Scripting News

Microsoft's cloud strategy?

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:11:36 GMT

No one seems to hit the sweet spot, the no-brainer cloud platform that could take our software as-is, and just run it -- and run by a company that stands a chance of surviving the coming recession (which everyone really thinks may be a depression).

Of all the offerings Amazon comes the closest. With a number of turns of the key you get a Unix or Windows platform in the sky. I wish the number of turns was 1, but it seems to be more like 10 or 20. But it's still pretty good.

There are a number of VPS companies, but... none of them are really big enough to make a convincing case they won't go the way of Exodus or Conxion, two colo companies I bet on in the past whose pain became my pain when their businesses got in trouble.

I was hoping Microsoft would hit the home run, but it seems not. Why wouldn't the Windows company just offer Windows in the cloud -- nothing more and nothing less? The marketing people seem to have figured it out, they call the new offering Windows Azure, but what does it have to do with Windows other than sharing a brand? I don't know.

Wouldn't it have been great if they bought VMWare, or another virtualization vendor, and used their deep financial pockets to create server farms all around the globe that just ran the operating system they made famous?

Looks like I'm going to bet on Amazon.

As Rachel Maddow says -- talk me down!

goodvote.org

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:16:43 GMT

We needed an easy-to-remember address for people whose vote is being challenged. Here's what we came up with.

http://goodvote.org/

If you believe the will of the voters should be reflected in the result of the 2008 election, please pass on the address. It's totally non-commercial, with a single purpose, to help assure a fair election.

PS: 28 million hits for "good vote" -- goodvote.org is not on the first page -- yet!

I can't watch this election unravel

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:35:53 GMT

"I can't watch this election unravel over corruption, not this time."

Early vote New Mexico

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:38:48 GMT

CNN on voter suppression

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:35:20 GMT

On this day in...

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:21:24 GMT

Part of my daily routine used to be going back through the archive of Scripting News to see what happened on this day in fill in the year. But when the number of years passed ten for some reason I stopped doing it.

I thought it would be interesting to see what happened on this day four and eight years ago, to see where we were in the elections of those years.

http://scripting.com/2004/10/27.html

http://scripting.com/2000/10/27.html

Nothing really earth shaking happening election-wise in either year, but the Red Sox had just won the World Series four years ago, snapping a losing streak that had been going for 86 years. They called it The Curse of the Bambino. That's why there's a picture of Babe Ruth on the 2004 entry, with a big R.I.P. on it.

You have the right to vote

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:54:08 GMT

Checking out VPSes

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 09:40:10 GMT

I've been waiting for Amazon or some other large tech company to provide stability for hosting services. So I tried out EC2 this week, and I more or less understand what it does and how it works, and I'm confident that if I decided to go that way, I could make my public web presence work in their environment. But I'm not sure if I should do it.

If it were anyone but Amazon I wouldn't go for it. Buying a service like this isn't like buying a laptop or groceries. You're wholly dependent on the company you're contracting with. If they go out of business at the wrong time it could cost you a lot. Or how they deal with outages could matter a lot. I had an ISP flake out on me in 2000 in the middle of a big onsite meeting followed by a user conference. We lost a few months of forward motion, at least, in the week that our Internet access and hosting (all in the same basket) was down. A couple of years later, Exodus went out of business, and that's where we moved to after the Y2K outage. I always seek reliability and stability, but given the state of the economy you gotta wonder if any of these service providers are going to be around much longer.

If a company like Amazon did VPSes, Virtual Private Servers, I'd go for that right away. It's much more like what I'm using now, two co-located servers, but I hadn't been watching the prices, they're much much cheaper. I'm wasting a fair amount of money going the colo route. But I don't know any of the companies. This is where I could use some help from readers of this blog. If you use a VPS, which one, is there a consensus, one that's considered a no-brainer, that some larger entities depend on? No one wants to be the largest customer of an ISP.

PS: I need Windows VPS, not Linux.

Windows on Amazon, Day 3

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:27:38 GMT

I might be ~~Now I'm~~ getting somewhere.

I mostly paused yesterday, read docs, thought, tried to understand how the various pieces fit together, and I think I've got some of the basics down.

