http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/5-lessons-weve-learned-using-aws.html

I’ve played around with the Wolfram Alpha tool a few times in the past, but after reading about the top 100 innovations for 2009, and that Wolfram|Alpha was named as the “Best of What’s New” Grand Award winner in the category of computing, I thought I’d check it out once again. I was not disappointed.

If you think of Google as a fantastic research tool, well, I think of it as providing you “road signs” to information that may or may not be what you’re ultimately looking for.  Wolfram|Alpha takes that idea and expands it into offering you the information you were looking for without having to blindly click link after link. And the type of information you can derive from Wolfram|Alpha is in my estimation without boundaries. It has the ability to take your question in terms of a sentence, mathematical equation, dates, calculations, comparisons or just about anything and give you meaningful results almost instantly. Wolfram|Alpha is not designed to replace Google by any means, since it would be unfair to classify it as a simply a search engine. However in terms of quick and powerful data research, you simply can’t do any better.

Take it for a spin yourself and prepare to be amazed.  http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Or watch this video hosted by Stephen Wolfram himself. Make sure you’re sitting down first.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Oh, and if you take the Wolfram|Alpha and mix it with an iPhone, you get the a very powerful combination indeed! http://products.wolframalpha.com/iphone/

First some history: In the not too distant past I actually ran all of these services from multiple rack mounted servers in my garage, but over the years and after paying way too many high PGE bills, I consolidated all of my servers into a single Dell small form factor server running on my desktop. My PGE bills naturally went down, but I was still at the mercy of how reliable my DSL connection to the world was each day. And with a business DSL connection, the fastest upload speed I was able to get in the comfortable price range was 768 megabits per second. Not nearly fast enough for a robust email and web server environment in my opinion.

Well, when this little Dell went down a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that the time had come to end this home server experiment and move all of my sites and services into a hosted environment. But I couldn’t do all of that overnight, so I quickly ordered a replacement fan for the Dell server and until that arrived, I was able to continue operating the server with the case open and by pointing a small fan at the open CPU. This kept things cool enough to run each day. When the replacement power supply arrived, I was able to get that installed in a record 10 minutes (for me anyway), close the server case and resume normal operations!

The next step was finding a suitable Linux-based hosting provider with affordable monthly rates, shell access and the type of granular control I would need to continue hosting my websites and email. After evaluating a few candidates, I settled with a company called HostMonster.com. In addition to unlimited domains, unlimited email accounts, unlimited server space and unlimited bandwidth, the price per month dropped to an incredible $3.95 if you paid for three years up front. Sounded like a great deal, so I signed up and started the migration process for all of my websites and email customers.

Fortunately with shell access and using rsync over SSH, I was able to upload/copy all of my data (and there was a lot of it) over to the new HostMonster server. The migration process took a number of days, since my upload speeds from the house are so slow.  A couple of highlights include that HM used the Dovecot IMAP mail server, so the formatting of my existing mail boxes was exactly the same as where they would ultimately be hosted. What a time saver! Setting up Apache and the various domains was pretty easy, in addition to keeping things clearly compartmentalized on the server too. I’m also very happy with being able to offer my customers a much better webmail experience too. Not only does HM have SquirrelMail (which my customers had already been using), but Horde and RoundCube webmail are also available.

The last phase of my server migration involved moving my entire Nagios server/services monitoring application from my home server to the Amazon EC2 Cloud. I got this done today. Essentially I brought up a new server instance in the Amazon Ec2 Cloud, installed all the LAMP stack requirements and then installed and configured Nagios. I was able to save a great deal of time by rsyncing my existing plugins and configuration files from the old server. With a few tweaks here and there, Nagios came up clean and is now monitoring all of the sites and services offered by my employer. And I can sleep better at night knowing that the monitoring is now being done outside of my home network, which can be spotty on its own, and lead to erroneous notifications.

And finally, the coup de grâce. I was able to power off the little Dell home web/email server this morning. Sleep well buddy, you done good.

