Speed Graphic photography at the Head of the Charles Regatta

Speed Graphic photography at the Head of the Charles Regatta, a photo by ghaff on Flickr.

I thought this was a cool contrast with all the long lens DSLRs (including mine) out there.

Red Hat OpenStack "Folsom" version now available

The story of cloud computing has been one of open source-fueled innovation—often directly driven by end users with a need. OpenStack is no exception. The broad community developing and supporting OpenStack includes end-user organizations that have demanding IT requirements. Red Hat is proud to play its own role in delivering innovation to the many open source communities with which we're involved, including OpenStack. We also have a vision to make that innovation consumable by our customers. We now have a Technology Preview of OpenStack ("Folsom" version) available.

Read the rest of my blog post on the Red Hat press site.

Links for 11-20-2012

• Intel's Otellini to Step Down in May - Forbes - "Taken together, these aspects of the announcement suggest Intel’s Board believes the company needs to undergo some shock therapy to reposition itself for high growth, and could no longer tolerate business as usual in the executive suite."
• The Freedom of Open Source & Open Cloud Computing (John Owens, CIO,...
• Windows 8's interface may stink, but so does *every* PC interface | MIT Technology Review - "I was left with an inescapable feeling that, even after 20 years of graphical user interfaces and the WIMP paradigm, pretty much nothing about using a personal computer is "intuitive"; it's merely familiar or unfamiliar in the details."

Links for 11-19-2012

• Tina Brown on the End of 'Newsweek' in Print and Future of Newsweeklies -- New York Magazine
• Embargoes, NDAs, and tech journalism’s way of doing business - As an analyst, I sometimes used to sign NDAs. Mostly they were harmless boilerplate but sometimes the intent did indeed seem to be to control what I could write about a given company.
• RainyMood.com: Rain makes everything better.
• Beware the Big Data Campaign - NYTimes.com
• Don't Blindly Model Your SaaS Pricing on 37signals | Hacker News
• Amazon's Jeff Bezos: The ultimate disrupter - Fortune Management - "Writing a memo is an even more important skill to master. "Full sentences are harder to write," he says. "They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.""
• 7 Dumb Cloud Computing Myths -- InformationWeek
• Red Hat OpenStack - Red Hat's OpenStack Folsom Technical Preview is now available:
• The Largest Internet Database of Broadway Information - Playbill Vault - RT @americanrep: Wish you kept all those old playbills? Now you can rebuild your collection with @PlaybillVault.
• Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » A New Era of Unfounded Hyperbole - My biggest question comes about because big lectures are so widely cited as one of the things that 1.) many traditional educational institutions so often do badly and 2.) see almost anachronistic in this day and age. Yet, they're one part of the traditional educational experience that we've had the technology to do away with for decades.
• The Hater's Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog
• Red Hat | Red Hat Enterprise Linux - The Original Cloud Operating System - Blog post on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a cloud operating system
• John McAfee: sex, drugs and anti-virus software - Telegraph - This is really quite the amazing story.

Links for 11-15-2012

• Why aren't we all using Japanese toilets? | Hacker News - This is an absolutely hilarious thread.
• A Brief History of the Chemical Processes Used in Photography Over the Years - RT @petapixel: Brief history of the chemical processes used in photography over the years: ((Fun. Used to mix chemistry
• THE EATBEAT: Long-awaited Olive Garden receives warm welcome | Grand Forks Herald | Grand Forks, North Dakota - And this piece is hilarious, albeit (as far as I know) utterly unintended.
• Pete Wells reviews Guy Fieri's American Kitchen & Bar: critical masterpiece or malpractice? - "Now, you may or may not care for  Wells’ style here—that is a matter of taste. For my money, his use of the interrogative mood is appropriately directed at a man-brand who deserves nothing less than the violent probing of an inquisition for the calculated, cynical, sauce-drenched schlock he foists upon the country. Wells’ first question—“Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square?”—gets to the heart of the matter."
• Restaurant Review - Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square - NYTimes.com - "Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn’t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?"

Links for 11-14-2012

• Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction and Fantasy : Foundation and Reality: Asimov’s Psychohistory and Its Real-World Parallels by Mark Cole
• Ian Fleming – the Reuters journalist who ‘gave us all a run for our money’ | The Knowledge Effect
• Red Hat | Are you saying No(SQL) when you hear Cloud? - RT @asheshbadani: Read about Red Hat's investment in 10Gen, the Mongo DB company...my post here.
• Election maps

