Cloud Computing - Final Module Post

What Is The "Cloud"?

Anyone not familiar with IT concepts could ask "What does cloud computing mean?". After a lengthy and interesting discussion in class, we came up with a summary that incorporates the concepts of cloud computing and highlights its shortcomings, pitfalls and benefits.

Cloud computing is a concept were you have hosted applications/platforms on remote computers. Utilising such a system will lead to:

• no installations and upgrades required
• a user system which is less subject to viruses
• less control over your applications which may lead to problems when dealing with people
• some loss of data depending on browser reliability

---

Platform Independance

The promises platform independence in cloud computing have long been mentioned. One can argue that platform independence in the cloud is an illusion since the cloud is still dependant on the browser (flash, legacy tech). The only thing that might come close is the creation of an identical interface across platforms. In today's word, and from a developer's point-of-view, if you need a webpage to be identical across all platforms, either use flash or you have to write browser-specific tweaks.

---

Strength & Scalability

The main strength and the forte of it's adoption is the ability of access from anywhere (freedom, but one cannot ignore that it is still dependant on the data connection). Cloud computing offers scalability: the cloud will not fix a badly designed architecture but in itself, but rather, it forms its roots in a scalable fashion

---

The Clients of Today

The cloud can be said to require thinner clients, but on the other hand, we have to remind ourselves of the giants strides in hardware leading in the same processing power that was available in your desktop PC 4 years ago to be in the palm of your hand. One argument that hold true is that with the cloud we are reducing layers (consolidation): think Chrome OS, eliminating the OS

---

Control, Control...

The cloud can be said to offer your less control over your data. Cloud operators are starting to take this into account, offering you a fair option to pull yourself out from their service while taking all your data with you (Google Liberation Front, Capsule CRM)

---

Security. Should I, Would I, Will I?

New security questions are asked with the cloud. One can argue that your password maybe a bottleneck in your security and that your data may-be intercepted in-transfer. There are systems nowadays to overcome these issues such as the system used by banks to Log-In into the online-banking systems. Proper encryption will also take care of the data transfer. The real problem actually is to convince the companies to utilise the cloud. A valid analogy is the question: "Were do you store your money?", and you'll answer, "The Bank, of course!". And why do you do that, and not keep the money hidden behind a brick? Because, a bank specializes in keeping the money secure. The same argument applies to cloud computing: you are offloading security liabilities and risks to a company which specializes in security.

---

Cost & Legal Issues

Cheaper. A simple statement which may hold true in cloud computing. You cannot get away with software piracy that easily since you are actually connected to the provider. On the other hand, costs could go up depending on licensing policies. Legal issues arise with cloud computing since different countries employ different laws.

---

A Few Examples

Some examples of cloud platforms

• Citrix - provides desktop and server virtualisation
• Office365 - your Microsoft Office, on the cloud, shared
• Google Docs - Google's take on the cloud office
• Google Apps - providing businesses with hosting and clouding options
• iCloud - the upcoming service by Apple to integrate all your iDevices

---

Course Conclusion

This module was very enjoyable. We explored many technologies along the way including: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, PHP, XML, Web accessibility, Second Life, HTML5, CSS3, the Mobile web, Social Networking and Cloud Computing. Going through such an array of concepts, while writing a blog each week was quite an effective solution. It provided me with means to properly explain how I understood the concepts, left leeway for exploration and expansion while still remaining somewhat academic. I particularly enjoyed putting my take on the subject and highlighting problematic or frustrating issues (usually mutually expressed by my classmates). As a conclusion, the module was quite a well presented learning experience and I would recommend the weekly-blog as an assessment system to anyone.

The Evolution of Social Networks

Where It All Started

For better or for worse, social networks have become part of our everyday life. Their relevance and importance and use has been increasing exponentially for quite some time. The origins of such networks can be traced back to the late 70s with the start of Usernets and BBSs (Bullettin Board Systems). BBSs were based on a centralised computer to which only one user could connect and have their say.

Through the late 80s, we saw the rise of Instant Messaging starting with IRC and ICQ. These allowed you to connect to a channel: chatroom, in which many other people were connected. ICQ was partly responsible for today's abbreviations such as LOL and BRB and emoticons.

