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October 2008 - Posts
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In this PDC2008 talk, Chuck Lenzmeier - the Architect in Azure team explains how the
Virtual Images of OS works in the Azure cloud data centers. His Bio in PDC2008 says
that Chuck has been with Microsoft since 1989, and worked on all versions of Windows
from NT 3.1 to Vista. The below
video really helps to understand how the Virtual Images are being managed to achieve
Windows Azure manage while retaining absolute compatibility with existing OS, Software
and Applications.
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His co-speaker Frederick Smith from Microsoft explained the other aspects of Windows
Azure.
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Windows Azure provisions and monitors hardware elements (Compute nodes, L2 Switches,
LBs, Routers), hardware lifecycle management (burn in tests, diagnostics and repair,
failed hardware are replaced) and capacity planning
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Azure Fabric is highly available: Network has redundancy built in, services deployed
across fault domains, load balancers route traffic to active nodes only, Fabric Controller
state check-pointed periodically, FC state is stored on multiple replicas
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PDC 2008 CTP release of Azure has Automated Service deployment, Three Service templates,
change number of instances, simple service upgrade/degrade, Automated service failure
discovery and recovery, external VIP Address/DNS name per service, Service network
isolation enforcement & automated hardware management
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For 2009 release will have ability to model more complex application, richer life-cycle
management & richer network management
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I was in the talk by Andrew Fitzhugh from HP's Magcloud.com. The site is HP's attempt
to do on demand publishing of magazines and allow anyone to publish, sell and distribute
magazines. An interesting statistics that was shown that in USA about 3.6Billion magazines
were delivered to US News stands last year and out of which 2.3Billion was never read.
He talked about how Magcloud moved their front-end systems and portions of storage
to Windows Azure.
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Magcloud.com on-premises architecture |
Magcloud.com utilizing Windows Azure |
Seeing the title I had good expectations, but the session turned out to be disappointing.
The speakers completed the talk in 30 minutes and didn't have anything more to talk
or go into architecture or code details. The project seemed to me to a half-hearted
attempt to test drive Windows Azure and was a simple project to showcase anything
interesting.
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Today was the keynote by Rick Rashid, Sr. VP from Microsoft Research. Notes on the
session:
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Why is fundamental research important to a company like Microsoft or country like
USA. It is to survive tough times, about agility through your earlier investments
and having smart people
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Talked about Terminator,
liveness property. Basically if you create a lock in say "C" will the code release
it and so on
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Talked about Dryad -
Dryad is an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer
cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs, without knowing anything
about concurrent programming
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The study on computer "programs" help us to understand more on human "cells", similarly
study on "cells" is helping us to understand "programs"
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Microsoft has been working with Washington university for Collaborative technologies
- ConferenceXP
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Microsoft released today a new version of Microsoft Worldwide telescope Autumnal Equinox
Beta
Feng Zhao (Principal Researcher) talked on the energy usage, how to sense and how
we can reduce. He showed a small device made by Microsoft Research that uses a 16-bit
CPU, 10K RAM, 40K ROM to collect humidity, temperature and other parameters.
It then transmits it using a low-power Radio as they are powered by batteries which
need to last long.
He showed the below demo on how this data can be visualized:
These visualizations used in Data Center has helped them to map and plan on how cooling
happens, where to place heavy computing loads, etc. He talked about Senseweb -
a Wikipedia of Sensors which is used by over 11 universities worldwide. This
is used primarily in Swiss
alps to collate data from different instruments on alps and study them for impact
of humans on climate change.
David Heckerman in a video talked about how they are helping to find how HIV mutates
in a person using technology from SPAM identification and statistical analysis.
Matthew Maclaurin talked about Project
Boku - Lightweight programming for kids. Boku is a character/robot, he needs programming
to succeed. Why for Kids - because it is a life skill, demystify and engage &
make it easy for learning. All programming is done with XBOX Game Console, no keyboard
use. See the demo below:
COMING SOON
Finally they showed "SecondLight" an innovation based on Microsoft Surface. In SecondLight
you can show over the regular display, which gets shown only when you move an ordinary
paper above the display. There is an infrared sensor that follows you on the second
display.