1. You don't do a lot of customization of your AMIs, you might tweak up some of the settings for the OS, but don't install too much software in there, because all changes have to be bundled and saved and that's a slow process, and you don't want to do that too often.

2. The work is done in Amazon EBS Volumes. Install your software there, it can be attached to any instance. They're analogous to a hard disk drive in cloud space.

3. Now I'm wondering about costs. I've got the minimal system. It costs 12.5 cents per hour. That means in a 31 day month it will cost: $93 and that's without any storage costs. I'm having trouble estimating how much storage this instance will use. I have a bundle saved in my S3 space, and it's huge. Obviously I'm paying for that. I'll pay something for at least one IP address. Another question for oldbies -- how much should I expect to pay on a monthly basis for the most modest possible server?

4. All the docs say you can't depend on an instance staying up, but how does it relaunch if it goes down? I can't believe that's done manually. How can you build a reliable web service if it goes down unpredictably? (Not that my servers currently don't crash from time time, they do.)

5. I'm guessing you need to access the SOAP interfaces from inside your running instance. I'm going to have to find a concise overview of the interface. I find WSDL to be really hard to parse, would much prefer the equiv of Unix man pages. Have to go looking for that.

6. Wondering if all this is worth it. It must be, it seems, cause so many developers are deploying systems in EC2. How will it compare to what Microsoft announces next week? That'll be interesting to see. I can't get away to go to their conference in LA, but I'll be watching the news as closely as I can.

Do you know what to do?

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 22:03:13 GMT

When you go to vote...

Do you know what to do if someone tells you you're not on the list?

1. Don't just walk away.

2. Only as a last resort should you accept a provisional ballot

3. Call 866- OUR-VOTE or go to 866OURVOTE.org to get information on where to vote and the facts on your right to vote. A trained team of advisors is available to help you resolve your problem.

Over 10,000 lawyers are dispatched to the polling places on Election Day.

That's all you need to know.

Is Twitter the next Netscape?

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Fred Wilson in his famous answer compared Twitter to Google when it was a pre-revenue startup. A nice problem to have, for sure, but what if Twitter is more like Netscape than Google?

I was a web developer when Microsoft passed Netscape. They did it in a classic style, perfectly executed to take advantage of every door Netscape left open.

1. Netscape had left their Mac browser to languish while they focused on Windows. Microsoft, realizing that most web developers used Macs, produced an excellent Mac browser first, and worked closely with Mac developers to make sure their browser worked with the Mac software web developers used.

2. Netscape let anyone download their browser for free, but charged corporate users for the software. Microsoft's browser was totally free for everyone.

3. Microsoft fixed bugs, enhanced performance, listened to market and responded, did all the things a mature company that remembered its entrepreneurial roots could do. Netscape, being a disorganized, chaotic Valley wunderkind, did none of this.

Now, Netscape could have anticipated that Microsoft was going to do all this, could have kept up the investment on the Mac, made their software fully free, and become the first startup in history to be deeply rooted in everyone else's ego instead of their own. But all that would have been very very hard to pull off. In retrospect, you'd have to say that Netscape tried to own too much, became spread too thin too early. They probably should have narrowed their focus on something very valuable and defensible.

I thought of Netscape when I read this well-intentioned post by Alex Payne, who is single-handedly grappling with the most vexing of strategic problems on behalf of Twitter, without a clear model of the landscape of the market that's ahead of them.

The problem is this, how much of the flow of Twitter should they let outside their cloud and under what terms. You can see the promise to grapple with this in the last section of his piece, The Proverbial "Firehose."

So many things to say about this, but for now -- this reminds me of IBM's attempt to put the genie back in the bottle in the transition from PC-DOS to OS/2 in the late 80s. They wanted to shut down the clonemakers, Compaq, Dell, HP, etc, without losing their base of software. This opened the door for Microsoft to welcome all the clonemakers to their platform, Windows, and now OS/2 is only of historical note.

When one of the big guys competes with Twitter, they will do everything Twitter does, compatibly, and they will also offer a firehose without restrictions, licenses or approval. Twitter will have to follow suit, but then it will be too late, they will be following in the market they created.

