Greg Luck's Blog

New Hotness

I am seriously impressed with Amazon’s cloud offering. You get a pick list of virtual machines of different sizes, a CDN, monitoring with elastic forking of new instances, fixed IPs if required, S3, attachable storage and the ability to release software as .amis for easy deployment, map-reduce with Hadoop, load balancing and a payment service.

Each of these is configurable via a RESTful web service. Each one has command-line tools that interact with the web services which you can easily script. And I can see that the new https://console.aws.amazon.com management console will bring this together into an easy to use package. Right now there is a tab for EC2 and another for Map-Reduce. Give it a few more months and I can see this populated with tabs for the other services.

Ehcache Server AMI

I love EC2 so much that I decided to create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Ehcache Server. It is marked public and is available for anyone to use. I see it being used in two ways:

• To quickly try out and demo Ehcache Server. If you have an EC2 account you can be up and running in less than a minute.
• As an example of how to deploy Ehcache Server. The AMI comes with an init.d script for service control and ipchains rules mapping ports 80 and 81. You can use it as a template to create your own AMI with your own cache configuration.

Getting Started

1. Create a new virtual machine. Select ami-3512f45c from the Community AMIs tab. Select a security configuration and a machine size (small is fine) and start it up. Ehcache Server will start automatically.
2. To test it, hit it with http://amazon_instance_address/ehcache/rest/sampleCache1. From there, try writing a client. See the Cache Server documentation for sample client code in several languages.
3. To make configuration changes log into your machine. Ehcache Server is insatalled in /root/ehcache-server-0.7.

Video Tutorial

I have put all this in a video tutorial.

Me:decoded

Ancestry

Mitochondrial & Y DNA

Compared With

Susceptibilities

Ever seen the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles? Some travelers are caught up in an unbelievable snafu trying to get home for Thanksgiving.
Well, Brett Dargan, a colleague, and I had our own version of this over the past two days. We came down to Sydney to run an Architecture Away Day. All went well. We were sitting at the Swiss Grand Resort and Spa looking out over Bondi beach, knocking down beers with the attendees after the event about 5:30pm when the waiter (server for my US readers) pointed out a big storm brewing to the South. I felt the first unease.
Then a few minutes later I received an ominous SMS from Virgin Blue to tell me that my 7pm flight had been delayed. I rang up Customer Service, but of course several hundred other people were trying to do the same thing, so I gave up after spending 6 minutes in the queue. More beers. Brett then rang up 15 minutes later and got through. We were now on a 9pm flight. So, off to the Cricketer’s Arms Hotel in Surrey with Nugget for Tapas and more beers.
Having a good time at the Cricketers Arms. Catching up with some former colleagues and enjoying some great Tapas: Chorizo, Lamb Kofta and Grilled Haloumi, washed down with Pure Blonde low carb beer. Mike Edwards, a fellow drinker mentioned “Great lightning show out there”. Sure enough the storm that had been brewing was now coming close and looking bad. So I checked http://bom.gov.au and saw that there was a severe weather warning for Sydney over the next few hours, with heavy rain and damaging winds.
At this point I was beginning to think that it could be a bad night. By now it was time to go to the airport, so we said our goodbyes and went outside – right into a massive rain downpour. We managed to flag a taxi who, when we said the airport for our destination, said no, then drove 20 metres down the road, and then waved to us to get in. The street was a river by now, with 5 cm of water over the asphalt. We both got soaked to our ankles. From there we had an uneventful ride to the airport.
All went well until we got on our plane. We sat and waited, and waited, and waited. Then the steward, who was already looking well harried, made an announcement that a Flight Instrument was broken, and engineers were trying to fix it. This went on for half an hour, after which were deplaned. More waiting at the gate and then it was announced they had a plane for us at the opposite end of the airport at the JetStar terminal. We all trudged through an airport whose shops were closing up down there and eventually got on another plane. For non regular Sydney visitors, note that Sydney has a flight curfew of 11pm. Anyway the we got on, the baggage got loaded and were taxied out and waited to access the runway. And waited. And waited.
By now it was 10:30pm. Then the harried steward came on the Intercom and said that we were waiting for some other flights to land (I guess they take precedence when you get close to the curfew) before we could take off. He mentioned that we would be cutting the curfew close. After that we had regular updates every 5 minutes, as we moved inexorably towards the curfew time.
Now it was 11:02 pm. It was not looking good. Then the captain came on with encouraging news: we were now after curfew, but we had a flight clearance and could take off on the East-West runway out over the ocean. We were waiting for a few other planes.
At this point we allowed to move around the cabin. The harried steward kindly explained that the snafu had started at 3:30pm while the weather was still fine. He blamed short staffed Sydney air traffic controllers.
A few minutes later he came back on to say the cross-winds were too high, and we, along with several other 737s were waiting for them to abate. The larger planes were getting away.
You can guess what happened next. The captain announced the winds were not abating and we were going back to the gate, just as soon as a gate was available, because of course most of the airport and Virgin Blue staff had gone home. 10 minutes later we deplaned into a enclosed gangway. One problem: the door to the airport was locked. We sat in there like rats in a trap for a quarter hour before we were finally let out.
Back at the gate we sat around and waited, and waited, while Virgin Blue figure out what we all going to do. In the end they announced we would need to sleep at the airport, because “the delay was weather related”. I guess it was apart from the broken plane which caused our particular problem, which was in their control, and the airport issues which were not.
At this point Brett and I ran for a taxi to try and get a local hotel. Three hotels later I realised that other flights had already been bounced by the curfew ahead of us. We ended up back in the city at the Grace Hotel. The Night Auditor was checking us, and a horde of other stranded travelers in. I imagine this scene was being played out all across the city.
So, as I write this entry, I am sitting at Gate 39 at Sydney airport for a 12 noon flight. It was just announced over the intercom that our flight would be delayed due to our cabin crew not having yet arrived…

