Everett Toews

jclouds 1.6.1 has been released! Here’s the official announcement. This marks our first release as an incubated Apache project. We’ve fixed a number of issues and we’ve updated a lot of license headers :P but the biggest change is to our Maven groupId. It’s gone from org.jclouds to org.apache.jclouds. The version also includes a “-incubating” to indicate our current incubation status in Apache. This is a big update as we’ve effectively changed the address where you download jclouds.

I had an intermittent problem where Minecraft would freeze up on my Mac and just stop working. I would take anywhere from five to thirty seconds to unfreeze before I could start playing again. Some of the longer pauses would seem like a crash but it always eventually resumed. It was a nasty bug and extremely frustrating.

I got a comment on my jclouds and OpenStack post about how to get the Tenant ID via jclouds. The first solution that popped to my mind was to get the Tenant ID out of the access data structure that gets returned upon authentication. This turned out to be a bit trickier than expected as jclouds automatically authenticates on your first actual interaction with a cloud (i.e. the very first time you call a method that needs to talk to the cloud). To get the access data structure I needed to manually authenticate. Here’s how to do it.

The OpenStack community has been and needs to continue to be a welcoming community for developers in all programming languages. Naturally I’m referring to developers who are building systems on top of OpenStack and not the developers of OpenStack itself.

I was at Gluecon 2013 a few weeks ago and caught a great session from Jeff Lindsay & Solomon Hykes about Docker. Docker is an open-source engine which automates the deployment of applications as highly portable, self-sufficient containers which are independent of hardware, language, framework, packaging system and hosting provider.

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a mechanism that allows Javascript on a web page to make XMLHttpRequests to another domain, not the domain the Javascript originated from. Such “cross-domain” requests would otherwise be forbidden by web browsers, per the same origin security policy. CORS defines a way in which the browser and the server can interact to determine whether or not to allow the cross-origin request. It is more powerful than only allowing same-origin requests, but it is more secure than simply allowing all such cross-origin requests.