There has been this article published recently on the Tech Republic.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-reasons-you-should-build-your-own-cloud/3637?tag=mantle_skin;content

It is ridiculous and misguided to the point of being dangerous (just at the point where real cases of savings are appearing, it suggests a backwards approach), but it has promoted some pretty interesting debate: I am simply copying some of the comments I found entertaining and insightful

Can Google give the author his Google Apps on a CD?
by: den123net
What a moronic take on things! (Unless the article is a joke, in which case, its pretty good, as it caused solid laughs across a large office full of techies). I have now shared it across colleagues and even clients and all had a good belly chuckles..

There is no In-House Cloud by definition.
The same way as there is no “National Power Grid” in-house. You can have a server room, sure, even with back-ups (wow), but it is not, nor ever be a Cloud

Will your own Cloud magically grow when you need more data / compute? Will it shrink at night when you don’t need it?

The author should get a tech job, (writing does not count), and even then refrain from advising anyone on anything …

This generated this response:

techies?
by: rduncan@…
Will your own Cloud magically grow when you need more data / compute? Will it shrink at night when you don’t need it?

it won’t grow magically, but neither does any cloud,however you can build a hybrid cloud and consume some public resources as you need them (is this magic?)
- will it shrink at night
- yes! this can be controlled by policy, not just virtual machines but right down to powering downing nodes, these are built in features of Intel Sandy Bridge & Ivy Bridge chipsets that private cloud developers are taking advantage of and can save even small data centers thousands per year.

Private cloud is the fastest growing industry on earth at the moment, makes me wonder about that large room of ‘techies’

In turn, here is the reply:

Yes techies! As in people who used to build DCs, before cloud made DCs die

This debate is getting silly (it like arguing that horses are better than cars), but here is my last reply on this:

Again, there is no such thing as in-house or private Cloud. Like there is no such thing as an in-house power grid. You can host in-house and have your own private DC (on site or off site), but it is not, nor will ever be a Cloud. Calling it your cloud is silly.

it won’t grow magically, but neither does any cloud, = yes it does . Well not magically, but companies like AWS, Google, MS have technology which took them years and billions to develop that you will not have access to. They can add capacity at such a rate (and they do) that the dont actually know how many servers they have (Google has stated this publicly) It does not matter to them. They have moved away from individual servers or racks or even DCs – it is all just capacity for them now. They run custom Hypervisors and OSes that you cannot deploy in house, and never will… So its like “magic” for most of us.

however you can build a hybrid cloud and consume some public resources as you need them (is this magic?) = Not it is not magic (see above), but, the economic argument is lost immediately if you accept this: If hybrid works, then why full Cloud does not? Demand is peaks and troughs. If you build DC for the max demand (the past) – at least 50% is wasted – when you dont use it. If you build it for average, you waste 25% only, but have to pay extra every time you go to max.

If you build for the minimum, then your utilisation is 100% (in theory), but then why make the investment at all?

Hopefully you get the point that the only possible rationale for hybrid cloud is when you have ALREADY (in the past) made the investment, and just want to migrate to Cloud gradually, and sweat something that you cannot do anything else with for a while. Even then it is dubious, which brings us to the next point.

will it shrink at night – yes! this can be controlled by policy, not just virtual machines but right down to powering downing nodes, these are built in features of Intel Sandy Bridge & Ivy Bridge chip sets that private cloud developers are taking advantage of and can save even small data centres thousands per year. = Lol. Really? You can turn down power and cooling, even turn off machines at night – but this is saving a fraction of the cost.
Do you get some of you initial investment back? Do you shrink the room in the building? Do you shrink security / patches / maintenance / salaries of the employees managing it? No of course not. Thats why those costs are called “Fixed”. In fact, even at peak times, every manual tells you not to run anything at 100% capacity – 75% is typically the top threshold. So what happens to the 25% remaining? Do you get that back? Does someone pay you? Rhetorical question…

Private cloud is the fastest growing industry on earth at the moment, makes me wonder about that large room of ‘techies’ = where did you get this from?
Public Cloud (AWS, Google, MS, Rackspace and a few others) are growing exponentially, where as server and hardware sales are crashing (the stuff that would be used for “private clouds” (HP, IBM et al all whining and trying to build their own private clouds) – just do some simple googling or read anyone from Gartner to the The Register to see this.

