Enomaly EnBlog - Open Source Insights

New Blog - ElasticVapor : Life in the Cloud

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:33:00 -0400

We've started a new blog focused on Server Virtualization and Cloud Computing Check it out!

Enomaly Announces support for the Google App Engine (Google in the cloud)

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:19:00 -0400

Enomaly announces Enomalism product support for Google App Engine which enables users to run their web applications on Google's global cloud infrastructure.

Enomalism 2.0 Alpha - Now Available for Download

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:34:00 -0400

Enomaly, Inc. is pleased to announce the Alpha release of the Enomalism Elastic Computing Platform. The Enomalism v2.0 Alpha has been completely redeveloped from the ground up and further builds on the concept of " Elastic / Cloud Computing".

Web Testing in Parallel using Selenium Grid on Amazon EC2

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:07:00 -0500

Selenium Grid is an open-source tool that dramatically speeds up web testing by leveraging your existing computing infrastructure. It allows you to run multiple tests in parallel and on multiple machines, cutting down the time required for running web acceptance tests.

Introduction to the Cloud Databases (Document-oriented databases)

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:46:00 -0500

Imagine being able to create an infinitively scalable Database never worrying about running out of disk space or overloading the with too many connections. Welcome to the CloudDB.

Enomaly Domains (December 2007)

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:34:00 -0500

Listing of Domain names owned by Enomaly Inc, December 2007

Enomaly announces Enomalism 2.0 Roadmap

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:03:00 -0500

Enomalism 2.0 uses an approach to application development and deployment called Elastic Computing. This approach enables hardware, bandwidth and storage usage in a flexible way via API. Clouds of regional computing capacity can be scaled on the fly without affecting other applications deployed on the grid.

Amazon Web Services Introduces Multiple Compute Instance Types for Amazon EC2 Customers

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:57:00 -0400

Amazon Web Services LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced new flexibility for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) by introducing multiple instance types for Amazon EC2 developers. Customers can now choose compute instances up to eight times as powerful as those previously available, addressing a popular user request. Additionally, Amazon Web Services today announced that the Amazon EC2 beta, which previously limited the number of new registrants, is now open to all developers. Any developer can sign up to start using Amazon EC2 today at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2. We continue to be pleased by the tremendous level of interest from the developer and business communities in Amazon EC2, said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations, Amazon Web Services. Our beta participants provided important feedback that we used to improve the service and add new features like the multiple instance types that we introduced today. Were excited to open up the service to all developers and see the next wave of innovative businesses and applications built on Amazon EC2. Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables resizable compute capacity in the cloud to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Customers use a simple web service interface to obtain and configure capacity on Amazons proven computing environment. New server instances can be obtained and booted automatically as a developers computing requirements change. This elastic nature of Amazon EC2 allows any developer to reach the scale of major internet players like Amazon.com, but without the significant cost of building out and maintaining a massive back-end infrastructure. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing developers to pay only for the capacity they actually use. One of the most common requests from developers during our limited beta was for larger, more powerful instances, said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. Developers wanted the ability to use Amazon EC2 for more compute-intensive, memory-intensive or storage-intensive applications and now they can. Amazon EC2 customers now have the choice of Small, Large, and Extra Large instance types, which are set configurations of memory, CPU, and instance storage (for specific configuration details, see http://aws.amazon.com/ec2). The Small instance is the original EC2 instance type, and remains the default. The new instance types provide more memory, CPU, and instance storage, and are based on 64-bit technology. EC2 users can now utilize these different instance sizes to support an even broader set of applications and use cases. The creators of Animoto.com, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and high-end motion design, are integrating with the extra large Amazon EC2 instance type. Larger instance types could not have come at a better time for our business, said Brad Jefferson, Co-Founder and CEO of Animoto. We have started experiencing viral growth of Animoto since our launch last month and were beginning to get nervous about the ability of our small database instances on EC2 to handle the load. Instead of having to split our database across multiple EC2 instances, larger instances alleviate that headache and make Amazon EC2 an even more reliable and scalable solution for our business.

