From the Blogosphere

Wave on Ulitzer: Confessions of a Google Wave Fanboy

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST

Like many who were given early Google wave sandbox accounts, I didn't see the purpose at first. The rather buggy javascript laden interface was actually kind of slow and at times cumbersome and worst of all crashed my browser all the time. This was for the most practical of reasons, I didn't know anyone else using the platform and it was an alpha that was changing on practically an hourly basis.

Google Wave

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 03:00:00 EST

Looks like Google sent out another bunch of invitations (2620) for Wave & since most of my friends are already on Wave, I thought why not give it away. So, in case you want one, just drop a comment (don’t forget to protect it against spamming by substituting @ with [at] & the [...]

Crossroads in FOSS Projects: Some Business Considerations

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

At our Seminar last month, Managing FOSS to Lower Costs and Achieve Business Results, several participants asked about the dynamics of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) projects that reach a crossroads (a failure, a merger, loss of key personnel, etc). I had not expected that concern because with commercial software, it seems to [...]

Android - To Be or Not to Be?

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:45:00 EST

That Android has got a lot of publicity and public endorsement in the US is clear to all of us but the potential impact that Android can have is probably far beyond what you have thought. I am therefore posting some of my 'insights' in the subject.

When Andy Rubin left Sidekick and started Android (and acquired by Google), he and his team did a few things amazingly correct. The first thing they want to do was to embedded Google services as much as possible; secondly, providing a standardized easy to develop developer experience that is standardized across devices; and thirdly, provide a nice and easy UI.

What they did not do was to provide a native SDK, nor any tools to easily modify and change the UI, nor any backwards compatibility between 1.0, 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 - as for developers, it did not matter - they had the Dalvik SDK (which is stable). But the Android team released most of their code under an open source license (MIT) and that opened up for an unrivaled deployment from chipset, ODMs, OEMs and even operators.

And to be fair, Android is now the one and only open source package that provides everything from UI, kernel, sandbox and a bunch of applications that constitutes the basics of a smartphone. So what has this lead to?! Well, I can't tell you everything as some is information given in customer confidentiality, but some I can share:

- Mobile phones (Google-certified): HTC, Motorola, LGE, Samsung (though Samsung maybe not be totally backing it) and SonyEricsson (HTC);

- Operator endorsement from Verizon, T-Mobile, 3 and more on the way. What the OEMs and ODMs keep hearing is the demand for Android-based devices;

- Mobile phones (non-Google): China Mobile's oPhone (w Dopod, LGE, Dell and other producing phone); a number of shanzhai phones; virtually all ODMs (to mention a few: Yuhuatel, Pegatron, Quanta, etc.);

- Smartbooks: not supported by Google, but the ODMs and some OEMs are in full development of Android-based Netbooks, driven by operator demand. I have seen demos based on Qualcomm Snapdragon and Freescale iMX.51 done by ODMs in Taiwan;

- STB: I have been shown a few various reference designs by customer who has been using Android;

- In-Car Infotainment systems: One of the biggest Chinese car manufacturers is developing an Android-based solution (want phone capabilities); and

- Chipsets: nearly all chipset manufacturers have a demo with Android (Freescale, Qualcomm, TI, Marvell, etc. - even MIPS now).

At the ARM symposium that I attended in Taipei and Hsinchu last week, ARM itself had a number of speeches to show how to innovate and develop with ARM and Android. Apart from our Qt-demo and Movial's, a few were Windows Mobile and the rest was just Android.

In Japan, the in-official Android community is huge - more than 2,000 open source developers (and growing), compared with some 50-100 in KDE.

I was speaking at Web Wednesday in Beijing the same week in order to share my experience with open source business models. And most of the developers there were totally ignoring Nokia but a few them was really in favor of Android. The perception of Android's strengthen a position, is in my opinion, greatly over-rated, as there are clear signs already of fragmentation (and thus developers will not have such an easy life) but perception rules!

What drives this? For any ODM or OEM who wants to e.g. use an ARM-based chipset to drive down cost and to build a device quickly (partly being able to show a demo to a customer to be able to sell in the design), there are a number of things to look out for:

- free open-source solution means no budget spending and lengthy contract negotiations with supplier. I.e. easy to start the project and low/minimum risk

- avoid plumming that do not add any value. In the plumming, we have kernel porting, driver development, media-framework (some value in optimizing and performance), back-end features (SQL, UI toolkits, etc.), basic applications (such email, browser, dialer) and a sandbox model for installing 3rd party applications

- 3rd party application development model for developing and deploying applications on devices but also making it easy for the OEM/ODM themselves to add/develop pre-installed applications. The Java language makes it fairly easy for anyone to develop apps given that large existing Java developer community.

