While there was big national news for Portland-based JanRain and OpenID that broke yesterday—with Sears stepping up to adopt OpenID by using JanRain’s RPX—today marks some big JanRain news for us here locally.
You see, Peat Bakke has joined the JanRain team.
“JanRain and I have been flirting for a while,” said Peat in an email. “They have a great team here in Portland, and their products lend themselves to the kind of integration and custom development work that I enjoy. We’ve worked together on some big projects, the business is growing, and the timing was right… so on July 1st we sealed the deal, and I’m heading up the professional services group.”
Peat will be tackling any number of duties with the OpenID provider, including technical sales support, proposals, and day-to-day communications—all while “still getting to keep my hands dirty with the code.”
Aside from just being a terribly nice guy, Peat is a great technologist and fixture of the burgeoning Portland startup scene. And it’s always nice to see great connections like this happening in Portland.
For more, you can follow Peat on Twitter or check out his personal site. For more on his new employer, visit JanRain.
(Self portrait by Peat Bakke. Used under Creative Commons.)
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on the internet. All of this post is speculation by a blogger.
WordPress, everyone’s favorite blogging platform, is released under the GNU GPL, an open source software license. The GPL is notable in that it not only requires that source code be made available, but that it stipulates that anyone may modify and redistribute that source code as long as the derivative works are also licensed under the GPL.
Is a theme integrated into WordPress closely enough that it’s required to be licensed under the GPL? This morning, Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) posted a piece stating the “official” view that WordPress themes must be GPL.
How does this play with the premium (read: $$$) themes which are available for WordPress? I’m a big fan of Thesis (so much of a fan that I offer up that affiliate link), but a GPL-ed theme would wipe out the basic revenue model of “pay to use the theme.” There would still be opportunity for payment for services such as the excellent Thesis support forums, but the basic pay-to-use notion would be gone, since the code would be freely available from any number of sources.
I decided to pop the question of Thesis’ future to Chris Pearson (@pearsonified), the man behind DIYthemes which is the company that releases Thesis:
ahockley: Curious to see how this affects some premium themes, namely Thesis: http://bit.ly/txqE0 @pearsonified
pearsonified: @ahockley It won’t affect Thesis at all.
ahockley: @pearsonified Thanks for the reply… but… Thesis isn’t GPL, is it?
pearsonified: No
ahockley: @pearsonified So if Automattic says themes need to be GPL, and Thesis isn’t GPL, how does this not affect Thesis? Connect the dots for me
pearsonified: @ahockley Automattic says that, but they cannot and will not enforce it. Therefore, DIYthemes will continue to operate as normal.
Interesting way of handling the situation… sounds like Pearson isn’t planning to change his operation unless forced, and he’s confident that Automattic won’t press the issue.
Photo by stopnlook, used under Creative Commons licensing
Uptime is a measure of the time a computer system has been “up” and running. It came into use to describe the opposite of downtime, times when a system was not operational. The uptime and reliability of computer and communications facilities is sometimes measured in nines (similar to the unit of metallic purity). “Five nines” means 99.999% availability, which translates to a total downtime of approximately five minutes and fifteen seconds per year. [Wikipedia]
Uptime is increasingly important. For some sites that we’ve developed and that we maintain, there are “incidents” with uptime. We host a recipe site, and every so often something pops up that needs to be dealt with right now. That’s just the nature of high traffic websites. You come to expect it.
We now use a lot of services on the web, and those often require a ton of work to keep up and running at top performance. Some folks do a great job of it, like Google and 37signals. Some companies fall flat on their face, despite running a service that you’re paying good money for, and that you expect to just work.
Like GoFaxer.
About a month ago, we signed up for this promising service. They are one of a number of companies that will provide you with a fax number, and let you send and receive faxes via email or the web. It’s a great idea, because I hate fax machines with a passion. The problem is, as you might be able to see from the above link, is that they’ve been down for 23 days now. The service has not functioned almost the entire time we’ve been paying for it. The same vague message has been shown this whole time.
All of us are working hard to quickly resolve this issue so that we can bring our services back online. However this process may take some time and we apologize for any inconvenience that this unforeseeable issue has caused you.
Maybe we just don’t need a fax service after all.
Silicon Florist sucks doesn’t it? I mean, let’s be honest. It’s not perfect. And even though it’s completely a side project, that’s no excuse for it being half-ass. In fact, to quote a good friend, I want to be “using my whole ass.”
And I know you. You’ve got opinions. Ideas about what could be done better. Gripes about what I’m not doing terribly well. Things the blog could do that it doesn’t. Things the blog does that it shouldn’t.
While I’m always open to your feedback in this regard, I wanted to make a formal plea for your input. It’s half way through 2009. It seemed like a good time to do it.
And it can be about anything. The blog. Me. My responsiveness. The writing. The frequency. My availability. My areas of coverage. My mom. Okay, wait. Maybe not my mom. Aw what the heck. You can make comments about my mom, too.
