Category Archives: Panopticon

It's a New Week!

Well, getting code up and running is one thing.  Getting it deployed is another.  I have questionable skills in the former, and not so questionable skills in the latter!  In fact, there’s no question about my lack of skill in the latter whatsoever!  So it’s taking me a little extra time to deploy TwitYourl to the Rackspace cloud.  But I did get the cloud configured this weekend.  So that’s exciting.

Rackspace

After selecting Rackspace over EC2 for this project (Rackspace is #2, and seems to be gaining rapidly on EC2), Rackspace verified my credit card and sent me an email.  Within a couple of hours (and that’s because I was multitasking at the time), I was able to create a number of Ubuntu instances.  I wish that there was more to report than that – but there isn’t.  It just worked.  I installed a RabbitMQ hub, and was publishing/subscribing to messages using my new cloud instance (“Look ma!  Isn’t it shiny!?”) very quickly.

So This Week

I will be packaging up TwitYourl for deployment via Rackspace, getting all of the source up to github, and looking to integrate Panopticon’s Treemaps into the project as well.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

As I’ve been getting this relatively small project to the point where we can actually show something publicly, I’ve been building a list of ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if…”  in regards to cloud event processing.  What an IDE might look like, what capabilities a management console would provide, etc.  Once we’ve got TwitYourl up and running in the cloud, I will start discussing that list out here, in the open.

Suggestions – Keep Them Coming

I’ve been getting a lot of email, and a lot of traffic on the blog, and I think that’s a good thing.  I’ve received suggestions, requests for briefings, and queries as to my whereabouts in the near future.  Keep it up – I love to hear from the community, and the suggestions and feedback have been invaluable.  Thank you.

Just When I Thought I Was Done… Bring on the Visualization!

“They pulled me back in.” – The God Father.

I’ve received some interest/emails about TwitURL – our Map/Reduce as it applies to CEP (cloud event processing) project.  Seems that people would like to see the results of these processes visually.  Who can blame them, right?  So, I was thinking, how can I add a little sizzle to TwitURL?

Panopticon

Panopticon offers some pretty slick visualization capabilities – you can check them out here.  And based upon some feedback/requests, I’m going to hook up a heat map to the output of TwitURL.  The heat map will show which URL’s are the hottest-the most tweeted URL over a given time frame.  Once we deploy TwitURL in the cloud, we’ll use this app to see what’s going on in there.  Here’s a picture of the heat map: