Join our free Beta! Librato’s new Silverline service enables you to get more work done in your existing cloud or datacenter servers by letting workloads that are not time-critical run in the same servers as your primary applications, and “sponge up” the unused resources. With that, Silverline allows you to process your workload on a smaller number of servers without any impact on the Quality of Service provided by your primary applications; guaranteed!
Whether you utilize a server for 10% or 90%, it will cost the same; Silverline helps you to make the most effective use of the server resources you pay for. Sign up now for the free Silverline beta program and get special benefits when Silverline is officially launched. Beta users will receive a 20% discount during their first year of use if they decide to use Silverline after the official launch! Sign up and start using Silverline for free today!
What can it do?
Silverline restricts background workloads to safely only use spare resources not required by the primary application running on a server. For EC2 users: Silverline provides similar benefits as spot instances, but with lower cost and without interruption of service. It allows you to fully utilize your server resources by:
Running grid workloads along-side interactive or transactional applications
Completing background tasks, such as data analysis, media conversion, web crawling, or search indexing in parallel with the primary application running on a server
Performing backups and other maintenance tasks without impacting the primary application on a server
How does it work?
Librato Silverline encapsulates background applications in a “virtual application container” that only consumes resources not used by the primary application running on a server. This allows the background application to utilize all unused resources on the server, accomplishing additional work without additional cost, and with absolutely no impact to the primary workload.
Silverline monitors resource consumption 100 times per second, guaranteeing that “Silverlined” applications will not affect the primary application. It supports Linux and Windows running on virtual or physical servers, and requires that the primary and “Silverlined” applications run on the same Operating System. The Silverline technology is part of Librato’s Load Manager, deployed in Enterprise data centers since 2008.
How do I use it?
Silverline is easily downloaded and installed on virtual or physical servers running Windows or Linux.
After installation you can type:
> silverline <application name>
for any application that you want to take advantage of spare capacity on the server. This will launch the application in a background container and ensure that it only consumes resources not required by the primary application. You can be running your first Silverlined application in minutes!
Google announced today Android 2.2, a major update for Google’s mobile operating system. There are many changes and a lot of new features that are really useful.
Android now uses a just-in-time compiler that improves the performance for some applications, especially for games. “The new Dalvik JIT compiler in Android 2.2 delivers between a 2-5X performance improvement in CPU-bound code vs. Android 2.1 according to various benchmarks,” says Xavier Ducrohet.
Android’s browser includes the V8 JavaScript engine created for Google Chrome, so web pages that use JavaScript heavily will load much faster (some benchmarks show a 2-3X improvement). Google claims that Android’s browser is the fastest mobile browser available today.
Developers have a new API for app data backup, which is really useful if you want to switch to a new Android device or you want to install a custom version of Android. There’s also an extremely useful messaging API for sending data to an Android phone from another device. For example, you’ll be able to send a link from your computer to your Android phone and the phone will automatically open the browser and navigate to the web address. You can also send files and install applications from your computer over the air.
Android Market will have a web interface, applications can auto-update and you can quickly install all the updates, instead of manually installing each update. Another change is that applications can be moved to the SD card. Google also announced that it has acquired SimplifyMedia, a company that developed some cool applications for streaming your music.
Android 2.2 has built-in support for tethering and it can transform a phone into a portable hotspot. Android Market includes some great applications for tethering, but it’s nice to see that’s now a built-in feature.
You can add multiple languages to the keyboard and switch between them by swiping across the space bar, there’s a new UI for the camera, there’s support for Exchange calendars and remote wipe, LED flash for the Camcorder, support for sharing contacts with other phones and much more.
Flash 10.1 is now available as a beta application in the Android Market, but it requires Android 2.2. Nexus One and Motorola Droid will be updated to Froyo next month. The other HTC phones launched this year will be updated in the second half of the year. “This includes popular models like the Desire and Droid Incredible as well as hotly anticipated phones like the Evo 4G, MyTouch slide and upcoming models.”
(yes, I’m hoping this capability comes to the HTC Hero (sprint version / cdma) soon ) – and for those wondering – relocation was typically painful, but is now complete
For starters: customize your Android phone’s background. Some devices will even let you add a moving, interactive image. Just hit the menu button and select the Wallpaper option. Follow the directions to select images from your phone’s camera, images loaded onto your phone, or a default wallpaper. But images are just the beginning of what you can put on your desktop. Clever programmers have created dozens of widgets that can also be moved to your home screen. Press down on an empty spot of real estate on your home screen, and that will pull up a menu to let you add everything from widgets, to program shortcuts and folders. If you can bear to part with a little over $1, Beautiful Widgets from the Marketplace is a great place to start for finding home screen add-ons.
Accessing Ext3 and Ext2 partitions from Windows can be accomplished using a few different methods, as previously noted in (How to access a Linux partition from Windows). However, one of the easiest methods is by using a tool called Ext2Fsd. This tool ships with the drivers necessary for windows to detect and mount an Ext2 or Ext3 filesystem as read only or read/write. Additionally, Ext2Fsd comes with a Volume Manager and many other useful tools like mke2fs.exe (allowing you to actually create an ext2 formatted partition from windows). Installation is simple and straight forward.
What is Ksplice Uptrack? Ksplice Uptrack is a subscription service that lets you apply 100% of the important kernel security updates released by your Linux vendor without rebooting.
How it works :
Your Linux vendor releases an update.
Ksplice converts the update into a rebootless update.
You download and install the update seamlessly, without rebooting.
These updates can be completely automated if you desire.
It worked fine for me in Windows 7 on the first shot. While I’d already been using Cygwin, the instructions were clear, though I did follow the Vista section at step 5. The version I used was dated November 18, 2009.
jsSHA is a JavaScript implementation of the entire family of SHA hashes as defined in FIPS 180-2 (SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512) as well as HMAC. Despite JavaScript not natively supporting 64-bit operations, SHA-384 and SHA-512 are even implemented! jsSHA is also 100% cross-browser compatible.
jsSHA Security Blog
Got feedback on jsSHA? Want to read about how to use jsSHA? Check out the developer’s Blog and leave feedback!
Newest Release / Download
As of 22 July 2009, the newest release is v1.2 and can be found at SourceForge
N.B. I was sorely tempted to post an image relating to the futility of trying to contain crypto / ideas that was penned on flesh, in an image titled “howto-export-crypto-system-from-usa.jpg” (!)
1 TB of Memory in 1 Minute with 1 Command – By Eric Hammond on October 27, 2009 1:38 AM
Amazon Web Services just announced the release of two new instance types for EC2. These new types have 34.2 GB and 68.4 GB of RAM with a decent amount of CPU capacity on modern CPUs to go along with it.
But when it comes to flexing the raw power at my fingertips with AWS, sometimes I can’t help myself. So…
sitting on my couch with my laptop watching an episode of “Lie to me” on TiVo I just typed:
ec2-run-instances \
–instance-type m2.4xlarge \
–key KEYPAIR \
–instance-count 19 \
ami-e6f6158f
and in under a minute and about $45 later, I had ssh access to well over 1 TB (1,000 GB) of free memory. To be sure, it was spread over 19 Ubuntu servers, but still, there’s gotta be something I can do with that, no?
) – and for those wondering – relocation was typically painful, but is now complete 