Much better to get out ahead of it, narrow the focus, welcome the competitors, and reserve for itself the position of the naming authority. It will be impossible to unseat them from this position if they play it right. They can of course continue to operate twitter.com, and with a fully open firehose a bigger competitor might not even find a way into their market. Either way, Twitter must find a defensible posture, they've definitely staked out too much territory, they're spread too thin.

John McCain in October 2000

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:57:01 GMT

Full text in RSS?

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:28:44 GMT

Guardian: "Our feeds now contain the full content of each article so that you can take guardian.co.uk with you wherever you prefer to get your news."

First, I'm not aware of any other publication of the Guardian's size and stature that has gone this way, and I know some people will be excited about it and welcome it.

However I don't think full text makes sense in all circumstances.

I prefer the River of News approach, as exemplified by nytimesriver.com and bbcriver.com, and full text feeds wouldn't work very well there. If you want to skim the news quickly, from a large number of sources, the style favored by the Times and the BBC works better. I wouldn't want to see all news sources feel pressure to go the same way as the Guardian.

I think giving readers choice is the best way to go.

BTW the Scripting News feed has always been full text.

Windows on Amazon, Day 2

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:12:25 GMT

Yesterday's initial exploration of EC2 was a success. I have a server running in Amazon's cloud. It was up overnight. Still there the next day, exactly as I left it.

I was able to get Firefox installed and run a few performance tests of the net connection. Nothing that would blow you away, but enough for a modest server. There must be a way to up the bandwidth, but that's not a concern right now.

The next thing to learn how to do is: 1. Save my work so in case the server crashes I can restart it, and... 2. Reserve an IP address for the server, so I can map a domain name to it, and so that others can talk to the server over the Internet as you would any server. Eventually I will run scripting.com in the Amazon cloud, at least that's the plan right now.

As before, I'm just going to narrate my work here, and ask any questions I have here, and if they get resolved, provide the answers.

First question is whether the AMI that I create from my instance is private. I haven't entered any passwords into the Firefox install, so I'm not really risking anything. I guess I'm wondering whether I should install my server software in the AMI or in a disk image that gets mounted by the instance when its launched. My guess is the latter. Though I really would like to create a public AMI that has my server software built into it. This is one of the things I find really exciting, that I can create turnkey servers that other people can operate on their own, without me having to nurse the servers.

I put together a cheat sheet that summarizes the steps to creating an AMI from an instance.

I'm now bundling an AMI from my instance. I feel like I'm beginning to master the jargon!

Also bundling seems to be really slow. It's been stuck at 3% for about five minutes now.

Next frontier: Voting

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:18:26 GMT

With our guy way up in the polls, and less than two weeks to go, it's starting to feel pretty real right about now. Most Americans seem to understand how important this election is.

As usual there's 40 percent who are sure to vote one way and 40 percent who are sure to vote the other, and the decision will be made by the 20 percent who could go either way.

Me, I'm in the 20 percent. Sometimes I vote Republican, sometimes Democratic. About half the time I vote for the winner and half the time I vote for the loser. I'm no Missouri or Ohio, I'm far from a bellweather, more like a coin flip. So if you support Obama, don't take any comfort in the fact that I do too.

Now the campaigns start to focus on making sure their supporters actually go to the polls. If they do, it seems our guy is a shoe-in. But there's a nagging doubt in everyone who's voting for Obama, remembering the Gore-Bush election and Florida, where thousands of votes were "supressed" which is a fancy word for "thrown in the trash."

Sad fact: If the Republicans hadn't been so good at throwing out Democratic votes, Gore would have won Florida and would have won the election.

In 2000 our democracy walked up to the abyss and barely came back. I can't watch this election unravel over corruption, not this time. And not while there's still time to do something about it.

I'm just beginning to understand what's being done to prevent voter suppression. Apparently there's a huge effort here in California to organize lawyers to make them available to people across the country. If you've been asked to accept a provisional ballot (someone is challenging your right to vote), these people will help. I barely understand what's being done. But I'm going to find out what we can do if we feel we are being disenfranchised.

Salon: Where the GOP could get dirty.

I will have a hard time accepting McCain as President, should he win. But if he does, there must not be the slightest chance that the election was won fraudulently. That would not put us in a very good place here in the US and around the world.

The Hill: Police prepare for unrest.

