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?

One of my favorite blogs, nakedsecurity recently published an article that Google "offering to stop mapping wireless access point location data, granting network owner s worldwide the choice to opt out from its Wi-Fi geolocation mapping". The problem is, that Google is asking users who want to opt-out of their service to change the SSIDs of their Wi-Fi and add a _nomap postfix. This means that all Wi-Fi networks without the _nomap postfix would automatically be added to Googles database of Wi-Fi access points.

What does this all mean? Well apart from the obvious icky feeling you have in your stomach right now, the main summary is that Wi-Fi access points that aren’t changed will automatically be added to Googles database (the Google Location Server). In short, the default setting is that you give permission to Google to store your Wi-Fis SSID until otherwise stated….eeeyeew.

With the advent of cloud computing came the dawn of new terms for acronym savvy geeks to drool over, one of the most famous groups of these acronyms are the ‘aaS’ acronyms. These are the acronym that start with a letter or two and then end with an ‘aaS’.

Cloud computing isn’t fully defined right now, formal definitions usually naturally evolve once adoption rates reach a certain threshold. At the moment that threshold isn’t yet reached, so we don’t yet have a fully agreed upon definition. However, it’s a common understanding that the cloud comes in various flavors, 3 ‘major’ flavors to be exact. Iaas, Paas and Saas.

The ‘aaS’ stands for ‘as a Service’ , and it means that whatever it was that preceded it now can be treated as a service, and before we begin to move into that, it’s important to define what exactly a service is and why is everybody offering stuff as a service.

In the realm of selling stuff, the general categorization of ’things you can sell’ is basically products or services. No matter what you sell, regardless of where and when you’re selling it, everything you sell is either a product (an actual tangible ’thing’) or a service (less tangible but requiring effort). So basically every business revolves around the sale of either a product or a service or both.

According to a New York Times article today, the world has apparently shrunk beyond our imagination. The latest study uses facebook as the base for their study, and used it to study the separation of people.  Previously I blogged about the amazing study conducting by (even more amazing) Stanley Milgram and how he came up with the concept of 6 degrees of separation. The latest study not only re-inforces the original study, but goes further to explain that the number is now only 4.74.

It really is a great opportunity we have now with facebook being the Hyper-Social network, with little competition. What this means is, at least for now, everybody online has a facebook account. That would certainly change in the nest 2-5 years, but what’s really interesting is that with facebooks great popularity, we have now have a wonderful chance to perform these kinds of research, and kudos to facebook for actually initiating it. The data from the research can be found on facebooks data page. Now onto the research:

The main concern companies have in migrating to the cloud is security. That in one sentence covers cloud computing greatest hurdle, as more and more companies are beginning to see the benefits (economically) of moving their infrastructure and data to the cloud, the major turn-off is control. In essence, the greatest advantage of cloud computing is also it’s biggest detractor. Companies (especially non-IT companies) are really interested in letting someone else run their IT infrastructure, but their uncomfortable letting someone else run the IT infrastructure due to the security concerns.

In my work, I often deal with PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), which is a benchmark of sorts on how secure your servers are. In the banking world, any application,system or vendor hoping to store, transmit or process credit card information needs to be PCI-DSS compliant. If you thought pronouncing the acronym was difficult, adhering to and complying to the standard is even more so. In fact, the direction now is to use certain ’tricks’ to avoid having to be PCI-DSS compliant, including implementing point-2-point encryption (thereby disregarding the need for PCI-DSS compliance on all intermediary systems) or using tokenazation (to replace the card number with a token that can redeemed from a secure vault). The main direction is clear, compliance to security standards is mandatory and non-negotiable, but it’s also expensive and time-consuming, and anything that can help reduce the effort and cost is really taking off (just ask shift4).