Archive

New LinkedIn Feeds Work For Me

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 31, 2008
in Personal, Startups and Technology
. 0 Comments

I must admit that I’m finding some clear networking value in the newly releasedLinkedIn RSS feeds.

You can get Public feeds from LinkedIn Answers (which I don’t care about), or a Personal feed of your Network Updates (which I very much care about). Here’s the announcement.

From the Home page while logged in to LinkedIn, click on the subscribe link next to the Network Updates.

Then, read it with your favorite news/feed reader. Mine’s Google Reader.

Makes it easy to snoop keep up with the connections happening in your network of friends & associates.

Enjoy!

Tags: LinkedIn, RSS, Feeds, Google Reader, Brian Berliner, brianberliner



Scalr - Open Source Framework For Scalable EC2 Deployments

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 31, 2008
in Open Source, Software and Technology
. 1 Comment

I’ve written quite a few stories about Amazon Web Services, including their EC2 and S3 offerings. They are heading in the right direction toward utility computing in the cloud. I’m definitely a fan.

My most recent article highlighted how Amazon now allows you to use Static IP addresses with your hosted services - a clear step toward true, secure hosting in the cloud.

Of course, it’s still the wild west out there, and you do have to roll your own EC2 management and deployment services. Amazon gives you API’s to do this, but it’s still work and testing.

Enter Scalr:

Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2.

It allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI’s for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.

Very cool. The project is very young yet, but they are going in the right direction (building easily scalable application tiers).

This project appears to be supported by Intridea.

Tags: Open Source, Scalr, Amazon, EC2, S3, Utility Computing, Scalability, Intridea, GPL, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Golf Quote Of The Day

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 30, 2008
in Entertainment, Golfing and Personal
. 0 Comments

My wife and I went out for a 10-mile hike today near beautiful Pacifica Beach (stopped at Rockaway Beach). We joined up with the I.N.C.H. (Intrepid Northern California Hikers) group. They do some seriously hard hikes here in the Bay Area. This one was rated a Level 2 hike (out of 5).

The hike was a loop of pieces of Sweeney Ridge Trail, Baquiano Trail, and Mori Ridge Trail

Anyway, while on Mori Ridge Trail, I made a comment about the Sharp Park Golf Course, which you can see from the trail (we had some beautiful views today - a bit too much wind for my liking, but the views were great). A delightful woman we were hiking with, who shall remain nameless, said:

I don’t think I’ll ever golf.
It’s like playing fetch with yourself.

I Loved It!

However, the way I play, it’s often more like an Easter Egg Hunt while I search for my ball in the rough.

Tags: Golf, INCH, I.N.C.H., Hiking, Golfing, Hike, Pacifica, Trail, Sweeney, Baquiano, Mori,Quotation, Quote, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Sony Vaio UX Running Mac OS X At The Hockey Game!

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 28, 2008
in Entertainment, Gadgets, Mac OS X, Mobile and Technology
. 0 Comments

So, I’m at the Sharks hockey game last night, and I notice a guy a couple rows in front of me using a Sony Vaio UX Micro PC. Hey, it’s the Bay Area. People bring high-tech gadgets to hockey games. That’s just how we roll out here.

No big deal, right?

Well, I look a bit closer, and the device appears to be running Mac OS X! WTF?

Furthermore, the Dock appears to be a Leopard Dock, not a Tiger Dock, so I think the device is running Mac OS X 10.5, even…

Geeks.

Sheesh.

Of course, then I get a pang of jealousy.

After all, it is a 1.2 pound device running Leopard…

Geeks (including me).

Sheesh.

Poking around on Google, I find an old article about getting Mac OS X (which they call Mac OSuX for this device) on the Sony Vaio UX. Lots of scary stuff in there. Just get a Macbook Air. The picture above is from jkOnTheRun (i.e., is not a picture of the guy a couple rows in front of me).

So, you know what this means?

It means that you can develop iPhone applications on your mobile phone!