I am reading two books at the moment: The Long Tail and 50 Great E-businesses and the minds behind them.
The Long Tail is by Chris Anderson and was written in 2004. Call me a late adopter. I thought I understood the long tail, but reading the book introduces the idea of the democratization of production, aggregators and findability. I picked it up in a discount bin in a bookstore in Toowoomba, Queensland while looking for something to veg out on before a wedding. Perhaps I should tell Chris he was not a “hit”. There, anyway.
50 Great E-businesses and the minds behind them is a book by a Melbourne couple published in mid 2007. I work for one of the companies mentioned in their book so it caught my interest. But there are so many others that I had: a) not heard of; or b) heard of but nor seriously checked out.
One of the former is Lulu.com. Both books mentioned Lulu.com, which piqued my interest. And they won a Web 2.0 award. Founded by RedHat co-founder Bob Young, it democratizes publishing. Last year I was looking at publishing a book on ehcache. I had 150 pages that I had put a fair bit of work into. I thought it would be a simple matter of finding a technical publisher and then sitting back and getting royalties. NOT. Bob discovered the same thing and decided to do something about it.
I have had my ehcache book self-published up on Lulu.com for a few weeks now. The only real issue I came across was Lulu’s requirement to embed fonts. The best answer I have come up with is to use Save As PDFX-3 from Preview, which embeds fonts while retaining clear previews. Lulu is great: I get to publish my book and people get to buy it. And the middleman is reasonable.
See http://www.lulu.com/content/1538666 to see the result.
And maybe I am three years late to the ideas introduced in the Long Tail, but I think there is, to use a much abused term, a paradigm shift underway. In Australia it is going to take low cost high speed broadband for the digital media long tail to really work.
BTW, one job I have to do is to upgrade Movable Type to fix the spam problem I have with this blog. Perhaps a job for the Xmas break. If anyone wants to comment, please just email me and I will post it.