Links for 11-13-2012

• The Surprising Controversy Around the New York Public Library's $300 Million Remodeling Project | Vanity Fair
• Is There a Dropbox Effect? - "Certainly, consumerization is an important trend that has been around for awhile. But this simplistic view of the term ceased to be valid or even important years ago. There is nothing inevitable about a consumer product, even a really great one, gaining acceptance in the enterprise. Some will, if they are well-designed and manage to meet the needs of both IT departments and individual users. Many more won’t, and Dropbox is among them. Most of the companies I talk to don’t adopt Dropbox officially because so many people use it; they go looking for an enterprise tool (which Dropbox isn’t) which can fill the need identified by the many Dropbox users."
• Edwin Land and the Polaroid Camera - WSJ.com
• Exclusive: John McAfee Wanted for Murder (Updated)
• Open Hybrid PaaS « all things open - Nice posting about further automating @openshift PaaS using CloudForms by James Labocki #RedHat
• The History of Western Architecture in 39 Free Video Lectures | Open Culture
• When Social Networks and Analytics Intersect
• “Talking Innovation” with Andi Mann: From Keeping the Lights On to Keeping the Innovation Engine Purring - Innovation Today - CA Technologies - RT @AndiMann: Talking #Innovation - my new podcast on research showing gaps betw/ business & IT for #IT #innovation
• New IDC White Paper: Skies Are Becoming More Clear for Open Cloud | Linux.com - New IDC whitepaper on Open Cloud by @garychen147:

Links for 11-08-2012

• Cloud Computing Bootcamp - Agenda | Cloud Computing Bootcamp - RT @robustcloud: 24 hrs for @ghaff of @redhat to present "Building a Hybrid Cloud for Government" @cloudexpo cc: @j ...
• Inside the DreamWorks data center - Computerworld
• Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works - CloudFlare blog
• Photo by ghaff • Instagram - Before the deluge at #cloudexpo #redhat
• Open-source design: Mass bespoke | The Economist - "There’s a growing consensus that a hybrid open and closed-source model might be the way to preserve profit margins without smothering creativity. Mass bespoke is here to stay, but in the world of design it’s unlikely to be a file-sharing free-for-all."
• Elapsed Time: Uber NYC & the Surge: Right, Wrong, Lessons Learned - RT @mathewi: some good perspective here on the Uber thing from @hunterwalk:
• The Post-Apocalypse Survival Machine Nerd Farm - Businessweek - RT @valleyhack: I call this "What happens when people take a TED talk seriously"
• The Gadget Chef: Reconstructed Chicken Soup - The Daily Beast

Links for 11-02-2012

• The Power Of Visual Thinking? - Chuck's Blog
• The Top 6 Disaster Recovery lessons from Sandy – Symform - Seems like a good summary.
• Triangulation 76 | TWiT.TV Jonathan Schwartz
• What Does Nate Silver's '80.9% Chance of Winning' Mean, Anyway? - Justin Fox - Harvard Business Review - "There is something about a single-number probability assessment that lures our primitive brains in and leads them astray. We see more certainty than is actually there. "
• Cut The Cord In Your BYOD Strategy | Enterprise Computing Speedbumps - "The challenge with BYOD is ensuring the compliance, regulatory and security requirements of the organization are in place without sacrificing the principle of BYOD which was to empower the end user to be productive."
• UK Gets Open Definitions Right - Simon Says... - "Standards that can only be implemented after asking the permission of a rights holder are not "open standards" to the UK government. That seemingly small detail is an enormous boost for the modern software market."

The five stages of BYOD

The "Five Stages of Grief" (aka the Kübler-Ross model) as applied to Bring-your-own-Device.
Denial. It's just a passing fad. Or maybe we'll just get rid of those damned entitled Millennials who think they can bring their iPads into work. They'll learn soon enough how things work in the real world. Well at least we don't actually have to let them on the corporate network. Right? Right???
Anger. Don't people know IT tells them what devices and software they can and can't use. I'm sending out an email reminding everyone just who is in charge about this and they'd better shape up or else! WTF? Is that our CEO tapping away on a tablet over there?
Bargaining. OK, everyone. I get that you say these things make you more productive and all that. Tell you what. Let me load up a bunch of special monitoring and control software on those devices you bought yourself and we can all be friends again--just as soon as you read and sign this 50 page contract documenting the rules you'll need to follow.
Depression. I've lost control. I can't do my job. There's going to be a security breach and I'm going to be blamed. Nobody understands that IT has responsibilities for our company data and our customer data.
Acceptance. Maybe this isn't so bad. Most of our employees are actually pretty reasonable about taking measured steps like using VPNs and setting a password once I explained why it's so important. In fact, they're even OK with installing profiles that enforce some of those rules. And they get that I can't offer official support for stuff they buy on their own. I wonder if I can start getting out of supporting PCs too?

The other hybrid: Community clouds

Community clouds were included in the original NIST definition of cloud computing, which has come to be seen as more or less the definitive taxonomy. NIST defined community clouds as cloud infrastructure "provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organizations that have shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). However, as recently as a couple of years ago, it remained something of a theoretical construct--an intriguing possibility with only limited evidence to suggest it would actually happen anytime soon.  

That's changed.