Only in the Bay Area…

Tags: Sony, Vaio, Sony Vaio UX, Micro PC, Apple, Mac OS X, Leopard, Tiger, Mac OS, iPhone SDK, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

All Joe Thornton, All The Time

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 28, 2008
in Entertainment and Personal
. 0 Comments

 


Photo courtesy of David M*

My wife and I love the San Jose Sharks. We share season tickets with a set of family and friends. The Sharks fans really know how to support their team and make every game a fun event.

We attended last night’s game against the Dallas Stars. And won in overtime. I’ve gotta say. The overtime victories, where you come from behind to tie it and force the overtime, then go on to win it decisively in overtime, are the best!

The San Jose Mercury News covers it well. The first period was a sleeper, with the Sharks looking like they were on Spring Break, but the final two periods (and the ever-so-brief overtime) was hockey bliss.

My favorite player, the one on my Sharks jersey, is Joe Thornton. The man is an assist machine. Last night, he:

  • Took a great pass from Grier to score the tying goal that kicked it into overtime
  • Saved us from Dallas getting an easy winning goal (by mere inches)
  • Set up a perfect pass to Marleau for the overtime win

Thornton is worth every penny.

This was a key victory.

Go Sharks!

Tags: Sharks, San Jose, San Jose Sharks, Hockey, Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau, Shark Tank,Brian Berliner, brianberliner

iPhone SDK: Now With Interface Builder Goodness

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Gadgets, Mac OS X, Mobile and Software
. 1 Comment

That was much faster than I had anticipated.

I wrote about the Apple iPhone SDK and how I thought it was going to revolutionize the mobile application market.

At that time, Apple released the first Beta of the iPhone SDK, which was very functional, but did not include a working Interface Builder application. That meant that you would have to roll your own User Interface elements using Cocoa Touch. No big deal for now, but it sure would be much nicer to have IB available.

And, now it is.

Kudos to Apple for moving quickly to get this out.

I am extremely impressed by Apple’s execution of their iPhone strategy and developer program. There will be a shitload of high-quality and reasonably priced applications for this device.

Thanks to Ars Technica for catching the announcement for me.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone SDK, SDK, Software Development Kit, Mobile, Platform,Programming, Interface Builder, IB, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Taking A Wii

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Entertainment, Gadgets, Mobile and Personal
. 0 Comments

OK.

We broke down.

We got a Wii.

I’m not a big gamer. I do own a PSP, but I rarely play. I don’t own any other consoles, though my daughter did have a Playstation 2 for a while, and I spent way too many hours playing Grand Theft Auto. Oh, and I used to playDoom when it first came out on the PC. Mostly deathmatch with my co-workers at Sun Microsystems. Sun had a great (internal) multiplayer Doom system back in the mid-1990’s - it even ran on Solaris! I even had short bouts with Quake and Descent. Yeah, I’m old.

OK, so maybe I’m a bit of a gamer.

I am Male, after all.

But, I never really liked the current game controllers. The controller interface to the games is way too complicated and unnatural. Yeah, we’re back to that "old" thing…

So, my evil strategy for getting a Wii was to wait for my wife to decide that we really needed it. And, a couple of weeks back, the Sunday Best Buy ad said that each store had 15 in stock, so we pounced and got it!

And, the results are in.

The Wii is incredibly accessible to kids of all ages.

I went to Oregon to visit with my folks. They are in their 70’s. We had a blast playing golf and bowling, with an occasional tennis match thrown in. But nobody wanted to box against me. Tons of good laughs. Well worth the price.

And, since the Wii is such a small package, it was very easy to tote along with us. It’s my new, favorite, mobile gaming platform!

Recommended.

Tags: Nintendo, Wii, Nintendo Wii, Mobile, Gaming, Wii Sports, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Universal Parallel Computing Research Center

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

 

My good friend and advisor, Dave Patterson, has been selected to lead the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at UC Berkeley.