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This session was done very well by Eric Schmidt (Director, Microsoft).
Some top-level highlights were:
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34 top level events sorted by icons
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At the peak, 17 live separate events were happening
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2000 hours of live content and 2200 Highlight content that was created
The result was staggering: 1.3 Billion Pageviews, 50 Million Unique Visitors, 70 million
videos watched, 5000 Unique clips viewed per day during the final week, 600 million
minutes of video delivery, 27 minutes of viewing per session, 35 million mobile
views (external), 130,000 peak streams, 3.4 petabytes of video delivered, were built
for 2.5 times of what was delivered.
Four main types of contents:
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Live Content were delivered with Windows Media Server, with commentary was coming
from commentators typing in a CMS which got moved as XML to production
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Rewind - Video on Demand play of live content
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Highlight NBC pulled out 50 Interns from college put them in 30 ROCK and make them
create these 3-5min highlights of individual events.
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Encores – Broadcast replays
Other points mentioned:
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Planning of capacity was most important. When, Where and Size (each sport is of different
length) was to be planned to determine the CPU, storage and ingress/egress needs.
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NBC was helped by Intel Penguin processor, NBC waited for it and the servers got shipped
around in May and took 6 weeks to go to Beijing
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Bandwidth out of Beijing was limited to a 40 meg (DS3). 40 encoders were running live,
so about 1MB per encoder (Digital Rapid). All this went into two windows media services
box in Beijing, this got patched to window media services in 30 Rock, New York so
that they can control if they had to. Which was then mapped to Limelight & Level
3 CDN's massive WMS boxes. More details of encoding
process in the blog post here
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No full screen due to IOC Advertising requirements on the percentage of advertisements
to video
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Many partners were involved: Deltatre (Italy) had the CMS the best in the world to
do live score on web
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HTTPWatch Professional (and Fiddler) was useful to see what’s going on
Lessons Learned:
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Scrum and Scrumming builds better teams as the teams were distributed worldwide
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Meeting Face to Face was very important, especially to bring this up cost in RFP stage
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Everyone should know all roles and all architectural touch points
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Reduce complexity via common schema
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Long-tail delivery hides issues, when you are watching current items you needed to
focus on the older contents that were being watched by the long-tail
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The industry needs better telemetry and monitoring solutions
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“Chunked” workflow (smaller sized thousand of files created) presented new challenges
– Now IIS 7.0 Smooth Streaming in Media Pack announced yesterday does this better
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Over 250 people between Microsoft, NBC and all other partners
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The announcements made in this keynote today was picked by every media around the
world, so I will be brief. You can watch
the full keynote from here.
Windows 7
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The improvements were on decreasing Memory, Disk I/O, Power consumption and on Increasing
Speed (Faster Boot, Device Ready), Responsiveness (Start Menu) and Scale up to 250
Processors
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BitLock on USB Drives to protect your data
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Native VHD support to mount and boot
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Remote Desktops now support Multi-Monitor, cool
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Multi-touch, Start Bar UI improvements and more...
On seeing this I was initially
disappointed to see no new UI or major changes. However, after using
Windows 7 in the labs and attending more sessions, I realized Microsoft was not throwing
what was done in Windows Vista, but improving on it, which is good.
The UAC improvements made me think why not introduce "Roles" like in Windows Server
for Windows 7 (Client) also. This way "Developers", "Power Users" and "Home Users"
can have different settings and security prompts.
.NET 4.0
The idea to have the "Web" guy Scott Guthrie do the talk on Windows 7 developer improvements
and on WPF was a "major coup" to promote it.
