let’s do this!!
Woo! We shipped an implementation of libcloud, check it out over on libcloud.org. It is a pure python library for working with a variety of cloud server providers. It is still a work in progress, but would love to get others involved!
Last Friday, we presented at the Under the Radar conference. Things went really well, and Cloudkick ended up taking best in show (people’s choice)! Techcrunch did a nice article on our progress. Exciting times!
Today has been an amazing week — and it is only half over! On Monday, we launched our product Cloudkick. Cloudkick is a system to manage cloud servers, like those provided by Amazon EC2 or Slicehost. We have been building this over the past three months as part of the y-combinator program. It was very exciting to get it out the door!
So far the results have been awesome.
We broke 2000 registered servers tonight! Note, the x-axis is about 1.5 days, we nearly doubled in size!
The press has been great too:
Today we pitched as part of Y-Combinator’s demo day. It went very well. We said all the things we wanted to say, and had very strong interest from investors. I can’t name names or anything — but things are looking good, even though we are in a down economy!
We are still are working some kinks with the system, and quickly working on adding new features, but so far everything is going well. I’m excited to see what the rest of the week has in store.
It was like 70 degrees here today, so I decided to plant a garden.
Yep, it’s along the base of the fence line. Eh, it’s the best I can do with what I have. I’ll let you know how it works out. :)
Put together a little hack … thought I would share … it allows you to do automatic failover on EC2, using the AWS “elastic ip” feature. Not perfect, but very cool!
Posted over on the AWS forums:
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=112816
Tonight I got myself pretty excited about an EC2 hack. Essentially I was able to create arbitrarily sized root filesystems, when the limit was supposed to be 10GB… or so I thought.
A little background. Amazon AWS allows you to make custom machine images to boot their “elastic compute” (EC2) nodes. Essentially they are a giant file with the entire OS in it. The file gets slapped on their virtual servers and booted. You can create these images with tools that AWS gives you. The images are limited to 10GB, which means your root (/) filesystem can only be 10GB in size.
Normal Example:
root@domU:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 9.9G 1.4G 8.0G 15% /
I was investigating how the tool that created the images worked. After poking around with the build script, I noticed that the max size was hard coded. “Hmm, I wonder what happens if I just increase this…” I figured if the file size protection would be else where in the stack, like in the upload part, or when you actually register the image with AWS.
Anyway, the image built without a problem … then it uploaded, no problem … and then it registered with AWS! At this point I was pretty excited, but then I remembered I still had to boot the thing. Guess what?
It booted!
root@domU:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 50G 521M 47G 2% /
That’s a 50GB root file system! “I’m such a hax0r.” Well, at least that’s what I thought — up until I wrote out an 11GB file and the filesystem went read-only then crashed the box. Looks like AWS did the filesystem size limit in the kernel and/or the hypervisor. Good idea AWS … “bummer, not a hax0r, just ignorant.”
Lessons learned:
The always awesome Paul Querna came up with a cool trick to log cache hits/misses. In your virtual host set the environment variable SetEnv CACHE_MISS 1, then log it using your CustomLog with %{CACHE_MISS}e. It will log as “1″ when it is a miss, or as “-” when it gets hit.
How does it work? To quote Paul:
20:36 < @pquerna> as the setenv command runs in fixup hooks
20:36 < @pquerna> which is after the Quick Handler
20:36 < @pquerna> that mod_cache uses
Mostly just noting here so I don’t forget in the future … Thanks Paul!
Keeping and eye on the police has never been so much fun! Recently, my friend John lent me his USRP, allowing me to play with GNURadio. From wikipedia:
The Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) is a high-speed USB-based board for making software radios.
GNURadio is a free software, software radio. Essentially, the USRP allows you to tune or transmit any radio signal, given the correct tuner/transmitter attachment. Currently it is anything in the 0-5.9Ghz range. The USRP John lent me came with a FM/TV tuner — meaning I can listen to anything between 80Mhz and 800Mhz.
What exists between 80Mhz and 800Mhz? Lots of stuff! For example, normal FM radio is between ~87Mhz - 108Mhz, all of which can be demodulated using GNURadio. Also, analog TV transmits in that range, allowing you to watch or listen to any of that on your computer.
But! It gets even more interesting. For instance, San Jose International Flight Control exists around 124Mhz (although, I have not heard much there…). Or, you can even listen to Police Central at 460.4Mhz. Listening to the police has been pretty fun. So far, Sam and I heard about a stabbing at a local restaurant, and plenty of phone number / license plate checks.
Anyway, so far I have not done much hacking on the device — there are a lot of example applications to do the FM demodulation. The one thing I did figure out was now to remove the FM static when the channel is not in use. It took me awhile to figure out, mainly because I did not know the correct terminology. Turns out, the term is “squelch“, and gnuradio implements a block to do this. All I had to do was create a squelch handling block, put it as part of the rest of the processing chain. Looks something like this (inside the usrp_wfm_rcv.py example program):
squelch = gr.simple_squelch_cc(0, 5e-3)
Then add the squelch to the rest of the connect chain:
self.connect(self.u, squelch, chan_filt...
This thing is super cool — and I’m excited to see what else I can make it do.
Check it out! Pat’s book was on the front page of the dining section in the New York Times today! I went down to Borders to get a copy, and while I was there did a little clean up of the “Reference” section…
Before:
After:
This is a hack I’m working on … trying to grab the daily news from the web and make an episode.