Windows on Amazon

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:21:09 GMT

This is my next drop-everything project.

http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

I'll be running software there soon, Murphy-willing.

Mary Jo says Amazon is releasing this stuff today in anticipation of something similar from Microsoft next week.

I just took a look at the docs for setting up Windows in EC2 and geez, it's got a lot of weird hoops to jump through. I don't see why getting started has to be any more complicated than setting up a new Windows machine, which believe me, I have plenty of experience with. Then if I want to do more fancy stuff later, I can learn how to do it later. It seems like all the arcane stuff has to be addressed up front.

Command-line tools? Really? Oh please help. I haven't used a command line since I left MS-DOS in the early 90s.

Maybe Elasticfox circumvents all the command line stuff? I'll give it a look.

I've had mucho success getting Elasticfox set up. Not really sure what it's doing, but it sounds like it's doing the same thing as the command line tools but with a browser-based GUI which is what I'm kind of used to (I use the S3 Organizer Firefox tool to do interactive management of my S3 storage). Elasticfox is similar in approach to that.

Feedback to anyone at Amazon who's listening -- your docs tell you too much if all you want to do is get started. You should get the user to a Remote Desktop Connection window of a functioning server asap. I'm working through the Elasticfox docs, and they're telling me so much more than I need to know (even though this time I understand it cause it's in terms that I understand). Also I think you should steer people to this tool up front, not make it a maze they have to climb around to figure out what to use. This could be a lot easier.

At 11:54AM -- I've got my Windows instance running in Remote Desktop from a Mac. That was really cool. Elasticfox gets you all the way there. Very nice!

First thing to do -- install Firefox. Looking around, I've got 160GB to play with. Should be plenty. Two drives, C and D. C has 10GB and D has 150GB. Install Firefox on C.

Next I want to do a speed test, to see how fast the Internet connection is. That requires that I install Flash. When I try to download it I get a security error. I didn't know Firefox had anything like that. Not sure how to change that. Later... Turns out Firefox 3 respects security settings of Windows. Instructions are here.

Okay so I'm running the speed test now. It says my server is in Seattle. Hah. Makes sense.

Okay, I'm ready to take a break now. I consider this a success and I think I'll be using this service, probably starting right away.

Next thing I have to figure out is if the IP address of this server is persistent. I saw something about that in the EC2 FAQ. I'm sure I'll have a lot of suggestions for them. I'm quite excited about the possibilities of providing turnkey servers for end-users. I don't think there's any problem with this being an end-user service, their docs just need better organization, but there's nothing to say I can't write some new docs. Lots of possibilities here.

New Business Models for News

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:05:59 GMT

There's a "summit" in NYC for new business models for news today.

Through the miracle of the Internet, I can participate too!

Here's what I think...

Where ever you see a barrier that says that only a professional can do this job, don't just get rid of the rule, proactively break it. Make the pros compete on the same playing field as the amateurs. The time is running short to do this, soon the professional news organizations won't have anything of value to the amateurs nor will there be many pros left to compete.

Here are some examples.

1. Get amateur bloggers through the hurdles necessary to cover political events. Give them credentials that the campaigns recognize. Help amateurs get on the press lists of of the campaigns. (My experience in the 2008 election -- McCain and Obama ignored all requests, Clinton hit me up for money.)

2. Put an amateur on your op-ed page along with the pros. A regular columnist, not a guest column, so they can build up some sway, and learn how it works.

3. Take news reports from amateurs and run them through the same editorial process. Then you will have amateurs participating in the editorial process.

4. Open your newsroom! After all your layoffs, you've got plenty of space. Have a budget of 20 local bloggers who have press room passes. This means of course that you have to get to know some of the local bloggers.

Each of these steps will create context for interaction, places where assumptions are challenged, where the arguments can happen, so people on both sides can find out what comes next. The whole discussion, as clearly shown by the participant list (they call them attendees, that's another mistake) for the NY conference, has been between people on one side. No wonder they're not figuring it out!

Now, I'm afraid this advice would have worked a lot better ten years ago, but believe me, I was pushing for the barriers to come down ten years ago too.

Anyway, hope y'all have a great conference.

PS: There's live video!

Why I like netbooks

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:49:24 GMT

John Markoff quotes Steve Jobs. "We don't know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk."

