May 2010 – davelevy.info

Follow the sun, the moon, the action and money

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a webinar with Cloudsoft, a suggested partner for Citihub in order to evaluate their offering and market positioning. They are seeking to solve the application mobility problem in Cloud Computing and have named their product solution Monterey. I had read their white paper, which they publish on their web site, via a resources page, which you need to login to.

They have a the idea that using their middleware, an infrastructure manager can on a policy basis optimise the deployment of an application for performance, cost, data, or liquidity, which they summarise as

Follow the sun, follow the moon, follow the action and follow the money

In order to offer this scale of applications mobility, they can and do offer wide area mobility; their design goal is clearly intercontinental. They position their product as middleware, although they have a platform in California, which they also describe as a reference architecture.

Their sales entry point is the applications developers. To use Monterey, you must have source code engineering rights and capability, and it works best with an application with a highly partitioned architecture, and possibly limited state. They have a Java API and the application must be architected to exist as multi-nodes, although it’s possible that a multi-node set of 1 might work . The Java IDE used is Eclipse. They have a C language pragma, and others such as C# are planned. Monterey is a truly distributed architecture, so it consumes cycles and memory on all potential application hosts. The partitioned architecture minimises the need for both shared disk and bandwidth consumption. It sees the potential hosts as either hypervisor VMs, such as Xen & VMware or bare metal resources, although since the mobile applications are java objects, there needs to by a JVM; they move the application, not the JVM, nor the OS instance nor the VM.

Their EZ Brokerage demo is awesome, they showed the effect of a follow the action and follow the sun policy rules and demonstrated their interface. I asked them for a Video so others can share its awesomeness.

The reference architecture uses Citrix Xensource, Intel and SuperMicro. They are also using Arista Networks and strongly recommend the use of 10GE network and layer 7 switching, although they and their partner switch vendors, Solarflare seek to position themselves as offering something better and cleverer. It’s another example of the re-coming of the conflated system and switch. If varying the components in the platform architecture, then one will need to ensure that it meets the requirements, especially the required network functionality and speed. One of the differentiators that Cloudsoft have is their appetite and success in selling to the financial services industry’s low latency solutions builders.

I am unclear as to how many of their customers use Monterey to implement co-tenancy.

I think it is a brilliant niche positioning. It’s an important problem to solve, they’re focusing on solving it well, and so meet one of Tim Bray’s Laws, “the big winners solve one problem well”. …

Copyright, a constitutional right

For some reason, I had a quick peek a the US Constitution earlier today, I wonder if Congress’s powers,

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

would permit nationalisation? What gobsmacked me though is that artists, authors and inventors copyright protection is a constitutional right. The constitution grants congress the right, or maybe duty,

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Mind you, I don’t see where it says that companies have the right to buy the copyright and pursue the author, artist and inventors customers. In fact, the consitution states that these rights should accrue to the authors and inventors, not their agents. Perhaps the current legal framework is unconstitutional.

ooOOOoo

Several people are exploring in the US, the limits of useful Arts, in particular looking to see if Porn films can be considered ‘useful arts’? DFL 12 Aug 2103 …

What happens next?

So we have a new government, I have been fearing a repeat of 1979, but I think some important things are different. I was taken with this article at Though Cowards Flinch and quoted at Socialist Unity and Lenin’s Tomb in an article called Labourism and the working class, which together with some of the results suggests to me that Labour may have found its heart (or stomach, if you prefer). They suggest found its soul, I think that’s a bit optimistic. Although the Liberal Democrats decision to join the Tory led coalition will not be forgotten by those who expected something different. Labour now needs to turn its back on neo-liberalism and find a way of posing a social democratic vision against those of the CONservative/Liberal DEMocrat coalition. It may even have found the confidence to find its way to truly oppose this government.

I may of course be badly let down by the Labour Party’s leadership election, I can’t see anyone that wants to take us there throwing their hat into the ring. The real problem is that Blair gutted the Labour Party’s internal democracy, so while they’re all busy thanking the foot soldiers or a magnificant campaign I am unsure if they know how to listen to us in the next few months.

I look forward to meeting and making new friends; I am one of those that came home to Labour last week. …

Electing a Prime Minister

It’s been an exciting couple of days in British Politics. One interesting fact that I was pointed at by Paddy Ashdown on the Radio this morning is that of the 12 Prime Ministers since the 2nd World War, only 6 came to office by winning an election. i.e. Only 50% of post war Prime Ministers came to office by winning an election.