Patterson has been an advisor for three of the startup companies that I have founded. He’s a great guy and has a brilliant mind. He has a knack for doing research with immensely practical applications. He gets ahead of problems in Computer Science, and addresses them with the end result in mind. I just can’t say enough nice things about him. Brilliant.

The UPCRC is a joint venture between UC Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by Intel and Microsoft. These two universities will spend the next 5 years trying to figure out how we build computing systems that can fully utilize the coming wave of multicore and manycore systems.

This is absolutely critical stuff.

Take a look at some of the coverage:

This is a very interesting project to me, and I will be writing more about it later. Why? Well:

  • I know David Patterson well, and have always admired his work
  • I am a graduate of the UIUC Computer Science department
  • Much of my career has been spent on HPC and supercomputer systems
  • Multicore and manycore systems are coming. You can’t stop it or deny it. There’s a solid reason why Intel and Microsoft are sponsoring this research.
  • I’ve been thinking about this topic of late.

You will absolutely hear more from me about this.

Tags: UPCRC, David Patterson, University of Illinois, UIUC, UC Berkeley, Intel, Microsoft, HPC,Parallel, Multicore, Manycore, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

BeInSync Synchronizes With Phoenix Technologies

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 1 Comment

image In the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked about the file synchronization market. Products and companies like FolderShare, Dropbox, Syncplicity, and Sharpcast.

In a timely moment, BeInSync has been acquired by Phoenix Technologies for $25M. TechCrunch covers it well.

BeInSync looks to be most similar to Sharpcast’s SugarSync product in terms of functionality. Sharpcast has support for Mobile devices, while BeInSync does not. BeInSync may only work on Windows (no Mac) in fact. BeInSync charges $39.95 for 50GB of storage per year, while SugarSync charges $199.99 for 60GB of storage per year. BeInSync certainly has the more attractive price!

I must admit that I don’t fully get why Phoenix Technologies was interested, except that Woody Hobbs, current President/CEO and previous President/CEO of IntelliSync, clearly knows what he’s looking for.

And, the $25M price tag can’t be sitting well with the Sharpcast folks, since they’ve already taken down $16.5M in VC money. Sharpcast would need a significantly higher exit for an acquisition to make financial sense.

Amazon EC2 Gets It Right

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Open Source, Software, Startups, Technology and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

I’ve written a couple of articles about the Amazon EC2 service. It’s the Elastic Compute Cloud that lets you build very scalable (and, reliable) web sites "in the cloud", using Web Services created and operated by Amazon.

It’s amazingly good.

And, just got significantly better.

Amazon just announced two significant improvements to the service:

Elastic IP Addresses:

Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your instances, and can be programmatically mapped to any of your instances. This allows you to easily recover from instance and other failures while presenting your users with a static IP address.

Availability Zones:

Availability Zones give you the ability to easily and inexpensively operate a highly available internet application. Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.

These two capabilities answer the primary complaints that I have heard about the EC2 service, and I suspect will allow for significant customer adoption in the next 18 months. Static IP Addresses, combined with serving up the proper certificates, should allow for fully secure computing under Amazon EC2.

The guys at RightScale have described Setting up a fault-tolerant site using Amazon’s Availability Zones.

Amazon also announced User Selectable Kernels:

Amazon EC2 now allows developers to use kernels other than the default Amazon EC2 kernels with their instances.

Including:

This release makes the following new AMIs and AKIs (Kernel IDs) available:
AMI: Fedora Core 6 - 32 bit - a stock FC6 release with matching kernel and RAM disk
AMI: Fedora 8 - 32 bit - a stock F8 release with matching kernel and RAM disk
AMI: Fedora 8 - 64 bit - a stock F8 release with matching kernel and RAM disk
AKI: 2.6.18 Kernel - 32 bit - a stock 2.6.18 kernel (can be used with 32 bit AMIs)
AKI: 2.6.18 Kernel - 64 bit - a stock 2.6.18 kernel (can be used with 64 bit AMIs)

Tags: Amazon, EC2, Cloud Computing, Web Services, Static IP, Failover, Redundancy, Brian Berliner, brianberliner