VMWorld 2009 TweepUp @ The Chieftains on Saturday 8/29 @ 5:30p

I’m organizing a TweetUp for the folks coming to VMWorld 2009. It’ll take place at The Chieftain Irish Pub on the corner of 5th Street and Howard (across from InterContinental Hotel). So come out and hang out with your #VMWorld tweeps and enjoy great draft beer & pub food.

The Chieftain is offering the following drink specials:

$3 PBR
$4 Mimoas
$5 Bloody Mary

I’ve posted the event on Facebook. Please RSVP so I can give the Pub a rough headcount. Current this event isn’t sponsored. Email me if you’re interested in sponsoring it.

The count down to VMWorld 09

The etherspace has been busy with highlights, tips, and expectations of VMWorld 09 taking place at the Moscone center in SF starting August 31. I’d like to chime in and highlight technology areas that I’ll be focusing on while I’m there next week.

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)

Cisco’s entry into the server computing realm by providing a platform that unifies network, compute, storage access, and virtualization resources. A “wall of UCS” at VMWorld will showcase 16 racks containing 64 chassis, 512 blades, 4096 cores, & 24 TB of memory. This is where the VMWorld labs are run out of and it is expected that ~1500 users will be accessing the UCS systems at any given time through VMware View.

Here’s a video of what the rack looks like at the Moscone:

VMware View and Cisco WAAS

As remote desktop technologies gain adoption throughout enterprises, Cisco’s WAAS & ACE products ensure availability & performance when users access their remote desktop images through VMware View. (more…)

idea blog, 24 august 2009

Earlier this week I read on NY Times about the GPS run craze sweeping through the running community and wondered if there’s an iPhone app that tracked your GPS coordinates and “drew” them for you to upload to sites like gpsdrawing.com. I found the following apps that sort of accomplishes that.

Trails – Primarily designed to record maps while hiking, on bike trips or while jogging directly on your iPhone.

InstaMapper’s GPS Tracker – Periodically uploads iPhone’s GPS coordinate to a website to be shared w/ other people.

Neither application does exactly what I’m envisioning. So here goes idea #1 for today’s blog… and that is an iPhone application that basically tracks your GPS coordinates and plots its movements over a period of time, producing a “drawing”. Sort of a fun / waste-your-time application that can be applied to running, hiking, roadtripping. (more…)

How to get started in the Cloud

Here’s a presentation by the CEO of GoGrid at CloudWorld09. He discussed:

• What is Cloud Computing – The Cloud Pyramid
• The Benefits of Cloud Computing & Hybrid Hosting
• What can Cloud Computing do for me and my business
• The Competitive Landscape & Key Differentiators
• Cost Savings of Cloud Computing – pay only for what you need
• How to determine when to utilize Cloud Computing
• How should you get started using the Cloud?
• How to identify what to put in the cloud first (more…)

web-based screen capture/recording tool

As simple as it is to create a video and share it with the world (aka screencasting), I feel that technology for creating a recording of one’s desktop interactions (combined with audio) is still somewhat limited. Camtasia is probably the better known desktop/screen recording application. However it only works on Windows. Same goes for the open-source Camstudio. I did find a couple screen recording tools for the Mac. (more…)

X-Forwarded-For log filtering

The “X-Forwarded-For” is a HTTP header commonly used to pass the original client ip address as the web request traverses through reverse proxy servers. Furthermore, to truly capture the request ip address, the web server must be configured to record the ip address from the X-Forward-For header. If not, the log file will simply show that all requests are coming from the reverse proxy servers that frontend the web servers. (more…)

Configuring Sendmail to relay through Gmail SMTP

Sending email directly from the MTA (mail transfer agent) on one’s server is now considered to be faux pas. Unless you’ve got that machine configured within DNS (MX record, reverse lookup, etc), it’d likely fail most basic spam checks at the destination mail server. The complexity of the configuration increases if you’ve got the need to masquerade emails from multiple domains. (more…)

Dissecting Amazon Web Services

Just reading this article on AWS and thought I’d share some interesting numbers (in addition to the Quantcast data I shared earlier):

• 52 billion objects are stored in S3 and that S3 requests regularly peak at 80,000 requests per second.
• EC2 is experiencing monthly growth of “almost 10%.”
• Amazon has U.S. data centers in Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle, and St. Louis, and international data centers in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. (more…)