Way cool. @RotoruaNZ Tweeted me the other day after I posted some photos of Mountain Biking up here.

Asked if they could use one of my photos on their Mountain Biking page. Check out Phil Ross on the dipper with the *loud* strobe action going on.

http://rotoruanz.com/ 

If you’re one of my overseas readers I can’t comment the City of Rotorua to you enough. I’ve dreamed of living there since I was at highschool and it’s still 100% on my 5 year roadmap. It’s close to the ski fields, has phenomenal mountain biking (the Redwoods), great kayaking (Kaituna and Wairoa) and great air links for frequent business travellers like me (Can go direct to AKL, WLG, CHC and ZQN).

The only query/quibble I have with the Destination Rotorua site is why on earth is it hosted on the other side of the world!?! See the trace-route below. Looks like it’s in Orlando!
Looks like their site uses PHP so they’ll probably be a good candidate for the Apache version of the Runtime Page Optimizer http://www.getrpo.com/Product/Apache. Running the RPO site tester it reckons it should knock a couple of seconds off the New Zealand load times.

C:\Users\Chris>tracert www.rotoruanz.com

Tracing route to rotoruanz.com [66.7.213.144]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    13 ms    <1 ms     1 ms  …
  2    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  …
  3     1 ms     2 ms     1 ms  wlgrtr1-65.intergen.org.nz [202.126.87.65]
  4     4 ms     1 ms     2 ms  ihwrtr1-129.intergen.net.nz [202.126.87.129]
  5     2 ms     5 ms     3 ms  32.114.216.13
  6   158 ms   150 ms   148 ms  165.87.71.190
  7   150 ms   148 ms   148 ms  12.127.33.6
  8   150 ms   152 ms   158 ms  cr2.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.136.74]
  9   148 ms   148 ms   156 ms  ggr3.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.136.17]
10   150 ms   149 ms   154 ms  att-gw.sanfran.level3.net [192.205.33.78]
11   157 ms   162 ms   161 ms  vlan89.csw3.sanjose1.level3.net [4.68.18.190]
12   176 ms   152 ms   160 ms  ae-83-83.ebr3.sanjose1.level3.net [4.69.134.233]

13   151 ms   155 ms   167 ms  ae-2.ebr3.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.132.10]
14   148 ms   157 ms   148 ms  ae-63-63.csw1.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.137.3
4]
15   160 ms   163 ms   161 ms  ae-62-62.ebr2.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.137.1
7]
16   183 ms   181 ms   192 ms  ae-3.ebr3.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.132.78]
17   202 ms   181 ms   180 ms  ae-93-93.csw4.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.136.166]

18   190 ms   197 ms   181 ms  ae-91-91.ebr1.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.136.133]

19   215 ms   214 ms   224 ms  ae-1-14.bar2.orlando1.level3.net [4.69.137.153]

20   220 ms   218 ms   210 ms  ae-9-9.car2.orlando1.level3.net [4.69.133.69]
21   212 ms   210 ms   211 ms  hostdime.car2.orlando1.level3.net [4.79.118.38]

22   211 ms   211 ms   213 ms  dime151.dizinc.com [66.7.213.144]

Trace complete.

So just a great morning here in Wellington today. Rode into the office and dropped off my laptop then did 50km around the bays. Rode out around the peninsula to the round-about then back again. About 1hr 45min all up but the last bit from Kilbirnie home was pretty cruisy. Training effect on the Suunto T3c was 4.0. Speed on my Polar is broken due to a spoke that keeps coming loose.

So I spent last week Mountain Biking in Rotorua and generally recovering from my 3 months of travel.

Got out with the Canon 5D MkII and some strobes for a bit of run in the Redwoods.

Photos were taken by a variety of Myself, Phil Ross, James Ogle and Sarah Bolland.

Phil Ross on ‘The Dipper’.
5D MkII, Sigma 14mm F2.8 EX DG + 580 EX II on ‘Ebay Triggers’

Chris Auld on ‘The Dipper’
5D MkII, Sigma 14mm F2.8 EX DG + 580 EX II on ‘Ebay Triggers’

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Chris Auld on the Dipper
Canon 5D Mk II w/ 70-200 F2.8 IS L 1 x 580 EX 1 x 580 EX II fired by ST-E2

David Addison
Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Chris Auld and David Addison on The Dipper
Canon 5D Mk II w/ 70-200 F2.8 IS L 1 x 580 EX 1 x 580 EX II fired by ST-E2

Getting the strobes setup
Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

So at almost all the Windows Azure events I’ve run around the world recently we’ve always gotten into a discussion about hooking Windows Azure applications up to on-premise systems. Indeed in a recent demo I wrote for a CRM + Windows Azure session I showed how to wire up Windows Azure applications to your on-premise CRM server. Often you’ll be using the cloud for what I call forward processing.