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AutoCad was showing how they are using Windows 7 Multi-Touch, Ribbon APIs for their
native C++ rendering
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A new WPF Toolkit and Silverlight Toolkit were announced today
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In .NET 4.0 you will have side by side hosting in the same process both .NET 4.0 and
.NET 2.0 CLR
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A new managed extension framework which was shown in VS2010 on how the Text Editor
can be customized
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VS 2010 is being rebuild on top of WPF, this I felt will certainly force Microsoft
to improve the performance and invest more on WPF and make it better
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Having JQuery (an Open source project) supported is another major coup within
Microsoft
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ASP.NET 4.0 will support multiple web.config, one each for Debug, Production and so
on
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Today Silverlight 1.0 is in over 25% of all machines in Internet and nearly in 100
million of them have Silverlight 2.0
Live Services
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David Treadwell showed Live Services which consists of Search, Geospatial, Live ID,
Communication & Presence and Directory services
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Live ID will now support Open ID. This if works well, has the potential to make
it come alive the dream of a single identity provider on the Internet
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The demo of BBC Live Player using Live Mesh services to sync up was cool. The
BBC Engineer talked that "Last Year Broadcaster decided what you saw, This Year you
decide what you saw, Next Year will determine what you see". What they are watching,
which segment is good will all be shared using Social networking tools and powered
by Live Mesh
Office "14"
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This was perhaps the most interesting demo of the day, with a lightweight of office
(Word, Excel and OneNote) for the Web
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The cool thing was how it synced up in real-time changes done in Client version
and the Online version. All working behind the scene with "REST" protocols
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Microsoft claimed this to be "Office without Limits"
Reviews on the Web: Windows
7, Office
14
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 After
showing preview of Silverlight for Mobile two years back, Microsoft has been absolutely
silent. Since there was no news for a long time I presumed they have killed this project.
After seeing this session today I am glad the project is alive and getting closer
to release. In this session by Amit Chopra and Giorgio
Sardo, they talked more about this - both the speakers did a fabulous job of entertaining
the audience and making the session fun. Notes on the session:
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The Mobile version of Silverlight will be Silverlight 2.0 with .NET Managed code support
and not the SL v1 with JavaScript (Thank god)
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Public CTP will be released in Q1 '09
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Most of the Silverlight applications written for desktop today can run in SL for Mobile
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A new emulator for debugging Silverlight for Mobile is now integrated with Visual
Studio
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By using the User-Agent and Platform class you can determine whether your application
is running in Desktop, Windows Mobile or Nokia phones, etc.
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Lot of optimisation work is happening to play media well on SL for Mobile
You can see one of the demos in the video below that was shown running in a Windows
Mobile:
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I am right now in Microsoft Project
“Velocity” talk in PDC2008 by Muralidhar Krishnaprasad. Microsoft has been promising
a distributed (and in-memory) cache system for a long long time. If I remember right
it was first talked about in COM/ASP days. After that in every Microsoft event a version
of it was shown (by a different team each time) in pre-release stages, but none of
them got released. The story from Microsoft on the need for one, how to solve it and
roadmap kept changing all the time. As for me, having got tired of this I have been
using SQL Server as the distributed cache for few years now.
Notes from the session:
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“Velocity” is Microsoft's Distributed Cache .
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Usage scenarios are: Reference Data, Vendor Catalogs, Activity Data, Resource Data
(Flight Seat Inventory and like)
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It is an explicit, in-memory, distributed cache
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Any .NET Objects that can be serialized can be cached
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Scale very easily, add as much memory and add as much machines as you can
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Velocity is going to be free and released in MSDN
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Runs on standard Windows PC. If machines go down, the data is preserved and not lost.
High Availability (HA) is ensured
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Velocity releases: CTP2 now in PDC, CTP3 in Mix ’09 and release at Mid ’09 timeframe
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In V1.0 simple Add queries can be done. In later versions LINQ queries will be available.
You can read more on the CTP2 that got released today from the Velocity
blog post here .
With what we were shown today of Velocity, especially its high availability, monitoring
tools, ease of use and scalability are pretty impressive. I just hope this time they
ship this and not go the previous paths.