Creating an Effective EC2 Backup Strategy

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 22:16:00 -0400

It's 11:30pm on a Friday night and you're ready to settle down, maybe watch some Leno. You check your email for the last time and realize to your horror that your EC2 cluster has just stopped responding. Your first thought, maybe my Internet connection is down, but that's not it. Maybe my Apache is down, no I can't ssh in. Maybe Amazon is down, no, some of my machines are responding. Lastly, you check the forums and there has been a hardware failure on several EC2 machines and all your data is gone. If this sounds familiar, this discussion is for you. While I can't help you restore what is already lost, I'd like to give an overview of several different approaches to backing up and recovering your data on EC2 to ensure it never happens again. The afore mentioned scenario is exactly what happened to Enomaly earlier this year and lead us to create ElasticDrive, a continuous data protection server application for Amazon S3. You can learn more about ElasticDrive at http://www.elasticdrive.com. Please feel free try our Public AMI or VMware appliances. S3 Based Backups Backing up your data to S3 is probably going to be the easiest and most cost effective solution for most EC2 users. S3 provides virtually limitless storage at a relatively low cost. The amount of data you want to backup is an important factor when planning the perfect strategy. Other variables such as the amount of lists/puts will also become a key factor. File systems typically work on a block level meaning that data is written and read on a frequent basis. Creating a S3 based file system can be the simiplest solution but may also be the most costly if you're writing heavy amounts of data. Dumping files may be the cheapest but may require a lot of work upfront. Each have their own pros and cons. In building ElasticDrive we decided that a file system approach offered the least up-front configuration and setup for the typical consumer. Rather then having to re-design and develop an application to take advantage of the S3 API, all our customers need to do is install ElasticDrive and point their existing applications to either &; the new file mount or configure a hard drive mirror using RAID. We also felt that giving our customers the choice of several remote storage solutions allowed for the most flexibility now and in the future - after all technologies change very quickly. One of the typical starting points for using S3 is a periodic dump of data. For example, an SQL dump can happen on an hourly or daily basis. This is a simple yet effective way to backup key data and using various S3 applications such as ftp-based transfers. A popular solution has been jungledisk for S3 data transfer. For more intensive or highly dynamic applications like databases or websites, a more broad data mirroring may be more efficient. This is a use case we at Enomaly have the most experience with using our ElasticDrive. Continuous Data Protection We created ElasticDrive for the purposes of continuous data protection. Wikipedia defines continuous data protection (CDP) also called continuous backup, as backup of computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data, essentially capturing every version of the data that the user saves. It allows the user or administrator to restore data to any point in time. This becomes very important if you lose an instance in the middle of a transaction and you want to roll back to a point before the transaction had started, such an hour or two in the past. You could even roll back days, weeks or years if needed - any point in time before the corruption occurred. ElasticDrive is a service that captures data changes to a separate storage location. There are multiple methods for capturing the continuous changes that serve different needs. CDP-based solutions can provide fine granularities of restorable objects ranging from crash-consistent images to logical objects such as files, mail boxes, messages, database files and logs. For Enomaly the simplest solution is to run ElasticDrive in the form of a mirrored RAID drive (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) where all data is automatically written to a S3 backed virtual drive. In order to restore all our previous data we simply need start a new AMI with ElasticDrive automatically mounted at startup, which prepares us in case of such an emergency. If an instance is lost, a new AMI can be launched and downtime is kept to a minimum. If you assume the AMI's are going to be lost, you could even create a monitor to automatically repair or rebuild lost instances with little to no human intervention. This is also very handy when using both local and remote server resources inside and outside of AWS. Virtual Tape Library & Off-site / Remote Backups Another option is to create a virtual tape drive where data is backed up to look and act like a tape similar to a traditional enterprise but instead to a virtual storage environment. There are literally dozens of commercial and open source applications dedicated to tape based backup. One such application is Zmanda which allows for an easy to manage environment with a web based graphical interface and various other features. Amanda provides the unique capability of writing backups to tape and disk simultaneously. The very same data can be available online at EC2 for quick restores from a local disk and off-site (low cost dedicated server host or S3) for disaster recovery and long-term retention. http://amanda.zmanda.com/Using traditional dedicated hosting providers is also a popular trend among EC2 users and may be a solid approach for long term low cost data protection. A number of third party vendors offer API based S3 alternatives. For instance AOL xdrive offers 5GB for free. Network File Sharing & Virtual SAN Creating a virtual storage area network is yet another option. This allows for either a master / slave type environment to be configured or even a hybrid where both a S3 backed drive and distributed storage engine can be used. A recommendation for this type of solution is dcache and is ideally suited for use with EC2.The goal of this open source project is to provide a system for storing and retrieving huge amounts of data, distributed among a large number of heterogenous server nodes, under a single virtual filesystem tree with a variety of standard access methods. Depending on the Persistency Model, dCache provides methods for exchanging data with a variety of storage systems as well as space management, pool attraction, dataset replication, hot spot determination and recovery from disk or node failures. Connected to a distributed storage system, the cache simulates unlimited direct access storage space. Data exchanges to and from the underlying HSM are performed automatically and invisibly to the user. Filesystem namespace operations can be performed through a standard nfs interface. http://www.dcache.org/Distributed / Replicated File System Another option is to use a Google style replicated file system. One such system is GlusterFS. It enables a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. GlusterFS effectively allows users to create a google style cluster with data distributed amount multiple EC2 nodes. This is great when working on large EC2 clusters as the chance of all cluster nodes failing at the same time is slim so additional S3 storage may not be needed. Although for most users I would still suggest some kind of secondary backup regardless of the amount of EC2 redundancy. My concern with glusterFS is its lack of data security so be careful. MySQL Backup and Recovery Most modern web applications depend heavily on a database. The most frequently used database for Enomaly is MYSQL. Having an effective database backup and recovery plan can save you time and money. There are a number of third party applications devoted to helping manage SQL backups ranging from ruby or java libraries to full turnkey solutions such as Zmanda's MYSQL backup. The Zmanda offering is free and extremely user friendly. Features include; Schedule full and incremental backups of your MySQL database. Start immediate backup or postpone scheduled backups based on your needs. Choose to do more flexible logical or faster raw backups of your database. Perform backup that is the best match for your storage engine and your MySQL configuration. Backup your remote MySQL database through a firewall. Configure on-the-fly compression and/or encryption of your MySQL backups to meet your storage and security needs. &; Get e-mail notification about the status of your backups and receive MySQL backup reports via RSS feed. &; Monitor and browse your backups. Define retention policies and delete backups that have expired. Recover a database easily to any point in time or to any particular transaction, e.g. just before a user made an error. Parse binary logs to search and filter MySQL logs for operational and security reasons http://www.zmanda.com/backup-mysql.htmlIn conclusion, there are various security measures you can take to make sure you don't lose important data. The best bet is to save your information in more then one place and plan for the worst. --------------------- You can learn more about ElasticDrive at http://www.elasticdrive.comAbout Reuven Cohen Reuven Cohen is the Founder and Chief Technologist at Enomaly Inc, a Toronto based open source technology firm. Reuven has extensive experience working with emerging enterprise technology and has developed in excess of 500 websites for companies including John Hancock, Intel, Alliance Atlantis, 20th Century Fox, Best Buy and Business Objects. To Learn more about Enomaly, please visit http://www.enomaly.com or http://www.enomalylabs.com

