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Jun
25thRazor OSS #2 : Public Release of MK
Shortly after the open-source release of Razor in late May, we started to see requests from users for more information about the Microkernel that is used by Razor. What distribution was used as the basis for this Microkernel? What services does it provide? What is involved in building a custom Microkernel that will support my hardware? Will the Microkernel be open-sourced as well? If so, will it be part of the Razor project or a separate (but related) project? At the same time that these requests started coming in from the Razor community, we saw our first Razor issue that was directly linked to the Razor Microkernel. The issue was with support for a networking card that we hadn’t seen before (the Broadcom NetXtreme II card) that was presenting some issues for a Razor user (The Microkernel it wasn’t checking in with the Razor server on machines that used this network card because the it couldn’t connect to the underlying network). In the end, the issue turned out to be that the firmware needed to support this network card was not included in the Microkernel (even though firmware for this card that would work with our Microkernel was readily available). Our intention all along was to make this project publically available, but we still hadn’t worked out the last remaining issues around automating the build of a Microkernel ISO from the Razor Microkernel project itself (at the time of the Razor release late last month the process of building a [...]
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May
21stLex Parsimoniae : Cloud Provisioning with a Razor
Blogging has been very difficult for me over the last 4 months. My move to the Office of the CTO within EMC changed much of what I did and left me searching for content I could write about. Most of what I was dealing with on a daily basis was either too early to mention or too secret to reveal. Today, this changes with the release of a project I have spent the majority of my days and nights working on this year. Without long-worded wind up I am proud to announce the release of Razor, a cloud-provisioning tool to change the way we look at provisioning hardware for cloud stacks. Razor is a software application, which is a combination of Ruby (main logic) and Node.js (API, Image Service) for rapidly provisioning operating systems and hypervisors for BOTH physical and virtual servers. It is designed to make standing up the base substrate underneath cloud deployments both simple and transactional. Now at this point, many of you are thinking: “Great, another *cloud* provisioning tool.” And I don’t blame you at all. So what makes Razor different than many other tools out there like Cobbler, Dell’s Crowbar, or other deployment services? Just about everything. The real answer to that question is related to the reason this project is named Razor. We based much of our design theory after Ockham’s razor. It is based on the belief that OS/hypervisor deployment should be simple, succinct, and incredibly flexible. Many products out there try to [...]
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Mar
1stUBERLinkedTwit : Chambers special
So my buddy posted the following tweet today: And since I had some calls today I decided to kick off a project to do just that. So here is a simple github link for UBERLinkedTwit: Basically a command line ruby script which using the LinkedIn gem to auth, pull, and grab twitter ID’s for your connections. I haven’t rigged it up to auto-follow using the Twitter gem yet. But that is pretty easy using the Twitter gem examples. Hit the github project, get LinkedIn developer keys, read the README, and have fun. Free free to extend and I will pull into main project. .nick
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Feb
11thManic Innovation Challenge(Feb) : UBER Twitter Stats
UPDATE : As of last week UBER Twitter Stats are offline. The account used for replying to requests was tagged as spam and blocked. I don’t plan on moving to a new account. Instead I am going to work on a replacement which should rock even more. Continuing my pursuit of the Manic Innovation Challenge I am proud to release my newest *dumb* idea: UBER Twitter Stats! NEW UPDATE – Based on some tips (thanks: Brian Katz @bmkatz) some of the details haved changed below to make UBER Twitter Stats work a little easier. The same old command style still works. But the newer one is much easier. Written in 100% Ruby and running in the cloud, UBER Twitter allows you to ask me (technically my cloud-like proxy @myubertwit) for interesting recent stats about your Twitter account. It is really quite simple. Send a tweet to my app account (@myubertwit) with the text: “<command>”. With the command being one of the following: My Word Count – Will reply with the top 20 words you used recently. This automatically strips out very common words. Shortcut: ‘mwc’ Mention Word Count – This will reply with the same as the above but for tweets that mention or are to you. Shortct: ‘mmwc’ Who I Mention – This will list the top 20 people you talk to or mention in your recent tweets. Shortcut: ‘wim’ Who Mentions Me – This will reply back with the top 20 people who have mentioned you the most lately. [...]
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