The Thais have had a rough couple of months. With floods inundating entire swaths of the country, Bangkok had to revise its GDP estimates for the year and even hard-disk prices spiked due to limited supply. There is some good news though, Western Digital recently started up it’s plant in Thailand (although no news on when it’ll be resuming operations) and many other companies are following suit as flood waters appear to have subsided.

Some laws you have to fight wars to keep….others you have to fight wars to be repealed. This is one of those laws you have to fight to prevent from ever being made a law…

On April 12th , 1861 Confederate forces attacked Union Military installation named Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The attacked marked the beginning of the American Civil War, and the United States of America would never be the same. The war was about more than just a secession from a Union, it was about preserving the right that every man was created equal and that no man or woman would ever be ‘owned’ again. In just over 140 years later, the United States of America elected their first Black president.If ever there was a war worth fighting for, it was the American Civil War. The Abolition of slavery was a law worth fighting for, it was worth preserving, even till death.

Cloud computing is already lowering the barrier to entry for new startups to essentially $0 hardware cost. Of course the cost itself isn’t zero, but what cloud computing has done is turn that cost from a Capital Expenditure to a Operating Expenditure. So instead of buying expensive servers, switches, racks and house them in expensive data centers, you can instead rent these devices …with no money down, and in most cases a lot cheaper than if you rented the actual physical hardware yourself.

So what’s the catch?

Large Corporations usually have service providers that provide services to us that we otherwise ‘would prefer not to run’. These services are core components of our business and critical for business operations…but it’s just that we’d rather not invest money/resources and expertise running the servers and software. We’d prefer someone else to do it for us.

The Malaysian government is a crazy bunch, just today I saw two bits of news that left me squirming with disgust. First a short piece on Christmas Carollers requiring Police Permits to go Carolling (not just permits but full details of every activitiy) and then later today there is a new Computing Professionals Bill 2011.

Why would a government want to regulate the computing Industry? It’s not like we’re bankers or something? Why is there a need to regulate an industry that first off is too broad to define under an umbrella called computing, and secondly isn’t exactly a threat to national security.

Lowyat has done a great deal to summarize the bill and post it up for reading here..

But where we should be really intrigued is a part of the bill (according to Lowyat) that says:

Last week I migrated my blog from Nearlyfreespeech (who are awesome by the way!) to dreamhost (who are also quite awesome in their own way). What prompted the move was that I’m already subscribed to a year of hosting to dreamhost at about $6/mo, while my blog at Nearlyfreespeech is still costing me money, although admittedly not much. So I thought why waste my dreamhost hosting, and instead switch over from Nearlyfreespeech to dreamhost.

Before I start, let’s me first explain what I want to do. I want to migrate my blog from nearlyfreespech to dreamhost, in essence I want to change my hosting provider from Nearlyfreespeech to dreamhost. I do not want to change my url, I still want readers who type www.keithrozario.com to visit my blog, it’s just that the blog is now hosted on a different service provider and will ultimately have a different IP.

I also want to point out that although I already have a parallel blog setup on blog.keithrozario.com, I decided not to migrate because nearlyfreespeech kicks ass in terms of reliability, up-time and speed :).

I’ve long been a great fan of all things Google, even when they weren’t exactly producing top quality stuff (like Google Wave), I stuck by them through thick and thin. That being said, it’s been more good than bad, sure they had a rough patch with Wave and Google Buzz, and yes Google+ isn’t exactly the Facebook killer it was tauted to be. However, think of all the really cool stuff they’re doing, consider the fact that I literally LIVE on Googles Cloud, all my email is on GMail, there isn’t a single day that goes by that I don’t get my daily dose of blogs via Google Reader and I do Google Searches at least 10 times a day. So overall Google is still pretty good in my book.

Be that as it may though, one of the hallmark of successful innovators is that they know when to call it quits. Google has already shelved Google Buzz, and spun off Google Wave as Apache Wave. Which begs the question of what would replace Buzz.

Amazon Web Services has formed the IAAS backbone of many corporations IT infrastructure, through it’s various tools and offerings you can do almost everything under the sun on the cloud. You can spin EC2 instances till they merge together to become one giant super-computer, you can host webpages on their Simple Storage Solution (S3) platform which offers nearly limitless storage, you can even host that data on edge servers via CloudFront to reduce load times, and the list of offerings go on and on.

If you’ve wondered what happened to my 30-day challenge to blog everyday….well it didn’t go so well. So far, I’ve fallen short last Friday (although I posted twice the next Saturday) and then missed posting this Friday and Saturday as well, turns out my challenge is pretty much over. Although, I’m still persevering, I guess even if I complete the remaining 20-odd days, I’ll always ‘know’ I missed 3 days!!

Now I’m not one to make excuses but the reason I missed these last 2 days was because I was trying to get my blog migrated from nearlyfreespeech (who are awesome by the way) to dreamhost. It took me a while to figure out all the nooks and cranies and nearly 4 hours to complete the migration. I’ll blog about migrating your wordpress once it’s done.

A couple of days ago, I stumbled onto a website by mozilla claiming “The internet we know and love is at risk”. Now I’m not one to panic but this was some serious stuff here, Mozilla is a company I admire and respect, so if it tells me something serious is going down, I stand up and pay attention.

Further reading brought on a couple of key points, namely that Mozilla was talking about the new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was designed to stop online piracy, but what it would effectively do was make give copyright holders essentially too much control over their copyrighted material. Now copyright holders undoubtedly have legal rights to their work, but giving them the right to shut down YouTube because someone sang their song and posted a video takes that a bit too far.

Mozilla also claim:

The fact is that this legislation as written won't stop piracy. But it would pose a serious threat to social media and user generated content sites (like YouTube) across the internet. It could also undermine some of the core technical systems underlying the internet, creating new cybersecurity risks.

As a non-profit committed to keeping the web open and accessible to all, Mozilla wants to ensure that this legislation does not jeopardize the foundational structure of the Internet.

Well technically Cisco is a big thing already, a company that by itself is defining the internet as we speak with mind-blowing efficiency. Sure, Huawei thinks they’re catching up, but the truth is Cisco is in a league of it’s own, literally.

Today, I bumped through 2 articles I thought were pretty interesting. Cloudbeat, a blog I just recently subscribed to, reported that Cisco thinks “that global traffic generated by cloud computing services will increase a staggering 12 times by 2015 compared to cloud traffic in 2010, while data center traffic will increase at a less-showy-but-still-impressive four times by 2015”. Now that’s a whole bunch load of traffic the internet is going to have to contend with, more interestingly though I was surprised that it was Cisco who did the study, not Amazon or Microsoft or Rackspace, not any traditional cloud computing company? Why would Cisco be so interested in checking out cloud traffic?