Basically it is a tiny app that will play a morze code when you receive an SMS message. The morze code is the phone number of the sender in ‘cut number’ morze form (to be shorter). The idea is that first of all morze is a cool sound and second is that each sender gets a unique sound that you can learn to identify over time so that you know who sent you a message as soon as you hear the beep.

This is very early beta – there is no UI, no configuration. You can download it here. Leave bug reports in the comments of this blog post. It does not disable the stock SMS-received sound.

The following is a short and non-exhaustive list of what Azure does not do according to their own experts:

• no Infrastructure as a Service – which means that they actually don’t offer you servers to run you code on, they only offer Windows Server instances to which you can deploy your code. There is no imaging and no platform choice. In a half a year or so they plan to roll out Virtual Machine Instances where you will actually be able to upload your own images of what you want to run and then running Linux on Azure will be possible, but that will run with a double virtualization, so it is likely to be incredibly slow
• No fast key-value storage – they only provide SQL servers, with blob storage if you want, but nothing in the NoSQL scalability department
• their Windows Azure (limited version of Windows Server OS that they actually run in their cloud) does not run most of their current server solutions – they are working to migrate them one by one
• SQL service has no backup (but raw data storage has data triplication)
• No autoscalability as such (but they do provide a tool that you can install on your cloud servers to launch additional instances when load rises, or kill instances – reliability and configurability is unclear)
• No VPN (they are working on it, might be delivered in 12 months, meanwhile they suggest to use a Service Bus – their equivalent of Amazon SQS to communicate to you cloud servers, and pay a subscription fee + per-request fee + bandwidth fee)
• No way to launch a server with more than 14 Gb of RAM – both Amazon High CPU and High RAM server offerings were alien to the presenter
• Their SQL server offering is a monthly subscription – no pay-as-you-go there
• No reserved instances, but Microsoft is willing to talk about volume discounts, but later, at some point in a year or two when they start actually providing service contracts
• Their bandwidth fees for Asia are three times higher than in other regions for some reason
• If you think of any interesting feature, like CloudFront, CloudWatch, MapReduce, FWS, load balancing, notification service, … Microsoft Azure does not have that.

The Microsoft presenter also repeatedly engaged in shady tactics when presenting his information:

• he implied that you need to pay for Windows licences on Amazon
• he claimed that starting up an instance on Amazon with any custom configuration (like from your own image) would take a lot of time
• he claimed the invention of container data centres
• he claimed that Microsoft is the only provider that you can trust to store your data in the location that they advertise – when confronted that Amazon has a EU datacenter and provides you a clear way to get your data there, he actually claimed that Amazon might leak your data to other datacenters – ‘How can you know they will not?’
• He impled multiple times during the presentation that no other cloud providers can be trusted to keep data within EU – he even tried to say that Amazon only opened their first EU datacenter last month and was very surprised and annoyed when corrected (they opened an Asian datacenter and had a EU datacenter for a long time)
• Tried to pass off the fact that you can only run Windows provides a ‘good choice for the customers’
• Talked about planned features like they were implemented and available already – like MS Systems Centre online which he spend 5 minutes talking about how it will enable to migrate services from your private cloud in-house to the Azure cloud and then barely mentioned that it might mature to a beta status at the end of 2010
• Tried to pass off Amazon as ‘too low level and complicated’ while contrasting it to ‘niche’ force.com and Google App Engine and then presenting their solution that will ‘run all kinds of .Net and Silverlight applications’! Yeah, apparently their platform does not even run regular Windows .exe files
• Tried pass off their SLAs (non-contractual guarantees of service levels, which are unlikely to be enforceable beyond ‘money back guarantee’) as key selling point, even though they don’t even offer actual service contracts Update: Also claimed that Amazon does not provide SLAs, while the actually do
• With fanfare claimed 14k applications running in their cloud, when pressed noted that most of these application don’t even pay them, because they got in on special promotions.

So to summarize, Microsoft has build a cloud of Windows-like machines which can run your programs (as long as they are in .Net or Silverlight) and which does not have even a third of the features of such de-facto market leader as Amazon AWS. They try giving away their product for free and only get 14k applications in 6+ months.

Note: Amazon has at least 300 000 public applications and God only knows how many more private ones.

They will grow, due to companies locked-into Microsoft’s way of thinking buying into their marketing, but if you have a head on your shoulders, you should avoid it as a trap, which it actually is. All that can be done on Azure, can also be done on Amazon. The opposite is not always true. In addition, if you will want have a mixed environment with both Windows and Linux servers, you will not be able to deploy Linux servers to Azure (or they will be very slow) and you’ll have to put your Linux servers into Amazon (or another) cloud and pay double traffic fees for every byte of traffic between your own servers.

Microsoft Azure prices are exactly the same as Amazon EC2 prices with Windows instances. However on Amazon you actually get fully capable Windows Server instances. And if you don’t need Windows, you can get a much better price on Amazon.