You should use caution here. Your Windows Azure application has the ability to scale almost infinitely. Your on-premise application does not. If you wire your Windows Azure web role directly to your on-premise system, say by making a direct Web Service call, and then your site gets slash dotted you’ve basically built your self a massive cloud hosted Distributed Denial of Service engine!

What you need to ensure that you do is buffer all of your requests from the cloud to your on-premise system via a queue of some sort. You may choose to use a Windows Azure Storage Queue for this or you may choose to use the new Queue and Router capabilities in the .NET Service bus. This means that if your Azure Web Role suddenly gets a huge amount of traffic the requests to your back end system will be queued and processed only as fast as the on premise application is able to handle them- the last thing you want is for a simple client self service application in the cloud to bring down a core business application on premise.

Obviously doing this is going to require that the call to the backend system is capable of being made asynchronously. If it’s a one way operation then it’s easy, if it’s a two way operation then getting data back to your user is generally going to be a case of having your worker role right back to to an Azure Table or indeed having a notification queue for each user that your worker role can enqueue the result onto.

In summary: If you wire your Windows Azure application directly to your on-premise application you are dicing with danger.

So it’s election time in India and just check out the BJP election add that popped up when I browsed Kiwiblog today

He’s like some 80 year old decisive determined Ninja!

Hope this place isn’t like Thailand.

So it appears that Paul Smith, the TwitchHiker has decided that:

“wherever you go in New Zealand, residents will complain how utterly frustrating the technology is, one born of a telecommunications monopoly and the country's remote placing on the planet”

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/2307100/Twitchhike-stumbles-at-last-hurdle/

Is our telecommunications infrastructure really that obviously ‘one born out of a telecommunications monopoly’?

I’ve travelled the globe, hell, I’ve travelled the globe in just the past 3 months and our infrastructure in new Zealand is as accessible, as fast and as useful as any other country I’ve visited recently. If Paul Smith wants to fly over here on the generosity of New Zealanders (@flyairnz and others) and then spout his mouth off about out internet infrastructure then he can $%&^$^ off back to Newcastle as far as I’m concerned.

Clueless tool!

[Update]

In the comments someone asked me to back my statements up saying that Mr Smith backed his statements up. Well. Mr Smith just regurgitated the same old ‘Telecom is a monopolistic provider’ crap that seems to do the rounds. And I struggle to see how he could really lay claim to his experience unless he spent his entire time in a hermetically sealed Maui campervan.

So some facts to back it up then.

I travel the country and indeed the world. (9 Countries, 23 cities/airports, 130,000km and 59 days on the road just this year). My iPhone 3G and Tablet PC (with UMTS inbuilt) travel with me everywhere. In NZ this year I’ve been to TUO, HLZ, ROT, DUD, CHC, ZQN, AKL, MRO, NPE, NSN and a bunch of places in between when it’s been via vehicular rather than winged transport. From memory the only place I’ve been without Broadband when I’ve wanted it was at the Outdoor Pursuits Center in the middle of bloody nowhereville near National Park. Anywhere else I’ve had at a bare minimum sufficient GPRS signal to check my mail(I had GPRS at SEHOPC but I wanted broadband) , tweet my tweets and, should I have wanted to, cry poverty and try and sponge some more free travel. While not as ubiquitous as in the USA or Canada, the availability of good quality WiFi (back hauled no doubt by monopoly provided ADSL) is just fine here in NZ and as good as Australia or any other country that I’ve been to recently in South East Asia bar maybe Singapore.

So I’m staying on the Infosys Campus in Bangalore this week and hitting up their gym each morning.

The campus is a fantastic facility and the gym is top notch.

Did a cardio work this morning including a sprint on the Recumbent bike…. never thought I could peak my heart rate like i did on the recumbent! Always thought they were for grandmas! Definitely more of this for me going forward. Check out the chart

Tracking my workout using both my Polar S625x (as above) and my Suunto T3c at the moment.  Set out to achieve a 4.0 Training Effect on the Suunto which I nailed right at the peak of the recumbent interval- I think I was on level 18 (Constant wattage mode) doing about 100 RPM for that interval.

I need to grab some files over Live Sync to review on the plane….. look what I get

I’ve been meaning to write a Blog post praising your use of this technology…. but this stuff is just STUPID!!!!