So what could go wrong? What could stop the Android and make him rust. There are hurdles and deploying on non-ARM chipsets are one; memory consumption can make the devices too expensive (beyond mobile); difficult to develop and customize the UI (important once the screen is not standard screen) and of course, consumer uptake. Still there are no evidence of real consumer uptake and the next year stand to prove the case.

There are also some large developer houses that questions the viability of Android and ability for 3rd parties to make some serious money. Gameloft recently announced cutbacks of Android apps development. A quote: "We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like ... many others," Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said at an investor conference.

Android could also fragment itself to non-importance with its open-source model and non-backward compatibility in the framework and Native controllers. It could become the preferred choice for building anything but would be limited to UI and some on-device preloaded applications and a browser and not much more beyond mobile phone. Also Chromium OS may divert attention and given that ChromeOS is built upon Canonical's Linux distro, there are also chances that we can easier get Qt and CWRT running on those devices. But I fear that Google in true non-open source spirit and its aim to rule the world will limit OEMs/ODMs if they want Google services preloaded on their devices

Alternatives to Android? Moblin maybe, but that is x86-based and not open to non-Intel chipsets (GPL only otherwise) which really limits uptake

And where is Maemo? Should that have been one of the options for any ODM? Well, probably but it seems too complicated to build a device based on ODM.

SonyEricsson provides an alternative view on how to provide a developer experience:

And this is also well in-line with Nokia's push for the WebRuntimes that is on S60 devices and also in some of the S40 and also Maemo. Similar for PalmPre and this is also aligned a bit with Chromium OS. Webapps is the future?

Google SPDY Protocol Would Require Mass Change in Infrastructure

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:15:00 EST

Google’s desire to speed up the web via a new protocol is laudable, but the SPDY protocol would require massive changes across networks to support

ArsTechnica had an interesting article on one of Google’s latest projects, a new web protocol designed to replace HTTP called SPDY.

SPDY uses a single SSL-encrypted session between a browser and a client, and then compresses all the request/response overhead. The requests, responses, and data are all put into frames that are multiplexed over the one connection. This makes it possible to send a higher-priority small file without waiting for the transfer of a large file that's already in progress to terminate. Compressing the requests is helpful in typical ADSL/cable setups, where uplink speed is limited. For good measure, unnecessary and duplicated headers in requests and responses are done away with. SPDY also includes real server push and a "server hint" feature.

Having recently emerged from a trip into the world of service-providers and its associated protocols, the description of SPDY immediately brought to mind other asynchronous, message-oriented protocols such as SIP and DIAMETER. It therefore made me seriously consider the kind of massive changes that would be required to support such a protocol across all data center components: security, load balancing, acceleration, web servers, application servers, caches. Basically any network intermediary based on the premise of a strict request-reply, synchronous behavior would likely need radical changes to its core protocol handling systems.

MAJOR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SPDY and HTTP

SPDY, as described, is asynchronous and message-oriented. Like DIAMETER, SPDY would allow multiple requests per connection, effectively turning a single connection designed to be used and then closed into a long-lived connection. This is more along the lines of a SIP connection which is initiated and held open until the session is terminated.This is very different from the HTTP model in which connections are opened and closed within fairly short time intervals and are not expected to be held open for exceedingly long periods of time. SPDY thus eliminates the overhead associated with opening and closing many connections and the negative impact that has on application performance.

The current draft of the SPDY protocol states that “from the perspective of the server business logic or application API, nothing has changed”. But from the perspective of the infrastructure that needs to process the protocol, everything changes.

KEY CHANGES TO HTTP HEADERS

The following are directly from the draft of the SPDY protocol and document the changes from HTTP to SPDY

REQUEST CHANGES

The first line of the request is unfolded into name/value pairs like other HTTP headers. The names of the first line fields are method, url, and version. These keys are required to be present. The 'url' is the fully-qualified URL, containing protocol, host, port, and path.
HTTP request headers are compressed. This is accomplished by compressing all data sent by the client with gzip encoding.
Content-length is not a valid header.
Chunked encoding is no longer valid.

