My Aunt Jeanne Narum, director of Project Kaleidoscope and the Independent Colleges Office, received Doctor of Science, honoris causa and addressed GW graduates on the National Mall May 17, 2009.

(See also: YouTube: Jeanne Narum, GW Commencement 2009)
(See also: GW: Remarks - Jeanne Narum)
(See also: GW: Formal Commencement Photo Gallery)

Despite several rendering issues on the SlideShare site, the presentation is available here:

(See also: SlideShare: Cloud Computing Services and the Data Center)

The following weekend an interesting article about data centers appeared in the New York Times magazine:

(See also: NYtimes Magazine: Data Center Overload)
(See also: NYtimes Magazine: Data Center Overload slides)

Reading and thoroughly enjoying Donal O’shea’s, ‘The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe‘. Though small portions of the math are on the high end, the text is technical, historical, and accessible.

Reading the bit about Bernhard Reimann’s ‘Reimann Curvature tensor’ and his contributions to Complex Analysis. This is my Father-In-Law’s field.

More as I finish the work.

(See also: Amazon: The Poincare Conjecture)
(See also: SEED: What is The Poincare Conjecture?)
(See also: bookslut: The Poincare Conjecture)

A quick read at 147 pages, the book is peppered with examples of historical and modern heretics. (Martin Luther is cited.) In the past, life has been tough for people who think outside the prescribed norm, now the business and social climate rewards new and novel. Don’t be a ’sheepwalker’, be a heretic.

(See also: Amazon: Tribes, we need you to lead us, by Seth Godin)

NASA is developing a new integrated Cloud Computing environment they call NEBULA at NASA Ames Research Center. NEBULA is an open-source project, built from the ground up with common tools: Eucalyptus, JAVA, LDAP, Lustre, MySQL, Python, SAML, Subversion, and TRAC. It will provide high-capacity computing, storage and network connectivity, and use a ‘virtualized, scalable approach to achieve cost and energy efficiencies’.

According to the NEBULA website:

The fully-integrated nature of the NEBULA components provides for extremely rapid development of policy-compliant and secure web applications, fosters and encourages code reuse, and improves the coherence and cohesiveness of NASA’s collaborative web applications. It is used for Education and Public Outreach, for collaboration and public input, and also for mission support.

NEBULA extends the Software-as-a-Service to the realm of Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. In the process, slaying several classic conundrums of computational collaboration.

I wish them the best of luck.

(See also: NEBULA site)
(See also: InformationWeek: NASA Launches Nebula Compute Cloud)
(See also: Open Eucalyptus project)
(See also: Eucalyptus Cloud Computing presentation)