The table below compares various URL shorteners based on how much they value service performance and the privacy of their users.
Here is the short version of the reading guide: a URL shorterner which gives a high priority to reliability, performance and privacy will use a 301 (“Moved Permanently”) response code, will not use cache control [...]

Related posts:

1. The fallacy of privacy settings

From ancient Mesopotamia to, more recently, Holland, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore and Korea, the success of many societies has been in part credited to their lack of natural resources. The theory being that it motivated them to rely on human capital, commerce and innovation rather than resource extraction.

Resuming where we left off (part 1 , part 2), here are more words that we need in the age of Twitter and blogs.
#17 The feeling of elation when writing an IM which you know is approaching 140 characters, your fingers start to tense but you go past it and nothing happens, nothing turns red, [...]

Related posts:

1. There should be a word for this (Blog/Twitter edition) part 2

Say you want to play the though guy on Twitter, but would rather not be taken to task on your proclamations.

I’ve been tracking the modeling technology previously known as “Microsoft Oslo” with a sympathetic eye for the almost three years since it’s been introduced.

I wasn’t at the OSCON Cloud Summit this past week, but I’ve spent some time over the weekend trying to collect the good bits. Via Twitter, I had heard echos of an interesting debate on Cloud standards between Sam Johnston and Benjamin Black.

Oracle recently published a Cloud management API on OTN and also submitted a subset of the API to the new DMTF Cloud Management working group. The OTN specification, titled “Oracle Cloud Resource Model API”, is available here.

Steve Staso

Bernd Harzog recently wrote a blog entry to examine whether “the CMDB [is] irrelevant in a Virtual and Cloud based world“. If I can paraphrase, his conclusion is that there will be something that looks like a CMDB but the current CMDB products are ill-equipped to fulfill that function. Here are the main reasons he [...]

Related posts:

1. Generalizing the Cloud vs.

Twitter has decided that for our good and their own it would be better if any time you click a link in a tweet the request first went to Twitter before being redirected to the intended destination.

Most APIs are like hospital gowns. They seem to provide good coverage, until you turn around.
I am talking about the dreadful state of fault reporting in remote APIs, from Twitter to Cloud interfaces. They are badly described in the interface documentation and the implementations often don’t even conform to what little is documented.
If, when reading [...]

Three weeks ago, VMWare and Salesforce.com launched VMForce, a Salesforce-hosted PaaS solution based on VMWare runtime technology and force.com application services. In my analysis of the announcement, I wrote:
VMWare wants us to know they are under the covers because of course they have much larger aspirations than to be a provider to SalesForce. They want [...]

The previous entry, “Don’t tell Facebook what you like, tell Twitter“, used Twitter and Facebook as examples to illustrate a general point about the integration of social profile data. Unfortunately, the examples may have overshadowed the larger point. In the post, I didn’t consider Twitter as a social network but as a message conduit. Most [...]

There seems to be a lot to like technically about the announcements at Facebook’s f8 conference, especially for a Semantic Web aficionado. But I won’t have anything to do with it as a user. Along with the usual “your privacy is our toy” subtext, I really don’t like the lack of data portability. “Web 2.0″ [...]

When Mark Hurd read Steve Job’s rant against Flash (saying, in effect, “we have to tolerate Flash on our desktops/laptops for now but this piece of crap is not going to soil our iPhones, iPads and iPods”) he must have thought “hey, if I can pull one of these stunts maybe I too will have [...]

How many flavors of PaaS do we need?

PaaS for business apps
PaaS for toy apps (simple form-based CRUD) and simple business front ends (e.g. restaurant web sites)
PaaS for games, mash-ups and social apps
PaaS for multimedia delivery and live streams
PaaS for high performance and scientific computing
PaaS for spamming, hacking and other illegal activities (Zombies as a Service)
Other?

BTW, [...]

The VMforce announcement is a great step for SalesForce, in large part because it lets them address a recurring concern about the force.com PaaS offering: the lack of portability of Apex applications. Now they can be written using Java and Spring instead. A great illustration of how painful this issue was for SalesForce is to [...]

Let’s start with the disclosures: by most interpretations I work for a competitor to what Salesforce.com and VMWare are trying to do with VMforce. And all I know about VMforce is what I read in a few authoritative blogs by VMWare’s Steve Herrod, VMWare/SpringSource’s Rod Johnson and Salesforce’s Anshu Sharma. So no hard feeling if [...]

NEW YORK -- Trumpeting two new products and surrounded by floating blue banners proclaiming the rise of cloud computing, Oracle has jumped on the bandwagon with a vengeance, reversing months of public skepticism around cloud computing and its viability. Oracle claims it is ready to provide enterprises with their own internal cloud computing environments from servers all the way up, saying that private clouds rather than public cloud services are what enterprises want.

Another round of “update your Facebook privacy settings right now” messages recently swept through Twitter and blogs. As also happened a few months ago, when Facebook last modified some privacy settings to better accommodate their business goals. This is borderline silly. So, once and for all, here is the rule:
Don’t put anything on any social [...]

The battle of the Cloud Frameworks has started, and it will look a lot like the battle of the Application Servers which played out over the last decade and a half. Cloud Frameworks (which manage IT automation and runtime outsourcing) are to the Programmable Datacenter what Application Servers are to the individual IT server. In [...]

Oracle has a busy week in store for people who are interested in application management. Today, the company announced:

Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, to package and easily deploy virtualized composite applications. It’s an application-aware (via metadata) set of VM disk images. It comes with a graphical builder tool.
Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option (not the most Twitter-friendly [...]

Devops? What’s devops? See these articles:

Infrastructure Renaissance (doesn’t mention the word “devops”, but describes the phenomenon)
What is DevOps?
The Rise of DevOps
DevOps mixing dev, ops, agile, cloud, open source and business
Understanding the cloud and ‘devops’ (part 1, part 2, part 3)
Myopic View of DevOps Misses the Mark (read the comments too)
Why so many DevOps conversations focus [...]

In a recent blog post, Don Ferguson (CTO at CA) describes CA Catalyst, a major architectural overall which “applies enterprise application integration patterns to the problem of integrating IT management systems”. Reading this was fascinating to me. Not because the content was some kind of revelation, but exactly for the opposite reason. Because it is [...]

For the short term (until we sell one) there are three cars in my household. A manual transmission, an automatic and a CVT (continuous variable transmission). This makes me uniquely qualified to write about Cloud Computing.
That’s because Cloud Computing is yet another area in which the manual/automatic transmission analogy can be put to good use. [...]

I got invited to give a short keynote presentation during the Cloud Connect conference this week at the Santa Clara Convention Center (thanks Shlomo and Alistair). Here are the slides (as PPT and PDF). They are visual support for my bad jokes rather than a medium for the actual message. So here is an annotated [...]

Yesterday’s panel session on the future of Cloud standards at Cloud Connect is still resonating on Twitter tonight. Many were shocked by how acrimonious the debate turned. It didn’t have to be that way but I am not surprised that it was.
The debate was set up and moderated by Bob Marcus (ET-Strategies CTO and master [...]