RESPONSE CHANGES

The response status line is unfolded into name/value pairs like other HTTP headers. The names of the status line are status and version. These keys are required to be present
Content-length is no longer valid.
Chunked encoding is no longer valid.

These changes would have a huge impact on infrastructure solutions, many of which rely on URI or HTTP headers (custom and standardized) to perform specific actions such as blocking, scanning, persistence (server affinity), or routing. The requirement that SPDY be transported via SSL has its own, well understood impact on infrastructure and is already dealt with by most devices, but SPDY also requires that headers are compressed via gzip. This means every intermediary requiring to perform some action based on the headers will need to decompress, process, and then likely recompress the headers before sending it on to the next hop. Coupling required compression with SSL would not only require support on all relevant infrastructure but will also likely reintroduce latency that could offset some of the performance gains claimed by testing of SPDY thus far.

SINGLE-CONNECTION: LONG LIVED SESSIONS

That all communication would essentially flow between the client and server over a single connection also poses a challenge for intermediaries that perform any kind of analysis or are required to act on the data exchanged. Load balancers, for example, are not generally designed to handle switching of messages in what becomes a 1:N connection:server scenario. The protocol could likely be supported as is by most load balancing solutions on a strictly layer 4 load balancing basis but advanced features that take advantage of application-aware capabilities such as message header and payload value routing (content-based routing) as well as egress functionality like Data Leak Prevention (DLP) would be much more difficult to implement, if not impossible for some solutions. This capability actually sounds a lot like HTTP pipelining on the request side.

The single, long-lived connection would have more of an impact on the overall architecture and capacity planning. In some respects it would be easier, as there would be an easy 1:1 ratio between users and connections. But because each user is effectively being handed dedicated compute resources, this would actually change the resource consumption model on servers and make it more difficult to support high volumes of users without building out a scalable infrastructure.

ASYNCHRONOUS EXCHANGE OF MESSAGES

Further complicating the ability of infrastructure solutions to handle SPDY is its definition as asynchronous. Essentially asynchronous protocols do not enforce order of replies. That means a client could send three requests in a row without waiting for a response and the server could send back the response in a completely different order. Again, from the draft SPDY protocol:

Because TCP provides a single stream of data on which SPDY multiplexes multiple logical streams, it is important for clients and servers to interleave data messages for concurrent sessions.

This may not sound like a problem, but for infrastructure that is optimized to handle HTTP and has been built around its implicit behavior this would require changes to the core networking stacks on most devices. In a typical HTTP scenario a request is received, the infrastructure solution processes any applicable ingress policies, and then initiates a connection to the appropriate server and waits for a response. It appears that with SPDY, like DIAMETER, the infrastructure still processes any applicable ingress policies and initiates a connection but does not necessarily wait for a reply as it might need to act upon the next incoming message.

This means a single network “session” would need to carefully track multiple incoming requests and outgoing responses at the same time on a per connection basis. This is not something most infrastructure is typically prepared to handle. Combined with the possibility that different requests may need to be routed to different servers within the infrastructure, this complicates the nature of application delivery and load balancing and could have a huge impact on the costs associated with cloud computing. Long lived sessions/connections initiated on secondary or tertiary servers launched to handle temporary capacity increases could hold open those connections long enough to incur excess charges that are unnecessary.

Also similar to DIAMETER is the inclusion of a “real server push” feature. The ability of a server to act like a client and vice-versa is inherent in DIAMETER and this reverse flow of traffic is not something most infrastructure is prepared to process.

THE IMPACT ON INFRASTRUCTURE

Any infrastructure solution that is heavily focused on application layer (HTTP) processing for any purpose would likely need to make radical changes to its core networking and processing engines. Some solutions, particularly those tasked with load balancing and scaling existing message-based protocols may already be capable of supporting a protocol like SPDY. Whether the solutions that support DIAMETER and SIP load balancing and scalability could support SPDY without modification is highly dependent on whether support for the service-provider focused protocols is based on an underlying generic message-based implementation [PDF] or a protocol-specific implementation. The latter would be difficult to adapt to a new protocol while the former would be more easily extended to specifically support the requirements of new message-oriented protocols.

But that’s only load balancing and scalability. There are many other infrastructure devices that are used to secure, monitor, accelerate, and otherwise manage HTTP that would need to be updated to handle such a new protocol. The upheaval across data centers would likely be on par with the anticipated challenges associated with mass migration from IPv4 to IPv6. Like that migration, however, support for both SPDY and HTTP could be achieved through the use of translating gateways; infrastructure capable of supporting both SPDY and HTTP or able to translate between the two could be utilized to enable a smoother transition.