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This was by far the best session for me in PDC2008. It was SQL Server: Database
to Data Platform - Road from Server to Devices to the Cloud by David Campbell,
a Microsoft Technical Fellow and SQL Server guru. David was brilliant, you could clearly
see and appreciate his deep expertise on the subject. He gave an overall view of what's
happening with Database in the last few decades, how you can write very complex huge
data applications today easily. And then he talked about where this SQL on cloud fits
in, where it doesn't and so on. You can see two brief demos shown in the talk below.
David Campbell talking about Sync in Action with Sync Framework in the talk
Zach Skyles Owens of Microsoft showing the Trey Research Demo application
If you want to catch up fully on what David talked about here, you can watch this
video he did few weeks before PDC2008 covering the same topic - I highly recommend
you watching this.
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Ray Ozzie
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For the last few years, the scope of enterprise applications are increasing. IT departments
have to manage more of outside users (their customers) than their internal users
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More of IT Pros and Developers have to work together and learn together in this new
cloud world
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More than ever the web site of an enterprise is critical to the overall business health
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Hat's off to Jeff Bezos and his team at Amazon for the phenomenal work they are doing
with EC2 and Windows hosting.
In ways we collaborate with them and in other ways we compete with them
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Today this cloud is another tier. The first tier is your PC or Mobile, it is all about
you. The second tier is the enterprise and its scope is the size of the enterprise.
The third tier is this cloud. To do this we had a team headed by David Cutler, Amitabh
Srivatsa and others in Microsoft
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Today's systems whether it is Windows, Java or others are all modelled for scale-up.
We need for the next 50 years, we need something that can scale out & parallel
computing
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We announce today "Windows Azure". It is our new Windows (new OS)
that supports all the infrastructure to power this cloud design. It is not a software,
but a service that is running on Microsoft Datacenters, initially in USA then to be
rolled out worldwide
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It will be the most environmentally sensitive, scalable, reliable service for all
Microsoft hosting over the years
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Windows Azure works with the same tools - VB.NET 2008, C#, C++, .NET, etc. including
both managed and un-managed code. Initially managed will be supported and later support
for un-managed will be introduced
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There was a demo of a new services, a Mobile Phone discovery in neighbourhood using
Bluetooth - bluehoo.com and client can be downloaded
from m.bluehoo.com
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Note: For the first time I saw Microsoft keynote speakers (Ray Ozzie and Amitabh
Srivatsa) in a developer conference not wearing T-Shirts but are in formal attire
with a blazer.
Ray Ozzie's closing notes video below:
Bob Muglia
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There was demo of using .NET Services and SQL Services by RedPrairie and also of System
Management "Atlanta". Atlanta uses SQL Services for customers to compare their instrumentation
data with others and best practices
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This week we are releasing "Oslo" a new modelling tool and a language "m"
Dave Thomson
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Vice President of Microsoft Online, he has headed the team that developed Active Directory
and in Exchange Server
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One of the problems to solve is federated identity. This is done by using Microsoft
Services Connector which sites on-premises and then syncs it to the online cloud.
This is currently used by Microsoft online services and will be the same used by Windows
Azure.
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I have been using as my primary laptop a Macbook
Air running (obviously) Windows Vista for last six months. Everything is great
with the laptop - the lightweight and the very cool design. There are only three things
I don't like in this laptop: No right mouse button, Only one USB port, Problem with
Wake up after sleep. The first two I can't do anything about, but the last one I can
try to fix by a driver update. A check in Apple site didn't show up any updates for
Bootcamp for Vista. Then looking into Device Manager I realized the graphics card
in Macbook Air is Intel Mobile 965 Express, so going to Intel support site I downloaded
the latest update: Mobile
Intel® 965 Express Chipset Family Ver.# 15.11.3.1576 Date: Oct 11, 2008 for Windows
Vista 32
Installing this, solved my wake up problems. If you have a Macbook Air, running Windows
Vista and having problems with the machine coming up after sleep, I highly recommend
this upgrade.