How to do it? You’ve got any number of choices. Comfortable airing your views in public? Comment below. Want to rip me to shreds in private? Send an email to siliconflorist at gmail dot com. Or keep your constructive criticism to 140 characters and send some tweets to @turoczy on Twitter.
What about Silicon Florist sucks? What could be better?
Looking forward to hearing your feedback. And, as always, thanks in advance for taking the time to share it.
"Stuff I find here and there, scanned and cataloged for your enjoyment and mine."
Collection from flickr user Big Red Robot.
 |
 |
You guys know the expression that “Time is of the essence”. Well I’m starting to think that maybe time isn’t on my side with this venture. I’m not sure if it’s because the summer season is now in full swing and people would much rather be at the beach than discussing business but I can’t seem to connect with my local officials about establishing a community Farmers Market. Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way giving up. If I can’t get things up and running for a late summer start you better believe in summer 2010 the Farmers Market will be on the map. I received my planning packet from the State Dept of Agriculture and reviewed the guidelines as previously discussed with them over the phone about what is needed in order to have a successful Community Farmers Market:
Subscribe To Us By RSSI was just fiddling around with my old fake command line in a web page thingy that I first posted here months ago (inspired by the awesome goosh!). Learned a few interesting things in the process:
On the iPhone, I was still getting a partial shadow along the top edge of the text input field. -webkit-appearance: none gets rid of this.
WebKit on the iPhone seems to ignore calls to focus() on a text input element that happen in an onload handler or timer. There does not seem to be any workaround. I can certainly see why they wouldn’t want half the web pages in the world sliding up a keyboard as soon as they finished loading, but if you actually want to do this for a specific reason, there’s no apparent way to do so.
In HTML 5, you can use the autofocus attribute on an input to completely avoid having to write gnarly JavaScript just to focus an input field. However, this doesn’t work on the iPhone either.
My “solution” to not being able to autofocus the text input field was to add placeholder="Tap here" to the input.
HTML 5 has the best DOCTYPE ever: No, seriously, that’s it.
I’m sure most of you web-jockeys probably know all this already. But I don’t get out much.
Yes, we have sauce:
I just checked the fridge to see if we had spaghetti sauce and found
seven one-third full jars of the stuff. None recent.
Well, we broke another contest entry record with the RYZ shoe design contest. 1,600 designs were submitted... awesome work. Now comes the hard part of trying to find a winner from so many great designs. This is where you spread the word about your designs and get your friends and family to vote for your shoe. Good luck!
Remember, winner takes home the grand prize - $750 cash and $250 store credit to the RYZ shop - plus free sponsored memberships at COLOURlovers.
It was tough work, but with the help from our friends at COLOURlovers, we were able to find the Top 9 COLOURlovers pattern designs out of the over 1600 submitted. In keeping with our voting process, we are seeding the voting gallery - top 9 selected by our COLOURlovers Creative Panel are on page 1, then the top 9 selected by our internal RYZ team on page 2. All other designs are listed on following pages and have equal chance in winning.
With the onslaught of multiple designs submitted, we have created a new feature where you can remove an entry from the competition. For those who have entered more than 3 designs, we'll give you through the weekend to self-select your favorite three (you probably shouldn't remove your design if it's in the top 9) - after that we will go through and remove designs for you. Go to your Contest Portfolio and select the "X" to remove a design from the contest. It will be returned to your Personal Design Workspace.
Remember everyone has a chance at winning - post your shoe to your networks, invite your friends and vote often!
Good luck to all and thank you again to the COLOURlovers community!
If you haven’t started to implement OpenID yet, you may be falling a bit behind the curve. You see, thanks to the efforts of Portland-based JanRain, even the good old—and I do mean old—brick and mortar companies like KMart and Sears are jumping on the OpenID bandwagon. Or, as Mike Rogoway at The Oregonian’s Silicon Forest blog put it, “Old economy stalwart Sears announced this morning that it’s adopting OpenID.”
That’s big news for JanRain and for OpenID in general. And as the de facto hub for OpenID, it’s big news for Portland, as well.
The Sears and KMart implementations are a combination of Chicago-based Viewpoints an JanRain RPX, a series of services that allows organizations to implement OpenID more quickly and easily.
Built on web 2.0 open standards including OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and Microformats, and leveraging related technologies such as Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, and MySpaceID, JanRain’s RPX solution is able to deliver and sustain market leading functionality for its customers and partners. This is a rapidly evolving space where identity providers, services, and technical protocols are expanding and improving daily. By partnering with the pioneer and leader in third party authentication and profile management solutions, Viewpoints can continue to deliver best of breed capabilities to its clients now and in the future.
Given that KMart and Sears have already implemented OpenID, maybe you should get around to doing that too, don’t you think? It’s the Portland—and Silicon Forest—thing to do.
For more information on the collaboration, read the joint release from Viewpoints and JanRain. For more on the technology behind the solution, read about JanRain RPX or OpenID.
