Later when I got home, my MacBook wouldn’t turn on so I decided that maybe if I hugged it, it would come back to me.  It didn’t, so at that point I realized I would either need a new keyboard or a new laptop, I was rooting for option 1.

So I made an appointment at the Genius Bar.  Went in and had to wait a bit because they were a little back logged, but I didn’t complain because they have laptops and internet where you wait, and I can spend time reading and what not.  So eventually I got called.  The guy was super nice and helpful, he took my laptop into the back and it booted up.  He came back out and told me that I needed a new keyboard.  Awesome, only $100, I can live with that.

So then he started typing everything up and he looked at me and said “What’s your password for the computer?”.  And I looked at him.  I was slightly dumbfounded that this man was asking for my password.  And I sat there and just stared ahead and then I did the dumbest thing I have done in quite a while, I actually told him my password.  I left the interaction feeling like I had just made the biggest mistake ever (mostly because I had) and then I went to Whole Foods, had some dinner and drove home.  On that drive home I realized that they now had access to my entire life.  Just about every password I have is saved somewhere on that computer.  The moment I walked into the door I got on my netbook and proceeded to change every password I could think of.

The next day I got a survey from Apple asking about my Genius Bar Experience.  And while the service was good, the security was not.  So in the comments I went on a diatribe about how they should have offered me a way to change my password.  About how it was so unsecure to just take a users password without explaining what could happen.  Blah blah blah.  So yeah I was pissed and I let it all out in that survey.

And then something strange happened.  They actually called me later that day.  Crazy I know.  The store manager I eventually spoke with (lovely woman by the name of Kristin) first assured me that if someone were to breach security the way I was describing that they would be fired immediately.  She also assured me that they do take security very seriously.  She then said that she had never really thought about what the conversation about asking for a password looked like with users that didn’t express concerns about handing over their password.  They have thought about the conversation they have with users that do express concerns, but not with those that don’t.  She said that my comments really made her think.

I did make sure that I told her that I didn’t think that the problem was specific to her store (Dedham Legacy Place…I recommend it) but was a company wide issue.  And while I don’t think that Apple should be walking around trying to evangelize security, I did say that I chose Apple back in the day because of their customer service, and that I think its important for them to talk with customers about things like this if they want to keep their track record of excellent customer service.  She seemed to buy what I was selling.

So hopefully I don’t have to go back to the Genius Bar any time soon, but if I do, I’ll be interested to see whether or not they really have changed.  At the very least I’m impressed with the manager I talked to and that Apple actually bothered to contact me.

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Visual depiction of the rotating Moodle architecture

I have a plan to back up Wheaton’s Learning Management System (LMS) to the cloud on a yearly basis. I talked about the basics of this architecture in my post I <3 Redmine and You Will Too.Essentially each academic year I will rotate a years worth of Moodle into the cloud, only keeping the current year and the previous year.  Here’s a picture to give you a little help in understanding.

So now I need to find a way for people that are not me to access the Moodle that lives in the cloud.  The problem is that every moodle has a config file, and in that config file, Moodle asks you to specify the URL for where your Moodle is located, this is slightly problematic because:

1. Amazon EC2 servers are not given IP addresses, they are given a Public DNS like
2. Technically they can be assigned to an IP address but Elastic IPs cost money when they aren’t being used, and frankly I would rather not have to pay extra if I don’t have to.
3. The people accessing these Moodles can’t be expected to ssh into a server and change the config file.

So I need to make this happen automagically when the server starts up.  I tried using the php variable $_SERVER but I got some weird things.  So my idea is to have a start up script call the public-hostname (using the API amazon provides) and then edit the config file.  That way when the server starts up, Moodle will automagically be available.

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I never argued *against* PHP/Python/Perl or even use of Linux/Apache by PaaS vendor. Just noted PaaS users *shouldn’t* care.

I apologized and asked for clarification since it seemed to me that there was an argument about whether or not a PHP/Perl cloud was necessary.

I re-read the article a few times, and on the last go around the only new explanations I could see from it was:

1. if i wrote in php a vendor would deploy in another language
2. he meant that the LAM in LAMP was what didn’t matter  (although that didn’t seem to be explicitly stated)

In the meantime though, I’ll just wait for a response (I sent it late last night and people tend to sleep) rather than possibly misinterpret more.