While it’s a fascinating and exciting notion, the introduction of a completely new protocol to replace HTTP seems more academic than realistic. More realistic would be for gradual implementation through adaptation of SPDY’s core concepts into the next generations of HTTP until HTTP is indistinguishably from a protocol such as SPDY. Making modifications and improvements to HTTP would be an evolutionary step rather than the revolutionary change implied with SPDY that would be almost too disruptive to adopt.

That said, not everything that comes out of Google Labs is adopted as an industry wide solution. It’s an experimental environment and a good one at that. What may come out of the SPDY project may well in fact be changes to HTTP rather than the presentation of a new, radically different protocol. Regardless, SDPY and Google’s efforts have people talking about what’s wrong with HTTP and how it might be fixed and that conversation is one we’ve probably needed to have for quite some time now.

You can read more about the tools Google offers and general problems with web performance at Google’s “Let’s Make the Web Faster” site.

Related blogs & articles:

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,Google,SPDY,HTTP,infrastructure,DIAMETER,protocols,web,internet,IPv4,IPv6,acceleration,security,load balancing,application delivery,application security,architecture

Google Books Settlement 2.0?

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:30:00 EST

Google has announced a revised settlement [redlined pdf faq pdf] that it hopes will address the concerns raised by the Department of Justice and many other groups. Here's a summary of the summary Google provides [pdf], although IANAL and I encourage you to read the summary, which is written ...

Orchestra Contributing to Future of E-Commerce

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:30:00 EST

It is one thing to use open source software and evangelize its capabilities to a marketplace. It is quite another to actually attempt to contribute to that software. Orchestra is now investing in contributing to open source projects that benefit the small and midsize business market.

New Amazon AWS SDK for .NET Developers Released

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:22:00 EST

Under the pressure from Windows Azure release in a week, Amazon unveiled today a new AWS SDK for .NET Developers providing .NET developers the libraries, code samples, and documentation needed to build an AWS-powered application using any programming language capable of making .NET calls including C#, Visual Basic, Windows PowerShell, and other compliant languages. .NET [...] Related posts:

Amazon Announces Amazon Elastic Map Reduce Amazon announced today the public beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce,...
Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop Released on GitHub The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop is tested and deployed on...
Amazon EC2 New Features: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch It is easier and easier easier for programmers to...

Open Source Surge (Google Closure Tool)

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:17:00 EST

Javascript has suddenly matured and perhaps these are its best of times. There is a large number of JavaScript libraries vying for your attention and capture your heart. Review the article describing the various libraries on Wikipedia.

It all really started with the introduction of Dynamic HTML[DHTML] when Javascript provided the scripting ability to interact with the web page which had remained mostly static till that time. With the support of CSS and Javascript the stage was set for the web pages to take the users to the next level. The next big push came in with the introduction of AJAX. The concurrent effort by developers to somehow address the display disparity with the existing browsers and make the user experience uniform across different existing browsers and versions resulted in packaging the various libraries. Of course Microsoft Visual Studio also worked hard on making this uniform user experience across browsers a priority and the applications developed using this IDE fulfilled this wish mostly.

Most recently Google made available its toolset, the Closure Compiler. It is supposed to make Javascript to download and run faster according to Google. It is more like a refactoring tool for Javascript. It also checks for script coding errors etc. Moreover it is integrated with Firefox's PageSpeed and you can see for yourselves the gain in performance using the Google Tool. The tool can be used from command line as well as a simple web application.

The above Google URL also has links to examples of the tool's usage. One such example shows optimizing code by removing white spaces. Review this example here.
In the above example, it took in the script shown here:
---------
function hello(name){
//Greets the user
alert('Hello, ' + name);
}
hello('New User');
------------------------
and the Closure Tool optimized it to the following after removing white spaces (as well as the comments) :
-----------
function hello(name){alert"Hello, "+name)}hello("New User");
------------------------------------------------

Parse errors with line number and character position are provided by the tool but you will have to go and count those on your input code. Also there is no color coding or error position highlighting.

How to access the Closure compiler?

Click on this URL and you are ready, set and go.
.

Open Source Content Management Software Company New CEO

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:15:00 EST

eZ Systems, the world´s largest open source content management software company, announced today that former IBM and BEA executive Christoph Rau will join the company as CEO, effective immediately.