Enomalism Announces Support for Open Virtual Format (OVF) for Portable Virtual Machines

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 12:05:00 -0400

Enomalism Inc today announced the support of the Open Virtual Format (OVF) specification submitted by leading virtualization companies targeting an industry standard format for portable virtual machines.

ElasticDrive Beta 0.1.6 - Amazon S3 FileSystem

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 10:49:00 -0400

Enomaly Inc is proud to announce the release of ElasticDrive. ElasticDrive is a network block device based upon the Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). ElasticDrive provides a caching block device driver which pushes blocks to and from S3 as if they were being written to a local block device. ElasticDrive FileSystem is now available for free download at http://www.elasticdrive.com/download.html ** Beta Software, use at your own risk. ElasticDrive provides this service through a virtual NBD service. The NBD service translates from standard NBD to S3 packets transparently, so that the client (the kernel) sees a generic block device. NBD is supported on almost every linux kernel (including EC2). Simply modprobe nbd, and you are ready to use ElasticDrive. ElasticDrive is not intended to replace your existing hard drives or network filesystems directly. ElasticDrive is intended to provide seamless backup, RAID target devices, or backing stores for higher level distributed filesystems. Use Cases --------------------------------------------------- File and Block-Level Replication ElasticDrive supports block-level replication. High-speed block-level replication enables the movement of transactional workloads such as mail servers and database servers. Disaster recovery and long-term retention ElasticDrive provides the unique capability of writing backups to a local disk and a remote storage system simultaneously. The very same data could be available on-line for quick restores from a disk and off-site. Cost-Effectively Back Up Your Servers Perform server & virtual server backup at any time. ElasticDrive provides an easy-to-use, centralized backup facility that leverages a remote distributed storage environment via Amazon S3 and other. Perform full and incremental file backups of virtual & physical machines or create full image backups. Centrally manage backups to simplify management of IT resources by using a single agent running on a remote server rather than an agent on every virtual or physical machine. Perform anywhere-to-anywhere workload migrations with broad multiplatform support. Move and protect all workloads regardless of hardware, operating system or virtual host. Protect all workloads in the data center with live incremental replication. Implement flexible, efficient and affordable workload protection and recovery solutions Release notes & Installation instructions http://www.elasticdrive.com/uploads/media/readme.txt Download > http://www.elasticdrive.com/download.html ElasticDrive is brought to you by EnomalyLabs, you can learn more about EnomalyLabs at www.enomalylabs.com

Enomalism Virtual Server Manager 0.7.1 Released - LGPL

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:15:00 -0400

Enomaly, Inc. is pleased to announce a new update of its Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard for Xen Hypervisor 3.0x. The free update and immediate availability of version 0.7.1 software adds important stability and reliability to the web-based administrative tool. These ongoing developments continue to improve and enable the elastic management of multiple isolated virtual servers to be managed from an easy to use web based interface

GeoStratus - Geo-targeted Private Computing & Content Delivery Network

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 10:48:00 -0400

Enomaly Inc today announced the creation of GeoStratus. The GeoStratus Elastic Computing Network is a geographically-targeted content delivery service that leverages a global network of low-cost hosting centers. From North America to Europe to Asia, GeoStratus incorporates clouds of targeted virtual server clusters with advanced content network architecture that automatically adjust to peak internet usage & demands.

