Interviewed by Silicon Angle TV at VMWorld 2010 - Cloud Provider Spotlight

I was recently interviewed by the fine team at SiliconAngle.tv during VMWorld 2010. It was a lot of fun and they were very professional about it all. As is usually the case I suppose after I was done I wished I had done many things differently and said things differently. But, none the less it was a good experience. So, a shout out to Silicon Angle to say thank you and to Falconstor for helping set it all up as well. 

Click Image to Go to Video at Silicon Angle

ZeroMQ Musings and Server Build

I just read an excellent writeup about ZeroMQ (ØMQ/ZMQ) yesterday on igvita.com.  This software appears to have been around a while but I hadn't seen it before.  It's really quite impressive.  So, I found myself quite curious to play around with it a bit this weekend.  So, I built a little rig that would let me do that based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTE.

I wanted to use the ruby bindings for my playing around and ruby 1.9.2p0.  I quickly found that most of the easy to find examples out there are in C or Python.  But, there is still some good stuff.  I'll add some of things I found as links at the bottom of this post. 

The server build instructions  here in case anyone else was interested.  The following steps will yield you a basic build with which you may test ZMQ w/ by writing ruby code.

If anyone has thoughts, ideas or improvements on this setup by all means please do let me know!  Comments have been off for a while on my blog but I'll be turning them back on after this post.

Server Build - Ruby 1.9.2p0 + ZMQ + Ruby Bindings

While playing around a bit this weekend with zeroMQ and wanting to mess w/ the ruby bindings I found I needed to build a server.  It wasn’t difficult but these are the steps which might help you get going quickly on the rackspace cloud.

Provision Your Server

I grabbed mine from the Rackspace cloud.  Your milage may vary but I know that a RS 10.04 is a well build no frills ubuntu server.  I really like using their templates as the basis for my builds.  Once you have your server up and you are logged in:

You are now all set with a ruby 1.9.2p0 and zeroMQ enabled server on Ubuntu 10.04 in the Rackspace cloud.  If this was helpful then let me know what you do with it as this is a very exciting combination.

Note:  This will work well with any Ubunutu 10.04 server. It doesn’t  have to only be a Rackspace Cloud Server.

For next steps take a look at the basic zeroMQ example published by Will’s Web Miscellany.

Of other notable interest is the Mongrel2 project which incorporates ZMQ.  The mongrel2 manual is very good reading as well.

Other helpful Links I found have been tagged on my Delicious acct here.  I'll be adding more as well as I find them.

Some Cloud Thoughts on a Clear and Sunny Day

Cloud Computing is a deployment model and cloud computing is a business model.  Cloud computing is not some silver bullet magical thing.  It's not even easy *gasp* sometimes.

As a deployment model cloud computing can it is simply summed up as on-demand, self-service, reliable, and low to no capital costs services for the consumer.

As a business model it is summed up as, again, low to no long term capital costs (and the associated depreciation) and pay as you go service provider pricing models.  In reality these are mountains of micro transactions aggregated into monthly and yearly billing cycles.  For example, I spent $0.015 for a small compute instance w/ a cloud infrastructure provider because I just needed an hour of an Ubuntu 10.04 linux machine to test a quick software install combination and update a piece of documentation.  I'll get a bill for that at the end of the month.  Get this...

An hour of compute time costs me 3.3 times LESS than a piece of hubba bubba chewing gum cost me at $0.05 (one time use only) over 30 years ago. #cloud

Enterprises and service providers are learning very quickly from the how the early public cloud vendors how to do things differently and often more efficiently.  It was well summed up in the Federal CTO's announcement of the government application cloud.  Basically, that we saw that consumers could get IT services for orders of magnitude less than we could.  So, we're fixing that by emulating what the companies that service the consumers are doing. Smart.  Bechtel did this exact same thing years ago when analyzing that the cost per GB of storage for Amazon was orders of magnitude less than Bechtel could and asked the very important question why and then answered it very well.

A couple of years ago now I helped found a company called nScaled.   nScaled does, business continuity as a service.  It is only possible with the resources, at the price, and at the speed we have moved because of following cloud computing deployment and business models.  It would not have been possible for us to build this business when we did and the way we have without these models.  

In March 2008 I called cloud computing a renaissance.

It is my opinion that Cloud Computing is a technology architecture evolution that, when properly applied to business problems, can enable a business revolution. I've been saying this for a while but in recent weeks I have actually come to prefer the term renaissance over revolution.

Today, two years into a startup that uses the raw power of cloud computing deployment and business models across the board to enable new ways for companies to consume disaster recovery and business continuity solutions I can say without a doubt that I believe that cloud computing is a renaissance more than ever before!

Convert WMV to FLV Using ffmpeg and a Dash of Cloud Computing!

At LegalCloud we use GoToWebinar to produce our webinar series on LegalCloud and Cloud Computing for law firms. I needed to convert our WMV files that GoToMeeting provides to FLV so that I could integrate them with my tools of choice for our website. I chose Flowplayer; which is excellent by the way.  Hopefully this information might help someone else who ends up needing to do this similar task.

