Here is a link to the presentation if you are interested.

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:

• Techcrunch - Use Cloudkick to Manage Amazon Web Services’ EC2
• ComputerWorld - Companies to Watch: Cloudkick
• VentureBeat - Y Combinator Demo Day: Simple cloud management, real-time energy monitoring, and more

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.

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. :)

Posted over on the AWS forums:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=112816

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:

• You can write out an 11GB file, not 10GB, so you actually can get an extra 1GB off EC2 if you poke
• It’s a smart idea to handle your OS restrictions in the kernel, not in your API (right on, AWS!)
• Still not a hax0r

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!

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.

Before:

After:

This is a hack I’m working on … trying to grab the daily news from the web and make an episode.

My dream goal would be able to generate these using a webapp and then let the site grow. I originally implemented a flash recorder, but now my flash trial has expired and I am unable to continue messing with it. Guess that means it is time to start hacking on a firefox-addon/ogv/icecast stack to replace the existing flash-plugin/flv/flash-server stack! It’s 2008, why is flash still the only solution for streaming video out to the web??