Commercial and OpenSource OCR Softwares

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST

SimpleOCR is the popular freeware OCR software with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. SimpleOCR is also a royalty-free OCR SDK for developers to use in their custom applications. If you have a scanner and want to avoid retyping your documents, SimpleOCR is the fast, free way to do it. The SimpleOCR freeware is 100% free and not limited in any way. Anyone can use SimpleOCR for free–home users, educational institutions, even corporate users. Our own freeware OCR application provides acceptable accuracy for those who just need to convert a few pages and can’t justify the cost of commercial OCR software. Developers can use the command-line and SDK versions to integrate SimpleOCR with their custom applications.

Contributing to FOSS: A Business Perspective

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Although my presentation focused on individual contributions, these lessons also apply to how businesses benefit by contributing to FOSS. When a business approaches a project they should attempt to build a symbiotic relationship with the community. Such a relationship involves following the established community procedures so that your contributions can be easily adopted by the project. Useful scripts and code developments made within the company that can be useful to the greater public should be contributed back and packaging of popular software within the company can be submitted for inclusion and use by the greater community. Testing and bug reporting based on experience using FOSS on their production (or development) systems can provide important information for FOSS developers about the health and status of their projects.

Welcome to The Managing FOSS for Business Results Blog

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:15:00 EDT

This blog is part of a new educational initiative to foster a deeper understanding of the capabilities and issues involved with administering FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to deliver concrete business benefits. Although our subject will sometimes become technical, we will strive to address the business benefits at the beginning of each and every post. Therefore, we are confident that this blog will prove interesting and understandable to a broad variety of leaders, managers, and technicians.

Blocks to Profitable Behavior

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EDT

I recently added 20 yards of distance to every club in my golf bag with no effort whatsoever (and the chipping now is sublime). For the non-golfers out there, this is quite a significant improvement. I have played the game for about 15 years achieved a reasonable standard and plateaued, content in the knowledge that I know enough to be competitive and to enjoy myself. Over the years I have taken, on average, two lessons per year, read copious amounts in magazines, watched my heroes on the TV, dreamed of faultless rounds, practiced my bad habits at the driving-range and, of course, played once a week.

HL7 Interface Engines

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

So what do you really look for in an interface engine? There is more to an IE than just being a pass-through of messages.

Network-Centric Mobile Field Force Automation

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:15:00 EDT

This article explores the use of geospatial information to provide a network-centric view of the mobile work place and the real-time location of your mobile assets. USAF Colonel John Boyd is credited with the concept of the OODA loop. The OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) is a concept originally applied to the combat operation processes often at the strategic level. It is now also often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. It has become an important concept in both business and military strategy. According to Boyd, decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe-orient-decide-act. An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby "get inside" the opponent's decision cycle and gain the advantage.

Real-Time Search and Five Reasons Why “We” Will Change the Web

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:15:00 EDT

If you don’t understand why the Real Time Web is huge, you will soon. Thanks to micro-blogging sites like Twitter, a constant stream of human-posted content has infiltrated the Web. This growing infiltration has created a bottoms up approach to content creation that via the progressive support of rapidly developing applications has and will continue [...]

Amazon’s Answer to SQL Azure - Amazon Relational Database Service

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:30:00 EDT

Today Amazon released its answer to SQL Azure, the hosted cloud database offered by Microsoft. The newest service form Amazon, the Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS for short, now in beta, makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. You get direct database access without [...] Related posts:

Amazon EC2 New Features: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch It is easier and easier easier for programmers to...
Microsoft the First to Deliver Full Relational Database in the Cloud SQL Data Services team at Microsoft, proudly announced that SDS will...
Amazon Announces Amazon Elastic Map Reduce Amazon announced today the public beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce,...

Google Liberates Your Docs

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:31:00 EDT

In a note to the CCIF list, Sam Johnston informed us that Google too has continued on its promise to liberate our data as part of their Data Liberation Front project. This latest Google effort introduces a new feature that makes it much easier to get your content back out of the Cloud using a tool that lets Google Doc's users easily "Convert, Zip and Download." It's interesting to note that both Microsoft and Google released completing "open" initiatives today with Mircrosoft announcing they are opening the PST format for Outlook. It's great to see both companies actively battling it out for "Open Cloud" supremacy.