So an recent article by The Visible Hand In Economics has managed to get me off my bum and get me writing this long overdue blog post. Now I’m a bit of a closet Greenie- it’s hard not to be when you’re into the outdoors, like paddling free flowing rivers and skiing snow  covered mountain peaks. Of course I’m not a Watermelon type Greenie, but, those discussions are for another day.

One of the things I’m big on is Reducing the amount of packaging and other crap I consume. One of the things I’m less into is paying to Recycle that crap that I do, despite my best efforts, end up saddled with. This blog post is about why I think paying for recycling is wrong- it’s focussed mainly on Economic arguments and I certainly can’t claim them to be original, but, it’s nice to get your own views down on paper.

If it costs (I’m talking about the Economic concept of Cost here not just the money you have to pay for something) more money to
recycle something than it does to simply dispose of it then I think it’s bad personal policy to recycle.
Take a Glass bottle for example (numbers hypothetical, but, it does cost REAL money to recycle- the costs outweigh the value of the raw material recovered):
It costs a manufacturer 5 cents for the raw materials to make a bottle
When I’ve finished drinking the beer time it costs 2 cents to collect the glass from my curb-side, it requires 2 cents of labour and 4 cents of energy to turn the glass back into slag glass that can be sold for 2 cents.
If I just dump it it costs 2 cents for the curb-side collection and 2 cents to provide the landfill services.

So the net ‘cost’ of recycling = (2 + 2 + 4) – 2 = 6 cents
The net costs of dumping to landfill = 2 + 2 = 4 cents

I’m paying 2 cents to recycle. What I am getting for this two cents? Some would say that it costs more to recycle because the landfill cost doesn’t fully factor the externalities (environmental impact etc…) so sure, you could argue that I am ‘paying a premium’ to protect the environment. But, whatever the case that is a 2 cent cost in resources- the question to ask is ‘could those resources be put to better use’? So, for example, if I chose instead to dump to landfill and instead donate the two cents to a University doing research into glass bottles, twice as strong as normal but containing half the glass, might that be a better idea?

It’s even more of a problem, as noted in the article I posted at the top, when the costs are totally hidden from us. Do we think properly about reducing consumption of glass bottles when recycling them is ‘free’?

So I’ve been head down and arse up this week; I’ve barely had enough time to get on top of my email inbox let alone my unread blog entries. Finally made some progress this evening at YVR and now on NZ83 en route YVR-AKL.

So while I was underwater a stink kicked up around a thing called the ‘Cloud Manifesto’. Meant to be being released Monday, it was leaked here (all 6 pages of it) a few days early. From my reading between the lines of the thinly veiled blog post by Steve Martin from Microsoft it looks like the document has been written, by an as yet undisclosed group, and is being farmed around a bunch of companies for them to ‘sign up’. There is a posting on the Cloud Computing Interop Forum (on Google Groups) by Reuven Cohen (who I’ve never heard of) who is the ‘Creator of the Enomalism Elastic Computing Platform’ (which I have to admit I’ve never heard of either). Reuven is also involved in Cloud Camp (which I have heard of). I tell you all this and encourage you to go and have a sniff around some of the links above and some of the press coverage so far so that you have some context before continuing.

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/03/26/out-of-order-20/ Steve Gillmor from TechCrunch

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=15341 – Amazon expressing their antipathy towards the whole thing

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Microsoft-Calls-for-Open-Cloud-Standards-538212/ Darryl Taft

I provide the above to give some background. Now for some of my thoughts.

The Emperors New Clothes*

So reading the document itself most of it feels so obvious it barely warrants saying- it’s PR puffery really. I’m going to cherry pick a few statements from the document to discuss.

“We believe that these core principles are rooted in the belief that cloud computing should be as open as all other IT technologies.  “

I hate to break it, but, other IT technologies aren’t that open. As I’ll set out below I’m a big believer that in most cases openness and interoperability are emergent aspects of technology and not something you should really set out to engineer.

“To reassure their customers, cloud providers must offer a high degree of transparency into their operations.”

So I just don’t know how realistic this is. Certainly Microsoft and even more so Google are highly protective of their data center operation details. A measure of security through obscurity is important here still I think. I would also disagree with the authors that moving data into a shared infrastructure necessarily exposes one to more potential for unauthorized exposure.

“Cloud providers must use and adopt existing standards wherever appropriate.  The IT industry has invested heavily in existing standards and standards organizations; there is no need to duplicate or reinvent them. “

So this is bang on target and to be honest the biggest thing that the Cloud Providers can do to ensure *useful* openness is to ensure they use existing standards wherever possible. But do we need this sort of industry bickering to state the bleeding obvious?

