I’m transferring all my technical writing and projects to this website. Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of technical content and wanted to centralize it.

If you are looking for the old DarkMagic repositories, those will start getting imported as I pull them from tape. If you are looking for work on embedded ARM systems, those will get moved over as I can get time. My work on native VMware ESXi software development will show up as I get it in shape for others to use it. The work on open source software will get documented here to include at least Eucalyptus, MXE and SmarterApp.

Lastly, I’ll probably document my work in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning here as I take course work and learn more.

I’ve got a pile of certifications that I’ve accumulated over the years.

Below are my Redhat Linux, Microsoft, Sun Solaris, Nortel Networking and ITIL cert logos. I think the RHCE and Sun Solaris certs were probably the hardest of this bunch.

Here are my SAS certifications that took me six months to complete on my own time. The Clinical Trials Programmer exam was by far the hardest of this set of tests. I mostly use my SAS experience now to port software to R.

I’m interested in the security CISSP and VMware VCP5 certification but have not had the inclination to spend the money or time yet.

Bought a Sony Blu-ray player with DLNA support. Added MediaTomb with a static binary on the Blackarmor. Tested it an it wasn’t very happy. It did run but the performance just wasn’t there.

The default Sony Blu-ray with my new BA NAS 400 series works just fine. A solution to my long standing problem with playing my digital content on my TV and sound system. DLNA support in the Sony equipment just seems to work.

New job and learning AWS in support of distributed computing. I’ve done a good bit of research to understand the ecology of web services. They can be expensive but when you count total costs, they come out pretty close to break-even. You can lease computational power for relatively short periods to do quick work, then give the hardware back and stop paying for it. That is a powerful shift in technology.

OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus and a couple others where in the running while doing the evaluations. Each had their advantages which I’ll probably write about later.

I settled on implementing a Eucalyptus system using spare hardware. So far I’ve got a working and running system built from the source code. It provides a subset of the AWS services on local hardware for testing. The S3 support isn’t quite there as of version 3.3.0 but it might improve in the next couple of months. S3 is simple storage interface allowing for storing information by a key value. Their EC2 support appears to be much better and allows for quickly building virtual machines with pre-configured operating systems.

In the background, I’m writing Java code to implement AWS tools and services. I forgot how much fun Java can be.