Links for 09-28-2012

• Digital Universe 2011
• The Politics of Beer: Stay Nonpartisan, My Friends - Hotline On Call
• How to build a windmill part 2, parts, nuts, bolts and blades - Jacques Mattheij
• Shocker! Marissa Mayer Has No Magical, Secret Plan to Save Yahoo | PandoDaily - "This plan was written five CEOs ago. Think about that for a minute."
• Spurned by VCs, a chip startup turns to Kickstarter — Cloud Computing News - RT @gigastacey: Spurned by VCs, a chip startup turns to Kickstarter >> This project is cool but is NOT the fu ...
• Don't Let OpenStack Hype Distort Your Selection of a Cloud Management Platform in 2012
• The Top 3 New Swift Features in OpenStack Folsom - SwiftStack - RT @OpenStack: Awesome blog post by @notmyname (Swift PTL) on what's new in Folsom for OpenStack Object Storage:
• You Think the MBTA is Hard to Navigate Now? Try Doing it in 1945 old map – BostInno
• C-Suite Briefing: Top Disruptive Technology Trends That Will Change How You Do Business (Post I of II) - CA Innovation Today - CA Technologies
• How Star Trek: The Next Generation Changed Pop Culture Forever | Entertainment | TIME.com
• How to build a windmill - Jacques Mattheij
• Buddhist 'Iron Man' Found by Nazis Is from Space: Scientific American - "A Buddhist statue brought to Germany from Tibet by a Nazi-backed expedition has been confirmed as having an extraterrestrial origin."
• Apple’s iOS6 – The Best Place For Maps | Technomadia - RT @nic221: Apple’s iOS6 – The Best Place For Maps. (best article I've seen about pros/cons of Apple & Google maps)
• The CMO doesn’t want to be in charge of IT either | Andi Mann – Ubergeek - RT @AndiMann: My response to @gigabarb () on the #CMO (#CFO, #COO) becoming the #CIO … or not! ...
• Video - Survey Finds Asian Airlines' Service Superior to U.S. Carriers' - WSJ.com - RT @WSJ VIDEO Why America carriers have bad service. Tiptoes a bit around differences in flight attendants.
• Fighting FUD: cloud players try to make sense of European data laws — Cloud Computing News - "Drumgoole said much of the concern over European regs is overblown.  ”EU data privacy laws are the new trendy reason not to like the cloud.  Basically, the rule is you must have command and control over data and know where it lies, you must be able to delete it, and provide audit records of what happens with it. These are fundamental things you should do whether you’re in the cloud or your own data center. You can’t put your data to bed in Germany and have it wake up in France.”"
• A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - RT @mathewi: Instapapered RT @megangarber: My chat with Randall Munroe, the brilliant mind behind xkcd