Ulitzer Named "New Media" Partner of Greatly Anticipated iStrategy Event in Berlin

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:15:00 EDT

A new ‘internet’ has been born which can flatten the market place if not managed correctly. New opportunities create greater challenges for any company to stay ahead. Thanks to sites like Ulitzer the corporate world has finally embraced online social media as a real competitive advantage, and the tier ones are now incorporating such initiatives in their 2010 business plans – but who will be left behind?

Meh. It's Just Data.

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EDT

There seems to suddenly be a lot of focus on “data” and the ability for users consumers to pack up their data and take it wherever they want. Except for people attached to their i-Thing. I think users of i-Things were approached about the concept but were unable to get past the revelation that there are other “i-Things” out there from other vendors in the first place. Regardless, the core concept appears a laudable goal and rational desire. After all, the data was probably created by the consumer and thus, by most people’s definitions, they own the data. It’s theirs, so they should be able to move it hither and fro at will. But what is “data”?

The Real Story Behind Independent Internet Consultants?

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:45:00 EDT

In a recent post on a cloud computing mailing list, an old timer from the telecom days admitted that for him “being an independent consultant means about the same things as “being unemployed.” Over the past few years the joke was “you cannot swing a dead cat over your head in downtown LA without whacking an unemployed telecom engineer.”

Baking MapReduce into Database Engines - Worth the Reduction Sauce?

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:30:00 EDT

MapReduce (implementations include Hadoop and CloudDB) has gained popularity in the industry. It also serves as marketing fodder for several new-breed ADBMS vendors who now claim to support it in various

Moving to the Cloud: How Hard is it Really?

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 06:00:00 EDT

Many IT managers would love to move some of their applications out of the enterprise data center and into the cloud. It's a chance to eliminate a whole litany of costs and headaches: in capital equipment, in power and cooling, in administration and maintenance. Instead, just pay as you go for the computing power you need, and let someone else worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.

Russia "Will" Develop a New Web Browser

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Russia "will" develop a new Web browser for federal employees. The news was published on infonews.ru. The project is funded by the Ministry of Defense and FSB (formerly KGB). According to infonews, "several million rubles will be spent on creation of Russian Web browser". They are planning to use Mozilla's Firefox as the base. The official version is that they are not happy that popular browsers are sending to Google search engine statistics on the user's visits of the Web sites. If this information is true, this is how you should read it: a group of people figured out how to get funding and split it between them. In a year or so the project will quietly fail, but Russia will have a couple of more millionaires.

Swedish Government Bans the Word "Bank" from .SE Domains

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 06:00:00 EDT

A major uproar has been brewing in Sweden over a recent government ruling banning the word "bank" from any Swedish domains that do not fit the official definition of a financial banking institution. (Basically *bank.se) On Thursday The Pirate Bay pledged it's support joining in the protest against the Swedish Post- and Telecoms Authority (PTS) The list has since started growing by hundreds of names per hour. It is run by the web host Binero to protest against the PTS decision to subject all Swedish se-domain names containing the word “bank” to an inspection prior to registration. This to insures that anyone that might be confused with a bank actually fulfills the legal requirements for one. It is a departure from international standards, where issues are solved, usually by a Uniform Dispute Resolution Process (UDRP) once they arise after registration.

The big concern isn't specifically about the word bank so much as it sets a precedent for other words in the future. Think about if words such as cloud or science or music require official approval by a government agency before you could register the domain.

The Swedish Bankers’ Association have lobbied for restrictions on domain names for a long time, making an interpretation of the Swedish law mandating that anyone using “Bank” as a name in their business must fulfill the requirements of one.

Their arguments is that the banks have not been able to show evidence of fraudulent “bank”-sites, that typosquatting would not be stopped, whereas many Swedes would have a more difficult time registering, that scrutinizing new businesses before domain registration would be injust and, above all, that the approval of name scrutinization prior to registration would spread to many other names; titles protected by law, names of public authorities, brands, racist words etc.

“To diverge from the democratic country norm of problem resolution post rather than pre registration, and to do it for a common word and name like “Bank” is dangerous. It makes it legally and logically plausible for many groups to lobby for scrutinizing an unforeseeable number of other words and names pre registration as well,”said Binero CEO Anders Aleborg, continuing:

“All countries have the same problem and lobby groups like our big banks. There is a big risk that this form of net censorship might spread if Sweden does it.”