You can see the results of my efforts here:

http://www.legalcloud.net/buzz.php

As for how I did this, it wasn't terribly difficult and I'm quite happy with the results. I decided to use a Rackspace Ubuntu 9.04 cloud server of the 1G size. You could use any server you want, this was just what I chose to use. Using your manage.rackspacecloud.com account you need to do the following:

• Start an Ubuntu 9.04 server
• Log in to server as root
• apt-get Update
• apt-get install ffmpeg

Transfer your WMV file from where ever you put it to your new server.  I uploaded mine to Cloud Files then just downloaded them from there to encode.

The following command can be used to convert a GoToMeeting Webinar (not the proprietary format) to an FLV.

ffmpeg -i "tdp.wmv" -sameq -ar 22050 -ab 96000 -deinterlace -nr 500 -s 720x576 -aspect 4:3 -r 20 -g 500 -me_range 20 -b 270k -deinterlace -f flv -y "tdp.flv" 2>tdp.txt

This command converted the 26MB file in 2-3 minutes for me which I was happy with. I tried this with local desktop tools on a mac and it took well over 1 hour (and wasn't mostly free).

The whole process takes under an hour so you can do this for approximately $0.06 which seems good to me since it's only something I do occassionally.

Note: You cannot use this command to convert the GoToMeeting proprietary format. I haven't found anything that would yet but I hope to. So, make sure you don't choose the compressed proprietary format for recording your meeting!

Once the conversions were done I uploaded the resulting FLV files to Rackspace Cloud Files and enabled the CDN feature for them. Then, I integrated them with our Flowplayer installation on my web site. I'm quite happy with the result and the Flowplayer team deserves massive amounts of credit for their very cool and usable software that building upon jquery.

I'm not an ffmpeg expert but this did produce nice results for me and it's what I came up with after some trial an error. If anyone has any suggestions to make it even better then please let me know.

This same process would work just fine with any cloud provider of your choice really so if you use GoGrid or AWS the same steps should apply. I can't speak for other Linux distros at the moment but I'm sure you'd have good luck there too.

Cheers,
Kent

Augmented Reality Becoming Reality

I thought it was time for another off-topic post.  If you know me, you know I have been following VR/AR for years and years.  I blame TRON, Star Wars, and any number of science fiction authors.  Someday, I don't know yet how or when I will get to work on this stuff full time.  But, in any event here are a couple of recent updates that got my attention for various reasons.

Here is an AR business card that mashes up with Twitter.

http://artimes.rouli.net/2009/07/cool-augmented-business-card-from-toxin.html

and more...

As soon as you can see these augmented reality images easier without a phone, webcam and a computer, or other unwieldy device that isn’t supremely geeky the world is going to change a great deal very fast.  Today those

http://www.vuzix.com/iwear/products_wrap920.html

devices still look kind of like this:

But, that's changing very fast.  Here is a contact lens that was recently "installed" on an unsuspecting little bunny rabbit.  It's a low resolution heads up display.

Then, of course, there is actually the concept of controlling things virtually and even in the physical world through a combination of AR and monitoring brain waves.

Neurosky is developing tools to translate feelings (brain waves) into actions.  What if you were to:

• Hook it to your car cruise control
• Get the will it blend guy to wire this up to his blender, will it mind blend?
• An augmented reality enabled version of the little engine that could where the kid actually participates in getting the train up the hill
• An alarm clock you CAN'T turn off until you are awake and "think" the damn thing off
• Obvious implications for additional controls for video/console games
• A mind controlled vibrator (so obvious)
• A lawn mower. Lawn Mower man 2.0.
• A vacuum cleaner
• Bank Lock boxes that require you to be calm to open them
• Drunk/Sleepy driving accident/construction prevention (what are a drunks brain waves like anyway?) - Car says your asleep and calls you a cab.

Depending on how difficult it is to learn to use this device of future revisions of it, it clearly has many possible uses. Why just calm? Why not also allow it to do things based on other states of mind like rage, excitement, happiness, sadness. That could be interesting!

As is often the case porn, marketing, and gaming will lead the way.  AR Strippers have arrived as well:

http://artimes.rouli.net/2009/08/ar-strippers-oh-my.html

Beyond Reality - AR Gaming is developing interesting AR games.

http://www.augmented-reality-games.com/

While the AR strippers are entertaining I suppose, the reason it is interesting is because if you imaging using a live feed in real time you see quickly that the future of video conferencing and phone calls in general could present a lot more of you than just your face and voice.  In the future, it'll feel to the people that see you in their spaces real and virtual that you are there.  Sometime well after that, it'll feel like you are there too.  But, that's much further out probably becuase integrating senses other than vision and audio is quite a bit more challenging at the moment.  We just don't understand the brain well enough yet.

Lastly, if you haven't picked up and read Rainbows End you might just want to as it could be a guide to how things are going to work in the not so distant future in several ways.