Prakash Advani's Blog

Thanks you, to all my blog readers.

Today 3rd May 2014, I am celebrating 11 years of blogging! Wow, I too can’t believe it! I still remember, Rajesh Jain with whom I used to work then, encouraged me start a blog. And that’s when it all started. Before that I used to write articles, and found a direct benefit of writing was reading.  I ended up reading a lot. When you need to write, you need to read!

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them”. – Mark Twain

It has been a good blogging 11 years, been regularly irregular 🙂 but still motivated to keep it going.

I first started with LiveJournal which was a good way to start, but soon moved to my own site on 22nd April 2004. I am happy to see that live journal is still live! Thank you LiveJournal for providing me a home 🙂

I was initially suggested Movable Type (MT), as that was the blogging standard then. But it wasn’t open source at that time but eventually did. But I decided to go with WordPress, which at that time was very limited as compared to Movable Type. But on hindsight was a good decision.

My first post, for those who are interested. While there are other older dated links, those were back dated entry added later to cover media coverages.

If you still aren’t blogging, I would suggest you do!

A few suggestions to first time bloggers:

1. Decide where you want to host, there are many blogging sites. I would recommend WordPress.
2. Decided if you want to have your own blog like www.yourdogsname.com or do you like yourdogsname.wordpress.com
3. WordPress.com offers both the options to host your blog.
4. I have chosen Dream Host as my blogging site because I can also host other content and sites on the same account, which is what I prefer. But if you only need a blog, then WordPress.com is a good choice.
5. Be regular in your blogging, that’s how you would build your fan following.
6. Focus on one topic, if its more than one, then they should be related. If you blog about cats and elephants, very few people would be interested in both. if you have more than one idea, would suggest have two different blogs.
7. Social media is your friend, use your social network to publicise your blog posts. there are enough plugins for WordPress which can automatically post to your social network.

Thank you once again to all my readers, special thanks to those who take the time to comment. Happy blogging and happy reading!

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is here.  Torrent is the preferred method for me.

Other releases.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/14.04/release/ (Ubuntu Cloud Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/14.04/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/14.04/release/ (Edubuntu)

As always Have fun 🙂

Mozilla Thunderbird is one of the most powerful email clients. However I used to find that it used to keep the active window open while sending emails. This was a bit irritating specially if the email has large attachments.

On searching for background send, I found that the feature exists but doesn’t show up in the preference. You need to enable it.

After enabling it, it works very well. The only thing you need to be careful is not to send an email and immediately close your email client or shut down your PC. What happens is that email will not go as it take a few minutes (depending on the size of the email) for the email to go. The good part is that the email don’t disappear, they still in the Outbox.  It will try to re-send the next time you start Thunderbird, but there is no way for you to know if its gone or not, unless you check.

Read more: http://woikr.com/howto/send-emails-in-background-in-thunderbird-tips/

 Google is currently in the best position to challenge Amazon because they have the engineering culture and technical abilities to release some really innovative features. IBM has bought into some excellent infrastructure at Softlayer but still has to prove its cloud engineering capabilities.

Amazon has set the standard for how we expect cloud infrastructure to behave, but Google doesn’t conform to these standards in some surprising ways. So, if you’re looking at Google Cloud, here are some things you need to be aware of.

Read More: http://gigaom.com/2014/03/02/5-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-google-cloud/

Outernet will provide Free WiFi, across the globe. Will be accessible in all areas, including the difficult terrains and will bypass all the Censorships and Firewalls of different countries.

Developers say they are less than a year away from deploying prototype satellites that could someday soon broadcast free and universal internet all over the globe from high in orbit.

The “Outernet” project being bankrolled by the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) of New York is currently in the midst of conducting technical assessment of the project, but say by June they hope to develop test satellite in order to see how long-range WiFi would work if beamed down by a tiny 10x10x10-centimeter payload called a CubeSat.

Read More: http://rt.com/usa/outernet-cubesat-free-internet-153/

GoGrid CEO John Keagy says if an organization wants to use a true open source database, like MongoDB, Basho’s Riak, Hadoop or Cassandra, Amazon is not the place to go.