How	1940’s	1950’s	1960’s	1970’s	1980/90’s	Post 1997
General Election	Attlee	Churchill	Wilson	Heath	Thatcher	Blair
Between Election		Eden & MacMillan	Dougas Home	Callaghan	Major	Brown

The table above doesn’t show Wilson’s second administration. Also Ashdown says that it was five who became Prime Ministers on the basis of the ability to command a majority in the House of Commons, rather than on the back of a general election, so I may have made a mistake. I used Wikipedia’s British General Elections page as my source. …

For all your tomorrows…

I don’t need Ed Balls and Peter Hain to tell me how to decide to vote tactically, and I don’t need Tony Blair to tell me to vote for the party I believe in. I have never before voted for the winning candidate in a general election; I have just lived in Tory areas. I was quite excited when I voted in Camden but since that was 1982, (I think), I still didn’t vote for the winner. This year, I hope I will since I plan to vote to return Joan Ruddock to represent Lewisham Deptford.

In the viral video,where, Cameron sings “Common People”,

the penultimate image is the statement,

It’s been a while since they were in power.
But there’s a reason for that.
They fucked the country before.
Don’t let them do it again.

Too true, I rember the ’80s. Some people are trying to suggest that it’s not enough to oppose the Tories, unfortunately for them it’s my vote and I remember the mess they left the country in. They are still only looking to serve the interests of a minority, so they’ll have to try and do so with out my vote. Gordon Brown, once released from the straight jacket of Sky’s Leader’s debate, spoke from his heart at Citizens UK,

and reminded me, and many of us, the reasons we have always supported Labour and are on the left of the political spectrum. Gary Younge, in the Guardian’s “Comment is Free”, reinforces this in an article called I hate Tories. And Yes, it’s tribal.

I’d also like to thank those Labour MP’s and councillors I have spoken to over the last six weeks reminding me that in the Labour Party, I meet people who will work with me to build a better society.

In order to be able to vote in Deptford I have left Hampshire East where there has been a boundary change, which means that my house has moved from an impregnable Tory seat, into a more marginal Tory/Lib Dem constituency. The Guardian writes it up on their web site here…, and there’s a largish Labour vote to squeeze. I am not a huge fan of Adam Carew, the LibDem candidate, but I know what I’d do if I was voting there. The Tory can be beaten here.

The Daily Mirror has published a guide on how to vote for those of us to whom stopping the Tories is our main priority. It is mine.

However, I have been drawn back into a small level of political activism through the campaign to stop the Digital Economy Bill. In my blog article, called “Get your own facts”, I argued that supporters of internet freedom should ask their candidates what they think and make up your own mind. ORG have offered you the chance to find out what your candidates think on digital freedom, their web page is currently at http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection. It’s crucial that you do. If the DE Bill is your priority, use the ORG tool to find out what your candidates think, although it’s probably a bit late now, or go and ask them. While some Lib Dems are arguing that their’s is the only party to offer repeal, it is my view that the 23 Labour MP’s who broke their whip to vote against the 3rd reading and the 20,000 campaigners have had an effect on the Labour Party who are beginning to listen, (like so many issues, a bit bloody late) and both the Green Party and the Pirate Party have better policies than the Lib Dems whose manifesto is actually silent. Find out what your candidates think, understand the electoral arithmetic in your constituency and cast your vote accordingly. But remember, it was the Labour rebels who were & remain the true friends of internet freedom. The Lib Dem frontbench at no time opposed technical measures and disconnection and is still talking about curtailing piracy.

If you want a hung parliament, it’s a similar process, understand your constituency electoral arithmetic, and vote either Liberal Democrat or Labour, which ever has the best chance of winning, unless you live in Brighton Pavilion, where voting for Caroline Lucas, the Green Party candidate may lead to the Greens getting their first ‘Westminster MP’. I feel that Parliament would benefit from having a Green Party presence, their best chance looks to be Brighton Pavilion, where their leader, Caroline Lucas is standing. If I lived there, I’d be really torn.

If you want a fair voting system, again understand the constituency electoral arithmetic, and vote either Liberal Democrat or Labour, which ever has the best chance of winning, unless you live in Brighton Pavilion, where you should consider voting Green. The Liberal Democrats want a proportional representation voting scheme, as occurs in most of Europe, Labour propose a new voting system to ensure every MP has the support of the majority of voters. There’s room for a compromise here, and as a Labour supporter, I want a truly fair voting system, if that means coalition governments from now on, then so be it….I have had enough of single party majorities, even my own. Some people, Ed Balls, thats you that is, argue that coalitions mean that politics occurs behind closed doors, all I can say is that one party government does the same. Many of the Labour Government’s worst mistakes were made inside committee rooms to which to few party members, supporters and voters were invited. I think multi-party government will put the compromises, and the points of contention in front of the people and deals will have to be in the open.

If you don’t like the Mirror’s guide, check your seat at the Guardian’s election page, which I quote because it’s actually got estimated voting numbers, and the Guardian’s guide to tactical voting. …

Spellcasting in Neverwinternights

I have over the last two days advanced my Mage into and up the Luskan Host Tower_in Neverwinter Nights. This is the first time I have played a Mage, as those of you who follow this thread know, and there are some interesting differences in playing one as opposed to a fighter type, in particular, Rimardo Domine is, much easier to defeat and the brazier entrapping Nymphithys much harder, For more, see Playing a Wizard. …