As with all Jobsisms, it's beautifully elegant, true -- and misleading. You have to read it very carefully.

He isn't saying no one knows how to build one, just that "we" don't know how to. Fine. And the last part is almost Republican it's so clever and nasty. He's not actually slamming Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer and MSI, but if you don't read it carefully you might think he's saying they're pieces of junk. I think he's been studying Sean Hannity.

Now here's what Dave Winer, Mac user, says: They are not pieces of junk. Quite the opposite, they are elegant Mac-like products, and you can be absolutely sure behind the scenes Steve is throwing tantrums at his engineers day and night extolling their virtues and telling them to hurry up cause their lunch is being eaten. This is the same guy who said people don't want video on their iPods until he had an iPod with video.

Jobs then said that the iPhone could be seen as Apple's netbook. Hmmm. Maybe Jobs doesn't understand what's so appealing about netbooks. I suppose it's possible.

Look, iPhones are not and never will be netbooks. Just like writing for the NYT is not and never will be blogging (Markoff once said the NYT was his blog).

iPhones are too locked to be netbooks.

OK, I suppose it's time to say what a netbook is...

1. Small size.

2. Low price.

3. Battery life of 4+ hours. Battery can be replaced by user. Atom processor seems to be a requirement, those that aren't Atom aren't selling (and are apparently being discontinued).

4. Rugged.

5. Built-in wifi, 3 USB ports, SD card reader. It seems it must have 802.11n to be taken seriously.

6. Runs my software.

7. Runs any software I want (no platform vendor to decide what's appropriate).

8. Competition (users have choice and can switch vendors at any time).

As a Mac user I would very much like to see a Mac netbook. Yes, I know if I'm willing to hack, I can get Mac OS to run on one, but I have a hard enough time keeping supported hardware working.

On the other hand, Windows XP/Home is not so bad as long as it doesn't get infected with malware. So far I'm happy.

What I am using (the most frequent question potential netbook owners ask): Asus Eee PC 901, purchased in July for $600, now sells for $440. I took it with me to the DNC and it was the only computer i used. Now when I travel, I leave the MacBook Pro at home. Too heavy, too much computer to carry.

I've suggested elsewhere that it might be time to have a Netbook conference. I'd be happy to participate as a host, organizer, or speaker. There's an active community of bloggers following netbooks, and it's a happy cooperative place. It feels like the early days of the Apple II or IBM PC.

If Jobs is missing the excitement that would be a shame because it would be nice to have an Apple netbook, and no the iPhone is not a netbook. Not even close.

Today the MSI Wind really went back

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:55:19 GMT

I got the DLink router, and btw, it has a fantastic browser-based interface, best I've ever used -- anyway -- I carefully restarted all the machines after carefully setting up the router -- and then the moment of truth, boot up the MSI Wind. And the exact same thing happened. It took the router down! I don't know how it's even possible, but I repeated the drill and it did it again, and that was the end for me. I am not a professional hardware debugger, I'm just going to say I got a bad unit. I boxed it up and sent it back to Amazon in Lexington, KY. I still had more unwinding to do, because the Slingbox doesn't like the DLink, so finally now I'm back to my Airport Extreme, the router I forgot I had. It worked so well with everything but you-know-what. Kevin Tofel, who I respect enormously has nothing but praise for the MSI, but I paid my dues now, I'm going to take a deep breath and move on to other work for the rest of the week. Five days of futzing with hardware is enough!

Subscribe via Google?

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:59:38 GMT

I just tripped over a heretofore unknown feature of Google.

Theoretically, unless I misunderstand, and I probably do, if you "subscribe" to Scripting News, then you'll be more likely to see results from this site in your Google searches?

Oy it seems I have to add keywords to my RSS feed.

Google doesn't need keywords. That's the whole point of Google. That's what makes it great, why it works. It can find stuff without keywords.

This is 1/2 a great idea (I've been lobbying for something like it for years) but I'm not jumping through all these hoops.

This is wrong in so many ways.

Of course I could still be completely missing the point.

PS: There was no need to invent a new namespace for the feature they added to RSS, it already has a category element that does what their new element does. They made the same mistake Apple made with iTunes. If they had looked before they lept they would both be using the same element and their feeds would be interchangeable.