AWS Virtual Private Clouds
Looks like I’m not the only one who thinks enterprises will pay for their own cloud-based infrastructure. Today, Amazon Web Services announced (h/t TechCrunch) a new service called Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) targeted at the exact demand I see. I should pay more attention to when I post stuff. Note to self: Friday afternoons are [...]
APEX in the Cloud
This post about running APEX in the cloud by Jason Straub came across OraNA last week. I’m surprised Chet didn’t pounce on it, being the APEX devotee that he is. Basically, you can now run APEX on Amazon EC2 for 60 cents. Oracle has recently been rolling out more offerings with AWS, including database and [...]
Who Benefits from Blog Comment Spam?
Over the last month or so, blog comment spam has surged here. You may have noticed, or not. I try to mark the ones that Disqus doesn’t trap, but some inevitably leak through into the wild. Not a big deal to me really because they’re more annoying than offensive. Initially, I thought that spammers had [...]
“Keep Your Barcode Scanner off My Merchandise”
Update: I added quotation marks to the title, thinking that they might help convey the right impression, i.e. I do not support the heavy-handed approach to barcode scanners. I think that’s clear when you get through the post. From my, “this will get really interesting” file, comes a story from ReadWriteWeb about retail stores and consumers [...]
Amazon iPhone App is Sweet
Last week, I told you about SnapTell Explorer and mentioned that it would be a great app for collecting and pricing your holiday gift and wish lists. I also wondered why Amazon wasn’t doing this already. Today, Amazon released an iPhone app that included Amazon Remembers, a feature close to what SnapTell Explorer does. Use [...]
An iPhone App Your Holiday Shopping and Wishlist
Last week, I found a perfect iPhone app for the year-end holidays, thanks to Paul’s Google Reader Shared Items feed. SnapTell Explorer (by way of Lifehacker) is a free app that works with the iPhone’s camera. Open the app and snap a picture of any DVD, CD, game or book cover. SnapTell processes the image [...]
We Are Expensive and Expendable
Rich and I were bemoaning the current state of the economy yesterday, and eventually, the conversation turned to outsourcing, not jobs, but storage, computing power, databases, applications, etc. You know, cloud computing. Remember after the Bubble burst in 2001 how people were in a tizzy, some rightfully so, about the exodus of tech jobs overseas? [...]
MacWorld Brings Twitter to its Knees
So much for scaling. Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld today brought Twitter to its virtual knees. The little guy’s web app is only just beginning to recover, while Twitter clients seem to be confused still about the number of requests I’ve made, meaning the Twitter API is borked too. For those who care about Twitter, [...]
Amazon SimpleDB and the Lazyweb
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Amazon released the latest offering in their AWS suite last month, SimpleDB. I tagged this and subsequent analysis posts for later consumption, and I’m just now getting back to it; a post from Web Worker Daily yesterday on LongJump and their new Database-as-a-Service offering jolted my [...]
Bigger Big Brother, Part 2
Thanks to Eddie and Steve for weighing in on the discussion I started yesterday. I think fundamentally, we disagree about who has more damaging information. I say Amazon does. Eddie and Steve say Google. My argument is that purchase history (even without exposing credit cards) can be more damaging than search/email/feed reading/documents. I say that [...]
Who’s the Bigger Big Brother, Amazon or Google?
I’m a paranoid guy, always have been. Last week’s report by Privacy International that slammed Google as “hostile to privacy” got me thinking about Amazon vs. Google, which knows more about me and how I feel about them. I happened to be downloading Smokin’ Aces (any good?) to my Tivo from Amazon Unbox, so I [...]
