Amazon S3 – Setting the benchmark in storage at scale

Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon S3 Shoots, Scores, Soars: “Developers have been pouring data into Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) at a prodigious rate. In fact, there are now over 800 million discrete objects stored in S3.”

This is definitely something to take note of. The economics are dramatic. When Tim O’Reilly talks about a key differentiator being operational efficiency, it really does matter.

Donald Gould: a good one

Donald Gould sounds like he was an amazing person. A truly good person. His obituary tells of how he died in the process of helping someone. Helping people was at his core.

I only knew of him through a presentation I heard on IT Conversations. He was working to change the world through totally amazing and innovative ways. Ways that were self sustaining, not dependent on billions of charity. You can see them at Pure Water for All.

My thoughts are with his family and friends. My prayers are that there are many more like Mr Gould out in the world…we need more Donald Gould’s.

go listen to him…in his own voice…NOW!

Daryl Plummer on ‘Web Services At A Crossroads’

Daryl Plummer is the (only?) Gartner person that consistently makes sense to me.

From Optimize Magazine: Web Services At A Crossroads:

“Users fall into two camps. One group advocates using Web services to build complex internal systems known as enterprise service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The other seeks to use emerging Web technologies in tandem with Web services to create flexible external applications. Their divergent approaches each require different organizational skill sets.

The split began in 2003, when companies such as BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems questioned whether mission-critical systems were possible with Web services as originally defined. Over the next two years, the Web took on new significance as Google’s use of advanced techniques and Web services began to get widespread notice.

When it comes to building SOAs, I can’t get over how much effort is wasted trying to force Web services to deliver enterprise-level capabilities they were never intended to handle. For example, managers at a well-known airline once asked me how to make their Web services provide an enterprise-level distributed-transaction environment, given the shortcomings of the Web services standards. ‘Did you consider using a real distributed transaction environment instead of Web services?’ I asked. The looks on their faces indicated they hadn’t.”

Tim Bray has some pointed comments on Mr Plummer’s article. While I think they are reasonable, I think Mr Plummer’s paints the big picture well.

Finally, it reminds me of something Don Box said about supporting REST and WS-*.

NetNewsWire beta

I’m looking forward to trying out the NetNewsWire beta. Cross platform syncing is the thing I’ve wanted but didn’t do anything about. If it works, I’ll likely buy FeedDemon in addition to my more commonly used NetNewsWire.

Concerns

A post or two ago I wrote about “considerations.”  Well, after considering it, I think I’m wrong and what I meant to say was “concerns.”  Concerns is around AOP.  My original note was something I wrote on a piece of paper during a presentation by a VP in HP, and he was saying considerations.

But I digress.  Considerations…Concerns…either way there is a buzzword brewing here once we get past Web 2.0.

[gmail delete:currentMessage]

Wow. After all this time of wishing GMail would have a simple delete button, it is finally there. Wonderful. No more “select messages, click drop down, selecte ‘trash’.”

What a happy day. Now is there a keyboard shortcut?

Considerations

I’m sensing that one of the next big buzzwords for the industry is “considerations.” It is often asociated with Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP), but probably is a broader concept.

DRM

A while back, Adam Curry has an interesting definition of DRM.

DRM = Don’t Rob Musicians

I liked that one.

Printing Google Maps sucks

When Google maps came out, I thought it was neat like everyone else, the dragging and everything. But what I loved most was how “pretty” they were. OK, the technical way of saying it would be that they were very readable.

It became my main source of driving directions and especially printing a map of the destination so I could see the streets around it. Knowing what streets are just before a turn are as important as knowing the actual street (or you will be doing many loops).

For at least the last month, Google has been worthless in this areana. When you hit the “print” link or “print…” (in Firefox at least), you get a very poor quality map printed. And it almost never has street names (because it has such a low resolution).

I’ve reverted to the following two options:

- Do a screen capture and print it in Photoshop (on my Windows machine) or Preview (on my Mac).

- Use another service.

I’ve done the former a bunch, but am at the point that I’m likely to revert to a “less readable” (aka pretty) map since the print version on Google is as unreadable as it gets.

If I’m at home, going someplace in the DC area, and using my Windows machine, then I actually use a CD Rom product (from Rand McNally, which bought Thompson maps I think). They are VERY readable and great (I buy the old Thompson real maps because they are the most readable…better than ABC). I still need to find an alternative for the other times/destinations.

Running video over UTP (Cat-5)

After we moved in to our house 4 years ago, I started wiring it. While wireless is fine, having wires in the wall has great value. While I have coax for video, I have FAR more Cat-5 cables.

So I wanted to run video and audio over these lines. While I’ve heard of people just soldering on some RCA connectors to Cat-5 cables. I’ve also heard it is less than perfect quality (of course that person didn’t wire up his ethernet cables correctly either).

The right answer is to use a “balun”…which converts between balanced (the RCA side) to unbalanced (the RJ-45 side). I spent $150 for two (one for each side), but they can be had for much less now. For example you can get the Unicom VAA-U501-VA Video/Audio Media Adapter at places like Rapicom for under $30 each.

I finally had cause to use them. I wanted to pipe audio from my Mac to the whole house. So I connected my Mac to one of these, Cat-5 to the other, then a audio patch cable to my video modulator (which pumps what is connected onto channel 117 on all TVs in the house). Bingo, quality Christmas music throughout the house (and all in sync).

Why not just connect a long audio cable from my Mac to the modulator? I tried that but the hum from the grounding issues made it unexceptable. The “balun” approach is the “proper” solution.