Ride Like the Wind...

R2AD proudly supported the American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure 2018.  You too can support the cause by visiting the site and donating.

Ride On!

R2AD Cloud Team = AWS Certified

R2AD is proud that our cloud team has achieved various AWS Certifications. We recommended obtaining an AWS Certificate if you are an architect, developer, tester, information security professional, etc.



We used ACloud.Guru videos to train ourselves along with the new AWS Certified Solutions Architecture book now available on Amazon. Learn more from the AWS Certification Site.

Total Eclipse 2017

R2AD held a corporate off-site within the zone of totality during the August 21st, 2017 Total Eclipse.
We'll plan a similar event for the next total eclipse in 2024 - hope you can be there!  We'll plan ahead and announce the social event for all to come and enjoy.  We'll keep you updated with this web site: Totality (which is an AWS S3 Bucket replicated between two regions).

Cloud Activation: FOM in Cloud

R2AD's cloud team along with the FOM developers and JDISS engineers are now transitioning FOM into the AWS/C2S Cloud.  This is a significant move toward a scalable, secure, and reliable FOM production environment.  Additionally the longer term goals are being worked on to provide a sustainable environment for improved enterprise-ready, multi-organizational, application development.   R2AD is Cloud Ready!

More information about the AWS/C2S cloud is available here.

R2AD Delivers FOM to JDISS

R2AD delivered  a new version of the Federated Order of Battle (FOM) application to the
Joint Deployable Intelligence Support System (JDISS) Program Office.  R2AD is a subcontractor supporting JDISS under Fulcrum IT, providing services to the Department of Defense (DoD) Intelligence Community (IC).

The Federated Order of Battle Management (FOM) application provides a lightweight work flow enhancement tool for Operational Intelligence (OPINTEL) analysts and watch standers. The primary mission of FOM is to enable users to dynamically manage and disseminate the underway Naval Order of Battle (NOB). 

R2AD is maintaining the FOM code and is supporting the fielding of FOM and customer support as a member of the JDISS team.

AWS Cloud Machine

AWS Lambda = Dynamic Functions

R2AD advocates the use of the newer Amazon Web Services (AWS) API Gateway and Lambda services!  Together, these services offer a secure cloud scalable platform for web applications.  Because it is "server-less", efficiency increases, sustainment cost is reduced, and security is improved. R2AD has briefed on this topic - Here is the link for the API Gateway + Lambda slides!

Computer Science Camp for Kids

R2AD personnel are preparing to teach a computer programming camp for kids this summer (July 2016).  Details, as they progress, are available at the FOGE Event page.

Here's the current description of the course:

Learn about computers, inside and out!  This camp covers computer history coupled with programming in Basic.  Students will be able to understand the potential of programming and will learn techniques which they can apply in other FOGE courses that incorporate programming (i.e. robotics).  Apple ][ computers will be available for demonstrations as part of the history aspect of this unique course.

We'll be using, to some extend, the Small Basic book available from Computer Science For Kids.

If you would also like to volunteer, please contact R2AD or FOGE today! 

The 2016 DI2E Plugfest planning is gearing up! Join R2AD and many other industry partners as we team together to develop needed applications and services to improve interoperability through standards, cooperation, and hard work!

R2AD plans to code and integrate using the Intelligence Community Identifier (IC-ID) specification, One of our focus items this year. 

Shink your Linux VM using UNIX and VMware commands

There are many reasons why you would want to shrink the overall size of your VM.  Here are a few: Conserve Disk Space (the final frontier); Fit the VM on a CD or a DVD; reduce time to transmit the VM over the network; reduce overall backup time.
This entry provides a summary of a basic technique that we use.  I'm sure this is documented elsewhere, however sometimes unique perspectives can be illuminating.

Open two terminal windows and use sudo or become root.  In one terminal, issue the dd command shown in the image below to create a huge file in /tmp to fill up the disk space with zeros. Zeros are highly compressible.  You can repeat the command or change the arguments, depending on the size of the volume.

• dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/full bs=100M count=500

While that is running, check the progress using the df command in the other terminal window. When the disk is full, stop the dump command (ctrl-c) and then remove the huge temporary files and then shutdown your system. 

Next, run the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe utility to decompress and shrink your virtual disk volume.  So first use the -d option, passing in the name of the VMDK file, and when that is completed, run again with the -k option.  In our case, the resultant OVA file went down from 17GB to 1.3GB.  Cool Bytes.
 

(Windows Example is referenced below)

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware>"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe"
VMware Virtual Disk Manager - build 1895310.
Usage: vmware-vdiskmanager.exe OPTIONS |
Offline disk manipulation utility
  Operations, only one may be specified at a time:
     -d                   : defragment the specified virtual disk. Only
                            local virtual disks may be defragmented.
     -k                   : shrink the specified virtual disk. Only local
                            virtual disks may be shrunk.
   

R2AD attending DoDIIS Worldwide 2015

DoDIIS WorldWide 2015...
R2AD is supporting ONI at DoDIIS WorldWide 2015!  Stop by the JDISS booth (#232) to see great cloud related demonstrations.    R2AD has been busy migrating modern applications such as FOM and TMSWeb as new Intelligence Mission Applications (IMAs) into the JDISS portfolio. Learn more at the DoDIIS Worldwide.

OGF-43 and GENI Engineering Conference 22...

R2AD is attending and participating in the Open Grid Forum 43 (OGF-43), the GENI Engineering Conference 22 and US Ignite Application Summit.  It is hosted by the George Washington University, March 23-26, 2015.
GENI Engineering Conferences (GEC) are regular open working meetings where researchers, developers, industrial and international partners and the GENI Project Office meet to advance infrastructure planning and prototyping for the GENI project. The GEC focuses on how to design and build a suite of infrastructure that can best inspire and support creative research. The conference is open to all.
R2AD is a active member of the Open Grid Forum. 
If you're interested in future cloud and computer networking, check out the 22nd geni conference agenda!

Google I/O in DC

We are participating in the Google I/O Extended DC #IOxDC 2014 event being held at the Artisphere in Arlington, VA.  A live feed is shown from Google I/O and there is a Google Wear hack-a-thon.  Android Coding!  Link: Google Developer Group Meetup

Cloud Expo East 2014

R2AD participated in Cloud Expo East 2014, specifically Big Data Expo 2014.  This event was well attended by both cloud enthusiast and industry providers. The event had a lot of focus on Cloud APIs, noSQL databases, and abstraction layers to make Big Data easier.

Cloud APIs are going to get more attention in the near future, especially as organizations realize the need for interoperability and also portability of their "cloud code".  

Note that Docker 1.0 was just released as well and was talked about during the conference...this is a way to achieve application portability between the clouds.

Internet of Things (IOT) was also had powerful  presence at the conference. R2AD is looking forward to IOT hardware and application development in the years to come!