It's not that community clouds are everywhere, but we now see concrete commercial examples in pretty much the places where you'd expect. Where there are specific rules and regulations that have to be adhered to and where there are entities that can step up to some sort of supervisory or overseeing role. 

Unsurprisingly, the federal government is one of the most fertile grounds for the community cloud idea. Government, well, "thrives" may not be quite the right word. But certainly government procurement is rife with a veritable alphabet soup of rules, standards, and regulations that must be adhered to. Indeed, government procurement was one of the driving forces behind the aforementioned NIST definition in the first place. And, in many cases, the policies and process associated with these rules have relatively little overlap with how businesses operate outside of the government sphere.

Furthermore, government agencies aren't wholly independent entities. They've often acted as if they were to be sure. And one of the big issues with government IT costs historically is that purchases often get made project-by-project, agency-by-agency. That said, initiatives like the 2010 Cloud First Mandate have the federal government towards more centralized and shared IT functions. The Cloud First Mandate may not have progressed as quickly as then-US CIO Vivek Kundra initially intended. Nonetheless, it's helped push things along in that direction. (As, no doubt, budget pressures have overall.)

The result is that many agencies are rapidly moving towards a cloud computing model--often using a hybrid approach that bridges internal resources with external GSA providers. I discuss one such agency in a session at the Cloud Computing Bootcamp in Santa Clara next week.

One public cloud specifically catering to the federal government is Amazon with their GovCloud which:

is an AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The AWS GovCloud (US) framework adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements. Workloads that are appropriate for the AWS GovCloud (US) region include all categories of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), including ITAR, as well as Government oriented publically available data. Because AWS GovCloud is physically and logically accessible by US persons only, and also supports FIPS 140-2 compliant end points, customers can manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with federal requirements. In other respects the GovCloud Region offers the same high level of security as other AWS Regions and supports existing AWS security controls and certifications such as FISMA, SSAE 16/SOC1 (formerly SAS-70 Type 2), ISO/IEC 27001, and PCI DSS Level 1. AWS also provides an environment that enables customers to comply with HIPAA regulations. (See the AWS Security page for more details.) The customer community utilizing AWS GovCloud (US) includes U.S. Federal, State, and Local Government organizations as well as U.S. Corporate and Educational entities.

As discussed by Brandon Butler in Network World, however, community clouds aren't limited to government. 

Given the data privacy standards imposed by the HIPAA regulation, healthcare providers also have some specific requirements and concerns when it comes to cloud computing--or, really, IT in general. Nor are these concerns purely academic. In 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services fined two different organizations a total of $5.3 million for data breaches even though those breaches were, arguably, relatively minor.

Optum, the technology division of the UnitedHealth Group, is an example of a healthcare community cloud from the Network World article. Butler writes that:

[Optum] released its Optum Health Cloud in February as a way for those in the healthcare industry to take advantage of cloud resources. Strict data protection standards regulated by HIPAA, plus a constant pressure to reduce costs and find efficiencies in healthcare management has made community cloud services seem like a natural fit for the industry, says Ted Hoy, senior vice president and general manager of Optum Cloud Solutions. Powered by two data centers owned by Optum, Hoy hopes the community cloud will eventually be able to offer Iaas, SaaS, PaaS for customers.

The service, Hoy says, has differentiating features tailored specifically for the healthcare industry. HIPAA regulations, for example, regulate how secure certain information must be depending on what it is. An e-mail exchange between two doctors about the latest in medical trends needs a different level of protection compared to a communication between a doctor and a patient. Optum worked with Cisco to create security provisions tailor-made for the system that identifies who is entering information, what type of information it is and who has access to it.

 It's still early days for community clouds and it's reasonable to question the degree to which they'll expand beyond fairly specific (and relatively obvious) uses such as we're mostly seeing to date. At another level though, I see this as another example of how it's hard to call exactly where workloads are going to end up running. Which is why industry analysts such as Gartner are making such a big deal about concepts such as Hybrid IT.

Links for 11-01-2012

• How Google Street-Viewed The Grand Canyon
• Grounded: An Eye-Popping Sci-Fi Short Filmed Using Canon DSLRs
• Gartner 2012: Your IT Infrastructure Will Become Obsolete
• Why OpenStack doesn’t need a Linus Torvalds « Seeing the fnords - "As comparing OpenStack with Linux becomes an increasingly popular exercise, it’s only natural that people and press articles start to ask where the Linus of OpenStack is, or who the Linus of OpenStack should be. This assumes that technical leaders could somehow be appointed in OpenStack. This assumes that the single dictator model is somehow reproducible or even desirable. And this assumes that the current technical leadership in OpenStack is somehow lacking. I think all those three assumptions are wrong."
• The Lessons of the Lotus MarketPlace: Implications for Consumer Privacy in the 1990's - The 1990 Lotus Marketplace brouhaha seems so cutely quaint today. (And shows data privacy is not a new issue)