_why scares me, in a good way. When he’s not illustrating his recent code snippets by hand, drawing cartoon foxes, making an idiosyncratic soundtrack to an equally-idiosyncratic Ruby programming manual, he’s coding, furiously.

Witness balloons, little webpages that you can plug some Ruby code into and share with the world. The world can then run the program by running something like this on the command line:

ruby -ropen-uri -e 'eval(open("http://balloon.hobix.com/balloon_name").read)'

Just replace the balloon_name with the name of the balloon and run the command line. As a bonus, the code is viewable by a normal web browser. For an example, look at keepvid.

Hobix, _why’s blog engine, always used this mechanism to install itself, so I guess Balloons were a logical outgrowth.

Silly? Yes. Brilliant? Quite possibly.

ASIDE: IMHO, The funniest creation _why ever came up with was this fake ad that lampoons those X10 “camera” ads that were once ubiquitous on teh intarweb back in Web 1.0 days.

I spent a little time tonight poking around inside a virtual machine booted on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud web service. I knew that they used Xen for virtualization, but that’s about all. Here’s what I found.

Opteron Inside

Looking at /proc/cpuinfo, it looks like the host machine is running an AMD Opteron 2.4 GHz processor. Very nice.

Custom domU Kernel

Yes, Amazon uses their own custom-built domU Linux kernel built as a monolithic kernel image with no module support. You can put whatever kernel you want on your filesystem image; it will be ignored completely.

Here’s what uname reports:

Linux domU-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx 2.6.16-xenU #1 SMP Wed Dec 20 12:45:04 SAST 2006 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

/tmp can be nearly infinite

All you need to do is mount /dev/sda2 to get a freaking huge virtual disk for scratch space:

[root@domU-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx ~]# mount -t ext3 /dev/sda2 /tmp
[root@domU-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             4.4G  2.1G  2.1G  51% /
none                  851M     0  851M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2             147G  189M  140G   1% /tmp

1.8 GB of RAM Ought to be Enough for Anybody

[root@domU-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx ~]# free 
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1740944     614080    1126864          0      78224     363436
-/+ buffers/cache:     172420    1568524
Swap:      1023992          0    1023992

This particular AMI image was configured with a 1.0 GB swapfile (/var/swap), but it turns out that /dev/sda3 is available with about 1.0 GB of swap.

No Loopback Device Support

This may make some people sad.

[root@domU-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx tmp]# mount -t ext2 -o loop foo bar
mount: Could not find any loop device. Maybe this kernel does not know
       about the loop device? (If so, recompile or `modprobe loop'.)

Bottom Line

You get to rent a fully functional Linux box for $0.10 an hour. If you need a whole lotta computing power and you want it cheap without having to maintain a farm of machines, then EC2 is definitely the way to go. And, if you want to build a custom Linux appliance for the job, you can get up and running by building a raw filesystem target and following Brett’s instructions.

This will become a lot easier really soon.

Dell recently opened up an idea forum called Dell Idea Storm. Currently, the most popular request is pre-installed Linux… Although I don’t see Foresight in the list

What sets Foresight apart from the rest of the fledgling distro pack is the software management framework on which its built. Foresight is one of the most active projects based on rPath’s Conary software management system, which offers administrators a great balance of flexibility and control in deploying and maintaining applications on Linux.

read more | digg story

After a very brief night of sleep (about 3 hours), Elizabeth started having contractions, strong enough for us to drive to the hospital. At around 5:18 EST our second daughter Kate Maciel was born!

There were some post-partum complications and Elizabeth lost a lot of blood, but the doctors seem to have things under control now.

Nothing can prepare you for the roller coaster of emotions one goes through when witnessing the birth of your child. Little Yv is the most excited, and keeps asking me: “Daddy, when can we bring her home?”

Today, the rPath and Ubuntu family has gained one more member! Just ask my Y2K (Yv and Kate) duo here!

Can you say “sleep deprived”?

Jon has been working on a cool new gtk interface to rAA, here are some early screenshots of it in action.

My parents wanted to know how my wife’s pregnancy was progressing…

Our doctors have told us that our second daughter will be born on Valentines Day (February 14th for those who don’t live in the US). But what is science compared to my mother’s sixth sense who, after having just seen this photo sent to her via cellphone, boldly stated: she’ll be born by tomorrow!

Shorter Steve Jobs: "DRM sucks, and we’d be totally psyched if those idiotic record companies would stop insisting that we use it".

It’s about time someone with a little pull in the industry just came out and said it. Now that I subscribe to eMusic, I’ve really slowed down my iTMS purchases. In fact, the last two albums that I bought that were not on eMusic were actual CDs — CDs that have no DRM at all, and thus nothing with which to stop me from burning a billion copies or, better yet, tossing up on any file sharing network.

As a follow up, Daring Fireball has a must-read analysis, natch.

This is a interesting post on integrating video mode selection in the kernel.

I think this could really improve the user experience, is it a pipe dream?

I really liked the new “face-lift” given to Launchpad (still in beta)…

Something tells me we’ll see it being used by many companies in the near future as their management tool for… well, pretty much everything?!?!?

Apparently I didn’t get in the habit of blogging short entries often.

Today liferea notified me there is a new release of WordPress that I should upgrade, so I figured I might as well post something.

First off, liferea is slowly becoming a habit. I use it to track announcements about new software (see paragraph above), keep in touch with my friends, read news from ./ and some other news sites. To the point that I have now to see how I can replicate the feeds on all of my computers. Maybe I should try a news reader from yahoo.

A lot of exciting things happened. We’ve finished upgrading rPath’s issue tracker, Jira, to the latest version. And we did it in a eat-your-own-dogfood way: it’s a software appliance living on a Xen machine, as a domU. I was involved in this initially just for the Mercurial plugin for Jira, but figured we might as well go to the latest version of Jira. I had to fix several other plugins that were broken by API change (yes I wish you didn’t have to touch plugins to make them work on newer versions). It’s pretty cool, if your reference a Jira issue in your mercurial commit message, it will get indexed by Jira and linked to the issue (viewable as the Mercurial Commits tab). This link is an example.

The software appliance lets you isolate the application from the base operating system, and it makes it trivial to update it. No mess left on the host operating system either. I know package managers are supposed to help there, I’ve been installing rpm packages for almost 10 years now, trying to achieve that. But the very moment you deploy the system in a production environment, you know things get installed that you didn’t plan for. Conary helps a lot here.

I am looking forward to version 0.45 of Inkscape to land in Foresight. The screenshots look awesome. Ken promises he’ll have it committed in a couple of hours. It’s very nice to have the latest and greatest software, and Foresight is doing a great job there. A big thanks to the Foresight community and to Ken for making Foresight a great distribution - which DistroWatch reviewed yesterday.

On the personal front, we’ve been unhappy with my daughter’s school (or maybe looking for a reason to move into a larger home). At any rate, we’re in negotiations for the repairs the seller has to perform before we close. This is exciting. Except for the hour I spent today with the heating technician inspecting the gas pack in a chilly 18 degrees Fahrenheit. And for the amount of siding that has to be fixed. Hopefully we’ll get to an agreement on this. But I had to spend a lot of time on the phone with lenders, insurance agencies, inspectors, real estate agents and the such.

I’m now on Twitter. The funny thing is I remember when LiveJournal was just like this. Part of my brain is actually horrified at what Twitter represents (see title of post), but I’m going to try it out anyways.

Related reading: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve,
or why all this “connectivity” may be considered hazardous.