It’s been no secret that Verizon has been selling off it’s old-school copper customers fast and furious lately. But I somehow fail to catch the news that Verizon is also selling off it’s FiOS division, to which I happen to be a customer of.
If your not familiar with FiOS, it’s a bundled service (cable, internet and television) offering from Verizon operating over fiber-optic network. Service is delivered over fiber-optic cables using 3 different wavelengths. One for voice, one for internet and one for television. I’m happy to say that my house is legacy free. I don’t have any copper coming from the outside into my house, everything is all fiber-optics.
In my area (Portland Oregon) Frontier Communications based, out of Connecticut, has purchased all of Verizons POTS, copper cable and FiOS service for $5.3 billion dollars. Verizon was doing pretty good with operations here in the Pacific Northwest. Verizon also spent billions of dollars rolling out it’s FiOS service to my area. One of the first in the country to get FiOS. So it’s kind of surprising that Verizon would turn around and sell a promising asset that they spent billons rolling out.
There are also questions about wether or not Frontier can handle such a transaction. Frontier is buying assets 3x the size of it’s current operations. They are also buying a much more advanced network. It remains to be seen if they can handle the exisiting FiOS infrastructure and expand out the network – seriously doubt that.
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Erik Howard Verizon FiOS, Verizon
Today Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released Ubuntu 9.04.
What makes this release stand out from previous Ubuntu releases is the new Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud services.
Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud services is the first commercially-supported Linux distribution that enables businesses to build private cloud environments inside their firewalls. Companies will now be able to create their own private clouds pretty easily.
The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is powered by open source system known as Eucalyptus. The Eucalyptus API matches Amazons EC2 API. If you really are dying to create your own private cloud, check out the Ubuntu Eucalyptus Getting Started documentation.
Besides supporting creating private clouds, Ubuntu 9.04 will also be fully available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Thanks to the work of Alestic and others, creating an Ubuntu EC2 instance was quite simple. With Ubuntu 9.04, Canonical is taking more of a leading role in helping customers deploy Ubuntu EC2 instances.
Erik Howard Ubuntu, cloud computing cloud computing, Ubuntu
Too many posts to handle? If you missed out on a great post from last month, here’s a quick digest of the top posts that you may want to check out:
- Erlang Debugging and UTF-16
Posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 in Erlang – Comments: (0)
I’ve been teaching myself Erlang. It’s a great Functional Programming language. I’ve also dabbled a little with Scala.Besides wanting to learn a new computer language, I’ve also wanted to port some of my high-traffic Ruby On Rails sites into Erlang. Erlang will be able to handle 3x-4x the traffic using less resources. Less EC2 instances up and running means more money in my pocket.
- Installing Erlang on Ubuntu
Posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 in Erlang – Comments: (0)
Lets rewind to about a month ago. As I usually do, I skipped past the README files and installed Erlang with apt-get. Ten seconds later, I had Erlang up and running on my Ubuntu development VM. Like a bad teenage horror movie, I’m sure you can see where this is going.Fast forward to present day. I was running into another serious compiler error with Erlang.
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Lets rewind to about a month ago. As I usually do, I skipped past the README files and installed Erlang with apt-get. Ten seconds later, I had Erlang up and running on my Ubuntu development VM. Like a bad teenage horror movie, I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Fast forward to present day. I was running into another serious compiler error with Erlang. A few of the Erlang web frameworks were refusing to compile – again. As usual, the error message being thrown by Erlang was as cryptic as Aramaic spoken with a lisp. Nothing turned up in Google about the error. I even hopped on the #erlang channel on IRC hopping to get a few pointers.
No one had a direct answer, but I did get a clue. One person mentioned that Erlang is very good telling you vary far in advance if there will be any breaking changes in future releases. I also found out that I was using an Alpha release. Not good, not good at all.
So armed with this new information and a few hunches, I un-installed Erlang (again) and download the last stable release – R12B-5 at the time of this article. Here’s what I did.
sudo apt-get libncurses5 libncurses5-dev
tar xvzf otp_src_R12B-5.tar.gz
cd otp_src_R12B-5/
./configure
make
sudo make install
I had to install libncurses5 and libncurses5-dev since it wasn’t installed on my Ubuntu development VM.
After building Erlang from source, I went back to compile my code and everything worked. Erlang is definitely death by 1,000 cuts. It’s enough to make a grown man cry.
Erik Howard Erlang Erlang, Ubuntu
I’ve been teaching myself Erlang. It’s a great Functional Programming language. I’ve also dabbled a little with Scala.
Besides wanting to learn a new computer language, I’ve also wanted to port some of my high-traffic Ruby On Rails sites into Erlang. Erlang will be able to handle 3x-4x the traffic using less resources. Less EC2 instances up and running means more money in my pocket.
While playing around with mochiweb I ran into a compile error that didn’t make sense. At least it didn’t make sense to my limited knowledge of Erlang. The error was this:
Eshell V5.5.5 (abort with ^G)
1> c("mochijson2.erl").
./mochijson2.erl:38: illegal atom
./mochijson2.erl:2615: no module definition
error
I opened up the file and went to the offending line-numbers and could not find anything out of the ordinary. After a little Googling, I found a post on the Erlang-Questions mailing list from someone who had the same error as I did.
Turns out that there was nothing wrong with the file other than being encoded as UTF-16, which Erlang does not like at all. It would have been nice if the compiler threw an error saying that your source file is in the wrong encoding. Illegal atom / no module definition just doesn’t cut it for me.
Cryptic error messages have been my biggest stumbling block with learning Erlang. I take two steps forward, then one epic step backwards. So the moral of the story is to make sure that all of your Erlang files are encoded using Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) and not UTF-16.
Erik Howard Erlang ec2, Erlang, software development
Too many posts to handle? If you missed out on a great post from last month, here’s a quick digest of the top posts that you may want to check out:
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More rumors today from TechCrunch about Google and Twitter. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch goes on to say that Google and Twitter are in early talks of some type of partnership or an outright acquisition.
Last year Facebook was in talks to buy Twitter for over a half billion dollars. Twitters current valuation is around $250 million dollars. If such a deal would go through this would be the second time that Evan Williams has sold a company he co-founded to Google. He previously sold Blogger to Google.
Here’s hoping that the rumors are true. The fail whale is starting to appear a little too frequently for me.
Erik Howard acquisitions, twitter acquisition, google, twitter