The room of techies, most used to design DCs and build / deploy / manage servers, large and small. They have all left the industry to join the one that has come to replace it – Cloud.

I think the final one nails it, in that it covers the main argument point. In the end, it just progress. Every time we have a similar conversation with some of our clients, and they strongly disagree, I just relax – the Cloud revolution is happening – whether someone agrees with it or not… Like all progress, it is unstoppable, not matter how many wrong articles appear around the net…

We’re having to process a lot of data at work. We’re spinning through data from a legacy system and parsing the data which has been kept in all sorts of different formats for addresses.

An awful lot of data doesn’t have spaces where you’d think spaces should be so I’m left looking for solutions… I thought about abbreviating the strings using Intelligent String Abbreviation from the lovely JSPRO.COM:

function abbreviate(str, max, suffix){
  if((str = str.replace(/^s+|s+$/g, '').replace(/[rn]*s*[rn]+/g, ' ').replace(/[ t]+/g, ' ')).length <= max){
    return str;
  }
  var abbr = '',
  str = str.split(' '),
  suffix = (typeof suffix !== 'undefined' ? suffix : ' ...'),
  max = (max - suffix.length);
  for(var len = str.length, i = 0; i &lt; len; i ++){
    if((abbr + str[i]).length &lt; max){
      abbr += str[i] + ' ';
    }else {
      break;
    }
  }
  return abbr.replace(/[ ]$/g, '') + suffix;
}

But after thinking about it I clocked that it was simply a question of replacing “,” with “, ” but only when the comma wasn’t being followed by a space. I guess that HTML would be fine with more than one space but it offended my sensibilities to indiscriminately replace commas with commas and spaces…

This, however, does the trick very nicely (Thanks Lars):

var str = str.replace(/[,^s]/g,", ");

Wishing you all the very best for 2013!

Thank you.

I’m not a designer by trade but by hobby so I’m always fascinated by colours. I live and breath HTML code so I end up using shed loads of hex values in page design work both at work and at home.

As such I don’t really take much notice of the names of colours used in HTML code but prefer to use the hex value, I’ve spent an awful lot of time creating little JavaScript snippets and functions to manipulate those hex values – which has helped my understanding of hexadecimal no end (My first test when I applied to do my conversion Masters in Computer Science was to take away a set of sums in hex and return with the answers – with the help of a tame Java developer I managed it as well). I remember once creating a lovely little script which rotated a set of numbers throughout the hex spectrum and allowed me to create nearly every colour eventually. Magic (I’ll have to find it soon as it made lovely little patterns).

Anyway there’s been a number of related articles about colours of late which fascinated me. I think the first of which was this one by Jacob Sloan writing in disinfomation. He talks about how we as a species have evolved our distinction of colours – almost like moving from a black & white TV to a colour TV. I was especially interested in his quotation from Empirical Zeal:

Blue and green are similar in hue. Before the modern period, Japanese had just one word, Ao, for both blue and green. The wall that divides these colors hadn’t been erected as yet.

Fascinating ehh?

But along with that article is this one on colour names around the world from CrowdFlower which investigated whether or not people in different countries had different colour boundaries. There’s a lovely visualization on there as well which allows the user to check the colour names depending upon where the respondent answered and which country s/he belonged to.

It was interesting though in that it might have had more to do with the standard of English of the respondent though. I can’t imagine many people who speak English as a foreign language being able to comfortably use some of the more esoteric English names for a colour (I do love the word Teal – not a lovely colour but a lovely word).

But alongside the differences between cultures there seems to be a much more significant difference between the sexes. Data Pointed have another lovely visualization where the different sexes were asked to name colours. That again has a lovely hover facility where you can hover over a colour to see what it is names by respondents of different sexes.