I went on a short ski trip to Park City, Utah this week, and came back with this to remember it by:

I had a great three hours of a skiing lesson on Monday, but I headed down a run not appropriate for my skill level that afternoon. Got a toboggan and snowmobile ride down to the first aid office, and then a taxi ride down the mountain to the Park City urgent care. I really hoped I had just sprained it badly, but alas. I flew home a day early and found an orthopedist. He had an MRI done, and as it turned out, I fractured my tibia in two places: one that you can see in the x-ray above, and another chip of bone pulled off by my ACL. Luckily, my ACL is intact. They decided not to perform any surgery and just let it heal. So, I'm sitting here in a leg brace. Fun times!

If you're a citizen of the United States, please write your House representative and urge them to vote for HR 3043 to override President Bush's veto of the bill. This bill contains a number of important items, including legislation requiring open access to journal articles produced from research using NIH funding.

From The Scientist:

In a statement released by the White House after Bush vetoed the bill, the president decried the Democrat-led Congress for engaging in what he called a "spending spree," and said that the legislative majority was "acting like a teenager with a new credit card."

Amazingly arrogant. For some perspective on what our taxes actually are paying for, check out this chart. Please tell your representatives that you want your taxes to pay for science and education, not war.

Edit: Yes, the chart above is skewed and not a complete picture in any way. It compares Iraq war spending against reasearch into alternative energy, not spending as a whole. For a full picture of tax dollars spent, please see this amazing presentation of the data.

I attended the Citrix iForum user conference this week in Las Vegas, in support of rPath's partnership with BusinessObjects, Citrix, and RightScale. We announced a demo of a virtual appliance based on Crystal Reports Server XI. We built a site to "test drive" the appliance: http://www.rpath.com/crystalreports/. You can choose to either run your appliance using Citrix XenServer Express, or an 8-hour trial for free on Amazon's EC2 cloud. It's very similar to the rPath's own guided tour, and it really shows how quickly you can get up and running with a large and complex system such as Crystal Reports Server.

I was able to attend Mark Templeton's keynote on the first day of the conference. Mark is the CEO of Citrix and delivered a very interesting presentation, heavily focused on what Citrix is calling "application delivery". Fueled by a series of strategic acquisitions, including XenSource for $500 million, they're trying to make application delivery as easy as setting up cable TV—the cable company doesn't care what kind of receiver is on the other end. 16" black and white TV, 36" plasma, or movie projector. He explained that the old model of software delivery depends on always-increasing amounts of bandwidth, server hardware, and storage capacity. The new model should be as simple as a web browser or another standards-based interface on the client's end.

While Mark focused on the actual delivery of application functionality to the end user, the construction of the virtualized image must be considered. This relates to rPath in an interesting way. In the traditional software delivery model, a system is made up of a number of components. For instance: the core operating system, a database server, an application server (Tomcat, JBoss), and the actual application itself. That's at least four different vendors for updates and support. Using a virtual appliance built with rPath tools, the entire configuration is collapsed to one stream of updates and support, simplifying delivery, setup, and maintenance. BusinessObjects' Crystal Reports demo shows how powerful this can be. A virtual appliance also eliminates the complexity of integrating multiple versions of each component: the "matrix of pain". You, as the software vendor, control every component from the core OS to the application itself.

It will be very exciting to see where ISVs such as BusinessObjects, Ingres, Digium, Zimbra, and others are taking the concept of application delivery. With the build tools from companies like rPath, virtualization tools from VMware, Citrix, and Amazon (EC2), and management with interfaces like RightScale and Enomaly, I believe that application delivery will indeed be transformed in the next few years.

This Friday was my last day as a software engineer for rPath. I'm going to be moving on to a new role in the same company: I'm starting Monday as a field engineer (otherwise known as a sales engineer), which means I won't be doing core development anymore. Here's a good general description of the job: What "Sales Engineers" Do. I will be spending most of my time with prospective customers and I'll be doing a lot of traveling.

I've had a great time in core engineering and I've worked with some positively fantastic people in our organization. I'll definitely miss spending a lot of time with all of our engineering team, but I'm sure that I'll find enough time to give them a hard time when they deserve it.

In keeping with rPath's great tradition of tossing folks right into the deep end, I'm going to be in San Francisco all next week. I'll be spending most of the week visiting customers and delivering training, but on Thursday, September 20th, I will be at the Intel Developer Forum. If anyone who reads this is going to the forum, I'd love to say hi. Similarly, if anyone in the Bay Area wants to get together for a coffee or a drink or something, just let me know! (Hi, VMware guys!)

I've noticed some welcome advances in the world of virtualization and appliances today. VMware open-sourced their guest tools which will make the lives of appliance vendors who are targeting VMware and multiple virtualization platforms much easier, especially when they're using tools like rPath's rBuilder. Excellent work, VMware, and kudos for a long-awaited open-source release.

Newly joining the fray, it looks like Ubuntu is entering the virtual appliance market with a tailored version of their distribution, tuned, liked rPath Linux, for appliance configurations. It will be interesting to see what kinds of tools they can produce to enable the creation and ongoing maintenance of their dpkg-based appliances.

One more interesting news item: it looks like a standard encapsulation format for virtual machines is finally gaining some traction: OVF. This will also be a welcome addition for virtual appliance vendors. You can expect to see support for this from rBuilder soon, I'm sure. Hopefully this will reduce the number of disparate (and very similar) formats that are currently in the wild.

It certainly looks like the appliance model is gaining a lot of traction in both the commercial marketplace and the open-source community. Exciting times!