Progress

This week I spent a lot of time writing my thesis. As requested by Ruben, I also build in support for CloudSigma clouds. Adding CloudSigma took about 10 minutes for the actual CloudProvider and another hour for fixing some stupid library conflict (the api requires an old version of GSon, which conflicted with code I'd written).

I also added a VNC viewer seeing as how CloudSigma only provides VNC access to its sever by default. This is a strongly hacked copy of TightVNC, consisting of really old java 1.1 code. I needed to hack it for several reasons, like all of the System.out.println statements that shouldn't be there, window placement, getting the code out of the default package so I could actually use it, removing hundreds of scattered System.exit(x)'s, etc. I have to say, starting a server and being greeted by a big brown Ubuntu background is kind of nice.

One problem I still have to solve is the fact that for some strange reason reading the image list for cloudsigma takes even longer than reading the image list for amazon EC2. Even though there are only about 5 images (ok, I'm underestimating but still only a few percent of the amazon image list). I have no idea why this is, and I can't very well see because all CloudSigma communication goes over HTTPS.

To fix this I'll probably implement some kind of image favorites system, which is checked on every statrt of Scarlet Nebula to assure this image still exists. That kind of sucks, especially all of the serialisation and deserialisation I'll have to do, but I don't see a lot of other options (when I say CloudSigma is slow, I mean more than a minute, possible several minutes).