When it comes to figuring out how to make a living off of producing content—especially online content—everyone is scratching their heads. Newspapers, television stations, and of course bloggers. One thing is for sure: ads aren’t quite cutting it, these days.
What to do? Well, the folks over at Portland-based Contenture have been offering up some other ideas for bloggers to get reimbursed for their efforts—by making it up on volume. Today, they’ve launched their latest feature: microsubscriptions.
Contenture’s first offering—which I’ve been testing on Silicon Florist—involves passively dipping into a reader’s monthly Web stipend as they swing by the site. I pay a flat fee per month. When I visit participating sites, they get a little payment each time I hit their site.
How much? Well to date I’ve made $8.36 on Contenture micropayments. Which, while it isn’t a ton, is $8.36 more than I would have made otherwise. Without selling ads or gumming up the site with a bunch of hoohah. So that’s not bad. And I have to assume that some of the other sites using Contenture are getting better results than that.
But what about folks who want a more consistent and repeatable payment for their efforts? Well, that’s where Contenture’s microsubscriptions come in.
Any site can use microsubscriptions. Contenture lets you set the monthly price for your premium content at a minimum of $0.10 per month. You can also implement more than one subscription on your site (e.g. a web service with different paid plans).
With microsubscriptions you can deliver premium content to only those folks who pay for it. What content? That’s up to you. It could be special articles, reports, or your whole darn stream of content, for that matter. You decide. And your readers decide whether you’re worth the price.
What’s more, sites can offer as many different subscriptions as they want.
What’s the catch? Well, you have to pay to play. At least a buck a month. But really, how hard is that? I mean, I’ve got an eight month subscription purchased with my Contenture earnings already. The other cost? Contenture is going to take 10% of your earnings to cover their service.
Well, and for folks to pay for subscriptions, they have to be Contenture members, of course.
Users must be Contenture members to pay you for microsubscriptions, so we are lowering the cost of a Contenture account to $1 a month.… This covers our transaction costs, and lets you charge as little as you want to for your service or website. In addition, you still get paid when other Contenture members visit your website, even if they don’t subscribe to your premium services.
I haven’t figured out any sort of content to test the subscription model yet. But I’ll keep thinking. And I’ll keep you posted about the kind of revenue I’m seeing from Contenture.
Wow. June was a tumultuous month for the Silicon Forest startup scene. There were some big wins like Open Source Bridge and the news of Reductive Labs moving to Portland. But there was quite a bit of sad news, too.
I wanted to give you a look back. Just in case you missed anything. But I didn’t want to just pick topics willy nilly. So here are the top 10 posts according to you—a combination of Web and RSS metrics—from Silicon Florist for June 2009.
In closing, per requests, I’ve condensed the list to a Top 10 instead of the Top 25. Better? Worse? I’d love to hear your feedback.
(Voodoo Doughnut image courtesy Carolyn Coles. Used under Creative Commons.)
This is a guest post written by Howard Sullivan who together with Tom Phillipson make up the London based design agency Your Studio. You can see the original post on their blog.
“Underneath Day’s azure eyes, Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies, A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite’s destined halls.”
As the sun rose and the art-crowds flocked, the great palazzos threw open their doors this weekend marking the opening of Venice’s 53rd Biennale, curated by Daniel Burnbaum and open
Francis Upritchard’s ‘Yellow Dancer’ from ‘Save Yourself’, installation for the NZ Pavillion, Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana, Venice Biennale, 2009
For the next four summer months. This showcase of the world’s best and most diverse art talent is the modern treasure within not only the amazing crumling palazzos but also at the ‘Arsenale’, a grand industrial L-shaped sequence of double-height brick warehouses and at ‘Giardini’- a large open park scattered with rambling pavilions and outbuildings.
We first encountered Francis Upritchard at Kate MacGarry’s Vyner Street Gallery for the show ‘Feierabend‘ with Martino Gamper and Karl Fritsch. ‘Save Yourself‘, Upritchard’s show representing New Zealand at the Biennale at Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana is both entrancing and unmissable.
Francis Upritchard’s ‘Save Yourself’ for the NZ Pavillion, Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana, Venice Biennale, 2009
Entering the decayed splendour of the top floor rooms of the palace, you feel like you are aparty to something private, privileged to enter a kind of magical assembly. A bande of beautiful and intriguing miniature figures in a kaleidoscopic array of colours sit, dance around, lie back in ecstacy atop long grey formica tabletops which sail into the antique mirrors lining the walls.
A beautiful and tranquil-looking figure from Francis Upritchard’s installation ‘Save Yourself’ for NZ, Venice Biennale, 2009
The power of these colourful characters, made with intricate details, tiny hands and fingernails perfectly crafted, is that they permeate a feeling, from meditation, transcendance to personal bliss, we seem to be witnessing all of them in some state of subtle and personal peacefullness.
