Scott Moser has just announced this week that the new Ubuntu images which boot out of an EBS-based root filesystem in EC2, and thus will persist across reboots, are available for testing.
As usual with something that just left the oven and is explicitly labeled for testing purposes, there was a minor bug in the first iteration of images which was even mentioned in the announcement itself. The bug, if not worked around as specified in the announcement, will prevent the image from rebooting.
Having an bootable EBS image which can’t reboot is a quite interesting (and ironic) problem. You have an image which persists, but suddenly you have no way to see what is inside the image anymore because you can’t boot it. Naturally, even if the said bug didn’t exist in the first place, it’s fairly easy to get into such a situation accidentally if you’re fiddling with the image configuration.
So, in this post we’ll see how to recover from a situation where a bootable EBS image can’t boot.
Continue reading ‘Recovering a bootable EBS image’
After about one year writing this service in my spare time, it’s finally out.
geohash.org offers short URLs which encode a latitude/longitude pair, so that referencing them in emails, forums, and websites is more convenient.
Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision, similar prefixes for nearby positions, and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision). I’ve put the algorithm created in the public domain. Some details may be seen in the Wikipedia article about it (hopefully that’ll help establishing prior art, and prevent Microsoft from patenting it).
To obtain the Geohash, the user provides latitude and longitude coordinates in a single input box (most commonly used formats for latitude and longitude pairs are accepted), and performs the request.
Besides showing the latitude and longitude corresponding to the given Geohash, users who navigate to a Geohash at geohash.org are also presented with an embedded map, and may download a GPX file, or transfer the waypoint directly to certain GPS receivers. Links are also provided to external sites that may provide further details around the specified location.
Published on
2004-03-11 in
Article.
I’ve translated to portuguese (pt_BR) the APT-RPM article I wrote for LWN. It’s available in printed media on Revista do Linux #50, and also on the LinuxIT site.
I’ve written an article about APT-RPM to LWN, exposing features recently introduced in the software. Check it out!