Links for 09-26-2012

• Bostonography
• Untitled (http://www.datamation.com/data-center/red-hat-were-not-just-about-linux-anymore.html) - RT @linuxalert: Red Hat: We're Not Just About Linux Anymore
• Student editor publishes story on his own after it’s spiked by college president | JIMROMENESKO.COM - Disturbing thing I find about article is that some college presidents can spike student newspaper stories
• Cartoons from the Issue of October 1st, 2012 : The New Yorker - RT @NewYorker: A #Klout cartoon of the day by Matthew Diffee: @Klout
• 100 years of fashion in 100 seconds on Vimeo
• Announcing Source Code Pro « Typblography - RT @monkchips: new open source font from adobe for code editors. nice
• The Perils of Law School - The Daily Beast - "So what used to be (as you say) a risk averse choice for people who decided to give up on writing the great American novel has turned into an extremely risky and indeed often flat out reckless gamble, wihch still retains the appearance of a sensible and prudent thing to do in the eyes of clueless baby boomer parents etc."
• Red Hat | Insight Into Cloud and Virtualization: Red Hat Survey Results from VMWorld - My blog with some results from a survey we conducted at VMworld.
• The sad state of affairs of device power/charging | Flickr: Intercambio de fotos - The sad state of affairs of device power/charging
• The Apple Maps Lesson: Build a Data Moat Around Your Business – tecosystems - "Data, unlike software, cannot be generated quickly. Which makes it, in business terms, an excellent barrier to entry."
• The Indomitable Mary Meeker | Wired Business | Wired.com
• Tiny Urban Kitchen: 48 hour Sous Vide Short Ribs (Momofuku)
• The Joy of Quiet - NYTimes.com
• The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s) by Randal Picker :: SSRN
• Preview of the analysis of the upcoming OpenStack release « Bitergia's blog - "OpenStack is expected to release their next major version, codenamed Folsom, in a few days. To prepare for that release, we at Bitergia have performed an analysis on the development repositories of Folsom core projects (those that appear as “core projects” in the OpenStack Projects webpage plus the OpenStack Manuals project) with the aim of better understanding their release cycle since the last major release, back in early April. "
• ITC: How an obscure bureaucracy makes the world safe for patent trolls | Ars Technica - RT @MarkBoTech: Good read on inherently discrimnatory nature of ITC patent enforcement -->
• Twitter CEO: Soon, you can download all your tweets | Internet & Media - CNET News - about time! RT @matteastwood: Twitter CEO: Ability to download all your tweets coming this year via @johnobeto
• Red Hat | The Process to Make OpenStack a Product - RT @linux_at_ibm: RT @RedHatNews The Process to Make OpenStack a Product #redhat
• Amazon Web Services Blog: Learn More About re:Invent - Three New Videos - I'll be back in Vegas in November for AWS re:Invent

Links for 09-19-2012

• The History of Digital Storage [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Another Big Fine After a Small Breach - GovInfoSecurity - "For the second time in three months, federal authorities have issued a hefty financial penalty stemming from a HIPAA compliance investigation after a relatively small breach."
• xkcd #1110- with Seadragon
• Daring Fireball: The iPhone 5 - I do plan to upgrade to an iPhone 5 from a 3GS. But Gruber has just been, well, drugged
• My dog: the paradox - The Oatmeal
• Can We Please Move Past Apple's Silly, Faux-Real UIs? | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
• Amazon's Renaissance Of Reading - "Another reason for Amazon's increasing book sales is that people are buying more books. In a Guardian article last month, Amazon.co.uk described this as a "renaissance of reading." Amazon claims this renaissance was ushered in by the Kindle. The UK arm of Amazon told the Guardian that "British Kindle users were buying four times as many books as they were prior to owning a Kindle." That statistic was repeated by Bezos today."
• The Living Room Candidate - RT @JamesPanero: Campaign commercials age poorly but there are still some greats ones here @MovingImageNYC
• Comcast to Replace Usage Cap With Improved Data Usage Management Approaches : Comcast Voices | The Official Comcast Blog - Comcast provided me with some more info about their temporary removal of data caps:

Podcast: Cloud Evangelist Chat: Talking Intel Developer Form

The Intel Developer Form, held the week of September 10 in San Francisco, is always a good opportunity to reflect on what's happening with hardware. That's what my fellow Red Hat Cloud Evangelist Richard Morrell and I do in this podcast. Did the cloud make it possible to keep delivering chip performance improvements? Did the cloud fundamentally cause the ongoing disruption in the client space from iPads to Android to ARM?

You can check out Richard's blog at cloudevangelist.org.

Listen to MP3 (0:24:46)
Listen to OGG (0:24:46)

Links for 09-13-2012

• Exadata, You Bully ! « benchmarkingblog - "Sort of like deciding to have a fistfight with your grandmother."
• Marketers Still Can't Tie Social to Bottom Line - eMarketer - "Econsultancy and Adobe found in August that 57% of companies around the world said the deepest level at which they could track the effectiveness of social media marketing was in terms of engagement, such as the number of followers, comments and time spent on social pages. Even more agencies said this was the deepest metric their clients could track."
• Getting Cloud Architecture Right the First Time Ver 2
• Why Cloud Computing Projects Fail
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Reflections on the Longevity of Mainframes

You can't just say no

This post by James Staten is a bit of an ad for some detailed Forrester reports, but in nonetheless offers solid succinct advice about how most organizations should approach a cloud use policy.