Lost in a state of personal bliss- detail of ‘Rested’ figure from Francis Upritchard’s installation ‘Save Yourself’ for NZ, Venice Biennale, 2009
The figures don’t look at us but turn their gazes inwards in some form of compelling transcendence, you can’t help feeling beckoned to join them.
Francis Upritchard explains the subject-matter of her work herself:
“…like dark ages craft adjusted and repainted by some futurist revolutionary caught in a wild dream.”
‘Richard’ from Francis Upritchard’s installation ‘Save Yourself’ for NZ, Venice Biennale, 2009
Amongst Wolfgang Tillmans’ works exhibited this year are beautiful single chroma-coloured photographs hung simply tacked onto the walls in deftly colour-coordinated clusters spanning the gallery corners.
Wolfgang Tillmans at the Venice Biennale, 2009
Also in rows behind Perspex vitrines folded, crumpled and scored chroma-coloured photogrphs form colourful sequences.
Wolfgang Tillmans at the Venice Biennale, 2009
What these photos were of it was impossible to know but you got the sense that you were looking at a detail of something that had been ‘photographed’ as opposed to just a randomly chosen block of colour and part if the enjoyment seemed in deciphering what these close-ups might come from. Your mind can’t help wondering what the image would be if you zoomed out to see the full picture.
Cildo Meireles in the Arsenale presents a series of chroma-coloured walk-through installation. Over a sequence of five rooms, you journey through orange, yellow, green to violet to blue, each room with an enticing doorway giving a sneak into the next saturated super-colour.
Cildo Meireles’ walk-in installation at ‘Making Worlds’, the Venice Biennale, 2009
The corner of each room at eye-level houses a monitor playing what seems to be a view of the corner behind the monitor, but as we move, the colour flicks to one discordant to that of the room, so orange on blue and yellow on green. As a development from his original ‘Red Shift’ installation from 1967-1984, where the red colour theme of the room is made of a myriad of found objects, all in the same hue of red, this work is like climbing into a techno-rainbow, boxed by Tadao Ando. Your mind can’t help responding to the super-saturated brightness of the colours; effective chroma-therapy for the jaded art traveller.
Our final stop away from the main trail of the Biennale was at the Punta della Dogana, the much anticipated second location of the Palazzo Grassi on the tip of the lagoon on the Grand Canal. Squeezing itself literally into every last inch of it’s triangular plot on the tip of the lagoon on the Grand Canal, Guiseppe Benomi’s 17th century Venetian Customs House has been transformed into a double-height shrine to the very best of contemporary art. ‘Mapping the Studio’ the current exhibition there curated by Francesco Bonami and Alison Gingeras sets the personal art collection of the French magnate Francois Pinault (the man behind the Gucci Group) against the waterside views of Venice. And it literally feels like you are walking through a collection of the best art in the world.
Amongst the amazingly colour-saturated glossy pictures of Piotr Uklanski and the classics such as Sherman and Koons, our favourite was the work of the relative newcomer Matthew Day-Jackson. A row of wax sculls along a series of shelves morph as they progress upwards through the colours of the rainbow from realistic skulls to gradually more hybridised faceted volumes.
A duo of highly engineered polished cases with glass fronts and infinity mirror backgrounds display two hybrid-skeletons. Certain selected elements of the bone structures have been replaces such as the ribcage is now a series of polished brass coils. Unfortunately, photography of the collection was strictly forbidden (and strictly enforced!) so we were unable to picture this work. The work however, feels totally fresh and part of a new colourful movement of artists adding a metallic, psychedelic twist to classic celebration of the dark and macabre.
Haegue Yang’s ‘Symmetric Inequality’ installation inside the Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2009
Bridging our step from colour to works on an interior scale is Haegue Yang’s ‘Symmetric Inequality’ installation inside the Korean pavilion at the Giardini. Made from a series of multi-coloured blinds constructed the pseudo open dwelling, part hut, part temple flutters in the breeze as the fans surrounding it sporadically turned on and off.
One of more quirky installations but one we loved was Chu Yun’s ‘Constellation’, also at the Arsenale. Described as ‘various household appliances divorced from their usual setting’, Yun has created a miasma of flashing, flickering twinkling lights from a landscape of objects whose LED lights flash on standby.
A modern-day cosmos of domestic white goods/ white Gods Chu Yun’s installation ‘Constellation’ at the Arsenale, Venice Biennale, 2009
Howard and Tom were lucky enough to catch the installations and performances of these other artists: Liam Gillick’s installation, Ttéia 1 | C’ by Brazilian artist Lygia Pape | The Scottish pavillion and Palazzo Pisani with the work of Dundee-based artist Martin Boyce | The work of Yoko Ono | and Charles Ray’s “Boy With Frog”.
See the additional coverage. More on Kate MacGarry & Francis Upritchard.