Enomalism Amazon EC2 Migration Module

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 10:34:00 -0400

Enomaly Inc today announced the release of the Enomalism Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Migration Module.

GeoElastic : Adhoc Geo-Targeted Virtual Computing Alliance

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:20:00 -0400

Enomaly is proud to announce the creation of the GeoElastic Virtual Computing Alliance. GeoElastic is a adhoc global alliance of hosting providers who have come together to create a global elastic computing cloud of geographically targeted virtual servers.

Enomaly Releases Enomalism v0.6.9 - Virtual Server Management Dashboard

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:19:00 -0400

Enomaly, Inc. is pleased to announce a new update of its Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard for Xen Hypervisor 3.0x. The free update and immediate availability of version 0.6.9 software adds important new improvements and features to the web-based administrative tool. These ongoing developments continue to improve and enable the elastic management of multiple isolated virtual servers to be managed from a easy tot use web based interface.

Enomalism to offer customized Elastic Cloud Computing services & platform.

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:17:00 -0400

Enomaly Inc today announced the limited release of the Enomalism Elastic Computing Cloud Platform. The customized grid service will target the specialized capacity demands of large-scale hosting and data centers.

Draft VMcasting Specification Published

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:13:00 -0500

VMcasting is an automatic virtual machine deployment mechanism based on RSS2.0 whereby virtual machine images are transferred from a server to a client securely delivering files containing a Technical Specification and virtual disk image.

VMfind - Virtual Appliance Search Engine

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 15:17:00 -0500

Enomaly is proud to announce the launch of VMfind.com, an online community & search network for virtualization technology with a focus on, pre-configured virtual appliances, tech papers, documentation, forums and blogs.

OpenID decentralized user-centric digital identity system

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:17:00 -0500

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity.

ElasticTube goes Beta.

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:58:00 -0500

ElasticTube.com provides everything you need to rapidly deploy internet video powered services across the web.

Run Your Own Google Style Computing Cluster with Hadoop and Amazon EC2

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:09:00 -0500

Hadoop is a framework for running applications on large clusters of commodity hardware. The Hadoop framework transparently provides applications both reliability and data motion. Hadoop implements a computational paradigm named map/reduce, where the application is divided into many small fragments of work, each of which may be executed or reexecuted on any node in the cluster. In addition, it provides a distributed file system that stores data on the compute nodes, providing very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster. Both map/reduce and the distributed file system are designed so that node failures are automatically handled by the framework. Amazon recently released their EC2 Elastic Computing cloud which allows developers to acquisition computing power a the rate of $0.10 per hour consumed. Recently work as been done to allow Hadoop to run on EC2. This combination will allow developers to write scalable algorithms and then bring up large numbers of servers for computing power which can then be then shut them down when they are not needed.

Hacker's Profiling Project (HPP)

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 14:57:00 -0500

Imagine being able to preview an attacker's next move based on the traces left on compromised machines. That's the aim of the Hacker's Profiling Project (HPP), an open methodology that hopes to enable analysts to work on the data (logs, rootkits, and any code) left by intruders from a different point of view, providing them with a profiling methodology that will identify the kind of attacker and therefore his modus operandi and potential targets.

Trixbox, an Asterisk-Based VOIP Phone System

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 10:45:00 -0500

Asterisk based trixbox enables even the novice user to quickly set up a voice over IP phone system. trixbox can be configured to handle a single phone line for a home user, several lines for a small office, or several T1s for a million minute a month call center.

Windows running on the Amazon Elastic Cloud Beta

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 13:50:00 -0500

Yes, we've done it! We were able to get windows Server 2003 running on EC2. Here is the screen shot of the remote desktop connection.

The Deal with VM Rootkits

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:04:00 -0400

&;"There's an interesting interview on eWeek with Joanna Rutkowska, the stealth malware researcher who created 'Blue Pill' VM rootkit and planted an unsigned driver on Windows Vista, bypassing the new device driver signing policy. She roundly dismisses the quality of existing anti-virus/anti-rootkit products and makes the argument that the world is not ready for VM technology. From the article: 'Hardware virtualization, as recently introduced by Intel and AMD, is very powerful technology. It's my personal opinion that this technology has been introduced a little bit too early, before the major operating system vendors were able to redesign their systems so that they could make a conscious use of this technology, hopefully preventing its abuse.'" http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2040760,00.asp

All I want for Xmas is Open source Java!

