Category Archives: Programming

Cloud Demystification

Posted on by Diego Caravana
1

Something weird and unexpected happened lately: the big Amazon cloud failed. Anyone on any media is talking about it, and everyone is communicating just this sense of surprise.

Wait a second and let’s ask to ourselves: why is it weird and unespected that AWS failed? The cloud is something human, so it has failed, as expected, and will fail again. By the way, I am sure that it failed a number of times in the past, but the failures weren’t so big to be noticed like the last big event. Continue reading →

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URL Shortening

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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Introduction

If you want, you can read everything about URL Shortening on wikipedia (i.e. http://​bit​.ly/​b​g​k​uGT or http://​d3w​.io/​9​K​i​lxK or http://➡.ws/蔤囦 ) but I would like to shortly (sorry, pun intended) say a couple of things.

The “URL shortener” concept is very simple: take an URL and transform it into another (shorter) URL, then use redirection to go back to the first URL. So what’s the deal? Continue reading →

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A simple SimpleDB use case

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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I’m happy to say that I had the chance to use Amazon AWS for a project of my customer Deltatre.

The news is particularly good because it offers a real argument in the “use or don’t use it” debate, and offers practical innovation to the company.

Technically, we decided to go on with SimpleDB during the development of deltatrePULSE (or simply Pulse) product: the idea of CTO Carlo De Marchis is to create a new distributed system that will open more the Deltatre web/sport platforms. Continue reading →

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Google Chrome Mac Builds

Posted on by Diego Caravana
1

Here you can find the builds of Chromium (the open source project on which Google Chrome is built) for Mac OS X that the fine guys at Google are preparing for us.

Waiting for an official version of Chrome (and for Firefox 3.1), let’s continue the browsers’ war on features and not on the garbling of web standards!

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Lightweight Microsoft​.NET Process Debugging in Production Environments

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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Everyone is aware of the problem of discovering the causes of a bug when it’s only present in one environment and, if it’s Production, the problem is even bigger, even if you have a solid error logging system in place.

Recently we faced this same situation and we didn’t have any clues to help us, only that the w3wp process was dying and the ASP​.NET session remained locked. After some thought, we arrived at the conclusion that there was an infinite loop somewhere, and we had a vague idea of the “zone” of code where this was happening, but we couldn’t reproduce it in any other environment even after several hours of testing.

Continue reading →

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Clouds Evolve: Dealing with Infrastructure Complexity

Posted on by Diego Caravana
2

As expected, at least by me, Amazon EC2 is evolving in a more “concrete” platform good for web hosting; in fact, some time ago I received a mail from AWS announcing two new features: Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones (you read for sure the news also on Slashdot: Amazon EC2 Now More Ready for Application Hosting, isn’t it?)

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Amazon EC2 will get persistent storage

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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Only a small note to let you know that Amazon is hearing us and added a new feature to EC2: persistent storage.

As a subscriber of AWS services yesterday I received an email in which Amazon announces that we “will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance…”.

The mail ends saying that the new functionality “will be publicly available later this year” and offers a link to request to join the private beta program; I subscribed it and will let you now as soon as I’ll put my hands on it.

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More on the [Computing] Clouds

Posted on by Diego Caravana
4

Recently I stumbled upon a couple of articles1,2 and, remembering my experience with EC2, I discovered that utility computing was not what I was searching for: I was searching for something that helped me without adding complexity, but I was not happy with simple web hosting offers, I wanted also complete control over my infrastructure to have the technical freedom that I could need and because, when I think about my customers’ data, I trust no one.

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Helping Improve Virtualmin

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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Only a small note to let you know that Virtualmin (from version 3.54) can be used for serious work when importing websites from Plesk backups: I tried the previous version with some web sites but it was too buggy, so I decided to help authors in debugging and testing it; I think that now Virtualmin can import the backups in a rather complete way.

BTW, Plesk is a good product, full of features, but I prefer Webmin/Virtualmin because they let me have full control of the server, instead of the way of Plesk that is too automatic in my opinion and offers less choices, impositions that I feel too strong (one for all: Plesk comes and works only with QMail).

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