Copacetic

They’ve moved the date. Fantastic! BarCamp is now on on the 30th in Cork. I’ll talk a little about all the startups I’ve passed through in Ireland, including Generics, CR2, CapeClear, LeCayla and my own startup PutPlace.com, if I’m let!

See you all there…

What great organisation, everybody I meet there is helpful, responsive, they’ve been invaluable in getting my business started, especially the CORD grant.

But why does your website still not render properly in FireFox? Why is there no RSS feed for breaking news and events? Why is the Leadership 4 growth page still advertising places when you closed this course to applicants several days ago.

Why can’t I register to get email telling me about every possible event in the software sector that Enterprise Ireland has involvement (I have yet to find about any EI event directly from EI).

Don’t get me wrong, you do a great job, but these are small things that could make an entrepreneurs life so much easier!

John Keyes has come up with a sweet hack to a problem I’ve been seeing since we switched to gmail for domains. He uses the stylish plugin for FireFox to restyle the google fixed font to be courier. Without this hack any formatting (e.g. —+ style boxes so beloved by Trac) all get screwed up. Run over there and try it out.

If you use IE your SOL….

If you know any thing about Bruce Schneier or have ever had to struggle through “Applied Cryptography” then The Bruce Schneier Facts site should crack you up. A small taster,

• Bruce Schneier once killed a man using only linear cryptanalysis
• Bruce Schneier reads RFID cards with the knuckles of his clenched fist
• Alice and Bob got Eve pregnant together; the result was Bruce Schneier
• When Bruce Schneier decrypts the Da Vinci Code, the ending doesn’t suck

You need to vist the site and see the pictures to get the full value…

So now you have unbounded programmatic access to computing and storage resources via EC2 and S3. Anybody who has a moderate amount of programming skill (skilled in the art as the patent people say) and has access to a credit card can slap together their own grid in no time at all. More importantly you can resell a grid to a vertical market.

Now a whole plethora of companies have been trying to flog Open Source stacks to corporate America, and to my mind corporate America (and corporate everywhere else) is not ready to take these companies offerings on board for a number of reasons,

• Certification is no good without delta change detection. Your stack might be good the day it deploys, but is it good after 6 months of production tinkering?
• Most customers need some kind of customised stack, rather than an off the shelf offering, so configurations proliferate and the costs for both the vendor and the customer escalates
• None of these guys wants to play nice with the rest, so how do you integrate stacks from different vendors
• Isn’t Open Source supposed to be free as in beer

However the whole game changes if instead of offering an installable package you offer a managed EC2 image with all the good juice pre-canned and ready to go, and you manage the customers application deployment on top of that image and then cut a new precanned EC2 image with all the good stuff in one bundle. Tinker away all you want and deltas can easily be identified by comparing the production image with a clean install of the original.

Customisation becomes delta management with everything being a managed delta of a base kit and integration of different stacks can be easily tested because the base infrastructure is already deployed into an image ready for merging.

Expect to see lots of people offering layered services on EC2 fairly rapidly with simple Apache, MySQL and J2EE and ESB instances appearing in short order and more complex three tier and N-tier packages  following on rapidly. Also expect the monitoring and management vendors to offer layer packages that plug straight into these environments.

Can Google trump this?

I like it. Very slick, proper wysiwyg, support for categories, nice easy configuration to boot.

I’m just catching up on my blogs and the one thing that rocks my world is news of Amazon’s new web service EC2. They’ve jumped the gun on Sun and Google to provide a global grid facility to anybody with a credit card. USD$ 0.10 (10 cents) an hour gets you,

… the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth

You get prebuilt Linux instances to layer your own images on and free interconnect to your S3 storage.  We already use S3 so this is going to increase the security of our application, improve scalability and make it cheaper all in one go!

Total cost for a years worth of compute power 0.10 * 24 * 365 = USD$ 876. Moving stuff from out current hosted environment to our S3 storage was going to cost us a fortune but this could have a radical impact on our most significant cost, bandwidth, where’s that spreadsheet…..

Tom Murphy (one of Irelands most pre-eminent software PR guys) has moved his blog to a new home.

Tom is always worth a read.

I’m on holidays in West Cork (Kilcrohane if you must know) for the next two weeks. Mobile signal is pretty patchy and broadband is unheard off, so look for new posts at the end of August.

Joe.

The UK Home office posted an alert today on its website, that includes these draconian measures,

All cabin baggage must be processed as hold baggage and carried in the hold of passenger aircraft departing UK airports.

The only items that may be taken through airport security search points and in to the cabin, in a single (ideally transparent) plastic carrier bag, are the following:

• pocket-size wallets and pocket-size purses plus contents (for example money, credit cards, identity cards, etc - handbags are not allowed.
• travel documents essential for the journey (eg, passports and travel tickets)
• prescription medicines and medical items sufficient and essential for the flight (eg, diabetic kit), except in liquid form unless verified as authentic
• spectacles and sunglasses, without cases
• contact lens holders, without bottles of solution
• for those travelling with an infant: baby food, milk (the contents of each bottle must be tasted by the accompanying passenger) and sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight (nappies, wipes, creams and nappy disposal bags)
• female sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight, if unboxed (eg, tampons, pads, towels and wipes)
• tissues (unboxed) and/or handkerchiefs
• keys (but not with electrical key fobs)

Nothing may be carried in pockets.

So no PCs, backpacks or munchies.

I see a lot of very disgruntled users trying to boot mashed up PCs in the next few days.

The measures are expected to stay in place throughout the weekend.

This is due to events this morning when the UK police disrupted a major plot to blow up ten or more aeroplanes leaving Heathrow. More news on the bbc website.