---

The Profile Era

The idea of have a profile, were you could portray your self and adorn it with a photo can be partially attributed to the early dating sites. These allowed users to find and contact other people. From roots of BBSs stemmed the rise of online forums, which are still very much in use today.

In 1997, Six Degrees approached today's concept of a social network, were you can become friends with other users and create your own profile. This site was shut down in 2001. While Six Degrees was on the rise in 1999, LiveJournal came up with the concept of encouraging users to keep a blog which they constantly update. This is reminiscent of the basis of most social networks today.

By 2002, we started seeing a different and more somewhat more cautious approach to social networking through Friendster. This network is based on helping you make new acquaintances by considering friends of your friends and assuming similar interests. In 2003, we saw the introduction of Hi5. Hi5 was hugely popular in Malta back in 2005-2006 and it centred around your friends, and friends of friends. At the same time, MySpace was also blooming. It was appealing due to the fact that it allowed an infinite number of custimisation options to your profile, leading to some pretty eye-watering, blinking and horribly colour-schemed profiles. My Space was and still remains quite popular with the music scene. Also at the same time, LinkedIn introduced a business aspect to social networking. It is nowadays quite sought after by employers and employees alike.

---

Facebook; And The Rest Of Recent History

2004 saw the coming to fruition of Facebook. The company's story has been dramatised in the 2010 movie "The Social Network". Starting as an exclusive Harvard-only network, in 2006 it opened to the public and at the time of writing, they have just announced that Facebook has over 750 million users. The "wall" is Facebook's central feature, were one can keep up with their friend's activities. Facebook also started connecting technologies when it introduced instant messaging, apps and recently video calling for it's users.

Other social networks of mention are Flickr, which is popular with the photography scene. It focuses on the user's photos and one can add them to "pools" were the users of that "pool" can view them. There are other networks like Orkut, which is very popular only in certain countries and niche networks, mostly focusing on bookmarking like Delicious and Reddit. Other types of networks, or rather communities are the MMORPG communities like World of Worcraft, which is centred on their forums and in-game communications. There are also communities which focus on video content, ranging from YouTube, which allows you to post videos, to live streaming sites such as UStream.tv.

---

Today

Looking into the future, from 2007, Twitter has grown considerably. While not a social network in it's own right, but more of a short updates to your followers network, it has gained momentum. The recently launched (still in beta invite-only at the time of writing) Google+ service is also interesting. What Google have done is take the best of the other networks and add a flavour of their own. So they added a "wall" - like feature similar to Facebook's but also introduced the new concept of "circles". "Circles" allows you to group your acquantancies into categories, for example "Family" and "Photography". This will allow you to group or rather, categorise the information coming to your wall and it also therefore allows you to share particular materials with only a "circle" of friends.

---

Conclusion

Personally, right now, I make use of Facebook to keep up with my real-life friends, Twitter to keep updated with the latest and greatest and also trying out Google+. While Google+ is still pretty much full of tech-savvy people, I would like to see it grow but at the same time understand the simple question most people pose: "Why should I leave from the comfort of Facebook?". They can co-exist side-by-side, but this still remains to be seen.

The Mobile Web

The Evolution of the Mobile Phone

In this lecture we explored the evolution of the mobile phone. From simply devices which their sole task was to act as a portable home phone to today's multi-touch, multi-connected (time wasting) devices.

Some notable mobile phones in history:

• Motorola Dynatac 8000X (1983) - The first portable mobile phone
• Motorola Microtac 9800X (1989) - The first truly portable mobile phone, now featuring an address book, and the first flip-phone
• Nokia 5110 (1998) - First mainstream mobile phone, featuring some in-built games and a 5 inch display
• Nokia 3310 (2000) - Hugely popular phone with T9
• Motorola RAZR (2004) - Hugely popular phone that set the standard for stylish and fashionable phones to come
• Apple iPhone (2007) - Touch-screen goes mainstream, auto-rotation, integrated Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS

---

The Evolution of Mobile Phone Connectivity

Technology	Standards	Year Introduced	Data Rates
1G	AMPS, TACS	1983	-
2G	GSM, CDMA, EDGE, GPRS	1991	236 kbps
3G	UTMS, CDMA, HSDPA	2001	384 kbps
4G	LTE, WiMax	2009	< 1 Gbps