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James’ last question: “Is the ‘open sourceness’ of a programming stack even that important anymore?” is a good one, but orthogonal to the discussion about a LAMP/PHP cloud, in my mind.

So why has this conversation gotten me in a tizzy and forced me to write two blog posts in one week?  Well two reasons:

1. Many web based open source projects are built on the back of P languages (PHP, Perl, and Python)
2. The cloud exists to make technology easier for the masses.

Now before I go any further I will disclose that the first language I learned was PHP.  The second one was Perl.  While I know there are wars that start on listservs about what languages are better, that is not the purpose of this post, so put it out of your head and don’t say anything about how much you think PHP sucks in the comments.

Web based open source projects are built on the back of P languages

Now I could write something about this, but I like lists.  So here is a brief off the cuff list of what open source projects use P languages:

1. MediaWiki (PHP)
2. WordPress (PHP)
3. Bugzilla (Perl)
4. Drupal (PHP)
5. Plone (Python)
6. Moodle (PHP)
7. AWStats (Perl)
8. MovableType (PHP and Perl)
9. Subversion (Python and C)
10. Trac (Python)

Now, I’m not going to argue the merits of how good each of these piece of software are. Again that’s not my point.  But they are popular whether you like it or not.  And to just dismiss them would be foolish.

The cloud exists to make technology easier for the masses

Google Docs makes it easier to get to files you need to edit.  Heroku makes it easier to deploy Ruby on Rails apps.  Amazon EC2 makes it easier for you to deploy a server.  The fall out of the cloud is that technology suddenly becomes much easier to create and deploy.

So what happens when my mom wants to write her own blog.  Well, most likely she heads over to WordPress.com and creates a blog for herself.  And if she needs a little more, then she signs up for the WordPress Premium services.  But what if I want my own blog.  Well right now I have my friend hosting my stuff.  But what if I want it hosted elsewhere and I don’t want to maintain servers (since I do that all day long).  My only option right now is to do what my mom is doing, but the reality is, that’s not what I want.  I want something like Heroku but for PHP.  And if I had it, I could install any of the PHP applications listed above.

And I think this conversation is very pertinent given that Google just announced its open source learning management system written in Python and intended to be deployed in Google App Engine.  This could potentially be a big blow to Moodle who doesn’t have a cloud to turn to.

Conclusion

So yes a PHP based cloud does matter.  And yes it should be built because there are lots of people clamoring to use it (or who have already figured out a way).

And yes this blog post could be more coherent.

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Visual depiction of the rotating Moodle architecture

I’m in the process of setting up an architecture for Moodle. Essentially using VMWare I’ll rotate out servers every academic year.  Older server images will be put in the cloud so that if we need access to them quickly, we can do that without any problems.  This will allow me to:

1) get away with not having to do necessary MySQL tuning since Moodle doesn’t really delete much from its database.

2) not have to deal with compatibility issues since Moodle has been know to create course back ups that don’t work with future versions of the software.

3) deal with file storage issues, namely that users often thing the course management software is the place to store all of your files for ever and ever (its not by the way).

So now that I’ve come up with that I need a way to figure out what I have to do to make this work and then hope that I don’t forget those tasks.  Enter Redmine.  If you haven’t used it before, I recommend checking it out.  There is a demo redmine you can use to play around with it.

tasks that need to be accomplished in order to set up the Moodle architecture.

What I like about it is its flexibility.  At MPOW I am essentially a developer, systems administrator, and project manager all rolled up into one.  Its a lot of hats to wear, and often times I forget tasks, or I need to talk out the entire process.  Essentially I use Redmine to help me with that.  I can enter new features for the developer Rosalyn to work on.  I can enter tasks for sys admin Rosalyn to work on.  And all of this is done by project manager Rosalyn who is trying to help the sys admin and developer work together (yes i do talk to myself…and answer back).

Redmine has subtasking, subprojects, and you can change all kinds of things in it so that it can essentially function however you want it to.  And its written in Ruby on Rails so extending is easy (although the plugins are plentiful so you may not even need to write your own code).  I’ve gotten my boss on board with it, and he’s slowly trying to infect others so that they use it too.

So that’s my new best friend Redmine.  It has helped me organize and focus my day on the things that need to get done.  I <3 it and if you try it out, I think you will too.