“Any community effort around the open cloud should be driven by customer needs, not merely the technical needs of cloud providers, and should be tested or verified against real customer requirements.  “

Would be interesting to know what level of customer involvement there was in the Manifesto document? Were folks like SmugMug (who are my favourite example of a great Cloud operated business) or enterprise customers (I know there is at least one airline using EC2 for some of their stuff) involved? It all feels like a bit much of a simplistic puff piece at the moment- though according to the CCIP group post ‘major players’ have been involved.

“Cloud computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that efforts do not conflict or overlap. “

Haven’t really gotten off to the best start in this regard to be honest.

This document is meant to begin the conversation, not define it.

I’m afraid I agree with a number of the commentators (both vested interests and ‘independent’ voices) at the top of this post. It was a pretty shitty way to ‘begin the conversation’.

Who’s Actually Behind It All

So a big question in my mind is who is actually driving this thing?

To be honest if it were just a group of bit players stroking and stoking their egos then I don’t actually think it would have generated the level of interest and posturing (from MS and Amazon to date) that we’ve seen.

Gillmor looks at the obvious candidates, IBM and Google (Amazon having declared they’re outside the tent). It seems inconceivable that Microsoft and Amazon would not be invited to be involved in this at the earliest opportunity. Even if it were the ‘Anything But Microsoft Brigade’ you’d still expect Amazon to be seated at the table- hell their model of a high scale application operator selling their dog food to others embodies for me much of what the cloud is about.

I have no idea how Cohen can, with a straight face, say:

“Given the nature of this document we have attempted to be
as inclusive as possible inviting most of the major names in technology to
participate in the initial draft.”

Given that this Manifesto appears to be largely driven by East Coast companies I can’t help but think that IBM have got their finger in this somehow. It’ll be somewhat ironic if this the case, as a key proponent of the standardization of Office Open XML (now ISO29500) I’ve had first hand knowledge of IBM’s ‘do as we say’; might this be their ‘not as we do’ moment?

I guess all will be revealed come Monday.

On The Substantive Matter- Or Why I Only Kind Of Give a Crap About Interop in the Cloud

Standards stifle innovation. There, I said it. Friends of mine will probably bitch at me for being so blunt, but, I genuinely believe that standardizing technologies is, in most cases, best left until they have reached a reasonable level of maturity.

Once something is standardized pace becomes glacially slow and the ability for innovators to recover a return on intellectual property becomes nigh on impossible. There are, of course, some business whom this model is de rigueur- I guess we’ve got to wait until Moday to find out more.

For the most part we’ll be building our applications using the same protocols and technologies that we’ve always done. At least for the stuff that spins my wheels, high scale applications, there’s not a lot that’s new in the cloud; it’s really just an interesting new way to deploy and dynamically scale the same architectures I’ve been working on since I was building SaaS apps in the Dot Bomb days.

The new stuff really comes down to the cloud fabric^ and the management thereof and frankly I think it’s too early to think about standards. Amazon scales at the unit of a virtual machine, Microsoft does the same but with sugar on the top to hide the fact that it’s really Windows at all. Let’s see what sort of models shake out best for customers before we try and anoint one king.

I Guess We Wait Until Monday

As someone looking to ship a pretty significant Cloud delivered app later this year what I really want is;

• For my Cloud provider of choice to ship their bits!
• For my travel schedule to slow down a bit- my Tripit stats are truly horrendous and I’m flying to Bangalore Monday morning.
• For the Manifesto authors, whoever and wherever they might be to read a little Hayek.

Let’s see was happens Monday.

*So worth nothing this wasn’t my turn of phrase. Used here first but I liked it so much I pinched it!
^Call it what you will, this is the term I use when talking about Windows Azure at least.

At YVR, stupid tools have blocked MESH so I can’t login to accept an invitation to a MESH folder.

Elite Fail for YVR.

Somewhat of a FAIL for Microsoft too- surely you can let me accept invitations from the MESH client!

So the session videos are up for MIX09.

It’s video and screen casts …. which means you can watch me deftly dancing across the stage in my yellow Crocs. Both sessions are a bunch of fun! Well worth taking a look at.

Building Accessible RIAs in Microsoft Silverlight
http://sessions.visitmix.com/MIX09/T65M

State of the Art in Web Site Design on Microsoft SharePoint
http://sessions.visitmix.com/MIX09/C20F