Your personal server farm on demand

A good friend of mine has recently brought my attention to the EC2 service by Amazon. I touched this subject some 18 months ago, when Alexa opened it's search infrastructure to developers. Lots of things have changed since then. EC2, the Elastic Computing Cloud, accompanied by S3, the Simple Storage Service delivers the entire data center of any size, personalized and dedicated.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.

Starting a Web 2.0 company has never been easier. Of course you need a good idea and development skills. And you still need to code your system. But the obvious barrier so far has been the start of commercial service once the application has been coded. I wet through this with a couple of friends when we conceived the Overto service (an aggregator of Polish auction sites). One of us coded the application, but then we had to buy a rack, put it somewhere in an air-conditioned room (renting the room first), fill it with servers and storage, connect to the Internet (leased lines, firewalls), equip with uninterruptible power supplies, and in the end pay the bills for electricity and connectivity. And when, due to increasing traffic, we started hitting the ceiling of both hardware and bandwidth, it was again painful procedure to put more physical servers in the racks and upgrade the Internet connection.

With EC2 this could have been much simpler. Create software images of machines you need. The front-end web server, the application / query processor node, the storage processing node, the crawler / indexer node and so on. Then upload all the virtual machines to The Cloud, set up networking between them and to the world, start as many instances of the machines as needed and the take off is completed. Your service is gaining popularity? Just start new instances of the processing nodes (assuming the application is architected to scale-out, but this is a prerequisite nowadays anyway). Not enough bandwidth to handle the traffic? Just drag a slider to the right, Amazon will be pleased to offer you more when needed. Of course you pay for all this (processing power consumed, bandwidth consumed), but taking all aspects into account, hosting your service this way is much cost effective for you.

We do not own planes, but we fly. We do not own trains, but we ride them. We do not own buildings, but we run our businesses in them, as they were ours. The same paradigm has finally reached server computing. Have an application? Click on the Elastic Computing Cloud, create yourself a personal server farm on demand and run it. In the end... you do not have to buy a restaurant when you're hungry or want to host a party.

PS. Although Amazon has been the first major player to offer a service like that, I am more than certain the others, especially Google, are going to offer similar services. Soon buying a server will mean downloading its virtual machine image over the Internet.

Yamaha Sound Projector

What is a projector? It takes a light source, passes it through an image (celluloid film or LCD filter) and beams on the wall in front of us. The wall reflects the image and the reflected light comes into our eyes. Very simple idea, nobody even wanders how this stuff works these days, as projectors have been with us since the Lumière times. But what about sound? Can we project sound and bounce it off the walls? Sure... every loudspeaker does that. But there is a distance between a loudspeaker and a sound projector... similar to the difference between a light bulb and an image projector. To project an image, we need to seer the light very precisely. Dim some areas, tint some other...

To project sound we have been using multi - speaker setups, commonly referred to as home cinema. It takes two speakers to recreate a flat musical scene, it takes a few more, to create a surround scene and have some sounds come from the places in front of us, and some other sounds coming from behind. Basically with four speakers placed on a square plane we should theoretically be able to recreate the full surround sound stage. In practice it takes a few more to make the setup really good - usually a center speaker for dialogs and a subwoofer to pump the low frequencies. The downside of a setup like that is a room full of twisted cables, as every speaker needs to be connected to the sound source and an amplifier. Of course there are some wireless audio transmission systems (most of them proprietary), to allow us get rid of the cables around the room. But then each speaker needs to be independently powered, so in fact we swap amplifier cables for power cables. Not good at all (yes, I hate cables :) ).

A while ago Yamaha came out with a working product, named YSP (for Yamaha Sound Projector). You can say the YSP took the Texas Instruments' DLP concept used for years to power special class of image projectors and applied it to sound. DLP engine consists of many micromirrors, where essentially each mirror is a precisely controlled light source composing an image. In YSP there are "just" 42 individually controlled speakers in one box, but the concept stays the same. The intelligent DSP (Digital Signal Processing) engine inside controlls individually each speaker to precisely focus sound, after the system learns its surroundings (the walls, room size etc - fully automatically by using a "setup microphone".

The amazing thing is this really works. My room is not perfect square, but the YSP delivers true surround, precise sound scene, all from just one box, without any unnecessary cables - just one power cable and a fiber optic connection to the sound source (you can use standard copper as well). The YSP belongs to the product's category I really admire - things that solve old problems new and elegant way. In a few years every TV set should have a system like that built-in.

Motorola S705 - The Best A2DP Yet?

Every now and then I have to post on wireless headphones. There are several reasons why the subject returns. I do travel a lot. And I want my gadget bag to be as small and light as possible. On the other hand I carry a lot of gadgets with me and the process to optimize the bag contents is a never ending story. One of the threads within this process is getting rid of power supplies. Notebook, Camera, Sony Playstation Portable, iPod, portable speakers, mobile phone... the battery life in each of these devices is too short to consider going for a week long trip without a charger. Fortunately this problem is almost solved by the USB (Universal Supply Bus :P) standard. Almost - but not fully solved, as most of the personal electronics manufacturers do not understand the device power plug should be mini USB, full stop. So still one charger but a number of cables. HTC, Motorola and Blackberry seem to be the only three who understand. The rest, Samsung included, still tries to reinvent the power plug...

