- Meet The Sims and Shoot Them — America’s Army has proven so popular globally that, with so many users signing on from Internet cafes in China, the Chinese government tried to ban it. Full of interesting factoids like this about US military-created first person shooter America’s Army and other military uses of games. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Most Overused Cloud Metaphors, Sorted by Weather Pattern — headline writers beware: you are not being original with your “does the cloud have a silver lining?” folderol. (via lennysan on Twitter)
- Simply Understand — web site that translates a lot of UK government consultation documents (notorious for pompous and intricate prose) into plain English.
- Simple Event Correlator — small Unix part to find event correlations. It isn’t doing data mining to find correlations in a data stream, but rather you write rules like “tell me if X happens within Y seconds of a Z” and it takes events on stdin and emits correlations on stdout. (via NeilNeely on Twitter)
"cloud computing" entries
The State of the Internet Operating System
Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet? I’ve been talking for years about “the internet operating system“, but I realized I’ve never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post.
Google's New Marketplace Has over a Thousand Apps
One week into its public launch, the Google Apps Marketplace has just under 1,500 (enterprise) apps. Combined with Salesfore.com’s app exchange (also with over a thousand apps), enterprises interested in moving to cloud apps have an increasing number of software tools to choose from.
Four short links: 1 March 2010
War Games, Cloud Metaphors, Plain English, and Event Correlations
Four short links: 27 January 2010
Science Publishing, iState of the Union, Synthetic Bio Obstacles, UK Government Cloud
- Why I Am Disappointed with Nature Communications (Cameron Neylon) — fascinating to learn what you can’t do with “non-commercial”-licensed science research: using a paper for commercially funded research even within a university, using the content of paper to support a grant application, using the paper to judge a patent application, using a paper to assess the viability of a business idea.
- The iState of the Union (Slate) — humorous take on the State of the Union address, as given by Steve Jobs.
- Five Obstacles for Synthetic Biology — a reminder that biology is bloody hard, natural or synthetic. “There are very few molecular operations that you understand in the way that you understand a wrench or a screwdriver or a transistor,” says Rob Carlson, a principal at the engineering, consulting and design company Biodesic in Seattle, Washington. And the difficulties multiply as the networks get larger, limiting the ability to design more complex systems. A 2009 review showed that although the number of published synthetic biological circuits has risen over the past few years, the complexity of those circuits — or the number of regulatory parts they use — has begun to flatten out. (via Sciblogs)
- UK Government to Set Up Own Cloud (Guardian) — will build a dozen data centres (each costing £250m) and push for open source on central and local government computers, eventually resulting in thin clients and “shared utilities”. (via jasonwyran on Twitter)
Turning Predictions into Opportunities
The view from the eye of a recession isn't great. When companies are going bust, unemployment growing, and everyone's scouring their budgets for costs to cut, it can be hard to see opportunities. However, when Tim pointed to Stephen O'Grady's fine set of 2010 predictions I found myself popping with "oh, so naturally this will happen next …" thoughts. Think…
Four short links: 3 September 2009
Smarter Eyes, Urinal Protocol Efficiency, Petabytes on a Budget, and LocaLondon
- Many Eyes Make All Bugs Shallow, Especially When The Eyes Get Smarter (David Eaves) — Mozilla released bug submission data, and David realizes with some minor investment (particularly some simpler vetting screens prior to reaching bugzilla) bug submitters could learn faster. For example, a landing screen that asks you if you’ve ever submitted a bug before might take newbies to a different page where the bugzilla process is explained in greater detail, the fact that this is not a support site is outlined, and some models of good “submissions” are shared (along with some words of encouragement). By segmenting newbies we might ease the work burden on those who have to vet the bugs.
- Urinal Protocol Efficiency (xkcd blog) — geeks are pattern-matching creatures that can count. This leads us to a question: what is the general formula for the number of guys who will fill in N urinals if they all come in one at a time and follow the urinal protocol? One could write a simple recursive program to solve it, placing one guy at a time, but there’s also a closed-form expression. If f(n) is the number of guys who can use n urinals, f(n) for n>2 is given by: […] The protocol is vulnerable to producing inefficient results for some urinal counts. Some numbers of urinals encourage efficient packing, and others encourage sparse packing. (via Hacker News)
- Petabytes on a Budget: 67Tb for $7,867 — DIY cloud hardware. (via timhaines on Twitter)
- LocaLondon (Chris Heathcote) — informative, ingenious, and replicable (like all that Chris does), it’s a Twitter feed of art exhibitions in London (when they open, when there’s a week left, and on the last day) and a glorious horizontal touchscreen-friendly meta-reviews site so you can quickly see at a glance what’s on now and what people think of it.
Four short links: 4 August 2009
NASA Cloudware, btrfs, eBook Editing, Exponential Death
- NASA Nebula Services/Platform Stack — The NEBULA platform offers a turnkey Software-as-a-Service experience that can rapidly address the requirements of a large number of projects. However, each component of the NEBULA platform is also available individually; thus, NEBULA can also serve in Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service capacities. Bundles RabbitMQ, Eucalyptus, LUSTRE storage, Fabric deployment, Varnish front-end, MySQL and more. (via Jim Stogdill)
- A Short History of btrfs — Now for some personal predictions (based purely on public information – I don’t have any insider knowledge). Btrfs will be the default file system on Linux within two years. Btrfs as a project won’t (and can’t, at this point) be canceled by Oracle. If all the intellectual property issues are worked out (a big if), ZFS will be ported to Linux, but it will have less than a few percent of the installed base of btrfs. Check back in two years and see if I got any of these predictions right!
- Sigil — open source WYSIWYG eBook editor. (via liza on Twitter)
- Exponential Decay of Life — This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. (via Hacker News)
Cloud computing perspectives and questions at the World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum started a
research project
at Davos 2009 concerning cloud computing, which they broadly define to
include all kinds of remote services, from Software as a Service to
virtual machines.
Four short links: 8 June 2009
3D Geometry, The Printable Web, Government Internet Fail, and Real World Cloud Computing
- How to Project on 3D Geometry — the fine art (and math) of distorting an image so that it looks undistorted when projected onto a non-flat 3D surface. Confused? See the images below. (via straup on Delicious)
- ZinePal — Create your own printable magazine from any online content. (via warrenellis on Delicious)
- What The Government Doesn’t Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It — Tom Steinberg from MySociety lays it out. As true for US, NZ, and every other country as it is for the UK (for which it was written). Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.” What I like about Tom vs the US’s Gov 2.0 is that Tom puts down philosophy that’s hard to argue with, whereas the US is dangerously close to simply focusing on techniques and that’s subvertible.
- Real World Cloud Computing — summary from a panel of startups who are using EC2. The lock-in is latency. Transfering data within the Amazon services is free. Transfering data to an Amazon competitor: not free.
3D Glasses: Virtual Reality, Meet the iPhone
A light flickers from two distinct points in time. As a child in the early-1970s, one of my toys was a View-Master, a binoculars-like device for viewing 3D images (called stereograms), essentially a mini-program excerpted from popular destinations, TV shows, cartoons, events and the like. Flash forward to the present, and we are suddenly on the cusp of a game-changing event; one that I believe kicks the door open for 3D and VR apps to become mainstream. I am talking about the release of iPhone OS version 3.0.