Keystrokes :.

So this post is about the EU Hackathon 2011 I participated on 8-9 Nov, 2011.
I’m not going to write too much about how cool such experience was, although it is the very first thing that comes to my mind when I think about it: having the chance to work with a kick-ass team, full focused, with limited time, on something related to an important topic, next to other ~50 guys coming from 17 different countries all over the world with the same purpose… it has been just amazing. Not to mention the whole nice context: the hackathon had its opening and closing ceremonies inside the EU Parliament in Bruxelles and the coding session in the Google’s office (kind of a Googleplex).

This post is about a bad experience I had recently with my previous cloud provider, VPS.net. I want to make this very clear: this is NOT meant to complain or whine, but rather to tell this funny story and make people who are thinking to use this (and other?) service providers aware of what they are accepting.

Truth to be told, I’ve been an happy customer of VPS.net for almost two years: cheap service, acceptable availability, quick and reactive support were the key ingredients of my illusional satisfaction.

My resource was a small virtual private server, where this blog was hosted along with few websites I maintain and my private stuff (mail, svn, backups, small services, things i need to access from everywhere, etc.), nothing critical, no big deal. Actually pretty cool. Unfortunately, as someone say, good things rarely last.
Read more

A couple of weeks ago I’ve been suggested to join a kind of game named CCU (for Critical City Upload) where players are supposed to accomplish missions in the real world and then post details (e.g., pictures, videoclips, written stories or whatever) on the gaming platform for the other players to vote and discuss them.

Even nicer, players can eventually group together and accomplish sort of group missions, which sounds kind of fun . CCU’s landing page features a nice video which gives an idea of the game.

I think that is actually a brilliant idea, which might finally get people out of their places and eventually have fun together, so I basically joined and played a couple of missions. Right now, two weeks are gone and I didn’t find the time to play more, but I’m planning to do that as soon as spare time will come. And it definitively worth a post

My last mission:

Join CCU

Well, someone just made me notice that the paper* I contributed to write with the GEYSERS consortium for the Workshop on Green Communications and Networking at INFOCOM 2011 has been uploaded on the IEEEXplore archive.
That’s nice :].

* “Energy Efficiency in integrated IT and optical network infrastructures: The GEYSERS approach”, DOI 10.1109/INFCOMW.2011.5928835

… and by the way, here is my master thesis,
presented on May, 26^th 2011.

Cloud computing represented one of the most significant shifts in the IT industry, eventually delivering the long awaited dream of computing as utility. The paradigm is rapidly evolving towards combined management of heterogeneous elements in flexible virtual infrastructures offered as a service, which fall under the name of Service Oriented Infrastructures (SOIs). This work focuses on how software applications’ design can exploit the advantages of such dynamic infrastructure services, in order to satisfy non-functional requirements. First, a detailed instance of new generation SOI is presented, outlining the GEYSERS project. GEYSERS Service Delivery Framework (SDF) will enable flexible, combined “optical networks + any IT” Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provisioning, guaranteed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and designed with energy efficiency in mind. Considering this kind of services, this work aims to identify the set of most relevant problems for three major non-functional requirements, and to collect and present proper solution strategies. Wide Area Network (WAN) optimization is considered in the first place, decoupling the argument in this work from optical technologies employed by the GEYSERS project, and making it suitable for generic SOIs. Problems relevant to security are then investigated: first the additional concerns introduced by the new paradigm are identified; then, they are discussed from the different viewpoints of network security, data security and security auditing. Scalability is finally addressed, presenting popular techniques used by enterprise software systems and web-scale applications. This work concludes discussing the concept of service templates, and presenting few examples, in which the usage of illustrated techniques is exemplified.