Throughout the years, mobile phone began garnering more and more connectivity options, apart from the phone connectivity itself. Some of these technologies are:

• Infra-Red - significant reduction in phones equipped with this technology
• FM-Radio
• Bluetooth
• GPS
• WiFi

From the early days of WAP to the mainstream introduction of WiFi in our mobile phones, accessing the web on our phones has been long coming. In the WAP days, only specially designed pages could be accessed from our phones. Today, we can access the full-blown internet on our phones. The preferred practice though is to adapt our page for mobile access. Adapting for mobile access means that the page will fit snugly on the user's screen, eliminating side scrolling and zooming to read items. Providing sizeable buttons and click-able areas are also issues taken into consideration.

---

GeoLocation - where are you?

In conjunction with mobile phone development we explored the GeoLocation API. This API makes use of already known locations, such as cell phone towers and WiFi and uses them as reference points (triangulation) to determine your approximate location. After writing a bit of code, as shown below, to call the GeoLocation API, I tested it on a few browsers. Internet Explorer 9 failed to show anything. Firefox 4 took a good half a minute to get the location and was sometimes reporting errors. Opera and Google Chrome on the other hand, worked as they should.

HTML5, CSS3 & JavaScript

Overview

HTML 5 is being touted as the future of web-development for some time now. The rise of HTML 5 has caused many battles with other web technologies. Most notable rival is Adobe and their Flash platform. Flash has been used in many web projects since it brings dynamic and aesthetically pleasing content to your web-page. This however came at a price of sluggish performance a notable lack of scalability. HTML 5 and it's related technologies are now bringing the same level of dynamic content by extending the already standard HTML. Browsers are still implementing HTML 5 and CSS 3 functions as we speak. The use of engines is being used by browsers as well to enable graphics to be rendered specifically through our GPU (Google Chrome and Safari's Webkit and Mozilla Firefox's Mozilla engine).

As we are seeing more and more of our mobile devices be HTML 5, CSS 3 capable (Mobile Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android) more companies are embracing the new technologies with some even jumping ship from Adobe Flash altogether. The outspoken Apple blatantly showed this is 2010 by issuing a demo reel of HTML 5 and leapt into a heated and humorous debate with Adobe for a few months. More sites are now popping up with developers gearing and getting more and more creative as the tools develop.

---

Giving It A Try

I took quite a tour of the new available features such as the great new functions of HTML 5 such as the web-storage. Saw some clever web-pages utilizing CSS 3 in a myriad of combinations to produce stunning yet surprising simple and clean results, both in the terms of the coding and in the terms of the user interface. Switching to advanced JavaScript, the demos found at Google Experiments are particularly good (check webpage: ro.me!) and some even quite useful.

Guided by these innovative solutions, I check some tutorials at w3Schools and implemented some of features, starting off with HTML 5 web-storage function. There are two ways of storing data on the client, either on the Local Storage or as a Session Storage. Using the sessionStorage function we can now create a simple output to show how many visits the user has made to the page in the current session. The code is shown below:

A new attribute was given to the "input" tag; the email attribute. This checks matches the entered text with the basic email format of "x@x.x" and outputs an error message if it is not correct, as shown in the image below:

Another well-requested feature, especially by web-designers is the ability to round your borders (this could previously be done by some well-placed images posing as your "border"). Now, in CSS3, by simply specifying your border-radius, you will get a rounded bordered box, shown in the code below:

Animations will catch anyone's eye and as we can now start to deviate from Flash through the use of CSS3 2D & 3D Transformations and Animations. I experimented with a few of them and got to grips with rotation, translation, scaling and skewing transformations as well as defining keyFrames for the stages of an animation. The code is shown below:

I grouped my experimentation together into a single page that uses HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript that will:

• display the visit counter for this session and animate it to move left and right and back
• show a form with rounded borders that will include an email and a password field
• display a box with text, on which when the mouse is hovered, the box is spinned 360 degrees and changed in size, while having the text being resized accordingly

---

Concluding With The Same Old Cross-Browser Issues

Not all browsers support everything right now, and as I discovered while coding, you need to specifically call their respective toolkits for some of the code to work. The images below show the webpage in different browsers to highlight the differences between them.

