Somewhere out there!

We’ll be visiting here next time I’m in Vienna: Zanoni & Zanoni.

Well, maybe not quite; but here are some discussions about things that are going on now.

The thin embedded hypervisor in your future:

In order for a future like this to happen — with an embedded, thin hypervisor and a full mix-and-match set of virtual appliances cooperating on your desktops and servers — the hypervisor must be independent of the underlying operating system.

Where is all this virtualization going?

The trusted desktop is now behind a line of security that will protect it from the outside and from other VMs. Then you have a default non-trusted application VM. Maybe this VM runs applications like an Internet browser, media player, etc. This VM (or more likely its applications) is invoked whenever the user makes a call outside its trusted area or uses an application specifically configured for high security. This application is then presented to the trusted desktop (kind of like an ICA seamless window) but
is actually running in another VM. The non-trusted application VM might not even have an entire OS like we know it. Instead this VM may be another VM Appliance that has a small OS that loads just enough to support that browser app and a few multi-media type apps and presents the screen (like ICA or RDP) into a window in the Trusted VM.

The notion of a rentable VPU leads itself to considerations of a Trusted Computing Platform. It seems likely to me that a future appliance firewall will mediate both the ingress and egress of data not just from the network but to the processor.

Technorati Tags: vmware, future, vpu, trusted, computing

At the moment one of my side projects is understanding how Sun Ray works, and how maintainable its infrastructure is. As part of this I’m building a small lab with a trial version of Window 2003 Terminal Server and Solaris 10. Initially I installed Windows TS on a spare dual Xeon, then I changed by mind and decided to install both Windows and Solaris in VMWare machines.
This gives more flexibility, especially as Solaris 10 is a rather new experience with a learning curve greater than I expected. Multiple snapshots are very useful and save a lot of reinstall time. I went though all three main versions of VMWare, Player, Server and Workstation, before deciding that Workstation was definitely worth the money in this of situation. I put Ubuntu and VMWare Server on the dual Xeon for a larger test, but Server is not as useful for the development of machines.

During the week while doing some research on VMWare, I discovered something that had really only been a side consideration in the past. The growing development of virtualisation appliances. This revolution that seems to have been pushed along nicely but VMWare’s release of Player and Server as free products. I’ve used UML and Xen for a long while to both reduce the cost of hardware and admin time, but free access to VMWare’s more generic technology combined with the new high performance Dual Core desktop platforms is creating a whole new field of development. A network effect, like that of the fax machine or OSS, is creating a lot of opportunities for interesting stuff.

A case in point are the winners from VMware’s recent Appliances Challenge: HowNetWorks, Trellis NAS Bridge and Sieve Firewall. Other examples are the appliances at rPath: Sugarcrm, Foresight Linux, and a VoIP platform. And similar examples in the wide like Asterisk in an Hour with a Trixbox VoIP appliance.
The demand is there.

Discovering new areas of technology development like usually this gets me thinking, and my thoughts at the moment are that we are seeinga leading edge of the next revolution in user computing.

So for example, rather than carrying a phone, people will simply have a piece of software. There is no need for a laptop when even the local traffic lights will rent you some time on a virtual CPU or VPU. Within twenty years even your pocket pen will have the equivalent of a Duo Core 2 and so surrounded an ocean of computing, the notion of a PC becomes meaningless. Generic structured software virtual appliances will provide utility and carried by the end user, accessible via a PAN and mediated via other
appliances, they will interact with the world. The hardware platform itself like a pen will become disposable.

Data is the new platform carried by the Virtual Processing Unit.

Technorati Tags: future, vmware, appliance, software, vision, vpu

PSGw (Personal Skype to H.323/SIP gateway) is an application that allows connecting Skype network with H.323 and SIP networks. PSGw works as a router that should be placed between Skype and H.323 or SIP network and route calls according to user-defined rules.
Also a Linux version!

Technorati Tags: voip, skype, sip

I haven’t posted much recently as we’ve been busy with the sale of our house and the hunt for our new house. Our new home will be 600m from work, 500m from a nice park, swimming pool and gym, and 300m from the Onehunga cafe area. Even though I usually work from home, being able to walk down to grab some paperwork is going to be much nicer than having to drive for 25 minutes.
Yesterday, I got a good deal on an old Sun Ray 1 via Trademe. I’ll be doing some testing with these in the next couple months and will be comparing SRSS with NX.

Short tip for making USB keys read-only in WinXP:  How To Prevent Windows XP Users From Writing To USB Drives.

Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control.

From there right click and create a new key and name it “StorageDevicePolicies”. In the window on the right then create a new DWORD value and label it WriteProtect, give it a value of “1” and users can no longer write to USB drives. To re-enable this option change the value to 0 and users are again allowed to write.

Technorati Tags: tip, winxp, usb, storage

An article by The Angry Economist.

You can’t help poor people until you understand why they’re poor. To those who don’t know: poor people aren’t poor because they have no money. They’re poor because all their choices in life suck. Giving them money doesn’t automatically solve this problem for them.

This is basically my opinion as well, although I might prefer to say: “You can’t help people until you understand why they need help.” That said I believe a fair and happy community should provide itself insurance against certain risks, this reduces the overall psychologically cost of life. Of course things then start getting complicated again.

Technorati Tags: economics, life

SoftFlex™ Computer Gloves look very interesting. Time to find a piece of string to measure my wrist and then see if they can ship to New Zealand.

Other than supporting the wrist they probably do a good job getting it warm and the blood flowing. Which is an added benefit over mouse gell pads.
From.

WikiCal is a web authoring tool for pages for publish spreadsheet like data to a website or blog. Check this screencast for some insight into how it works.

Technorati Tags: wikical, spreadsheet

I’ve read several articles about the increasing price for real estate to build data centers in “resource-rich” location. A corollary to that with a short reference in this article is the increased stock value of companies that provide efficient hardware:

Rackable Systems Inc. (RACK ), which sells highly efficient servers and data storage equipment, has more than tripled its stock price since going public in June, 2005. And a surge in demand for Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD )’s power-sipping server chips is one reason it is humbling rival Intel Corp. (INTC ).

It then struck me as I was reading this:

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