The books page had been pulled down for a little while due to some issues I was having embedding images. So I went back to the drawing board and found a way to get a carousel of images. So the page with the books I’ve done is back up and online. Hope you like (and yes, I know they spin too fast, it’s still a little bit of a work in progress).
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Cyber Monday
You remember in the The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when Riff Raff and his sister do that weird elbow sex thing? The word “Cyber” conjures up an image of two people on either side of a network connection doing just that with their computer monitor. One looking like Riff (the girl) and the other looking like Magenta (the guy). 4.3 million shoppers a minute visited sites on “Cyber Monday”, elbow sexing their way into the American dream, with one-click shopping and buying 10% more crap on Monday than they did on Black Friday. In most cities “rush hour” doesn’t really refer to a single hour. Maybe it’s half an hour some…
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Virtual Private Clouds
VPN-Cubed was a solution that Amazon listed for some time, allowing users of EC2 or S3 cloud services to VPN their resources in Amazon’s cloud to their own offices. But Amazon recently went a step further with their own offering and now provide the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Pricing is based on a per-VPN connection, running at a nickel per hour that the VPN Connection is alive. Data transfer over the VPN is charged at a dime per gig into the cloud and between 10 and 17 cents per gig out of the cloud. There have been a number of concerns about security with regards to cloud services. The ability…
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Deploy EC2 En Masse
Render farms, cluster nodes and other types of distributed computing often require using a lot of machines that don’t have a lot of stuff running on them and are only needed during certain times. Such is the life of a compute cluster, which is what EC2 is there for. Because cluster nodes are so homogenous by nature you can deploy them en masse. Picking up where I left off with deploying EC2 via the command line we’re going to look at spinning up let’s say 100 virtual machines with the large designation, from a pricing standpoint. As with the previous example, we’re going to use ami-767676 (although you’ll more than…
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A Saturated Cloud Backup Market
It’s not that it all started with Amazon, but they were certainly the ones to mainstream cloud-based storage. Now, there are a variety of services such as Mozy (with CrashPlan) and BackBlaze from some of the smaller, niche players (both of them support the Mac) to Apple (can you say Mobile Me), Microsoft, Amazon (who now supports Windows Server and SQL Server), Google, Symantec, EMC and others for some of the more major players. According to James Staten of Forrester research, the cloud computing bubble will burst in 2010, if not before. At that point, we’re likely to start seeing far more feature rich applications start getting released and one…
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Final Cut Server: Using Amazon S3 for Archival
Final Cut Server allows you to archive the primary representation (or the original file) for assets that are cataloged. When you do so, the proxy clips (low resolution versions) of your assets still live on the Final Cut Server. However, the primary representation, once moved to your archive device can then be archived off to another form of media. There are a variety of strategies to manage archived media. The one I will describe here is using the Amazon S3 storage service at a cost of approximately $.12 to $.15 per gigabyte. As a conduit to and from Amazon S3 we will use the Jungle Disk application, which uses the…
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The Seven Wonders of the Internet World
The Google Search Engine is probably the top wonder in the Internet world. Why, because it’s just so friggin’ huge! But, also because it involves Google Maps, is integrated with gMail and well, is just a better engine than the other’s. Wikipedia – and don’t forget specialty wiki’s like http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page or even (as depressing as it may be) the wikia 90210 page. Social Networks – Facebook, MySpace, Classmates.com and LinkedIn – oh and digg and delicious too… Social networks are today’s iteration of what we thought virtual reality would be. They get better every year, with the exception of New Facebook, which isn’t actually as cool IMO as old Facebook.…