--------------------

For more information:

Anders Aleborg, CEO, Binero, +46 768-04 42 00, anders.aleborg@binero.se

Erik Arnberg, Marketing Manager, Binero, +46 70-398 75 34, erik.arnberg@binero.se

Swedish Government IT-advisor Patrik Fältström (Paf) blog: http://stupid.domain.name/node/812#comment

.SE home page re: this: http://www.iis.se/en/domaner/bank-i-domannamn/

PTS English home page: http://www.pts.se/en-gb/

Namnbank.se (Swedish): http://www.namnbank.se

Press pictures, Anders Aleborg, http://blogg.binero.se/press/

Binero AB is a web host and registrar with the ambition of being the friendliest in Sweden; transparency, honesty and friendliness.

Running Chrome Inside of Internet Explorer

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:00:00 EDT

Internet Explorer, particularly versions 6 and before, are the bane of any web developer's existence. The Internet Explorer versions Microsoft produced during the competion-free era between when Netscape died and Firefox came on the scene are masterpieces of monopolistic neglect. IE 5 and IE6 are slow, proprietary and just plain awful to work with. Worst of all, Microsoft guaranteed themselves longtime domination of the corporate browser market through this cynical behavior because all the web apps built for IE 5 and 6 are so full of hacks that they won't run on "modern" browsers!

Gmail Now Crashing Two Browsers

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:15:00 EDT

Wow. I’m impressed. For the past few days, Gmail has been hanging when I try to attach a file. It doesn’t matter what type of file it is or how big it is. More times than not, it hangs. The hang happens as soon as Gmail shows the bar that displays the percent loaded. I have to force-quit. This is with the latest version of FF and of Snow Leopard. (I use Gmail as part of Google Accounts, and I have https turned on.)

Google Apps: The Missing Manual

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:45:00 EDT

I’ve mentioned before that I run my small business, Crucial Point LLC, primarily by leveraging cloud computing capabilities. With this post I’ll mention a book that helped me do that: Google Apps: The Missing Manual. This book does a great job at capturing the core functionality of Google Apps. However, no book can keep up with the capabilities and features of the Google Apps suite. In cloud computing, features can be developed and fielded fast, and since Google intentionally invests in driving more and more features, a continuing stream of announcements on new functionality has occurred since I bought this book.

What Are the Data Recovery FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:27:59 EDT

Data loss is an unforeseen situations that could occur at any point, nevertheless of the hardware and software you are using. Data loss can harshly affect your business and may harm your company revenue as well as market reputation.

Media 2.0 on Ulitzer - New Media and Content Marketing Strategies

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:30:00 EDT

Here is an interesting news item which claims that UK online ad spend overtakes mainstream TV. The same news was corroborated by another post which stated that spending on online advertising surpasses TV. The news was little disconcerting because it did not seem to match with my ground level experience.

If Load Balancers Are Dead Why Do We Keep Talking About Them?

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Commoditized from solution to feature, from feature to function, load balancing is no longer a solution but rather a function of more advanced solutions that’s still an integral component for highly-available, fault-tolerant applications.

Unashamed Parody of Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Load balancers: I'm not dead.
The Market: 'Ere, it says it’s not dead.
Analysts: Yes it is.
Load balancers: I'm not.
The Market: It isn't.
Analysts: Well, it will be soon, it’s very ill.
Load balancers: I'm getting better.
Analysts: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.

Earlier this year, amidst all the other (perhaps exaggerated) technology deaths, Gartner declared that Load Balancers are Dead. It may come as surprise, then, that application delivery network folks keep talking about them. As do users, customers, partners, and everyone else under the sun. In fact, with the increased interest in cloud computing it seems that load balancers are enjoying a short reprieve from death.

LOAD BALANCERS REALLY ARE SO LAST CENTURY

They aren’t. Trust me, load balancers aren’t enjoying anything. Load balancing on the other hand, is very much in the spotlight as scalability and infrastructure 2.0 and availability in the cloud are highlighted as issues today’s IT staff must deal with. And if it seems that we keep mentioning load balancers despite their apparent demise, it’s only because the understanding of what a load balancer does is useful to slowly moving people toward what is taking its place: application delivery.

Load balancing is an integral component to any high-availability and/or on-demand architecture. The ability to direct application requests across a (cluster|pool|farm|bank) of servers (physical or virtual) is an inherent property of cloud computing and on-demand architectures in general. But it is not the be-all and end-all of application delivery, it’s just the point at which application delivery begins and an integral function of application delivery controllers.