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Today I got a chance to visit Cray Inc. (The
supercomputer company) headquarters in downtown Seattle. I got to see in their lab
the recently arrived Cray CX1 Supercomputer. This is the first product to be made
after the partnership between Cray
and Intel to bring the benefits of High Performance computing to desktops. This
is a cool (with Cray's patented cooling systems and low decibel noise) computer that
you can put it under your desk (or as a Cray engineer said on top of the desk to
show the world you have a Cray machine) and run demanding applications without a datacenter.
The machine sports state of the art specifications of
Up to Eight Blades per Chassis and in each chassis - Single or Dual Intel Quad-Core
Xeons (overall upto 16 Quad Core Xeons), 64GB per Blade (or Node) and so on.
The basic chassis costs about $8000 and an average configuration including few compute,
storage and graphics nodes costs between $25,000 to $60,000. Not that expensive for
owning a supercomputer. The part I love is that it runs
Windows HPC 2008 and the front-display panel sports a Windows CE for showing the
status.
I wish I can get one of our media customers to pay for this and then we can deploy
their web servers onto this!
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I am in Bay Area, USA for 2 weeks which will take me to Silicon Valley, Redmond (WA)
and Los Angeles (for Microsoft PDC '08). Sunday evening I went along with my cousin
who lives here to Fremont
Temple. This is a well maintained and spacious (considering it is outside India)
temple and I was impressed by the newly build area for the south indian gods.
On Monday morning I went to the Intel
Museum in their campus in Santa Clara (CA). The museum covers about the history
of Intel from memory chips, 4004 to the latest chips; chip fabrication process and
basics of silicon, etc. The self visit doesn't take more than 30 minutes and I will
recommend visiting this only if you happen to be in Silicon Valley area. Not worth
travelling from anywhere far for this. I was told most of this is available online
in their website as well.
 
 
Seeing the Intel 386 PC on display brought old memories for me. I started learning
and doing extensive programming first on this PC - a 386SX (without the math co-processor)
computer from Wipro during my school days. It is on this PC I learned my first business
programming language - FoxBase and then Clipper. It is amazing the progress we have
had in terms of speed and features over the last 23 years - unbelievable.
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Mozilla in their upcoming Firefox 3.1 release is introducing an experimental feature
"Geode".
Geode is about browser (and server) automatically deducing your location and provide
appropriate location based information. Though Location-aware applications are present
in Mobile Phones using Cell-Tower Triangulation or GPS, this is the first major effort
to do something similar on the PCs.
Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C
Geolocation specification and location information will be provided by one or
more user selectable service providers and methods - GPS-based, WiFi-based, manual
entry, etc. What I was curious is how they deduct location information using Wi-Fi.
It seems they use a technology from a company called SkyHook, whose hybrid positioning
system (XPS) is a software-only location solution that allows any mobile device with
Wi-Fi, GPS or a cellular radio (GSM/CDMA) to determine its position with an accuracy
of 10 to 20 meters. Click on the video below to see how it works - basically they
are building huge database of Wi-Fi access points and correlating them with Latitude/Longitude
information from other sources like GPS for each access point profiled.
All these are transparent to developers and users, for developers it is just a Javascript
call like the one shown below:
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(pos) {
alert( pos.latitude + ", " + pos.longitude );
})
Before these initiatives web applications were limited to deducing user's location
based on your IP. Technology is not standing still with IP
based deduction, earlier they were limited to US cities, now database are more
complete and are able to identify cities world over including India.
Related links: ZoneInfo
database, GeoNames
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Before I proceed let me state my belief on this topic: I am not against Open-Source
Software, at the same time I I believe software just like other literary (creative)
works have to be based on sound viable commercial model.