Photos & Content © Howard Sullivan
Subscribe To Us By RSS
CloudCamp was held June 30th, 2009 from 5:30-10:30 Pm on the 16th floor of WebTrends in Downtown Portland. The unconference was set up for people who work with cloud computing, were interested in learning more, or who wanted to understand what Cloud Computing was all about. You can see some of what was said on Twitter about #cloudcamp, or #cloudcampdx.
This was a very interesting conference that dealt seriously with some very important issues. Many of us in the field will be running into these problems, or already do. The advantages and disadvantages of Cloud computing need to be recognized before they can be dealt with. In this atmosphere (not to mention the excellent weather and balcony we had) information and knowledge sharing seemed to prosper.
The conference began with socializing and then an Un-Panel composed of a handful of campers who were heavily involved in Cloud Computing, either in knowledge or participation. Then, the audience posed a series of questions which were written onto a white board. The panel gave 1-5 minute responses on the questions of their choosing. At the end of the responses and follow up questions, the Dave Nielsen asked how many people were interested in discussion the questions further in an Unconference format. The topics with the most interest became proposed Unconference topics.
This was a unique way to run an Unconfernece. It put everyone on the same page by giving background and preliminary Q+A around key topics. It also allowed experts to distribute knowledge before sessions, and it made it so that everyone got some form of information, so there was less of a liability in missing conference sessions later.
A shout-out to Mr. Walsh, whom I wish I had more time to speak with.
Software as a Service (SaaS). Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Mark Johnson: It really depends if you’re an object guy or a relational guy. If you’re a relational guy you might think of it as a platform. If you have a really good database layer, it would be a infrastructure. If you have a business object later it would be a platform.
Dave Nielsen: There are still people who will offer SQL databases as a service, but there’s another type where people just need to store data and store it quick, not necessarily structured, and then there’s a third type where people need to store relational data like SimpleDB.
Right Scale: Your application needs to have a database because it needs to something, or you have some bit Oracle cluster and the application is the database.
Dave Nielsen: Data in the cloud was probably that most popular topic at CloudCamp San Francisco.
here, most of the audience was interested in Data in the cloud.
Mark Johnson: I think I’m answering a slightly different question, but the whole thing of security is — when they bring in security experts when they bring them in and get their opinion on Cloud Computing, they say “it’s not really our issue”, but I think that with cloud computing, it forces people to think about these things sooner.
Marcus: I work with government institutions.
Dave Nielsen: At cloud camp Paris I got a very specific computing. “How can I make sure my data is never seen by the NSA?”
Audience: Don’t ask that in public.
John Hartman: A project I worked on, it was much more secure in the Cloud vs. physical privacy. Easier to rob your house than to go up in the cloud and put that data back together.
I didn’t take any notes here. My apologies. If you have something to add, be sure to add it in the comments below.
4. How do you avoid Cloud Lock-in?Jason Mauer: Issues with wishing to switch from Amazon to something else. How smooth is this transition? Does data get stuck? With Azure, GoDaddy could run a verison of Azure in the CLoud and there would be no issues.And I think we’ll see mroe and more vendors running certain flavors of cloud as Cloud COmputing becomres more prevalent. But I think we’re still in the infancy of cloud computing.
BrowserMob: Google provides a very specific way of turning your data to CLoud. But you have to be careful becase if you write your code to assume that certian pieces will be there, then you can be locked in. Just be careful with it.
Dave Nielsen: If you are interested in security, there’s actually a Cloud Security Alliance. Cloudsecurityalliance.org, contact Nils Puhlmann.
About half the audience was interested in security.
Dave Nielsen: how many of you are running something right now?
A third of audience raised hands.
The entire room said Linux.
What flavor?
Debian, Ubuntu, most pop. choices.
OSX!
(in the cloud?).
Laughter.
Windows 3.1!
More laughter.
Dave Nielsen: Just shout them out.
VMWare, Amazon, Ubuntu, SUn wishes they were, Rackspace, possibly Google, Appengine. Some are software providers, but others are Infrastrucre as a Service. If looking at IaaS specifically, GoGrid, Flexiscale, Joyant, Engineyard is insutry - based on top of Ec2 Amazon.
BrowserMob: A small compnay called COntigex that’s rolling out their stuff any day.
Dave Nielsen: BlueLock is a VMware cloud.
HIPPA, PCI (payment card industry).
Right Scale: Yes, out of UC Santa Barbara, they have a program called Eucalyptus which is very similar to Amazon EC2, and it works just like it…for the moment.
Dave Nielsen: Abiquo out of Barcelona (recently moved to SF), also 3tera.
Ed Borasky: Ubuntu, by Canonical out of the UK Intrepid Ibex contains Eucalyptus. They also have something called Nebuli, which I’m not sure what is.
Audience: That’s not part of Ubuntu, but it’s another open source project looking to build another EC2 layer like Amazon.
Sid (from Jive): When considering enterprise Dave Nielsening, which is very expensive. A lot of problems with some clients where the data can’t leave the warehouse. Also, it’s alittle more expensive because with Cloud Computing you are paying a little bit more for flexibility.
