Erik Howard

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

• 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

• More News of Google Buying Twitter
  Posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 in acquisitions – Comments: (0)
  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.
• Amazon Introduces Elastic MapReduce
  Posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 in MapReduce – Comments: (0)

  Amazon Elastic MapReduce

  [/caption]Today, Amazon annouced the availability of it’s newest web servrice – Elastic MapReduce.Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

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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

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Today, Amazon annouced the availability of it’s newest web servrice – Elastic MapReduce.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Amazon Elastic MapReduce automatically spins up a Hadoop implementation of the MapReduce framework on Amazon EC2 instances, sub-dividing the data in a job flow into smaller chunks so that they can be processed (the “map” function) in parallel, and eventually recombining the processed data into the final solution (the “reduce” function). Amazon S3 serves as the source for the data being analyzed, and as the output destination for the end results.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce applications can be authored in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++.  Elastic MapReduce applications only run on Linux/Unix instances running in the US region on EC2. Both reserved and on-demand instances are supported. If you have any on-demand instances, they will be used first.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce pricing is in addition to standard EC2 rates.

Current Amazon MapReduce Pricing

Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 charges are billed separately. Pricing for Amazon Elastic MapReduce is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type, from the time job flow began processing until it is terminated. Each partial instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour.

Erik Howard MapReduce cloud computing, ec2, hadoop, MapReduce