A bit of progress on my home-based data center is happening bit by bit. Last week I figured I should give it a name, and so following on my latest RPG adventure in Fallout 3, I have decided to call it Vault 107.
The first trick up my sleeve is to figure out if it is possible, while Washington is being stupider than usual, to get a grant for my business to purchase some hardware. I've fallen in love with the affordability of dual processor 2U rack moutable HP servers (4G) and so I figure that if I come up with a nice 50 page document I can get my future bailed out. So I'm finding out a bunch of things.
One of the things I found out is that there are fifty government agencies that are currently certified as qualified to get federal money to electronically publish statistics on murder and other sordid crimes to the public. Now if you've looked at any of the government run statistical websites and compared their query tools to what we do on the regular, you just know that they are ridiculously inferior. Also, you should know that Mayor Bloomberg has revolutionized his little bailywick in NYC with Oracle Indicators, which are good but not as great as something like Tableau.
So as part of my off-hours project vis a vis the new call for government transparency, I'm going to FOIA my way into a small fortune - or at least that's the wild eyed plan I have at the moment.
Vault 107 will be the test bed and development studio, I will Ghost and Virtualize some commodity-type server images complete with data and then I will migrate them up to EC2 or some such and then voila, instant slashdotting. It just really depends on how quickly I can turn around data of popular interest. I've got a unique headstart because ever since Hyperion laid me off eight years ago, I've been growing some small niche popularity as a blogger up to the point at which I have the attention of some producers at NPR and heads at Pajamas Media.
My current inspiration is this guy. Patience is a virtue.
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