Month: July 2012

Cloud thinking

I did a quick internal brown bag on Cloud computing yesterday. It is interesting to still get to meet folks who don’t have much ideas on Cloud and what the various types are, what they mean and their value. In any case, cloud is just full of hot air. Smile

I always found, most people can get it when they can relate to cloud usage as a consumer. And of course the CoIT and BYOD will just help accelerate that and bring the usage out in the front. I personally am a heavy cloud user and use it all the time. I also have a local copy of almost everything, I still don’t trust the broadband providers – lots of things that can go wrong.

If you are new, welcome to the ride.

Redis on Windows 8 and VS 2012 RC?

I am trying to see if I can get Redis working on Windows 8 using Visual Studio 2012 RC bits – I have not had much success, but then I have not had much time to invest to try this out.

I am wanting to give a demo tomorrow and would be good to see if I can get this working. Curious to know if anyone else has got this?

If not Redis, then have you got some other implementation working on Windows 8? I was thinking of RavenDB.

Creating Word Maps / Word Clouds

I am giving a presentation next week on NoSQL and as part of that I wanted to create a Word Map, similar to the ones I have seen in the Guardian over the years. After searching a little, I came across the following two sites which do an excellent job of this. Both of them allow a number of options to customise the output and I think are very cool!

The first one is Jason Davies, World Cloud that is open source and you can integrate online searches, twitter searches, etc. The word map below is an example output when I search “bahree” on twitter.

The second one is Wordle, which is equally impressive but is a closed Java applet with some portions of the code copyrighted by IBM. With Wordle, you can enter some text, use a RSS feed or enter a del.icio.us user name to see their tags. I use my blog’s RSS feed to create the word map below.

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Fallacies of Distributed Computing

I was reading something and came across these fallacies of Distributed Computing which all beginners (to distributed computing) have. Oh how we all learn.

  1. The network is reliable
  2. Latency is zero
  3. Bandwidth is infinite
  4. The network is secure
  5. Topology doesn’t change
  6. There is only one administrator
  7. Transport cost is zero
  8. The network is homogeneous

WHS is back!

My WHS was dead for close to a year now with no automatic backups happening! I knew the issue was one of the HDD’s had failed, but I did not have time to take them out and plug them somewhere else to figure out the exact issue. I finally bought a couple of new disks and restored the WHS over the weekend and everything is running fine now. Also got about 101 GB backed up on S3, which is good.

Now, the question I have is which Add-ins do you recommend? I have the original WHS (v1) and not Vail (WHS 2011). I am already running Cloudberry. I would like something which can tweet the health status which I can monitor.

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