Second Life: More Scripting

For this week, we're taking a thorougher look at scripting in Second life using Linden Scripting Language (LSL). First and foremost re-run through some basic rules and outlines of LSL:

• it is a strongly typed language (every variable needs to be declared and they can only hold values of the relevant type)
• variables: integer, float string, key, vector, rotation and list and some of their practical uses
• basic loops and conditions (for, do, while) which are similar to Java and PHP
• a look at some string functions

Through the basic understanding, we now applied some of the example scripts in-game and modified them to our preferences. These included a colour changing object, objects that open webpages and objects that change the light they emit when selected.

While scripting these objects we became more familiar with some LSL functions, such as, the different chat levels that are available in game (channels, owner chat, private messaging etc.), dialogue options, object listening and making use of vectors and lists.

Following up on this, I decided to implement an object that will give a passer-by the option to type a message which will be sent to the owner via email. First and foremost I create the object out of basic shapes and gave it some texture. The picture below illustrates the mailbox object.

For the object scripting I made use of and combines some of the examples to produce the desired result. The script will check for the online status of the owner and always display that status as part of that object. When a user selects the mailbox, they are prompted with the option to enter a line of text in the chatbox. That line is then sent via email to the owner. The pictures below depict a user sending a message through the mailbox system.

Conclusion

This brings to an end the Second Life portion of this module. Second Life was quite an interesting subject to tackle. It is a niche in itself, a game that give you abilities and tools to create and manipulate objects at will. This "game" however seems to lack any purpose, there does not seem to be any quests or end-game objective or any form of completion. Thus, it is a platform on it's own. In today's world we are seeking integration in everything. You Log In with your Facebook or Twitter account to leave comments on blogs or forums, eliminating the Signing Up process and combining your digital life into a few accounts. As we discussed in class and as it was pointed out by several class-mates, if somehow, this platform could be integrated with social networking, then it could increase the appeal of the game.

Creating a complex object

Starting off I decided to create a room with a modern and free design. Following some tips and guides I commenced the object by creating a base for my building. It goes without saying that this object will be made up of more than one basic prim, so I had to first understand how to work with and link multiple prims.

Connecting prims requires that you first create more than one prim and then select them using the Shift key and change their properties to "Linked". Through this method, I built up the base and the walls. Through trial and error I came to realize that to align and place the objects together, one should make use of the positioning properties of the respective objects. This results in perfect alignment and not aligning them by eye and when you rotate the view, the object is totally not as it should be.

After I create the walls and the floors I wanted a roof to be made up in a cloud-like manner. This requires you to manipulate your object to deviate from the basic shapes. I created a basic object and manipulated and edited the options to create around 8 unique cloud-like random shapes and placed them around each other to form a cloud-like roof.

When I finished the basic structure I changed the textures of the objects to reflect wood, for the walls, some nice tiles for the floor and glass-like cealing. I also changed the texture of the entrance to reflect a grassy texture and added some benches and an orb-like transparent centrepiece.

I found building objects quite enjoyable though like most things, practise makes perfect so in order to learn how to translate what you have in mind onto a 3d model requires a fair amount of time.

Below is gallery showing the progress of constructing such an object

Second Life - Creating Objects & Scripting

For this week's lecture, we first logged in appropriately on Second Life and added each other in-game. Following this, we were all instructed to meet up in a sandbox called "Fermi". A sandbox is a piece of in-game land were one is allowed to built their objects and can put them in their inventory for later use.

Meeting there, we all started to get to grips with building basic objects and the general controls as regards it's shape/size/rotation etc. I managed to create a wearable glowing halo by creating a torus shaped object, re-sizing it, rotation it, adding the glowing and transparency effects and finally wielding it.

Next, we started dabbling with scripting objects. This is done through the game's own scripting language called the Linden Scripting Language (LSL). LSL is runs on the server side and is loosely based on Java and C. It is made up of "states","events" and functions, and crucially, every script must have at least one state: the default state, and one event handler. "Events" and pre-defined and the user can define the respective handlers for these events when associated to a particular object.

In-game we created objects that say text when clicked or change their colours when switching states.

All-in-all again, the concept is quite neat but the delivery is hindered by massive issues of lag and glitches. Sometimes it took a fair minute for a particular script to run and up till now we are still dealing with fairly basic scripts.