See 13. Performance Issues (question posed by Ed Borasky).
Sid: The lead time to to get ne hardware set up can sometimes b 3-4 weeks, but we have a lot of people wh
So sometimes you can run into complicated capacity planning here, where you guess how many people will use it in the next month and then plan it beforehand.
Red Shirt: One way you can use the cloud if you have predictable spiky load, you can use the Cloud to cover it.
Dave Nielsen: Super easy example would be file storage - for images on your website to push them out tho the edge.
Reid Beels: Seems like they’re talking about finished applications. Where would the development process move from local to the Cloud.
Dave Nielsen: At what point did you in the audience move from local to the cloud?
Audience: When the client wanted to see it.
Audience: It actually was when I was steady to deploy.
@dodeja: One instance I saw was with Animoto, with these massive spikes of access. When you’re doing heavy computing it makes sense to push it out onto the cloud.
Dave Nielsen: David Chappell (writes lots of books) - talked about two high uses of cloud, one when you need to scale, and another behind the scenes.
About 5 poeple were interested in use cases of when to move out onto the cloud .
Makes more sense to Dave Nielsen there.
BrowserMob: How do you deal with application performance in the cloud? That’s something people have a lot of concern themselves about because all sorts of things, including network bandwidth is not guaranteed. If you’re expecting to get x megabits of upload speed all the time, then that’s not a good mindset. To have the idea when you go in that you don’t know what upload speed there’s going to be is a better idea. If you need better performance, go with the more powerful equipment.
@dodeja: I think it would be more interesting to know the sorts of optimizations you can do to your infrastructure to make it run more smoothly.
Dave Nielsen: but that’s too specific.
Dave Nielsen: We’ll move now into the Unconference part, in which we’ll have 2 sessions of four topics each.
Pricing for different levels of the cloud, different needs.
Say you made a decision to go to the Cloud, but you want to estimate the baseline costs, the spike costs.
Eric was interested in practical approaches to data security for individuals and enterprise level. About half people attended were interested in this.
Practical uses of Amazon. Best practices.
Scott: Deploying Ruby apps in the cloud and making them scream.
Monitoring applications in the cloud.
Adam: Automation system for servers.
Steven Walling: Is Cloud computing a return to time-share mainframe style computing that we were formerly used to? And if so, does that
Lief: was interested in portability in platforms, standards and portability.
Alex Williams: Interested in defining different types of clouds: public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, and use cases for each.
Session NotesI went to the session on practical approaches to data security for individuals and enterprise level. About half people attended were interested in this.
Eric: It’s not that your data belongs to you - all of your data belongs to us. These larger companies that hold data. I’ve been working on a completely text based data store, flat files. Ideally, I’d like to have everything as secure as possible.
Lets start by defining things that are nice about the Cloud? What’s nice about Software as a Service (SaaS)?
Drew: It’s just easier.
One is reliability and universal access. The availability is everywhere.
Audience: Until a company goes out of business and the data no longer is there.
Aaron Blew: Scale.
Laura F.: Access.
Caseorganic: The fact that you can have one file, accessible by multiple users centrally updated, instead of 6 files, accessible by one person.
Eric: How can we get some of those benefits while still retaining our ownership of that data in the Cloud?
Eric: Academics utilize primitive version control when they keep renaming files over and over, but they often store multiple copies on one hard drive instead of E-mail, and other storage spaces. What I’m suggesting is having a flattened data store that is diversified.
(At this point, I felt like data was becoming a grain store, and that data store needed to be safe from rats and decay so that it would store tons of grain without bursting or being susceptible to storms (data spikes)).
——–
I arrived at the group after they’d talked about large scale, heavy duty, and enterprise-level storage techniques.
Group host: For the data hobbyist, you can store all of your data on EBS - a data block. Attach it to an individual EC2 instance. You can at least do things like snapshots of it.
Audience: Klint would know something about this, especially EBS.
Klint Finley: We’ve seen big fluctuations with EBS performance. We’ve turned on CloudWatch to kind of see what’s going on.
Dave Nielsen: Do you have a recommended architecture at this point?
Kint: For now we’re trying to do more in memory. Also, caching everything so we can handle spikes in access.
(And during this session I was looking around, thinking, “this is the underbelly - the equivalent of what the printing press is to printers. What lies beneath. The structure of how things work and what things do”. In other words: the most important thing we can be having a conference about right now).
———
Steven Walling: I’m sure you’ve all heard Kevin Kelly’s talk about what technology wants, that what every device will just be a window to the cloud.
@infovore: That everything is a dumb client, and that all the processing is happening up in the cloud.
Steven Walling: but i think that has some of the similar implications, that everything is running through the cloud, or just some of the really important things.
But if everything is running through the cloud there’s the idea that there doesn’t need to be storage anymore. Once everything is in the cloud, you just need a screen and an interface that, you know, you even touch the cloud with.