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 15:19:00 -0400

Jonathan is now on the record as saying that we'll have open source Java within the next 30-60 days. As reported by InfoWorld:

Walmart.com respins with open source (OpenLaszlo)

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 15:14:00 -0400

I found this very interesting, Walmart.com is relaunching, and has open source at its core. Why is this significant, because it's OpenLaszlo from Laszlo Systems. OpenLaszlo is a great way to add rich media functionality to your website. WalMart agrees, and so do we!

Test your web design in different browsers

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:32:00 -0400

Every now and again an web2.0 app catches my eye..

Amazon EC2 - Utility Computing

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 13:03:00 -0400

Recently, Amazon announced the launch of a new virtual computing service called "Elastic Compute Cloud" or EC2. The company claims the solution offers easily scalable computing on demand to developers. The service works in conjunction with another service that the company launched in March, Amazon's Simple Storage Service or S3.

Enomaly Annoucement : Business Objects Dev Community Site Live

ruv@enomaly.com — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 09:12:00 -0400

Enomaly Inc is proud to announce the launch of the latest Drupal powered community site, Business Objects Developer Community website at > http://diamond.businessobjects.com/ Over the last year the Developer Team at Business Objects has been working with the BO developer community, and Enomaly to leverage the company's technology as well as open source software to better understand how to help the BO developer community be successful in providing powerful solutions for their organizations. From the feedback that we got it was clear that they needed to invest in a strong community site as well as providing developer focused tools. In response to these requests, we have built the Diamond Community site (http://diamond.businessobjects.com/) which is supported by a skilled community team with many years of industry experience. Diamond is a new way for customers to get access to content on Business Objects and Crystal product lines. Diamond is aimed at developers, report designers, IT administrators, and any one who is tasked with creating business intelligence and reporting solutions. With the Community hosted on Drupal, we are helping to encourage an online community of developers helping developers. The Community will be a meeting place where customers, partners, and employees can share examples, experience, and solutions for the benefit of the entire community. The Community is organized into the three areas that every Business Intelligence or Reporting Solution should follow: Design, Develop & Integrate, and Deploy.

Enomaly Alfresco PodCast

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:09:00 -0400

Alfresco Fresh Talk Episode 3 [65:41m] Topics discussed: * Reuvens background and freelancing experience. * The attraction to Open Source Software. * The founding of Enomaly. * The creation of Enomalism. * The appeal of Alfresco. * Reuvens upcoming interview at Call for Help on G4-TechTV. * Rich Internet Applications and AJAX. * Recent news such as Adobe Spry, Intel Core 2 Duo, Open Rico.

Sun Embraces Open AJAX

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:03:00 -0400

Sun has announced its support of the AJAX application model by joining the OpenAJAX Alliance, as well as the Dojo Foundation. Sun plans to actively participate in these two communities, driving open standards for AJAX programming and increase interoperability across AJAX technologies. As part of the OpenAJAX Alliance, Sun will collaborate with over 30 other member companies and organizations to identify and consolidate best practices, reach a consensus on programming models around a reference implementation for tools interoperability and generate wider AJAX adoption throughout the industry. Sun is also a new sponsor of the Dojo Foundation and will participate in the Dojo Toolkit project. To quote, The Dojo Foundation is a 501©(6) non-profit organized to help promote the adoption of Dojo and to provide a healthy environment for JavaScript engineering of every stripe. The Dojo Toolkit is an open source JavaScript toolkit for making professional web development faster and easier. As part of the Dojo Toolkit project, Sun will be contributing AJAX widgets, helping with internationalization efforts and refining documentation. Greg Murray, Suns AJAX Architect, will be one of the people representing Sun as a member of the Dojo Foundation.

Age and Entrepreneurship

ruv@enomaly.com — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 13:12:00 -0400

Will Price had a &; very interesting post to his blog today. He outlined creativity comes in two distinct types - quick and dramatic and careful and quiet. David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago, analyzed the creative output of leading artists. He plotted the relationship between an artist's age and the value of their paintings. He quickly realized the artists clustered into two distinct groups - conceptualists, who did their breakthrough work early in life and then declined and experimentalists - who developed slowly, experimented and iterated, and peaked later in life. In the former camp are artists such as Mozart (age 30), Andy Warhol (33), Picasso (26), F. Scott Fitzgerald (29), and in the latter camp are figures such as Twain (50), Cezzanne (64), and Beethoven (54). Matt Asay summarized this nicely; " abbreviating far too much (and far too sloppily), you get the young entrepreuners who rock the world because they don't know any better, and the "old" entrepreneurs who innovate on the world as it is, because they know the world too well." At 27, I'm on startup number 3. My first attempt was &; a web design shop when I was 15 (1994), back then I was ahead of the curve, this like today was a double edged sword. My second company, was a video streaming company (Graphic Substance) I started in (1999) in NYC, i was also ahead of the curve. My most recent company Enomaly Inc (2004), an open source development shop, and by far my most sucessful company to date is sucessful because of my previous failures. Our latest product, Enomalism is in the midst of a beta period and poised to really move things to the next level. Dare I say I remain slightly ahead of the curve. &;This year I was awarded software developer of the Year in Canada, 12 years in the making, there is something to be said for experience. Experience gives you the insight that you just can't get anywhere else. I am the sum of all my past sucesses & failures, for those made me a better entrepreneur.