“We want to be an open source alternative,” he says. “If you’re not worried about lock-in then use (AWS). If you’re an enterprise that wants to be able to scale indefinitely and have a flexible architecture then you should identify those needs early and embrace an open source architecture.”

Read More: http://www.computerworld.in/news/gogrid-wants-to-be-your-open-source-alternative-to-amazon’s-cloud-databases

The company has been advertising to hire an engineering director who will “lead GoDaddy’s internal infrastructure-as-a-service project by adopting and contributing to OpenStack,” according to an ad posted to LinkedIn and the OpenStack Foundation website.

The ad doesn’t offer much more detail and GoDaddy did not reply to a request for comment so it’s hard to know how extensively it plans to use OpenStack. But adopting OpenStack to run internal operations would be in line with recent comments made by the company’s CIO, who told a publication called Business Cloud News just last week that the company is planning a big internal shift to the cloud and will use open source software to execute this vision.

Read More:  http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/401451/godaddy-goes-openstack

PayPal has spoken publicly and regularly about its private OpenStack implementation and recently said that 20 percent of its infrastructure runs on OpenStack.

But it’s only a matter of time before PayPal starts running some of its operations on public clouds, said James Barrese, CTO of PayPal.

“We have a few small apps that aren’t financial related where we’re doing experiments on the public cloud,” he said. “We’re not using it in a way that’s a seamless hybrid because we’re a financial system and have very stringent security requirements.”

Read More: http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/400964/private-cloud-poster-child-paypal-experimenting-public-cloud

Other countries should take a leaf from here, and not do the same mistake. Once you select a proprietary technology, you are stuck for life!

Some government decisions haunt the citizens of the country for a long time and the same is happening in South Korea right now. Thanks to a government decision made almost a decade ago, the South Koreans are stuck using Internet Explorer as their primary web browser.

All this goes back to 1990s, when Korea developed its own encryption technology, SEED, to secure e-commerce transactions. Consumers were supplied with a digital certificate, protected by a personal password, for any online transaction in order to prove their identity. For websites to be able to verify these certificates, the technology requires users to install a Microsoft ActiveX plug-in.

Imagine the irony, on one hand South Korea is supposedly one of technologically advanced countries, with the fastest Internet speeds, while on the other the citizens are forced to use a single web browser, and perhaps the worst one at that, when there are so many alternatives available.

Read More: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/how-south-korea-became-slave-to-microsoft-internet-explorer-223429

You gotta love it when one vendor helpfully announces what another vendor’s plans. That’s what apparently happened Monday when Rackspace Chairman and co-founder Graham Weston was quoted in the Wall Street Journal’s CIO blog  saying that Salesforce.com would start running OpenStack’s open-source cloud technology.

Read More: http://gigaom.com/2013/12/17/salesforce-com-will-adopt-openstack-says-rackspace/

According to a new Gartner report, around $3.9 billion will be spent on cloud services in India from 2013 through 2017, of which $1.7 billion will be spent on software-as-a-service (SaaS). The overall public cloud services market in India is also set to grow 33.6% this year to touch $404 million, an increase of $101 million from the 2012 revenue of $303 million, said the research firm.

Read More: http://www.cxotoday.com/story/india-to-spend-39-billion-on-cloud-services-by-2017/

Rubin began as a robot engineer at lens manufacturer Carl Zeiss and had a brief stint at Apple as a manufacturing engineer before devoting his working hours to developing computers instead. However, robotics remained a hobby, with Rubin both building his own and amassing a collection of robots from Japan. The Android operating system’s name was no accident: Rubin’s coworkers at Apple started calling him “Android” because of his love of robots, and he adopted the name for his own purposes years later.

Now, Google has allowed him to build those robots all day long. “I have a history of making my hobbies into a career,” Rubin told the Times. “This is the world’s greatest job. Being an engineer and a tinkerer, you start thinking about what you would want to build for yourself.”

Read More.

OpenStack, a non-profit organization promoting open source cloud computing software, wants to increase its presence in India.

The organization has formed a three -pronged strategy—launching new products and features, tapping organizations deploying cloud computing, and training the vast channel base of its alliance partners who have a strong presence in the country.