That entire vision is one extreme of cloud computing, as in, you don’t own anything, you just get to use the resources that someone provides to you.
That was the original idea of computing, that you’d just need a screen and a keyboard.
Bram Pitoyo: Like Thin Client.
Steven Walling: But that these actual computers were so complex and enormous
The reason we did that in the past was because it was cost convenient, and then we pushed it onto the web.
C: But this stuff - this Cloud computing - we’re doing it voluntarily - because it is easier now to store our things on the cloud and then access them from there.
Steven Walling: And what we’re doing is the same thing as before, just flipped upside-down.
Klint Finley: It wasn’t just a time function. you could have a terminal that was a small as a desk that you could access data from the mainframe with.
Joe: But we no longer have the space to be able to store the entire index of the web on your computer. You rely on Google to do that for you.
Some data is so large that you do need it on the cloud.
That was one of the big things Chris Messina was talking about at Open Source Bridge, that there is a need for those big kinds of supermarkets online that provide these large chunks of data service.
StevenWalling: Timeshare computing - too expensive to do anything but Really important science estuff .perosnal computing - anybody can have accress to it everywhere .Does timeshare cut out non-busienss use cases, does cloud cut out business comm?
Caseorganic: I think if a really important business does something online, it will be somewhat secure. But there is not really a set of standards in place for everyone.
Klint Finley: If we had a mesh wireless network it would work out if one network went down.
Jason Mauer: They did air strikes in Iraq in the gulf war to see if they could take down the Internet, and they couldn’t E-mal was used as a test to withstand attack.
Audience: What would happen is that we’d be able to pull off chunks of the Internet and have them function similarly to other chunks.
Audience: I know that a lot of people use Twitter now, or Facebook. A lot of our data is living on those networks now. There’s where I see a lot of problems. How do you get your facebook stuff out? Where does it go? It’s not even structured in the same way as your other data.
Audience: I started using Twitter and followed two people for a while. Now I follow 200. What happened? There’s too much noise. I don’t think I’m ready to handle that much noise yet. What what if I want to step in time? Filter it out? Listen to only the signals I need to?
Eric: It’s question of network structure. If you’re following 20,000 people.
You’re got a representative of every type, 5 people, totally, like Noah’s ark.
You’ve got a DBA, a marketing person. And you’ve got your neighbors, which are total wild-cards. and members of all these tribes i have. It’s about separating that data.
Lief: Yes, but aside from that issue, there’s another. If social networks are like TVs, there are only a few channels. If the channels are owned by giant organizations, then there’s no room for the next Twitter, or Flickr.
Steven :I don’t agree, because the flip side to that is that the guys in the garage don’t have to know anything about database infrastructure in order to know how to build an application. And that weakens the system if many people begin to use it.
Audience: But people are going to want to keep some private data: like family photos, or whoever knows what photos.
Mike Kaos: Consumers are king. They’re going to vote with their bits, so to speak. They’re not going to keep using a service to host their images with their friends, they’re not going to upload their data, unless it’s reliable.
——-
We went over each of the Unconference topics, gathering summaries from participants of each. Since it was quite late, I did not get to take notes beyond the point.
Overall, the conference was a great success. The panel/Unconference hybrid model was refreshing and informative. I experienced only slight frustration in not being able to clone myself to watch simultaneous conference sessions. But this is usual.
—-
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. She is interested in Cloud computing for many reasons, especially since she uses Twitter @caseorganic, and stores her collection of over 18,000 photos, screenshots, and research notes on Flickr.
Corvallis-headquartered Strands has always had a definitive focus on the power of recommender technology—a technology that use an amalgamation of personal actions, actions of like-minded individuals, and inferences from those actions to make recommendations. But they’ve struggled a bit finding the appropriate and market worthy applications of that technology. They’ve pursued music, lifestreaming, and—most recently—exercise.
However, if this recent news is any indication, it’s their personal finance recommender pursuits that may be paying off. You see, Strands just signed ING.
Now, Strands is proud to announce that ING has launched TIM for their customers in the Netherlands. The Dutch bank has chosen Strands technology to offer new services to their customers that allow them to better manage their expenses and income.
Strands first unveiled its personal finance service as Money Strands, a service built on the combination of Strands technology and the acquisition of Ryan Williams’ NetworthIQ.
More recently, they’ve been exploring the opportunity to partner with banks like BBVA in Spain. And those banks are seeing noticeable results.
Financial services companies that offer personal finance solutions increase their customer retention by up to four times.… In Spain, BBVA was the first to implement Strands’ technology last November and to launch the Tú Cuentas service. A month after it’s launch, more that a 130,000 users had already tried the tool and to this day, more than 250,000 customers have already improved their personal finance management.
ING is the latest bank to sign on for the service.
