The Knowledge Base.

Finally setting sail.

It is pretty obvious that Mobile Devices will eventually overtake the number of PC's. When this will happen is open to debate. So what. Well I think this will mean we will drop the word "mobile" and we will call everything a "device". The connected world will be dominated by the device. People will have multiple devices, phones, tablets and everything in between. I suspect most people will have at least two devices, a phone and probably a tablet, iPad or an Android device. So, what about the PC.? Well, the key word arising from the PC demise will be "specialisation". There will be a group of people who will need the power and versatility of a specialised device. A good example of this type of specialisation is the recent Dell / Ubuntu PC for Developers. Here is a device that is targeted to a specific group of people who have IT requirements that exceed the normal device. There are other markets that need this specialisation such as Gr...

Presenting information visually via a map is often a compelling paradigm for representing data. In these circumstances Google maps is a worthy choice. Google Maps is supported by a simple and easy to use Javascript API. This means you can integrate it into your web application relatively easily. My approach to web development tends to favour a server based approach. I tend to lean on the server more to do the HTML and JavaScript generation. This works for me in many ways and I end up with less JavaScript code in the client. I realise there is a tendency these days to shuffle a lot to the browser, but I tend to think this isn't a great option in many circumstances. This approach does mean I need to manipulate geographic locations on the server. I then generate Javascript and HTML which is fed back to the client for rendering. I love simple libraries and constructs and hand coding geographic locations is difficult work. This means I need a library which is simple to use, but ...

Marshall Mcluhan in 1965 !!

I installed Apache Tomcat and Apache Web Server on my Amazon EC2 instance recently. On a Amazon EC2 instance you typically restrict HTTP access via port 80. Apache Tomcat default port is 8080. I had a requirement to access the Apache Tomcat management console through a HTTP connection. To achieve this you need to proxy the Apache Web Server to the Tomcat instance. The following instructions were done on a Ubuntu 12.04 instance. First enable the Apache mod_proxy module ( if not already enabled ) sudo a2enmod proxy_http To install the module you need to restart apache2 web server. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart You now need to identify to Apache the sites that are available for the proxy. So, you create a file ( your choice of name ) within the sites-available folder. /etc/apache2/sites-available$ sudo nano tomcat-app_proxy The following goes in the file. <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> ProxyRequests Off ProxyPreserve...

Cats and dogs will never be friends. They see the same world through a different lens. Neither is wrong, neither is right. It is same with software people and hardware people. We see the same IT landscape but have very different views. Lets face it, the battle between the soft and hard has been intense and many meetings and projects have witnessed a blistering argument when both sides have crashed together. But, has cloud computing tipped the balance towards the software side.? As a cloud developer hardware has become a programming statement. A loop can create dozens of Ubuntu instances. A if test determines if they are started, stopped or terminated. A network has become elements within array. A IP address a key in a map. Hardware has become a software abstraction, a data element and maybe a programming bug.

The recent decision by Amazon to open a data centre in Sydney makes it more likely that you can create a "workable" desktop image on Amazon. My experience in the past was that the latency from Australia to external Data Centres was too high for a workable Desktop experience. By using Cloud Ping  I can see that Sydney has a latency of about 30 ms, the others are between 200 ms and a very slow 350 ms. At 30 ms you can get a reasonable experience in a desktop environment. So how do you create this image ? Good question. I have seen numerous blogs on the internet about the process. The best one I found was here .  It provides a step by step procedure for creating a desktop image on top of an image that does not contain a UI. Another approach is to use an existing image with the desktop already installed. You can find some of these here . This is not a bad approach, however remember you need to install no machine as a server ( and client ) to connect into your desktop. ...