"Clouds continue to dominate my life it seems. Not just because it's December which, granted, has been awfully cloudy and dark as we push ever closer to the solstice. And while I do so love a good solstice celebration, the ever-decreasing sunlight (when it does make an appearance) at times barely makes up for it. However, the clouds I'm referring to are those associated with computing.
"Last Tuesday, I gave a talk at the University of Waterloo as part of their annual WatItIs technology conference. WatItIs is "WatITis is a one day conference for those involved in IT planning, support and decision making at the University of Waterloo." As such, it tends to cover a lot of ground, when it comes to the technology it explores. I attended talks on video conferencing by Koorus Bookan, and another by Ken Salem who gave an high-level introduction to cloud computing.
"My particular talk was titled "Seeding the Clouds", a live demonstration of what's involved in deploying servers and operating systems in the cloud, and a strangely appropriate followup to Ken's talk. As part of that demonstration, I deployed an Ubuntu 8.10 64 bit system in Amazon's EC2 cloud, then logged in. I also created a machine under KVM using virt-manager on Salmar Consulting's servers. Finally, as a demonstration of a Web OS, I installed eyeOS, then had people create accounts and log in."