Open Source Startups & Marketing - its simple

ruv@enomaly.com — Fri, 12 May 2006 15:03:00 -0400

With our first open source Product, Enomalism launching next week, I thought I'd post my two cents about open source product development,

Open Source Marketing

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:46:00 -0500

To me open source marketing is about strength in numbers. Id rather have 100,000 free users with 1000 paying customers then just 1000 paying customers.

JBoss Web Server

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 14:15:00 -0500

JBoss Web Server is a new open source project that will provide enterprises with a single, high-performance deployment platform for Java Server Pages (JSP) and Java Servlet technologies, Microsoft ASP.NET, PHP and CGI. JBoss Web is built on Apache Tomcat and includes Apache Portable Runtime (APR) and Tomcat native technologies to achieve scalability and performance characteristics that match and exceed the Apache HTTP Server.

Microsoft and SugarCRM partner on open source

ruv@enomaly.com — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:06:00 -0500

Partnership is expected to boost interoperability and reveals an ever-increasing cooperative attitude on open source.

Oracle snaps up open-source Berkeley DB

ruv@enomaly.com — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:05:00 -0500

The database giant said Sleepycat's open-source Berkeley DB database will complement Oracle's existing line of closed-source databases for embedding within applications. The products differ from Oracle's flagship enterprise database software used for general business systems.

Opening Day for OpenSolaris on Xen

ruv@enomaly.com — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:03:00 -0500

According to the release on the sun Blog, Running on Xen, OpenSolaris is reasonably stable, but it's still very much "pre-alpha" compared with their usual finished code quality. Installing and configuring a client is do-able, but not for the faint of heart.

Yahoo! Releases OSS Ajax and Design Tools

ruv@enomaly.com — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:02:00 -0500

Today Yahoo! released the Yahoo! User Interface Library. This library is comprised of a number of dynamic HTML utilities and controls for building rich web UIs and Ajax applications. They are made available under an open-source license. In addition, Yahoo! released the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.

Remote Desktop Apps Compared

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:35:00 -0500

Together with sharing files over a network, being able to control another computer remotely is particularly appealing to users with their own networks - especially when printers, scanners and other gadgets are connected to the alien machine. RISC OS has a number of applications to achieve this and while each are very similar, they have their own individual features that make them stand out in different ways.

UWIN - Unix for Windows

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:33:00 -0500

UWIN or Unix for WINdows, is developed and released by AT&T Laboratories and David Korn - the creator of Korn shell. UWin basically consists of a set of tools and libraries which helps application developers compile and run Unix applications natively on windows. The tools include a complete shell (Korn Shell) for Windows which is bundled with all the command line tools you find in Linux/Unix

Fedora Core 5 Test 2 Released

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:32:00 -0500

Fedora Core 5 Test 2 has been released. "The Fedora Project announces the second release of the Fedora Core 5 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures.

Perl 6 is coming

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:31:00 -0500

Perl 6 is the long-awaited redesign and reimplementation of the popular and venerable Perl programming language. It's not out yet - nor is there an official release date - but the design and implementations make continual progress. Innumerable programmers, hackers, system administrators, hobbyists, and dabblers write Perl 5 quite successfully. The language doesn't have the marketing budget of large consulting companies, hardware manufacturers, or tool vendors pushing it, yet people still use it to get their jobs done. Why argue with that success? Why redesign a language that's working for so many people and in so many domains? Sure, Perl 5 has some warts, but it does a lot of things very well.

Mining the untapped potential of open source content management

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:29:00 -0500

Open source moved into many mission critical sectors in 2005, and if any of the slew of analyst surveys about market penetration are correct, it will continue to grow into the next decade.

GPL 3 Draft Released

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:28:00 -0500

A draft of GNU GPL version 3(define) is now publicly available for comment and discussion. The defining license of the Free Software movement is undergoing a revision process that will provide the foundation for the next decade's worth or free and open source software.

OpenVZ Pushing for Linux Kernel Inclusion

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:26:00 -0500

News.com is reporting that SWSoft is trying to get OpenVZ into the Linux kernel. OpenVZ is an operating system level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. From the article: "In this, it has a major ally: Red Hat, the top seller of the open-source operating system, which plans to add the software to its free Fedora version of Linux for enthusiasts. The companies' move to make OpenVZ partitioning standard in Linux is timely, said Pund-IT analyst Charles King."