Mark Collier, COO, OpenStack, affirmed, “After the US, India and China are the most important countries for us. We will target the large organizations that are either in the process of deploying, or have a cloud computing strategy in place. And cloud computing requires a lot of business transformation because of the cultural shift and dramatic changes in processes.”

 

Read More: http://www.crn.in/news/software/2013/11/15/openstack-keen-on-indian-market

This was shared by my friend Sudhir Pai, found it very inspiring and thought of sharing:

What’s Most Important In My Life

Put simply, what is most important in my life is cultivating the ability to help people be happy, and to relieve them of the suffering they experience. My No. 1 aspiration in life is to leave each person I interact with at least a little bit better off than I found them.

Sometimes this means taking a lot of time to help someone. Many times it means simply making eye contact and smiling to others as they walk by.

This effort is so important to me because I have become acutely aware of how much pain I feel when I have done things that contribute to the suffering of other people, and how much joy I feel when I help someone to be happy and/or suffer less.

The ability to help people be happy and suffer less is what I call true love, which I think has three essential components: kindness, compassion, and equanimity.

– Matt Tenney

Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-tenney/most-important-your-life_b_3920338.html

• US Number 1 Country, India Number 2!
• Ubuntu No 1 OS.
• KVM Number 1 Hypervisor.

The administration of the Swiss canton of Bern has decided that, in principle, software developed by or for public administrations should be made freely available. Using open source software helps to reduce the canton’s dependence on software vendors and in the long-term will reduce ICT costs, the Bern administration writes on 23 October. It has accepted a similar motion submitted this summer by six council members.

Read More: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/canton-bern-tax-funded-software-must-be-made-open-source

Couldn’t agree more. I wish all the countries should follow a similar strategy.

Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich announced today that the world’s biggest chip manufacturer will collaborate with open-source hardware platform Arduino. Together, they will work to foster innovation in the “maker” and educational communities.

Krzanich, speaking at the Maker Faire in Rome, Italy, also introduced the Galileo development board that will become the foundation of open source hardware platforms. Intel is donating 50,000 of the Arduino-compatible Intel Galileo boards to more than 1,000 universities worldwide over the next 18 months. The exploding “maker” community is a do-it-yourself technology movement.

Read More: http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/03/intel-teams-up-with-arduino-to-promote-open-source-hardware-community/

Netflix has developed s Asgard, a web interface that lets engineers and developers manage their AWS infrastructure using a GUI rather than a command line.

Netflix Asgard is open source.

Paypal a big user of OpenStack has ported Asgard to OpenStack.

Read More: http://gigaom.com/2013/10/02/paypal-has-rebuilt-netflixs-cloud-management-system-for-openstack/

I have been thinking of why people should put their Disaster Recovery (DR) site in the cloud. This makes perfect sense, here is why.

Typically a DR site cost as much as the primary data centers. This is because organisations need to replicate every component of their data center. Match every server with the same specifications: CPU, memory and storage.

DR is necessary because you need business continuity when disaster strikes.

But you will invest all that in a DR and disaster may never strike. Is DR worth the investment then ?

Solution is to put the DR in the cloud. Advantages are as follows:

• You create exact replica of your setup in the cloud.
• You fire up the DR in the cloud, only when Disaster strikes. Which when there is no disaster you are only paying for the disk space usage.
• You only pay for the full cloud instances when disaster strikes.
• You not only save money but you are also more environment friendly because you are not unnecessarily keeping your servers running.
• The cloud providers also do their own DR, which means you even enhance your redundancy further.

Are you worried about putting your data in the public cloud? Then a few companies can get together and setup their own private cloud DR.

Indian enterprises are already adoption DR in the cloud.

In Silicon Valley, tech startups typically build their businesses with help from cloud computing services — services that provide instant access to computing power via the internet — and Frenkiel’s startup, a San Francisco outfit called MemSQL, was no exception. It rented computing power from the granddaddy of cloud computing, Amazon.com.

But in May, about two years after MemSQL was founded, Frenkiel and company came down from the Amazon cloud, moving most of their operation onto a fleet of good old fashioned computers they could actually put their hands on. They had reached the point where physical machines were cheaper — much, much cheaper — than the virtual machines available from Amazon. “I’m not a big believer in the public cloud,” Frenkiel says. “It’s just not effective in the long run.”

Read More.