I am building a house in Northern New South Wales near the Queensland border in a mountainous area known as the Granite Belt. It is a wonderful area of Australia. As the local towns go it is in the middle of nowhere. I am building the house on the Maryland river adjacent to a gorge. It is surrounded by large beef properties and National Parks. It is at 800 metres, but is surrounded by mountain ridges.
The result is a wonderfully quiet and peaceful environment. The downside is that I am out of reach of the GSM phone system and ADSL.
As it turns out a Telstra copper cable runs through the property on its way to connecting a remote farm. I always thought I would just get that connected, but now it comes to it, the thought of sipping on a modem, or expecting guests to, leaves me wanting more.
I also thought that the privatisation of Telstra involved some concessions for people like me using the “Universal Access” principle that has long informed telecommunications policy in Australia. This currently manifests itself as the Australian Broadband Guarantee, where the government subsidises high speed Internet access to rates comparable to those in urban areas. (See http://www.dcita.gov.au/communications_for_business/news_and_events/australian_broadband_guarantee). Sadly no one from Telstra, even the local Telstra agency in Stanthorpe knew anything about it. I spent around an hour at two stores with the clerks madly searching. When I checked with Telstra I was looking at $500 per month for a Telstra satellite connection. There are some other players who are addressing this market such as activ8me (See http://www.activ8me.net.au/default.asp?contentID=527).
There is a new plan from the OPEL consortium, involving Singapore’s (I think government controlled) Singtel and Elders, an “agri-business” company. It will be interesting to see what that brings up. The contract was just awarded so I will be waiting a while. The network promises to cover 639,000 square kilometres. Australia has a surface area of 7686850, so this “rural” network will cover 8% of Australia. It will use WiMax. Sadly it will not reach my property due to its limited range of 8km and 16km (line of sight) (http://www.wimax.com/education/faq/faq31).
There is also HaleNet, a local telecommunications company founded by an ex-Telstra engineer. He is doing good business. He uses some wireless technology from Israel which has a range of 25 km but it relies on line of site. Due to the geography sadly this solution will not work.
A satellite service such as the one from active8me sounds ok, but satellite brings big latencies (240-290ms) due to the speed of light to the satellite in geostationary orbit (2 * 35,786km). I often ssh and use skype for voice calls, so this is far from good.
Somewhere in this investigation someone mentioned Next G as a potential solution. Because I do not get GSM, and because Telstra has had outrageous pricing for their mobile phone based data services, I had never considered it. Telstra has been filling TV screens and newspapers with all sorts of silly ads about their silly named “Next G” meaning to indicate that it was a 3.5 G or something network. A little like the Web 2.0, 3.0 fun and games. Anyway the ads show people uploading photos in a combi van, and personalities such as John McEnroe and Bob Geldof having telecommunication problems in their native countries and exclaiming “It would not happen in Australia”. From this very informative advertising everyone is of course supposed to realise that this product is a new remote access data solution, amongst other things. That realisation only took me a year.
Next G is actually an HSPDA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSDPA) network built for Telstra by Ericsson (See http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/press/releases/20061006-1079707.shtml). The interesting bit for me is that it operates at 850Mhz. The effect of the lower frequency is that it has a much larger coverage footprint than GSM and does not require line of site.
Telstra manage to provide an almost unusable coverage map (See http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/networks/coverage/maps.cfm). It did not work properly on the Windows computer from the Telstra dealer in Stanthorpe. Strangely it worked better on my Mac in Safari. Unfortunately the map shows very few landmarks such as rivers. By contrast the Google map for the same area shows much more; even my property boundary and the track I have made into the house site! A few hours of map making on my part showed that I had coverage if I used an external antenna. I also later found out that a fencing contractor has a Next G phone and it worked in parts of the property.
So, what sort of antenna? Cutting this rather long blog post somewhat shorter the usual Internet research showed people get good results from a Yagi antenna. I have ordered one from Comnet Solutions (See http://store.comnet.com.au/details/821268.html). It has to be pointed in the direction of the antenna, or maybe in my case the best echo.
Now what about Telstra and their outrageous pricing? The Telstra MobileNet pricing is still outrageous. In a byzantine twist if you use the ModMax modem (See http://www.maxon.com.au/products_modmax_overview.php) and no other, and if you get your data plan from BigPond, Telstra’s ISP subsidiary, then you can get something that though still terrible, is at least doable. You can get 200MB download for $39.95. or 1Gb for $49.95. (See http://bigpond.broadbandguide.com.au/wireless/high-speed/plans) Doable compared with $500 per month for satellite from Telstra, which is what the Newmarket Telstra shop brought up for me. Interestingly this pricing matches that from active8me for the same data amounts. So maybe Telstra are signed up to the Broadband Guarantee, even though no one at Telstra outside of one person in product knows it.
For anyone who has read this far, are you beginning to feel like a system integrator? Me too. Makes me wish that Australia had a government-owned telecommunications provider that could provide low latency Internet services outside our major cities.

Maybe this is one of the new Web 3.0 services. Twitter is about what you are doing. You voluntary allow yourself to be tracked.
Here is my Twitter link: http://twitter.com/gregrluck.
Or to keep things really simple, you can see my twitter “badge” which shows what I am doing is in the left sidebar on this page.

I have been in San Francico for a few days now. Coming to the US around once a year I always look for things that are new. As William Gibson said “The future is here now. It’s just not evenly distributed.”
With that in mind, what is happening in California, and San Francisco in particularm, tends to turn up in Australia a few years later.
So what I have noticed so far:

1. Diet Coke Plus. Diet Coke with added vitamins. Now I can tell my mother my addiction is healthy!
2. 49 cent Compact Fluro light bulbs. CFCs are the lowest hanging fruit of all to lower carbon emissions. California has jumped in by heavily subsidising them so that they are the same cost as incandescent bulbs. Great idea.
3. I have not seen a McDonalds yet.
4. The food servings remain huge, but with lots of salads.
5. The hot new fast food is Cream Puffs.