The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source

ruv@enomaly.com — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 13:35:00 -0500

Open Source developers have, perhaps without conscious intent, created a new and surprisingly successful economic paradigm for the production of software. Examining that paradigm can answer a number of important questions.

Adobe Open Source

ruv@enomaly.com — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 13:33:00 -0500

Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of values, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides.

Towards Open Source Flash Development

ruv@enomaly.com — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 13:32:00 -0500

If you love Flash Technology and Open Source development, you're lucky because some folks in the Flash community are developing really good tools, which integrate with other existing Open software. The result: A dream environment for Flash SWF creation. From now on you don't have to pay any kind of license and you are able to modify the source code of any tool.

Suneido - Open Source integrated application platform

ruv@enomaly.com — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 13:32:00 -0500

Suneido is a complete, integrated application platform - a system for developing and deploying applications without the frustrations of integrating multiple different products. Suneido incorporates an object-oriented programming language, client-server relational database software, and application frameworks and components. It includes the integrated development environment (IDE) used to create applications as well as the client and server required to run applications across networks. Suneido is Open Source - it is provided free, with complete source code.

Open Wengo - Open Source VOIP

ruv@enomaly.com — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 13:27:00 -0500

OpenWengo is an open source project, initiated by the French company Wengo, itself backed by neuf telecom.

MapServer Foundation : Autodesk Embracing Open Source

ruv@enomaly.com — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 18:40:00 -0500

snapshot of the MapServer Enterprise source code is available today through the new MapServer Foundation, an independent non- profit organization with the mission of supporting and promoting open source web mapping. The foundation's charter members include MapServer Technical Steering Committee members, the University of Minnesota MapServer Project, the DM Solutions Group, and Autodesk

ccMixter : Open Souce Commons

ruv@enomaly.com — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 10:28:00 -0500

At ccMixter, musicians and DJs are using Creative Commons licensing to share music content and build a community of artists, thanks to the open source back-end system ccHost, an infrastructure designed to facilitate storage, tracking, and sharing of multimedia content.

Protégé open source ontology editor / knowledge-base framework

ruv@enomaly.com — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 00:44:00 -0500

Protégé is a free, open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework. Protégé is based on Java, is extensible, and provides a foundation for customized knowledge-based applications.

Django Project : high-level Python Web framework

ruv@enomaly.com — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 20:04:00 -0500

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

PRADO : PHP Rapid Application Development Object-oriented

ruv@enomaly.com — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:09:00 -0500

PRADO is a component-based and event-driven framework for rapid Web programming in PHP 5. PRADO reconceptualizes Web application development in terms of components, events and properties instead of procedures, URLs and query parameters. A PRADO component is a combination of a specification file (in XML), an HTML template and a PHP class. PRADO components are combined together to form larger components or complete PRADO pages. Developing PRADO Web applications mainly involves instantiating prebuilt and application-specific component types, configuring them by setting their properties, responding to their events by writing handler functions, and composing them into application tasks. PRADO provides the following benefits for Web application developers: reusability - Codes following the PRADO component protocol are highly reusable. Everything in PRADO is a reusable component. ease of use - Creating and using components are extremely easy. Usually they simply involve configuring component properties. robustness - PRADO frees developers from writing boring, buggy code. They code in terms of objects, methods and properties, instead of URLs and query parameters. The latest PHP5 exception mechanism is exploited that enables line-precise error reporting. performance - PRADO uses a cache technique to ensure the performance of applications based on it. The performance is in fact comparable to those based on commonly used template engines. team integration - PRADO enables separation of content and presentation. Components, typically pages, have their content (logic) and presentation stored in different files.

pake - php5 project builder system

ruv@enomaly.com — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:08:00 -0500

pake is a PHP5 project build system with capabilities similar to make. pake has the following features: pakefiles (pakes version of Makefiles) are completely defined in standard PHP5 syntax. No XML files to edit. No quirky Makefile syntax to worry about (is that a tab or a space?) ; users can specify tasks with prerequisites ; pake is lightweight. It can be distributed with other projects as a single file. Projects that depend upon pake do not require that pake be installed on target systems. pake is heavily based on rake, a similar system for ruby. pake is available under an MIT-style license. simple example pake_properties('properties.ini'); pake_desc('task example'); pake_task('mytask'); pake_desc('another task example'); pake_task('anothertask', 'mytask'); pake_file('myfile.tmpl'); function run_mytask($task, $args) { print "my task"; } function run_anothertask($task, $args) { print "this task depends on 'mytask' task"; }

Symfony open-source PHP5 web framework

ruv@enomaly.com — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:02:00 -0500

Based on the best practices of web development, thoroughly tried on several active websites, symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure.

GoboLinux 012 : New Linux Destop Distro

ruv@enomaly.com — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

One major problem with the Linux world is the overwhelming number of redundant distributions, especially in the desktop-oriented area. It's rare to see a new distribution that isn't a Debian or Red Hat clone in disguise with an extra feature or two, or that dares to take a bold departure from the status quo. One of those rarities, however, is GoboLinux.