It's too late for your policy to say, "The use of cloud services is not allowed," so you need to start from an assumption that it is already happening — and that more of it is happening behind your back than in front of your nose. In fact, any policy that takes a draconianly negative tone probably won't go over very well (it might just be blatantly ignored).

A better approach is to actually encourage its use — in the right way. Your cloud policy needs to present IT as an assistant to the business in the use of cloud and as an advocate for cloud. This will ensure that IT isn't seen as the internal police that you need to hide your business-driven cloud use from. Because your policy should help bring cloud use into the light where it can be monitored, managed, and made better.

As Red Hat's CIO Lee Congdon put it in a webinar I did with him back in March: "Moving to cloud? Your business may have already beaten you to it." with "websites, social media presence, customer service, and CRM." 

The situation is similar to (and, in many respects, related to) Bring-Your-Own-Device. When I write about BYOD, I invariably get comments to the effect that it's a passing fad waiting for a disaster to strike and for IT to subsequently clamp down. This reader's response is fairly typical of such an attitude: 

Eventually when many of the younger crowd starts to understand why they can't find work, they will realize that employers call the shots. The BOYD trend was started by a small group of people who thought their devices manufacturer (I'll give you 3 guesses who the manufacture was, and the first two don't count) is so superior to other devices that they refused to work on anything else. I would happily wish those people well finding employment elsewhere and call for the next interviewee.

As Staten correctly notes, in most environments trying to roll back the clock will merely drive usage underground and beyond the ken of IT governance and policy--to say nothing of cutting off IT and line of business users from the genuine benefits of public cloud services.

The reality of cloud usage (in its various forms) is one reason why many users with whom I speak are intensely interested in topics such as hybrid clouds and application/portability. They realize that cloud is happening and they don't want to stop it. But they do want to bring it under an integrated management and policy framework that empowers users while protecting the company.

And this is why at Red Hat, everything we're doing in cloud from Red Hat CloudForms, to OpenShift to OpenStack to our Certified Cloud Provider Program is built around the twin concepts of open and hybrid.

Links for 09-12-2012

• DIY Book Scanning | A forum dedicated to book scanning, open source, DIY digitization.
• Fifty Years of Bond, James Bond: The Greatest Film Franchise’s Biggest Birthday | Vanity Fair
• The AGPL: Solution in Search of a Problem – tecosystems - "In my view, the AGPL is a solution in search of a problem. Worse, it is a potentially dangerous solution."
• Dear Help Desk: What's Safe to do in the Cloud? | Forrester Blogs - "It's too late for your policy to say, "The use of cloud services is not allowed," so you need to start from an assumption that it is already happening - and that more of it is happening behind your back than in front of your nose. In fact, any policy that takes a draconianly negative tone probably won't go over very well (it might just be blatantly ignored)."
• The Brute Force Computing Revolution - NYTimes.com - "The brute force computing model is changing a lot of fields, with more to follow. It makes sense, in a world where more data is available than ever before, and even more is coming online, from a connected, sensor-laden world where data storage and server computing cycles cost almost nothing. In a sense, it is becoming a modification of the old “theorize-model-test-conclude” scientific method. Now the condition is to create and collect a lot of data, look for patterns amid the trash, and try to exploit the best ones."
• Exclusive Interview with Mo Duffy, Red Hat IxDesigner - Core77
• Nipplegate: Why the New Yorker Cartoon Department Is About to Be Banned from Facebook : The New Yorker
• How Cloud Computing is Changing Many Job Descriptions - Forbes

I talk cloud on Silicon Angle's theCube

This video was shot back in June at Forecast 2012.

Hotel del Coronado LinuxCon event

Hotel del Coronado LinuxCon event
Originally uploaded by ghaff

This was taken at a Hawaii-themed party at LinuxCon/CloudOpen a couple of weeks back. The whole conference was fun and it was great to catch up with various folks.

Brute force computing doesn't replace models

Writing in The New York Times' Bits blog, Quentin Hardy notes that:

The brute force computing model is changing a lot of fields, with more to follow. It makes sense, in a world where more data is available than ever before, and even more is coming online, from a connected, sensor-laden world where data storage and server computing cycles cost almost nothing. In a sense, it is becoming a modification of the old “theorize-model-test-conclude” scientific method. Now the condition is to create and collect a lot of data, look for patterns amid the trash, and try to exploit the best ones.