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I was asked to write a piece on the cloud (I know you’re shocked) in the upcoming issue of Educause Quarterly which will be dedicated to the cloud. If you’re peer reviewing for that particular journal, we will now pause so that you can close the window (the peer review process is double blind) ………………………………………………………………………………………..

Ok good. Now that they’re gone. Here is a link to a first pass at my article:

Defining Cloud Computing

Essentially its a rehash of my presentation at NERCOMP with a bit more depth and significantly fewer audience members asking questions (not that I mind questions…that was my favorite part by far. its just that i didn’t actually get to finish the presentation properly because there were so many questions). The article itself defines the cloud, and then uses videos to illustrate each of the definition’s points.

Questions, comments, and feedback are welcome.

And yes, I was trying to be funny when I used the cloud to deliver an article on the cloud (see web address of article for more details).

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Adding wordpress.com blog as connected site in Google Buzz

Works like a charm.  If you’re not a wordpress.com site you can add the <meta> tag by going to the theme editor and inserting the tag in the header.php file (assuming that the theme is created properly).

Yay!

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My first impression is that survey respondents don’t understand what the cloud is, but that shouldn’t have been a shock to me, most people don’t know what it is.  Admittedly this lack of understanding could be due to the way the survey was structured; but even after a couple of tweaks to the order of sections (I moved Software to the front of the survey and Platforms and Infrastructure to the end), respondents were still having a hard time understanding what was what.  I’ll most likely need to do some clean up on the survey, but I think for now I have a great understanding of what is going on in Higher Education in terms of the cloud.

In the survey I tried to define the three main components of the cloud: Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service.  After the survey was completed, I realized that I’ll need to do a better job of defining things for the audience members in my NERCOMP presentation.  Something that I though I could spend 10 minutes on will probably need a solid 20 minutes so that everyone can be on the same page.  I think diagrams and other visual aids might really help people understand what these different components are, and how they correspond to computing they are already using.

My second impression is that institutions are very comfortable with using Software-as-a-Service.  Below is a graph showing SaaS usage among respondents.  Facebook is of course the leader in the SaaS cloud race, with Twitter and Google Docs coming in right behind them.  What I think is the most interesting though is that overall, Google has the highest share of the marketplace.

As far as PaaS and IaaS, most institutions are not using these services.  I’m hesitant to show results from these sections of the survey since so many respondents confused software for platforms or infrastructure.  Once I clean things up, I’ll provide more information.  Suffice to say though, few if any institutions are using Infrastructures or Platforms in the cloud.  Those that are are using Amazon Web Services (for infrastructure) and Google Code (for platform).

More to come later.  And thank you to everyone that took the time to take my survey.  It has been eye opening and hopefully will make me a more informed speaker.

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When I saw the post I printed it out (i know…the trees) and started marking it up.  This morning when I came back into the office I took a look at the paper and realized that most of the ideas that I liked were basically screaming “I’m a project!”  Some of the highlights from the post were:

• create a user-base for your data
• market to that user-base
• think about publishing your data at the beginning of the project
• consider the sustainability of publishing your data
• think about what you’re hoping to accomplish with your open data
• who are you targeting by opening up your data
• build your project based on what you want to accomplish and who you’re targeting

None of these points are really that new to me (or to anyone that works in systems).  You need to plan before starting on a project, and if you plan right you can have an awesome project.  I think planning is what makes data.gov.uk so much better than data.gov.  It was well thought out.  They considered user-bases in advance.  They incorporated RDF into the data catalogue (yes that’s the british spelling…we are talking about a british site afterall).  These little subtleties are what people are the most excited about.

At the same time I recognize that a lot of times we’re working with retrospective data, data that we thought no one would ever want to take a look at.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it useful now, and data.gov.uk proves that. Through great planning they created a very useful tool.

So my point is PLAN PLAN PLAN.  A well thought out plan can make a project succeed or fall flat.

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As a companion to this presentation. I’m doing a survey, to see what kind of things institutions are using in the cloud. Its definitely not a comprehensive list of what’s in the cloud or even what’s possible in the cloud, but my presentation is only 40 minutes.

At any rate, if you work in academia and you’re interested in/using cloud computing, please please please take my survey.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/cloud-academia

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

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