I came across this video of
Stephen Fry celebrating 25 years of GNU and introducing "Free" Software. Being a award
winning broadcasting Professional Mr.Fry has done a superb job of delivering a simple
and powerful message. But I find his introduction to "Free" Software and especially
his plumbing analogy to be incorrect and misguiding general public. (See the video
below and then continue to read)
Why?. He says just like you can change the plumbing in your house any way you want,
"free" software allows you to change your computer the way you want it whereas Operating
System vendors like Microsoft prevent you from doing that. Nothing can be far from
truth.
All software vendors including Microsoft or Adobe never placed any conditions on how
you use your computers or how you connect them to other systems. The limitation comes
when you want to change the core of the operating systems and redistribute
the new operating system. The limitation is not on writing applications on
top of the Operating systems but using someone else work for your commercial benefit.
Going back to the plumbing analogy (which is a bad pick by Mr.Fry) this is like you
wanting to cast your own steel pipes in a furnace and for doing it you want the pipe
vendors to share their blue-prints and chemical composition "Free".
There is nothing wrong in you wanting to do your own steel pipes if you want to, similarly
no one prevents you (Microsoft/Adobe/Apple) from writing your own operating systems.
My whole point is it relevant for the masses, is it practical, is it necessary.
I feel there are more pressing problem in the applications space, industry domains
that can be solved by spending the limited human creative energy on. There is no need
to write yet another Operating System, yet another UNIX/LINUX, yet another MS Office
clone and so on - which is precisely what GNU has done. To see this clearly
look at the number of Linux Distros that are being introduced everyday.
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 Few
months when the Petrol/Diesel shortage happened in India I decided I will buy an electric
two-wheeler. Apart from the advantage of driving when Oil is scarce, I thought it
will also give a personal satisfaction of being environment friendly. Of course, nothing
is more "Green" than a bi-cycle. So about a month and half back I purchased
the Ultra
Velociti - an electric powered scooter. It runs only on Electricity with no Oil
at all, the dealer claims there is nothing to maintain or service in the vehicle other
than periodic Tyre Air-Pressure and Battery check.
Specifications of the scooter (* Under Standard Test conditions and
a payload of 75 Kg):
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Speed 45 Km/ Hour*
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Range 50 Km/ Charge* (Each full charge takes about 6 hours)
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Vehicle weight 88 Kg
The only dealer
I could find in Chennai when I searched was GEE GEE Motors in Royapuram, but they
were willing to come down and give a test drive in my office. The scooter on road
including Road Tax, Registration & Insurance costs about Rs.41,000/-. After paying
the full money I had to wait for nearly 2 weeks before I got the vehicle complete
with registration and Number - I don't like to drive vehicles without number and insurance.
Having been driving only a car for last several years, when this scooter arrived it
was a experience of "Freedom" for me. I was able to go for local
shopping in crowded market streets in West Mambalam & T.Nagar easily, without
having to worry about parking and traffic. When I am driving this scooter and see
the vehicles next to me I feel good that I am not polluting and I am spending negligible
money for driving. Though the manual says maximum load is 120Kgs, I was able to ride
it myself with my wife and kid comfortably - obviously a bit slower than riding it
alone, but nevertheless you can. The one problem I faced was of charge, the power
meter is unreliable - from full, once it drops to half it takes only few minutes to
drop to zero. While it is in this region, it runs in kind of a stop-n-go motion. But
this was because I didn't charge for over a week (though I didn't drive more than
few kilometres as well), but it will be a wise idea to charge it every few days once
- to avoid this problem.
(You can see the charger in the left picture, the other
end can be plugged to any 5V socket; The Power-meter and Speedometer in the picture
on right)
Overall I found it to be a great second vehicle. Can it be the only one?, I doubt.
I feel the technology, power of the motor and the engineering have to undergo one
or two more iterations before the first time two-wheeler purchaser can go for this,
selecting this over a motorbike.
Reference: GEE GEE MOTORS, 73, Mannarsamy Koil Street, Royapuram, Chennai.Phone: 044-43528008,
43528009
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