July 2006 Archives

I promised at Supernova I would give an update on the integration of Amazon.com (through Amazon.com E-Commerce Web Services) into Second Life: Jeff Barr has the scoop and demonstrates it on the Amazon Web Services Weblog. As expected it was a complete grassroots effort with no official Amazon involvement. Go visit the life2life store now (yes that is second life url, you need the program installed to use this as a locator).

And as Jeff mentions there is some really cool second life style interface innovation: you can talk to store and a search on Amazon will be triggered. Go try it out!

I really enjoy spending time at comics.com and gocomics.com. On comics.com there is a category list of all comics and editorial cartoons available on their site. On gocomics there is a separate list for comics and editorial cartoons. Both sites offer interesting subscription models.

Candorville by Darrin Bell on 7/15/2006:

If done well a graph representation of data can reveal a lot of information about the structure of the data. And with particular care graphs can even become art.

Sala has achieved this by building a very nice graph representation applet for web pages. If you visit this posting you’ll see some really cool graph representations. The boing-boing one is particularly telling.

There are now about 1700 webpage graphs posted on flickr, tagged with websitesasgraphs. Go graph your own webpage here. Source code is also available.

Below is the graph for the All Thing Distributed home page. On the left are the postings, on the right the sidebar with categories, archives, etc.

Wow! 20.1 inch screen & 20.8 pounds; Introducing the Dell XPS M2010. I have been looking for a new laptop but for some reason I don’t see myself walking around with this one... It will be an interesting challenge to open it up in your economy airplane seat. Base price $3800.

Yesterday the Amazon Simple Queue Service moved from beta to production. SQS provides persistent messaging with the scalability and reliability of Amazon’s infrastructure. As a developer you can create an unlimited number of Queues and store unlimited messages in a Queue. As usual we manage your data in highly reliable fashion, capable of surviving complete data center failures.

The API is dead simple: Create, Send, Receive and Delete. With sufficient access control such that you can determine who can read and write your queues. We have chosen a concurrency model where the process working on a message automatically acquires a leased lock on that message; if the message is not deleted before the lease expires it becomes available for processing again. Makes failure handling very simple.

Charging is as inexpensive as S3: 10 cents for a 1000 messages, and 20 cents per Gigabyte of data transferred

Code Samples and Documentation can be found here.

The Atom and RSS Gods complained about my feeds. I made some offerings to the sacred Validator and I now no longer have to fear their wrath.

I aplogize to those readers who had to suffer through a series of confusing feed updates and I welcome those who can now suddenly actually consume the feeds

Today was a good news day: Geoff Arnold has decided to join the Amazon engineering family. As Geoff mentions in the announcement on his weblog Amazon is all about scale. In recent presentations I have been demonstrating how Amazon Engineers are scalability experts who can take any concept idea and turn it into a service that can serve hundreds of customers and then grow it seamlessly to support hundreds of millions of customers. In the Amazon world there is no such thing as a limited beta; everything needs to be production quality when it launches and scale in every possible dimension. Incremental scalability is a key fundamental concept in all of our designs such that we can handle growth reliably and cost-effectively.

Zidane is a brilliant player, so it is sad to see his international career end this way. It was a very bizarre moment in an otherwise rather open match. Italy ruled during the first half, but the French had control over the second half and the extra time. Again Henry showed that he is not the cold killer he should be. The Italians we impeccable with taking the penalties and thus ultimately won. Congratulations!

We had gone downtown to watch the match in La Vita E Bella on 2nd Ave. The restaurant is run by two Sicilians so the place was packed with Italians, although there was a small vocal enclave with French.

To taste some of the atmosphere watch the video I shot during the last Italian penalty kick