As both an author and as a technical consultant, I am fairly opinionated in terms of what I expect for next year (tomorrow!). Here are my predictions: There will be pressure to reduce IT expenditures. Increasing trend to favor outsourcing deployment platform (e.g., Google AppEngine and Heroku), infrastructure (e.g., Amazon AWS, RackSpace, both relational and NoSLQ data stores), and software as a service (e.g., CRM, etc.). Cloud computing gets more real. Research will be concentrated on shorter term profits rather than long strategy. China might be an exception to this: a friend reports that he has seen willingness in China to fund very long term Artificial Intelligence research. More people will spend more time using web based information and recreational resources using portable devices. There will be a shortage of wireless bandwidth in some areas. Use of the Java platform will stay strong, but with more emphasis on alternative languages like JRuby, Scala, and Clojure. Skills and educ...

If you factor in the cost of the debt to pay for our military spending then I think that a reasonable estimate of our yearly defense spending is about $1.5 trillion. The amount we spend on defense swamps other US government spending, including social programs. This is just my opinion, but I believe that we could keep our country relatively safe (compared to other countries) and spend far less money. The problem is basically banana republic style corruption: too much money is made by special interests for there to be any meaningful reform of military spending. The same comment is also true of other corporate interests like Wall Street, industrialized food production, pharmaceutical companies, insurance, etc. This is all enabled by total corporate control of the news media and shameful corruption in the lobbying industry and our federal government. Fortunately, for most of us, life is still very good despite corruption of the world's "elite." Again, this is just my personal...

The EtherPad collaboration-enabled online system is now open source . Cool. Google bought the company, the developers are joining the Wave team, and their product is now released under the Apache 2 license. Be sure to follow the instructions (failing to set the environment variable for the path to a MySQL client JAR file produces a strange "cp -f" error that has hung up a few people trying to build the system, as reported on Hacker News). It only took about 15 minutes to download the source and build the system - simple enough. After running the system and trying it, I used IntelliJ 9 to set up a project (choose project from existing source, main directory etherpad/trunk) and I am spending some time perusing the Scala and JavaScript code. Really nice looking code base, and reading through the Scala code will be an education. My JavaScript skills are a little weak, but I might still take a careful look at the JavaScript code to understand how they used Comet.

Using this service costs $0.025/hour so it may make sense to just run HAProxy yourself on a EC2 instance, but then you have to worry about fault tolerance/recovery if that instance fails. The ELB cost is small in comparison to running a cluster of EC2 instances and "outsourcing" as much of your system as possible to AWS (e.b., SimpleDB, Elastic Load Balancing, Relational Database Server, EBS, etc.) can certainly reduce both the complexity of your application architecture and also your implementation costs. Here are my notes for a simple ELB setup for an AMI that contains a Rails web application: export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=pk-....pem # different on your system export EC2_CERT=/Users/markw/.ec2/cert-...pem # different on your system ec2run -k gsg-keypair ami-e767ds71 ec2run -k gsg-keypair ami-e767ds71 Note: specifying "gsg-keypair" matches later doing ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa-gsg-keypair ... elb-create-lb MarkTest123 --headers --listener "lb-port=80,instance-port=42...

Discipline, a new view of system architecture, and rigorous automation procedures are required to take advantage of Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine, and other infrastructure as a service providers. Last week a customer commented on the rapid pace of Amazon's innovation. Yesterday they announced a new way to generate revenue from unused server instances by letting users bid on a spot market for unused EC2 instances. Discipline When you own your own server farm, even if it is just a few back room servers, you can spread out applications over your servers in a haphazard way and usually get away with some sloppiness in your process architecture. When you are dealing with someone else's infrastructure a more disciplined approach is just about mandatory. New view of system architecture Both Google and Amazon have published papers on dealing with very large scale geographically disperse systems comprised of many components, some of which are guaranteed to fail. These companies have al...

This week JetBrains gave me an upgrade license for version 9 of IntelliJ. I don't do too much Java development anymore - mostly maintenance on some of my old projects and new AppEngine and Google Wave development. Overall, version 9 is a nice upgrade: nicer source code repository integration, built in task management, the IDE seems faster, etc. I use the JetBrains RubyMine product almost every day. Long term, my use of IntelliJ 9 will depend on how good the AppEngine support is. As a test, I generated a new AppEngine project, added some home page material, edited the appengine-web.xml file to specify a registered app name, set the version, then deployed to Google's servers with no problems. I did have a problem importing an AppEngine project from Eclipse but eventally realized that I needed to go to Module Settings -> Artifacts, and drag "Available elements" from the right window pane to the <output root> tree display in the left pane. I tried writing a simpl...

When I first started using Ruby, Matz's C-Ruby was mostly the only game in town. I am also an enthusiastic user Ruby 1.9.x, JRuby, and MacRuby. Seeing the Ruby spec being developed in Japan under government funding, and that it is for Ruby 1.8.7, I get a feeling of déjà vu as a long time Lisp user. The balkanisation of Lisp has been more than a small nuisance for me in the last 25 years. I would prefer that all Ruby implementations eventually implement a common specification, but I would rather it be for something that looks like 1.9.x.

Just some advice that I give friends and family: Delete all cookies in your browser every week - it is easy enough to sign in again to web sites that require authentication. People who do not delete their cookies never see what sites are tracking them. It is easiest to do a 'delete all cookies' operation and not to try to save the 5 or 10 cookies out of thousands that are stored in your local browser data. Keep a text file with all passwords in encrypted form - and, do not use the same password for different purposes. Every time you use your super market's discount card (or possibly pay with a credit card), your purchases are permanently associated with you - do you care? maybe or maybe not. I do use a lot of web services that track what I do (GMail, for example) but I make the decision to give up privacy vs. benefits on a service by service basis.

This is worth sharing: easy to follow instructions for installing Rails 3.0pre . Thanks to Oscar Del Ben! Yesterday I spent 90 minutes trying a fresh install of Ruby 1.9.1 and Rails 3.0pre with no luck, so thanks to Oscar for his writeup. BTW, I Used Ruby 1.8.7 when following Oscar's directions.

Awesome - in the past I have had to write my own code/scripts to manage attaching and EBS file volume to a new EC2 instance. This new feature will make it a lot easier to manage your own EC2 based services. If you would prefer a PDF with the complete documentation, then use this link . This new feature will make using EC2 even easier for some applications - a welcome change. That said, I have my own scheme for automatically mounting EBS volumes, assigning ElasticIP addresses, etc. and for some deployments I will continue to use temporary boot volumes and pull AMIs from S3.