Who is ING? I’m glad you asked. ING is a Dutch financial institution that offers everything from banking to insurance. They offer those services to “more than 85 million private, corporate and institutional customers in Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and Australia.” The Strands service is currently in private beta with ING’s Dutch customers.
What is Strands providing? Much like typical personal financial software, Strands will help users better understand where their money is going, analysis of spending habits, and—drawing on Strands recommender expertise—comparisons with other uses.
For more on the deal and the details on the features, see the Strands post on the ING deal.
More than once, I’ve mentioned my involvement with the Portland State Aerospace Society. PSAS is an open source amateur rocketry group, and we build rockets. Damned fine rockets!
We’re currently in a fast-paced development cycle as we prepare for a launch this fall in Black Rock, Nevada. My contribution to that cycle is a carrier board for our flight computer. With direction by Andrew Greenberg and Sarah Sharp, I’ll be building a board that adds some functionality to the flight computer, including VGA, USB and 802.11 a/b/g connectivity.
Lofty goals, indeed, but keep checking back here and here on dotFiveOne for project updates!
Related posts:
Last month I launched Social Photo Talk, a new blog powered by WordPress. I kept track of the steps as I put the site together. This is not a comprehensive guide, but a rough list of the various tasks that I took care of in the preparation and launch of the site.
* Be sure to disable Twitter Tools while publishing content before you announce the site, lest someone discover it before you’re ready. Once your initial content is on the site, re-enable the plugin before you forget.
Obviously this is a fairly rough list, with some steps being quite vague (like “Customize the theme”), but I wanted to get this online both as a reference for myself and others in the future.
This is the first in what I hope to be a short series of posts explaining how I was able to conquer some of my core life fears and anxieties. I am publishing these in the hope that this might be of some assistance to someone else on the same journey as I have been on.
This post covers specific Web-based resources and tools I used in my work on overcoming my fear of flying. It is important to remember that there is a difference between tools and actual methods and approaches. I will touch on the latter in future posts. I am starting from the business end of my fear-conquering plan and working inward.
I probably should also add the disclaimer that I have no training or certification in counseling or aiding with fears or phobias and my advice should not be considered in any way professional or medical. These are just records of my own experience.
There is a strange balance of what is available to the fearful flier online. There are a large number of–excuse the phrase–rather fly-by-night companies, looking to make a buck or two by peddling self-help books and courses. Some look more reputable than others.
The lack of large online communities surprises me and makes me wonder if I somehow didn’t find the big place where everyone is hanging out. If one in six people indeed suffer from at least significant flying-nervousness, it seems bizarre that there wouldn’t be more of a crowd here. What good sites do exist are mostly crufty, 1990s-looking affairs clearly whipped together by the non-web-savvy. More power to them, of course, but where are the larger organizations? Missing, it would seem. Maybe there just isn’t enough money in this. Or maybe most people really do need personalized, professional help, the kind you can’t sell on a Web site.
Next up: books and audio books…see you next time!
While a number of the folks in the Portland tech community spend time getting together on a regular basis at things like Beer and Blog and Ignite Portland, there are still any number of wildly successful startups, blogs, and companies here in town that rarely get the Oregon cred they so richly deserve.
They’re doing good work. They’re garnering national—and sometimes international—recognition. And they deserve all the Silicon Forest love we can dish out.
So who are they? Let’s take a look. (Listed by the number of times people looked at me with incredulity when I told them they were headquartered in Oregon.)
One of the first—and easily still the best community blogs around—Metafilter is run by Matt Haughey who describes his location at Portland-ish.
Metafilter is a weblog that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to. A typical weblog is one person posting their thoughts on the unique things they find on the web. This website exists to break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members.
Arguably, the premier survey tool on the Web. I’m always amazed at how many people know about SurveyMonkey—and how few of them know that it’s headquartered in Portland, Oregon.
Started in 1999, SurveyMonkey is an online survey tool that enables people of all experience levels to create their own surveys quickly and easily. Every day, SurveyMonkey gives thousands of people the feedback they need to make more informed decisions, including more than 80% of the Fortune 100. SurveyMonkey’s offices are located in Portland, Oregon USA.
If you’ve used wifi in a hotel, it’s likely you’ve used Eleven Wireless. And if you’ve ever been to NedSpace you’ve likely met the founder of Eleven, Josh Friedman.
Eleven Wireless has been providing high quality software and services to leading hotel properties in the United States and around the world for more than seven years.
People talk about Portland being a Mac town. But it’s surprising how few folks know that Panic—makers of some of the most beautiful and useful products for the Mac—are right here in town.
When you’re a small software house, you pretty much work in vacuum. So, when Apple chooses your software out of an avalanche of entries to receive not one, but two Apple Design Awards, there’s not much you can do besides pretty much totally freak out. And boy, did we ever.
Who knew that one of the best parenting sites around was here in Portland? Well not enough of you, clearly. So Parent hacks made the list.
Parent Hacks is a collaborative website that collects and publishes parents’ tips, recommendations, workarounds, and bits o