The only companies that can safely use Azure are companies that only have Windows servers AND plan to only have Windows servers for the foreseeable future. Knowing how dominant Linux is in the server market and how many ‘Windows-only’ shops actually have a few Linux servers in the back room, there is very little future for Azure, until they wise up and make Linux instances first class citizens in their cloud. If not because their customers need them, then because their customers think that they at least might need them in the future.

Update: Amazon now released a Reduced Redundancy storage for S3 that provides the exacts same level of storage guarantees that regular Microsoft Azure SLA (99.9%) for two thirds of the price, and also Amazons now explicitly says that their regular S3 is ‘Designed for 99.999999999% Durability’, which is worlds above what Microsoft provides. Now in this case Amazon again is cheaper than MS. Also Amazon bandwidth prices are 33% lower compared to Azure. In Azia the difference is simply staggering (0.45$ vs 0.19$ per Gb).

The workaround is to boot from a livecd/usb and comment out all NTFS and VFAT lines in /etc/fstab. If that still does not help – replace the large UUIDs with device names back.

Still have not reported the bug as there look to be several – regression in NTFS support, the upgrader corrupting the fstab file and mountall incorrectly handling a case of an unmountable file system.

P.S. Also my Firefox would not start – that was solved by removing the sessionstore* files in my profile.

IF you have a Pylons or TurboGears application or anything else that uses the fantastic EvalException WSGI middleware for web debugging of you web program and have the following symptom:

* on a crash the traceback page shows up, but it has no css style and no images
* http://127.0.0.1:5000/_debug/media/plus.jpg returns a 404 (where 127.0.0.1:5000 is the path of your application) with “Nothing could be found to match ‘_debug’”

The problem that you are facing in this case is the enviroment variable PYTHONOPTIMIZE or apache_wsgi option WSGIPythonOptimize. Unset them both or you debug environment will not work!

So I set aside some money and started considering the options. In short, I could get another laptop OR get a regular computer for the same price but with twice the power. After considering all the laptop options up to 1000LVL, I decided to get a regular computer and if/when I’ll need to travel I’ll either take one of the old laptops with me or get a new netbook.

Now comes the fun part – choosing the components!

So far my choices are as follows:

• 1080p LCD/TN monitor with a built-in DVB-T TV receiver, around 23″ – around 180 LVL (comparable options without the TV receiver are around 50 LVL cheaper, getting an extra digital TV in the house is a nice extra)
• Intel Core i5 processor and a corresponding motherboard from ASUS with 4 RAM slots and 1 video card slot (I like ASUS hardware and the TurboBoost technology of i5 sounds a very nice alternative to buying a high-Ghz dual core setup) – 125 LVL + 80 LVL
• NVidia 250GTS video card (for my WoW raiding fun) – 60 LVL
• 2*2Gb of DDR3 1600 KINGSTON RAM with lifetime warranty, leaving 2 slots for expansion later – 60 LVL
• 1 Tb HDD (Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ got great scores in recent digital times reviews) – 55 LVL
• Chieftec 500W PSU and case (good experience with them so far and good reviews) – 70 LVL
• Blueray player with DVD-RW (why not at this price?) – 60 LVL

And that is it – a great setup that will last me a few years for around 700 LVL and it will have more partial upgradability than my laptop that I paid twice as much 3 years ago.

Any tips? Did I miss anything? Is it likely that anything in the above list will cause me any trouble in latest Ubuntu/Debian installations?

Update: got all of the above, except 500 Gb HDD of the same kind (faster, cooler, but higher price per Gb) and no Blueray (no drive in LV at the moment and did not want to wait a few weeks). The results are good, but I wish I would have gone with a 5 LVL more expensive video card that has a quieter cooler. Now I am buying a separate video card cooler for around 20 LVL that will be both more efficient and much quieter than the stock cooler I have – Zalman VF1000 is the model. Has not arrived yet.

P.S. It looks like updating a post in WP, automatically bumps it back into the Planet feed. Sorry


QEMU quit during console startup
bind() failed


Then two of your guests have the same port set for their VNC devices. Change the port in the VNC section to something that is free. A more specific erro would have save a half an hour of Googling.

The way to fix that would be to only add waves to your Inbox if you’ve commented on them (or added to them) which would not be possible for private waves.

Update: to make it work – replace in the Wavr source the URL to the WavePanel to “https://wave.google.com/wave/” and to determine your wave url, go to your wave interface, click on a wave and look on you address bar for something like “googlewave.com!w+Vc58PZQwA”. If you have ‘%252B’ in the URL, replace it with ‘+’. You might have to un-urlescape something else as well, so remember that ‘%25′ is a url escape for ‘%’.

Other people prefer Django, but it is too monolithic, non-modular and heavy to me.