The headphone problem is similar. It all comes down to the plug. In the old Sony Walkman days there used to be a standard here - a 3.5 mm stereo jack. You could buy just any phones, from any manufacturer, plug them in and they worked. But since the early days of mobile phones, for some reason I cannot understand, phone manufacturers started to implement their own headphone connectors. This had not been so much of a problem before music phones arrived. The tradition of incompatible plugs continued and users have been forced to listen to the music using the phones supplied by the phone manufacturer. The common quality standard here settled very low. The question one may ask is whether Samsung, Sony, Nokia are really interested in delivering music phones or is it just smoke and mirrors? Apple puts attention here - every iPod has 3.5mm jack. The others don't. As I have been changing my gadgets much more frequently than my headphones (I still love my Sony fontopia MDR-EX71 - they deliver very good sound, short cable and nice and small 3.5mm plug), I constantly look for a way to keep my headphones running regardless of an audio device I will ever have.

A2DP Stereo Bluetooth seems to be the way to go. Get yourself a good A2DP receiver and you can use your laptop, your mobile phone, your iPod (currently via an add-on, in future hopefully natively) to stream music to your ears. I have tried several solutions here. The first was a pair of Sony DS970, but unfortunately they were a bit weak on sound volume, had no 3.5mm jack and the USB charger required a separate "SonyEricsson" cable. Then I tried Plantronics Pulsar 260, but this proved to be a complete fiasco. Very weak sound and incompatible Bluetooth (did not even connect to my Samsung phone). So last week when the Motorola SoundPilot S705 arrived I was a bit skeptical. But so far I have to say, Motorola rocks. Very good and powerful sound, standard 3.5mm socket to plug your own preferred headphones, no compatibility problems at all and standard mini-USB charging socket. On top of that they throw a nice LCD display to help operate the thing and an RDS-capable FM radio built in. The drawbacks? May be it is a little too bulky, but on the other hand battery life is really very good. And it has the well known lag all new electronic gadgets share - the lag between the press of a button and actual action taken by the device. Other than that I am happy having a freedom to have one pair of headphines to use with my laptop, my phone (whatever this will be in future), my iPod, the Playstation and the like. Sometimes it takes really a few simple steps to make users happy. One hint here: stick to the established standards. It pays in the long run...

And a PS to Apple - I still cannot understand why your "Nano" does not have a built in microphone to be used as a Bluetooth "headset" for a mobile phone.

QWERTY or iPhone?

iPhone is going to hit the market this month. There will be a tsunami of posts and reviews, and I plan to stay out of the crowd. Especially that the first release is going to be US-only (still a very typical approach by many companies...), I will not have much of a chance to play with it. Do I want one? Sure I do. Would it be my primary phone for day use? Probably not. The reason? My current phone has a QWERTY keyboard and every new phone I buy in the future will have one. As long as we will be entering messages other ways than using our brain waves, a QWERTY keyboard is on my list of must - have features of a phone.

Mobile phones are not just phones anymore. People use them to snap photos, listen to music, organize their tasks and calendars and - sometimes - to make phone calls. Apart from making calls, I also listen to music on my phone and use it as a simple photo camera as well. But there are much more important tasks I do on my phone, other than music and photos. Among them are: mobile email, mobile Web browsing and contact management. Email and Web differs fundamentally from music and pictures. So does contact management. These tasks require a lot of data to be entered. Take email - you read what comes in, but very often there is a message that needs immediate attention and a reply. And typing even the simplest sentence is a nightmare without even the tiniest QWERTY keyboard. Same goes with Web browsing. Some of you probably do not agree here. Web browsing is following the links you say. True, but it is not that rare when you have to enter a http:// address or login/password to enter a personalized site. For almost two years I have been using a tablet PC to browse the Web at home. I have given up finally and now I use a laptop. The reason? Entering Web addresses and login credentials on a pen-only tablet was not the most comfortable user experience. With a proper keyboard it is as it should be. The easiest and the fastest and the most accurate. QWERTY is here to stay. Your work computer has it, your home computer has it, your laptop has it, why shouldn't your multi - function phone? I know several people who, once tried a QWERTY phone, never even considered anything else. There are many new ideas of data entry interfaces. Multitap, the old and faithful T9, virtual touch keyboards (iPhone will have this one), but just go and ask a Blackberry user. She will not trade her QWERTY for even the flashiest gadget on the Planet.

Recently I have stopped my gadget hunt for a while and traced the QWERTY back to its origins. It was created in 1860. Unbelievable... Our computers that turn obsolete every two or three years share a piece of hardware that is 150 years old and nobody even dares to think of an alternative... What is more interesting - the QWERTY layout was created to slow down typing on early typewriters by preventing common pairs of typebars from striking the platen at the same time and sticking together. And now it is considered the fastest machine data entry method available to humans. Have we just made a full circle? QWERTY is here to stay. The next machine interaction paradigm will be direct brain coupling. Until then QWERTY rules on every computer, and as phones become portable computers, QWERTY will replace the numeric keypad that used to rule phones when they were just phones.