[it architecture]" "topic:[network traffic]"

The photo in my banner V2

2008-04-16T21:22:14.000Z

Several months, or maybe longer, I changed the banner picture from a duck in a pond to the picture above which was taken by Simon Phipps. Simon's pictures can be seen at http://www.istockphoto.com/webmink, or at http://flickr.com/photos/webmink/. I didn't accurately amend the copyright statement and flagging in the banner. I have now. To be clear, the picture on this site, is not to be copied or re-used. The original is on Simon's Flickr site, and published under the creative commons, by-nc-nd.

tags: topic:[banner] topic:[roller] topic:[webmink]

If you want to know what I am reading

2008-04-16T09:29:55.000Z

Facebook's "Visual Bookshelf" has recently fixed their service that allows the embedding of your book shelf within HTML. I have posted my reading list at davelevy.info, so non-facebook users can follow my reading, if you so choose. I haven't posted it here; you can hover over the hyperlink. Their instructions are posted on their blog.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[facebook] topic:[books] topic:[davelevy]

workshoping the future

2008-04-02T19:00:00.000Z

Over the last two day, we have been in workshops, discussing aspects of the development of the internet. The workshops, their agenda and supporting papers are all hosted at the future internet site. We'll have to wait for the slides to see what agreement was discovered.

I was interested to attend BO6, "Future Internet Research and Experimentation", otherwise known as FIRE where I heard a number of presentations from FP6 funded projects talking about the Grids they'd built, primarily on University sites. There's a lot going on. It's a shame we couldn't find someone to take on Sun's London "grid-for-rent". There was some innovative stuff in the re-provisioning solution.

The other working groups were called Networks, Services, Content and Security. I am eagerly waiting the slides from the plenary sessions that introduced and concluded these workshops.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[europe] topic:[eu] topic:[future] topic:[research] topic:[grid]

the church on the island

2008-04-01T23:30:00.000Z

Lake Bled has been one of Slovenia's holiday attractions for many years, famously it has an island in the middle of the lake, with a church on it.

Other pictures are at my slovenia set, part of my photo collection at flickr.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[slovenia] topic:[lakebled] topic:[europe]

Using the HTML Version of this blog page

2008-04-01T20:00:00.000Z

I have added a twitter gadget to the sidebar on this blog. I am not planning to use it as a micro-blog, but it will say a bit about what I'm doing, particularly if I am having problems connecting to the internet; it allows me to use my phone to post short messages to my twitter feed and followers.

I also reduced the listed back catalog to 64 articles, which at my current publication rate means it shows articles up to about six months old. If you want older stuff, use the tag cloud above, the word search gadget or the date index in the sidebar, or go to the "Yesterdays Words" page.

Obviously the navigation instructions above won't work if you read this via an RSS feed.

category: general

The Bled Declaration

2008-04-01T01:00:00.000Z

We closed the day by adopted the Bled declaration, calling on the Commission and member states co-ordinate their R&D and do other good things, including the support in the construction of a "Future Internet Assembly".

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[europe] topic:[eu] topic:[future] topic:[appliances] topic:[FIA] "topic:[fia Bled]"