Cloud

Finally, "The Cloud" Means Something

Few jargonistic terms have annoyed me as much as, "The Cloud." When the term was first coined, its meaning was ambiguous at best. For some companies, it meant shared web hosting (but with a cooler sounding name). For others it was simply, "let us host your servers in our datacenter, which we now refer to as a cloud."

Android Candy: Never Plug In Your Phone Again!

Last month, I showed you an awesome audiobook player app for Android, but I didn't share my frustration in getting the audio files on to my phone. When I plugged my phone in to the computer, I couldn't get the SD card to mount, no matter what settings I changed.

Tarsnap: On-line Backups for the Truly Paranoid

Storing backups in the cloud requires a level of trust that not everyone is willing to give. While the convenience and low cost of automated, off-site backups is very compelling, the reality of putting personal data in the hands of complete strangers will never sit quite right with some people.

Nuvola: the Linux Choice for Cloud-y Music

Nuvola Player (formerly known as google-music-frame) is a Linux application that integrates cloud-based music services into your Linux desktop. I've tested it only with Google Music, but Nuvola now supports Google Music, Grooveshark, Hype Machine and 8tracks. It also supports Last.FM scrobbling.

Calibre in the Cloud

I've mentioned before that I keep my entire e-book collection in my Dropbox folder, and I can access it anywhere I have a Web connection. I didn't come up with the idea myself; instead, I shamelessly stole the idea from Bill Childers. I suspect he stole it from someone else, so feel free to steal the idea from me.

Swap Your Laptop for an iPad + Linode

Ditch your laptop and code in the cloud—it's easier than you'd think. On September 19, 2011, I said goodbye to my trusty MacBook Pro and started developing exclusively on an iPad + Linode 512. This is the surprising story of three months spent working in the cloud.

Dropbox Tips and Tricks

Dropbox, or one of the alternatives like Ubuntu One or SparkleShare, are great tools for keeping computers in sync. They offer some unique abilities as well. Here are a few of our favorites: Keep config folders, like Pidgin's .purple directory in your Dropbox, and symlink to it in your home directory. It saves entering the same information on your computers.

Webian Shell: Prototype Web-Based Shell

Webian Shell is a web-based shell that is designed to run full-screen and function as the primary user interface for your computer. At the moment, it's still at the proof of concept stage, but 0.1 is runnable without making any modifications to your system. As it features some interesting ideas, it's worth having a play around with.

Drop Your Dropbox and SparkleShare Instead!

We love Dropbox here at Linux Journal. It's cross-platform, offers a decent free offering and generally "just works". It has some problems though. Dropbox is proprietary. Dropbox stores a copy of your data in its own data repositories. Dropbox is limited in size, especially with its free accounts.

Open Source Cloud Computing with Hadoop

Have you ever wondered how Google, Facebook and other Internet giants process their massive workloads? Billions of requests are served every day by the biggest players on the Internet, resulting in background processing involving datasets in the petabyte scale. Of course they rely on Linux and cloud computing for obtaining the necessary scalability and performance.

Behind the Cloud It's Still Just Computers

I had the pleasure of joining a video conference with our local Drupal expert, Katherine Druckman, and Barry Jaspan, one of the system architects from Acquia. Acquia is a company that specializes in Drupal. While their company does many things for clients interested in using Drupal, we were specifically talking about cloud computing.

Observation: Cloud computing is nothing new

Cloud computing is not only the latest buzz term, it might well be the model of computing that powers the 21st century. However, it’s easy to forget that personal computing, in which each user has a standalone system that can operate without a network, is itself a relatively new approach.

eyeOS Web-based Desktop OS

eyeOS is a web based desktop operating system. Despite its unusual deployment orientation, in many ways, it's a full desktop operating system, complete with file management and full applications that operate within draggable, resizable windows.

Sync Your Life

For those of us lucky enough to use Linux on all of our computers, Canonical's Ubuntu One is a great way to keep files in sync between computers. Unfortunately, most of us are stuck using other operating systems throughout the day. We all have our own ways of managing such things, but I thought a glimpse into my “world of sync” might help others synchronize their lives. Files

Put Your Servers in the Cloud with Amazon EC2 and Ubuntu

Cloud services are all the rage today, although some of my fellow Linux Journal staffers may scoff when they hear me say that. Cloud services is a nebulous term that can mean anything from completely hosted services (like Gmail) to virtualized, leased servers, such as those provided by Amazon's EC2 service. And, the latter is the subject of this article.

EUCALYPTUS: a Tree Growing in the Cloud

From the Linux (and Linux Journal) perspective, there's an issue with clouds—those back-end Web services that compose Utility Computing. They're proprietary. Amazon owns AWS (Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2 and a growing number of others). Google, Microsoft and other companies own theirs as well.

eyeOS: Clouds for the Crowd

Cloud computing from the likes of Google and Amazon has become quite the rage in the last few years. Nick Carr's The Big Switch and other works have pointed toward a future of “utility” computing where we'll all use hosted apps and storage, thanks to the “scale” provided by big back-end companies and their giant hardware and software farms. But, there also has been pushback.