Load balancers, back in their day, were “teh bomb.” These simple but powerful pieces of software (which later grew into appliances and later into full-fledged application switches) offered a way for companies to address the growing demand for Web-based access to everything from their news stories to their products to their services to their kids’ pictures. But as traffic demands grew so did the load on servers and eventually new functionality began to be added to load balancers – caching, SSL offload and acceleration, and even security-focused functionality. From the core that was load balancing grew an entire catalog of application-rich features that focused on keeping applications available while delivering them fast and securely. At that point we were no longer simply load balancing applications, we were delivering them. Optimizing them. Accelerating them. Securing them.

LET THEM REST IN PEACE…

So it made sense that in order to encapsulate the concept of application delivery and move people away from focusing on load balancing that we’d give the product and market a new name. Thus arose the term “application delivery network” and “application delivery controller.” But at the core of both is still load balancing. Not load balancers, but load balancing. A function, if you will, of application delivery. But not the whole enchilada; not by a long shot.

If we’re still mentioning load balancing (and even load balancers, as incorrect as that term may be today) it’s because the function is very, very, very important (I could add a few more “verys” but I think you get the point) to so many different architectures and to meeting business goals around availability and performance and security that it should be mentioned, if not centrally then at least peripherally.

So yes. Load balancers are very much outdated and no longer able to provide the biggest bang for your buck. But load balancing, particularly when leveraged as a core component in an application delivery network, is very much in vogue (it’s trendy, like iPhones) and very much a necessary part of a successfully implemented high-availability or on-demand architecture.

Long live load balancing.

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,load balancers,load balancing,application delivery network,application delivery,security,acceleration,optimization,high-availability,cloud,on-demand

Related blogs & articles:

Don’t Get Stuck in a Cloud

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:15:00 EDT

Cloud computing is in fact a real phenomenon and does create great technological and business value. Simply put, cloud computing allows one to build network applications without having to worry about the network. So far, so good; but what is the catch?

Amazon S3 vs Amazon EBS on the Elastic Cloud

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) is a new type of storage designed specifically for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS allows you to create volumes that can be mounted as devices by EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes behave as if they were raw unformatted external hard drives and can be formatted using a file system such as ext3 (Linux) or NTFS (Windows) and mounted on an EC2 instance; files are accessed through the file system . They have user supplied device names and provide a block device interface.

Ulitzer vs. Ning

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:30:00 EDT

In the case of Ulitzer, as a writer I am focused on getting readers from within an existing audience. There are already thousands of readers coming to the Ulitzer site, so if they are interested in my topics such as marketing, they will find my articles as well as others. Ulitzer allows the writer the ability to set up a feed coming from another site, so it can be a write once, publish twice strategy. You just have to give Ulitzer a few hours to upload a new article you wrote on a different site. You still have to go back into that article even after it has been posted and assign it to topics and tags. This is part of the administration of your stories which is under the manage stories menu.

Facebook Open Sources FriendFeed Code

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:45:00 EDT

Interesting developments today in the scalable real time web front. In a rather unexpected move, Facebook has released a project called Tornado -- an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and and tools that power FriendFeed.

An Accident Waiting To Happen? Or Designing The Next Big Thing

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:30:00 EDT

... There was an interesting article in the news yesterday from an insurance company about which professions have the worst road accident records. Topping the list... ahead of sales managers and students... are computer engineers!!! Being an engineer at heart (although my programming days are long behind me) it struck me ...

Google Books Metadata: Google Responds

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:00:00 EDT

There's a terrific colloquy between Google and Geoff Nunberg in response to Geoff's critique of Google's handling of the metadata attached to the books Google is digitizing (which I blogged about here). It's fascinating for its content, but also very cool as a conversation between a company and ...

True Knowledge Not a Google Killer – and That’s Good

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Every time a new search engine pops up, bloggers, journalists and analysts get all worked up about its potential (or otherwise) to be a ‘Google Killer.’ I’ve written about this before, and really can’t understand the apparent obsession with ‘killing’ a company that’s continuing to do remarkably well at meeting the needs of millions. It’s not perfect, of course, and there’s always room for more innovation/competition, but does Google need to die in the process?

How Cool is the Cloud?

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 05:45:00 EDT

Today, we are an early cohabitant of “The Cloud”, thanks in no small part to our adoption of all of the cool cloud enablers mentioned above. But to understand how cool cloud computing really is, you first have to understand that the cloud is still in its infancy, and already, it’s a cool kid. It’s kind of like that ten year old who hangs around with friends that can drive.