Software Physics

Funny the things you suffer with. I’ve been using cygwin a lot on windows lately and decided to see if it had better support for cut and paste than the DOS shell does. Quick google seach shows that it’s been available for six years on windows in DOS shell. For anyone else not “in the know”…
If you want mouse select, copy, paste in a DOS shell you can on win2k and above by enabling “QuickEdit Mode” from the shell’s property menu.

I do other things than watch Amazon, really. This is really cool stuff. I’m using the beta of Amazon’s utility computing service. The upshot is that it’s similar in philosophy to S3 - simple and just works. Compute time for a dedicated Fedora image is $.10/hr with $.20/GB of data transfer. Amazon provides stock images which you can load whatever you want in. When you’re done, you bundle and store the image in S3. Once stored in S3, you register the location of the image with the EC2 service then can fire it up directly. Read more »

I work remotely a lot and frequently need to show remote users something I’m doing on my machine. To do this I wrote a simple program to capture my desktop then upload it to my website where viewers could take a look. I automated the viewer end with a little Javascript so, as I put images up, the viewers’ screens update. I called the application Simple Web Sharing or SWS. The tool was really only useful to me or technical folks who owned a website where they could post screenshots. I recently modified the application to use Amazon’s S3 so now you don’t need to figure out the website end of things. I think the tools are pretty useful and now interesting to a wider audience so I’m making them available.

Read more »

I’ve spent some time over the past few weeks hacking an old application of mine to do some new tricks. It now uses Amazon’s S3; it’s a bit Ajaxy; I cleaned up the code; it’s been fun. There’s two bits to it, an application client and a web client. I wanted to allow other folks to easily use the application; I thought .Net 1.x framework requiement wouldn’t be a problem; I was wrong.

Read more »

I’ve spent some time writing an application based on S3 over the past two weeks. I’m very excited that this building block is in place. You can already see a number of folks digging in building tools. Some observations: Read more »

There’s nothing and everything revolutionary about Amazon’s new S3 service. In case you’re unaware of the offering, Amazon has made a storage service available. The big news: pricing and accessibility. The service is priced at $0.15/gig per month for storing data and $0.20/gig per month for data transfer. Compare this to something like XDrive, at $5.00/gig per month ($10/5gig/mo), and you get an idea as to how much this changes the current game. Read more »

As promised, more stuff on flock: I still like Flock. I like the built-in blogging tools (online and offline) and the social bookmarking integration (del.icio.us and shadows). I had some buggy interactions but for the most part it’s pretty stable. I’m a bit disappointed that the feed aggregation is not more powerful. The capability is burried, unlike the well thought out access to the blogging and favorites; I’m guessing the feature is down on the feature list and will receive more attention in future releases.

Wow. The Chinese are moving fast on their domestic CPU capabilities. Last I looked (about 2yrs ago) their first generation product (code-named Godson) was unimpressive. Today, I came across an article claiming that a Chinese company (Menglan Group, a Chinese company that invests in textiles) plans to launch a $125 PC within the year. Reports are that the laptop computer, based on the second generation Godson II CPU, will have the equivalent performance of a 1Ghz PIII and will play DVDs, video games and comes in a small form factor (around 1.1 lbs). Given that I am writing this on a 900mhz PIII I know that they’ve reached the “good enough point” with the technology. I can’t find any info on disk or memory but even 10G and 128meg would be enough for the bread and butter stuff (web, email, editing, simple games) to run respectably.

Versioning is one of those potential potholes for SOA that no one really wants to think too hard about (it hurts). The problem isn’t new, it’s not even limited to technology — you publish rules that people follow; stuff gets built assuming your rules; you create a new version of the rules; stuff breaks. It doesn’t matter whether it’s software or the license renewal line at the DMV, changing the rules is tricky and can be costly. Read more »

Just starting to evaluate Flock. Seems like a Rather nifty browser with a blog editor built right in (posting from Flock right now or, as Madge used to say, “your soaking in it”). Not sure we need another browser, but I’m guessing this will go along like linux distros (Flock is built on the mozilla core).

I’ll add more as I go along.