etc.v1 //Eat, Think, Code.

It has been five years since my last post , claiming to restart my blog. But due to various reasons, the restart never actually took off. Many things kept me busy in the last five years, I - Received a Ph.D. degree of Computer Science and Engineering from University of New South Wales. Married my lovely wife. Published a book on " Cloud Data Management " with colleagues. Joined Yuruware , and built Boomerang product that leads to acquirsation. Left previous company due to U.S. head office refocus and Sydney R&D close down. A few days ago, I received my new offer from a Bank for a role in a Big Data project. The new journey is about to begin. And I can't wait to share my new learnings and experiences on my new blog platform etc.v2 //Eat, Think, Code. - Yep! A new blog build with Static Site Generator Jekyll in GitHub . So what happen to all posts here? Well, they are at least 5 years old. There is not much point to migrate them over to the new blog just...

It has been years since my last article posted in this blog . Two years exactly! In the last two years, I has been drifted among several SNS websites, including  Facebook , Renren (a Chinese Facebook-like website), Twitter , and Weibo (a Chinese Twitter-like website). However, none of them kept me for a long period. It always starts with an exciting experience, but unfortunately ends with frustration and boringness. Because they are nothing but 140 characters, photo sharing, like, and comments. Nevertheless, the fast-pace style experience drains my patience of writing long articles, leaving no time for blogging in the last two years. I now come back as my Google+ has brought my Blogger into integration. Google+ is more than a SNS website to me. It is also a portal of all Google services in the future. A decent integration is all I expected to combine my Google services together. In fact, another reason for not bloggi...

After running the following command line in Windows Azure, net start Following running services are returned. These Windows services are started: Base Filtering Engine Certificate Propagation Cloud Drive CNG Key Isolation COM+ Event System Cryptographic Services DCOM Server Process Launcher DHCP Client Diagnostic Policy Service Distributed Link Tracking Client Distributed Transaction Coordinator DNS Client File Server Resource Manager Group Policy Client Hyper-V Guest Shutdown Service Hyper-V Time Synchronization Service IKE and AuthIP IPsec Keying Modules IP Helper IPsec Policy Agent KtmRm for Distributed Transaction Coordinator Network List Service Network Location Awareness Network Store Interface Service OS Diagnostic Service Plug and Play RdAgent Remote Access Connection Manager Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Remote Registry Secondary Logon Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol Service Security Accounts Manager Server Software Licensing System Event Notification Service TCP/IP NetBIOS ...

I finished a prototype of performance monitoring system yesterday. One of its functions is to query the version number of running systems. So then it returns: Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002] According to the version number given, the possible Windows system in Windows Azure Platform should be either Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008. Obviously, as a server operating system, it is unlikely to be Windows Vista. Therefore, it is for sure that an Azure Instance runs Windows Server 2008 in it. It is interesting that the newest server version, Windows Server 2008 R2, does not sit inside Windows Azure Platform. Is the Azure Team also waiting for the Service Pack 1 of Windows Server 2008 R2? To make sure that the new system is safe enough?

Forward: I participated in a book chapter writing in last month. The book chapter is about cloud provisioning. And the following are some paragraphs prepared for that chapter. Prominent cloud platforms, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), open source platform Eucalyptus, Microsoft Windows Azure, Google App Engine and GoGrid Cloud Hosting offer a variety of services to their users for monitoring, managing and provisioning resources. Amazon EC2 offers three services namely Elastic Load Balancer , Auto Scaling and CloudWatch . Eucalyptus uses a hierarchical controller structure. Windows Azure implements a service called Azure Fabric Controller . GoGrid Cloud Hosting provides a service named F5 Load Balancer . Google App Engine supports scalable technology that all Google applications are based on. All five cloud platforms are able to do load balancing, provisioning and auto scaling to some extent. But the way of achieving the provisioning goals varies. Some platforms can be ...

As the official website advised, Microsoft code name "Geneva" is an open platform that provides simplified user access and single sign-on for on-premises and cloud-based applications in the enterprise, across organizations, and on the Web. Currently the newest version is Beta 2, released on Aug. 18, 2009, about two months later than the release of Windows 7. So when my colleague, Yang, tried to make its samples run in Windows 7 Professional. Some strange errors popped up. We worked together for a long time to modify setup scripts and authority issues, getting it work eventually. I categorized errors that we came across, and corresponding solutions we made as following. 1. Error in “Run SamplesPreReqSetup.bat” The script cannot find httpcfg.exe tool in the current running environment. You can install this by going to the following link "http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=100322" Please ensure that httpcfg.exe is installed in your PATH or the directory this sc...

Forward: this is an article that I was originally posted in Chinese on April 19th, 2009 before closure of Google Page Creator. Although Google Page Creator has already been deprecated nowadays, the idea of using Google App Engine as a free web server to host static files is somehow still applicable to Blogger users. Therefore, I translated the post into English to share my experience of migrating Google Page Creator to Google App Engine, as well as mapping multi-directory structure into single directory structure to achieve backward compatibility with Google Page Creator by configuring app.yaml. Google has announced to shut down Google Page Creator in June this year. The disappearance of the free web hosting service brings us an inevitable painful of finding alternatives. As announced, the official solution is Google Page Creator migration to Google Sites . But for those Blogger users who want to host their JavaScript and CSS files for free, Google Sites might not be an appropriate ...

Microsoft .NET Service Bus currently offers ten relay bindings, with different messaging patterns and various message options, giving developers a range of choices of service implementations. Moreover, different relay bindings fit different characteristics. NetEventRelayBinding is preferred to enable publish/subscribe scenario; NetTcpRelayBinding is optimized for both efficiency and throughput; NetOnewayRelayBinding is the most constrained binding; and bindings from BasicHttpRelayBinding to WS2007HttpRelayFederationBinding are designed for non-WCF clients. These ten relay bindings really took me some time to digest. For those who just start learning, I think a list of replay bindings with all messaging patterns and default message options would be helpful. Relay Binding Messaging Patterns Default Message Options from Sender BasicHttpRelayBinding Req./Resp. Messaging SOAP 1.1 over HTTP in plain encoding WebHttpRelayBinding R...

Google Wave invitation Just checked Gmail a moment ago, and found a new Google Wave invitation lying there... Hello, Google Wave!

The new blog is online! Congratulations to my second blog! As well as my first English blog! :-) I have kept maintaining a Chinese blog ( 螺旋进化 , aka 'Helix Evolution') for years. I'm not sure that it is popular or not, but at least, it touches PageRank at two without any sculpting. Nevertheless, life moves on. Two reasons drive me to start another blog life. For one reason, as a new PhD student in cloud computing research, it is a good time for me to start a new blog, focusing on cloud computing study; noting ideas, delivering experience and sharing knowledge that I'm going to come across in my future study. For another reason, both my supervisor and my colleague have already started their journey of blogging. The prevailing atmosphere of sharing in my group drives me to follow their steps and open my mind. Hopefully, I can keep my blog updating at a reasonable frequency, in weekly at least. \(^_^)/ At last, thanks for the inspiration from Xiaomin, aka Shrimpy. The wo...

Smart Services CRC PhD Scholarships are available in cloud computing research. Those who are interested in this area. Please check details from Anna's blog Smart Services CRC PhD Scholarships Available in Cloud Computing Research .