Windows 7

Today, I downloaded the newly available Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 and was able to get it installed on my Mac using Parallels. If you’ve been following the news as Microsoft pushes Windows 7 along this year to a hopeful commercial release in time for Christmas, you’d already know it’s getting favorable reviews as being faster, easier to use and overall a much more viable release than it’s predecessor, Vista.

Well you can add my name to the list of people feeling pretty darn good about Windows 7 so far. I actually downloaded and installed both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions on my Mac and found the installation for both to be very easy and amazingly fast. I can’t remember installing a version of Windows that didn’t take over an hour or more to get completely installed with all updates and drivers settled and functioning properly. Well, I can tell you that my two installations today had to be less than a half hour each, and when it was finished I was left with a completely functional, working version of Windows 7. And what is more amazing is I installed both on my Mac with little or no hardware issues whatsoever.

So far I can report that for me, Windows 7 seems dramatically snappier and responsive than Vista.  I only allocated 1GB of memory and 15GB of disk space to each installation and still the OS is quite snappy. Starting, stopping and rebooting seems quicker too, but that could be due to having nearly no start-up software or non-OEM software installed yet. But I still have the feeling the OS would be quicker in these situations regardless.

One thing I really like in contrast to Vista (not including the increased responsiveness) would be the OSX dock-like icons that can stay in place for applications you frequently use. The desktop gadgets are no longer tied to a particular side of the desktop either. There are many other items to report, but I’ve only played around with this for a day so far.

I’m pleasantly impressed so far and can’t wait until this is released commercially, so I can install and use it on my daily work laptop from home. And thus relieve myself of Vista once and for all.

After some research on the Internet, I found that Time Machine works to identify the target for the backup by the MAC address of the machine that had created the backup in the first place. Sort of like a key that connects the source to the proper target. That’s a pretty cool concept, because it means you could use the same removable drive for several machines, if there was enough space available.

So after trying some command line tools to try and change the ACL‘s of the various backup DB’s already on the drive and connect them to the MAC address of my new laptop, I was not successful in getting Time Machine to recognize the drive and start backing up. But then I found this cool little piece of software that will execute the exact command you need to update the ACL’s on the backup DB’s. The original creator of the software and the article I found that helped is here.

You have to do this as root, so make you’ve set up your machine to use “sudo”. You’ll also need to know your new MAC address. You can get this from System Profiler or at the Terminal prompt using “ifconfig -a”.

Here’s what I did to fix this problem.

1. Download the backupswitcher software here and unzip it.
2. Connected the removable drive to laptop.
3. At a Terminal prompt:
   cd to the directory where you unzipped backupswitch
   Then type:
   “sudo ./backupswitch  /Volumes/<YOURDRIVENAME>/Backups.backupdb/<YOURBACKUP> YOURMACADDRESS”
4. The program should end by telling you the old MAC address.
5. Disconnect and reconnect your removable hard drive.

That should be all you need to do and Time Machine will recognize the drive as the proper target for backups and do its thing. Thanks to Devin Lane at Shiftedbits.org.

I’ve recently learned that it is entirely possible to get free HD (high definition) programming over the air, using nothing more than a low cost, specialized antenna. Amazing! My older brother Louis introduced me to this in early January and I’ve been intrigued by it ever since. Of course the programming you’ll receive over the air is by and large limited to what you can get from broadcast locations in your local area. That’s good, because I would certainly prefer my local network stations HD feed over a standard resolution, since I can add in an OTA DVR device later to record some of my favorite network TV shows like SNL, CSI and major league baseball games.

So far, it appears you can use inside and outside antennas that vary in prices from $30-$100. The two that I’m drawn to so far are the Terk HDTVa and the Philips High Performance Amplified Indoor Uhf/Vhf/Fm/HDTV Antenna. I really like having an indoor antenna (especially with the high winds around here), and both of these have been highly rated by other buyers. You can mount them in the attic of your home without having to re-adjust the antenna. I’ll make the switch to OTA HD programming within the next month or so and happily say goodbye to Comcast!