Archive - May 2011
May 11th
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/11/2011 - 20:38
May 10th
Call me on Skype about the new YouTube Video
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 19:50So, Microsoft is buying Skype, and some people are asking why they are paying so much money for a company that isn’t turning a profit. It sounds an awful lot like the questions people were asking almost five years ago when Google bought YouTube.
I’ll leave those questions for others to answer. Instead, I’ll chat on Skype about one of the latest videos I saw on YouTube.
May 9th
Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 20:46Mother’s Day: We had a nice day at the park. I started working on the macrame hammock. Based on my experiences Sunday, this is going to take a very long time to complete. As long as I have energy for the project, I’ll provide updates.
Coming home, there was a car riding on our tail which promoted this tweet:
The Red Camero
Speeding, swerving on my tail
waiting accident
Actually, Kim was driving and the Camero was blue, but it gets across the idea.
It got me thinking more about other aspects of writing and so I spent some time watching YouTube videos about Lacan, Derrida, Zizek and others. More on that later, when I have more time.
May 8th
Happy Mother's Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/08/2011 - 09:14First, let me start off by wishing everyone a Happy Mother’s Day. Fiona and I are up, and Kim is getting to sleep in. Fiona did make Kim breakfast in bed and Kim will enjoy that later.
Money is still very tight for us, so we’ve been trying to find inexpensive but meaningful things for Kim. One thing we’ve been kicking around for a long time is upgrading her cellphone. She had an old Motorola RAZR that she’s had for many years. The keypad is wearing off. The battery has gotten less and less effective and a couple days ago, it appear to finally give up the ghost. Kim asked my recommendation about what to do.
I’ve really been enjoying the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon that I have for work. So, I checked to see what was available on AT&T. They have the HTC Imagine, which is fairly similar to the Thunderbolt. For people with free upgrades, it still costs $100. However, I had an extra $100 off of an upgrade available on my line, so I suggested seeing if we could get that applied to Kim’s line. There were a bunch of different aspects to the upgrade, so Kim called AT&T, and there just wasn’t any way we could get the upgrade done. Disappointed, Kim and I started talking about whether it was time to move to Verizon or T-Mobile. T-Mobile has a nice upgrade offer on for this weekend, and my Nokia N900 would work nicely there as well.
However, Kim ran out to do a few errands and stopped at an AT&T store, where they gladly did the upgrade and made a few other changes to our account that essentially gives us additional services without any price increase. Kim is now the happy owner of an HTC Imagine and I’m showing her some of the neat things it can do.
I did install Swype on it. It is a nicer way to do input on cellphones, but it is complicated to install on the HTC Insight on AT&T. AT&T locks the phone so you can only install apps from the Android Market place, unless you go into debug mode with a USB connection. However, that sort of connection is pretty simple and straight forward, at least to a geek like me, and Kim is now starting to use Swype. I also installed Bump, but haven’t gotten Bump to successfully connect between phones.
Another Mother’s Day gift that Fiona and I got for Kim is a macrame hammock, some assembly required:
Happy Mother’s Day everyone.
May 7th
Moving to the Cloud: Amazon AWS and Cloudplayer, Ubuntu UEC and UbuntuOne, and Rackspace/Slicehost and the Cloud
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/07/2011 - 09:48Slowly, I have been taking steps towards ‘the cloud’ and I expect that I’ll end up using cloud computing more and more over the coming months. With that, let me reflect on some of the steps I’ve taken.
First, I updated my home Ubuntu server to version 10.10. This includes the ability to run the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, or UEC. However, you really need a bunch of Ubuntu machines with sufficient memory and diskspace to make this worth while and my machines are a hobbled together batch of older machines and it just wasn’t worth it. On top of that, I’ve been busy with a bunch of other projects, so I’ve set that aside. If your interesting in exploring this, I’d recommend Ubuntu's Cloud Overview and Information Week's Roll Your Own Ubuntu Private Cloud.
One of the projects I was looking at is The Mapping Project. This would allow people to set up their own redistricting servers. They suggest setting things up on Amazon Web Services. You can get a free AWS account, but I found it very cumbersome and confusing to set up and configure. Once you’ve selected and configured all the opt-in services, actually setting up the server is pretty simple. You just select a pre-defined image. I selected the Mapping Project image, and I was up and running. Unfortunately, the Mapping Project image does not run well in the small instance you can get for free with AWS. So, I shut it down, and figured I’d try something simpler, like Drupal 7.
Drupal 7 ran nicely. However, a month later, I started getting bills for my AWS account. It turns out that the Mapping Project instance that I had shut down somehow got restarted, and I was using two instances at the same time. I contacted AWS customer service and they were less than helpful. After spending a bit of time finally getting my AWS account shutdown (or at least I think and hope it is shut down), I started telling everyone to avoid AWS. It just is not worth the hassle. All of this is on top of their recent outages.
Around the same time, my daughter was given an MP3 player, and I set up things to use Amazon’s CloudPlayer. Right now, the only thing I have in it is the one song that I bought for Fiona’s MP3 player. Given my experiences with AWS, I’m hesitant to do anything more with their Cloudplayer.
My website is hosted using Rackspace’s Slicehost. I’ve been pretty happy with Slicehost for some time, but an announcement came out that Rackspace is looking at rolling Slicehost into Rackspace’s cloud service. The announcement also talked about this in terms of moving to support IPv6. However, the initial response has been less than positive. People have expressed concern over the interface and how easy it will be to set up and administer. I’m also concerned about the billing and I wonder what the cost will be to move to the cloud. Will there be a nice way to cap the expense so I’m not signing a blank check, the way it seems a lot of cloud services are these days? If there is easy administration and a clean way to make sure you don’t get an unexpected bill for $2000 if you get hacked or hit by a DDOS attack, then this might be a good move, especially since I’m interested in IPv6. If they provide images, such as for Wordpress or Drupal, the way AWS does, it could become a very nice way for people to set up their blogs.
Back to Ubuntu, yesterday’s news was that the Ubuntu cloud chief beats CTO to exit door. It isn’t clear what is going on at Canonical, but I’m a little worried about these changes.
At the same time, Ubuntu is now pushing their own Cloud service, Ubuntu one. You can get a free 2 gig online, and there are mobile options and options for additional storage. It will be interesting to see how this compares with Amazon’s Cloudplayer. That is probably next on the list for me to explore.
