Ideas

Brainstorming / Geek / General / Ideas — No Comments
3
May 08

RSSI – Realy Simple Syndication for Interaction

After working on a few projects and thinking about how to tie multiple services and interaction processes into one location, I realized that there needs to be a really easy way of publishing the interactions or feedback that is required from a user for a specific application.

The nice thing about RSS is that you can find the information that you may believe is relevant or of interest to you, then have that information centralized in one place. There are websites that do this for you, such as Google Reader, or Popurls (non-customizable but pretty), and there are systems that aggregate social newtorking sites such as FriendFeed, but there isn’t a single place I can go to ‘push the buttons’ for all the applications I interact with in my day to day life. At it’s simplest RSSI is a simple boolean question with a custom prompt and application identifier.

Would you like to accept a friend request? Yes

PayPal payment failed, resend? Yes

Your virtualization environment requires upgrading, okay ? No

Things can get more complicated with fields and text values being sent along with the response, or even images sent with the interaction. What if you need to sign up for 10 services at once? Send me all the CAPTCHA images then I’ll send you the proper values in text boxes associated with each image.

With regards to implementation, things quickly get heavy, with message bus architectures, authentication and authorization, and a standard framework for describing an interaction with a user and UUID’s for interactions. Prompts, type of responses, values of responses, further action, etc.

I think this would be really cool – We’ve eliminated a lot of the repetitive actions required to get the content, we just need to figure out how to reduce the amount of work required to make things happen.

cloud / Geek / Ideas / sysadmin — No Comments
15
Mar 08

Open Virtual Machine Format

Open standardized protocols are what made the Web possible. We have standards all the way up the computational stack, from agreeing on which pins mean what in a wire, to what an X button means in a user-interface. Companies who don’t embrace them are destined to isolate themselves on tiny technological islands.  Specific implementations, however, don’t have to be shared and open. Huge markets with tiny verticals of implementation lock out competition, but they also prevent innovation. But sometimes something beautiful happens, and people get together to support a new kind of standard. An open, extensible standard that can be written and read by anyone. One place where this is just starting to happen is with computer virtualization.

The Open Virtual Machine Format, or OVF is a proposed universal format that aims to create a secure, extensible method of describing and packaging virtual containers. Because the standard is open, it means any environment supporting the standard can import and export those virtual machines between different hypervisor platforms. The current OVF specification includes definitions ranging from virtual machine metadata and disk format, all the way to detailed hardware specifications and logical network information. It also provides an ability for the virtual machine itself to get information from the hypervisor host, meaning that if you’re creative you could create some really nifty automated integration and deployment tools.

If that doesn’t mean much to you, then consider this: Industry heavy-weights like Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource all took part in drafting the specification. As far support tools go, VMware has published what appears to be the first OVF container creation tool, available here.

There IS a big problem with OVF right now, and a lot of bloggers and analysts out there are getting it wrong. OVF is not and does not define a new virtual disk format, simply a wrapper around them. This means that OVF support doesn’t enable you to drag and drop virtual machines between Xen and VMware. Some formats can be converted externally using tools, however most of the current techniques involve booting up a system, and running a migration tool to be able to convert the image – not exactly ideal. OVF does include the ability to describe your specification in an HREF, which means that you could publish your spec, and create a system that could modify containers on the fly.

If Vmware, Xen, and Parallels are technolgical islands, then OVF may one day be the bridge that will allow you to travel between them.

Update It looks like OVF will be announced formally at the Catalyst 2008 conference. More information here.

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