http://alex.polvi.net let's do this!! Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:17:48 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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! Here is a link to the presentation if you are interested. http://alex.polvi.net/2009/04/26/cloudkick-takes-best-in-show-at-under-the-radar/ 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 ... http://alex.polvi.net/2009/03/18/launching-is-awesome/ 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. :) http://alex.polvi.net/2009/01/12/pico-garden/ 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 http://alex.polvi.net/2009/01/07/automatic-failover-on-ec2-with-heartbeat-and-elastic-ips/ 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. ... http://alex.polvi.net/2008/12/12/get-around-ec2-filesystem-limits-sort-of/ 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 ... http://alex.polvi.net/2008/12/04/getting-cache-statistics-with-mod_cache/ 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, ... http://alex.polvi.net/2008/11/09/police-scanner-and-gnuradio/ 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: http://alex.polvi.net/2008/10/29/hungry-scientist-in-the-nyt/ This is a hack I'm working on ... trying to grab the daily news from the web and make an episode. http://alex.polvi.net/2008/10/24/net-nightly-news-2008-10-24-1224883389/ Just a quick note to point out my, now open sourced, videostrip generator. 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 ... http://alex.polvi.net/2008/10/23/videobooth-shell-script/