Apache Geronimo Application Server Challenge

ruv@enomaly.com — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 01:06:00 -0500

Apache Geronimo Application Server Challenge, sponsored by IBM lets you see for yourself how an easy to use, J2EE 1.4 compliant platformalready rounded up with the best in Open Source projectscan tame the worst of your development challenges. Youll benefit from Geronimos rich feature sets and no-obligation Apache LicenseAND you could also win a 42" Plasma HDTV, or a Sony PSP.

Coming Soon GPL 3.0

ruv@enomaly.com — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 16:57:00 -0500

The Free Software Foundation is just weeks away from announcing the roadmap and process that will govern the release of the first draft of the rewritten GNU General Public License.

The Java Desktop System

ruv@enomaly.com — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 12:05:00 -0400

The Java Desktop System is a secure and comprehensive enterprise desktop software solution that combines the best of open source innovation. Java Desktop System is a major component of the Solaris 10 Operating System, x86 and SPARC architecure editions, and an earlier release is also available with a Linux OS.

OpenFTS: (Open Source Full Text Search engine)

ruv@enomaly.com — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 22:38:00 -0400

OpenFTS (Open Source Full Text Search engine) is an advanced PostgreSQL-based search engine that provides online indexing of data and relevance ranking for database searching. Close integration with database allows use of metadata to restrict search results.

PostGIS: Open source gis software

ruv@enomaly.com — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 22:36:00 -0400

PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. In effect, PostGIS "spatially enables" the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS), much like ESRI's SDE or Oracle's Spatial extension. PostGIS follows the OpenGIS "Simple Features Specification for SQL" and will be submitted for conformance testing at version 1.0.

Project Looking Glass!

ruv@enomaly.com — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 23:53:00 -0400

What if your desktop was actually a 3D environment? What if your CD or movie database became a 3D jukebox? Project Looking Glass is based on Java technology and explores bringing a richer user experience to the desktop and applications via 3D windowing and visualization capabilities. It is an open source development project based on and evolved from Sun Microsystems' Advanced Development division. It supports running unmodified existing applications in a 3D space, as well as APIs for 3D window manager and application development. At the moment, existing application integration is supported for Linux and Solaris x86 platforms. The platform for 3D application development is available for Linux, Solaris and Windows platforms.

OpenOffice.org, AJAX and Common Sense

ruv@enomaly.com — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 23:47:00 -0400

One day in the not-too-distant future, you sit down at your keyboard to check your messages from Google's Gmail, then fire up Google Word to write a couple of letters. Next, you work on a presentation on new business locations in Google Point, incorporating maps from Google Maps and satellite imagery from Google Earth.

Support for AJAX Development Rising

ruv@enomaly.com — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 23:45:00 -0400

Looking to enrich user experiences with Web applications, vendors are increasingly turning to Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

MINIX 3 OS

ruv@enomaly.com — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 09:40:00 -0400

MINIX 3 is a new open-source operating system designed to be highly reliable and secure. It is based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX, but is fundamentally different in many key ways. MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 adds the new goal of being usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability.

The point of Google Print

ruv@enomaly.com — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:56:00 -0400

Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written. Imagine an historian being able to instantly find every book that mentions the Battle of Algiers. Imagine a high school student in Bangladesh discovering an out-of-print author held only in a library in Ann Arbor. Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world's books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Open Office 2.0 comes out

ruv@enomaly.com — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 14:27:00 -0400

Version 2 of OpenOffice, the open-source software suite that aims to compete with Microsoft Office.

Google Nears $100 Bln Value

ruv@enomaly.com — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 14:21:00 -0400

Google Inc. approached $100 billion in market value and analysts rushed to raise their price estimates after the company's results soared past the most optimistic of expectations.

Open source taking over Europe

ruv@enomaly.com — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 14:14:00 -0400

Nearly half of European local government bodies are using open source software while nearly a third don't know that they are using open source at all.

Flock Browser Takes Flight

ruv@enomaly.com — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 14:07:00 -0400

Flock, a social browser eagerly awaited by the tech set, was publicly available this week, after the company by the same name discovered its software had been posted on a file-sharing network.

Singularity : Open Source RFID/Sensor Middleware

ruv@enomaly.com — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 14:04:00 -0400

Singularity is an open source project dedicated to developing and promoting RFID middleware technology for use in supply chain management and the EPCglobal Network. Singularity has two major components, the Middleware and EPC Information Service (EPC-IS).

Xen Vs. VMware War Imminent

ruv@enomaly.com — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 01:09:00 -0400

The imminent launch of XenSource's first commercial open source solutions will kick off commoditization in the virtualization software market and threaten VMware's bread-and-butter revenues, observers predict.