I rather like the term "brute force computing."

On the one hand, it generalizes beyond Big Data to Big Compute as well. The common thread is that bits of storage and cycles of computing are cheap enough that they don't need to be applied judiciously. The article offers an example from Autodesk. "The idea is to try thousands of different conditions, like temperature, humidity, tensile strength or shape, in just a few seconds. Most of the outcomes will be lousy, a couple of them will probably affirm what a designer thought to begin with, and a few might deliver surprising insights no one had considered."

In another respect, "brute force computing" is a narrower term than Big Data, which really talks to the speed and size of the data rather than the sophistication applied to its analysis. The application of sophisticated models to large realtime data streams may fall under Big Data--but it would be hard to call such merely brute force. That there's such demand for data scientist skills is but one indicator that there's a lot more to data analytics than having a big server farm. Rather, the idea that useful results can fall out when lots of CPUs crank on lots of bytes is more akin to an idea that Wired's Chris Anderson popularized in his provocative 2008 article "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete."

And that's where I'd have liked to see a bit more counterpoint in Hardy's article. It's not that lots of compute plus lots of data can't yield interesting results. But as repeatedly discussed at conferences such as O'Reilly's Stata, it isn't that simple. The numbers often don't just speak for themselves. The right questions have to be asked and the right models, however refined and tested by data and compute, developed. "Brute force computing" has a place but it's got an even larger place when augmented with intelligence.

Links for 09-11-2012

• Cheat Sheets - good coders code, great reuse
• Geography Strikes Back - WSJ.com
• Untitled (https://plus.google.com/107543171463418626606/posts/RQM2cEyziVm) - Seamless device integration /connectivity has been one of the great failures of consumer IT/electronics

Links for 09-10-2012

• Marketing Is Dead - Bill Lee - Harvard Business Review - "First, buyers are no longer paying much attention. Several studies have confirmed that in the "buyer's decision journey," traditional marketing communications just aren't relevant. Buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews."
• 18 Solid Justifications for Cloud Computing -- and 10 Situations Where It Doesn't Work - Forbes - Joe was a great MC at GigaOm Structure back in June.
• As Heroku Boss Flees to Olive Farm, Where's the Platform Cloud Going? | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
• Cooking isn't fun, but you should do it anyway. - Slate Magazine - RT @asymmetricinfo: This sort of article is always a little bit shocking to me. What do people eat?
• What users are saying about open clouds | The Pervasive Data Center - CNET News - RT @amcpherson: What users are saying about open clouds. Good write up by @ghaff on cnet #cloudopen
• Oracle’s Historical Fiction « benchmarkingblog - RT @ibmperformance: Oracle's Historical Fiction
• The CIO as the (IT) supply chain manager — Cloud Computing News - RT @sbils: The end game for #cloud and the role of the #CIO? IT supply chain master #gom
• Modernism in literature: Rumble and roar | The Economist - Jeff hart was a professor if mine at Dartmouth. New book on 20th century writers
• Backblaze Blog » Price gap: Storage vs Bandwidth - Rt @backblaze: @ghaff We certainly agree! -- nice infographic.
• Podcast: John Mark Walker talks Gluster | The Cloud Evangelist - RT @RedHatStorage: Podcast: John Mark Walker talks Gluster via @EMEACloudGuy
• Untitled (https://plus.google.com/110195292458741862277/posts/Bd7nqq76kGm) - Video on setting up Katello (upstream for app mgmt component of CloudForms)
• The Cheapest Generation - Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic - "Zipcar gives drivers access to cars they don’t have to own. Car ownership, meanwhile, has slipped down the hierarchy of status goods for many young adults. “Zipcar conducted a survey of Millennials,” Mark Norman, the company’s president and chief operating officer, told us. “And this generation said, ‘We don’t care about owning a car.’ Cars used to be what people aspired to own. Now it’s the smartphone.”"