Month: August 2006

What's your favorite blog?

Okay dear readers, help me out here. I typically add a new blog every few days (give or take) to my aggregator, and remove a few every now and then. Whenever I come across an interesting post, I see if the blog has any other interesting posts, and if it does, I add it. However lately I haven’t had as much time to find new blogs, thus, I am asking you to suggest your favorite! What blog can you not live without?

PS. Please don’t suggest a blog that has recently launched a jobs board. If I see one more of those things I am going to go crazy!

Amazon EC2

Post ImageI’ve been meaning to post about this for some time now, but haven’t had a chance. I was really excited last Thursday when I read about Amazon’s new web service called “Elastic Compute Cloud” or EC2 for short. After seeing what they did with S3, I was particularly interested in the how EC2 would fit in. And boy does it ever fit in:

Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use our pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately. Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.

Nicely integrated with S3. The other great feature? Bandwidth between EC2 and S3 is FREE. I cannot even imagine how much cost savings that could equate to. With EC2, you pay only for instance hours used. Each machine instance is equivalent to “a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth”. Pretty darn sweet.

I’m already thinking of ways we could integrate this into Podcast Spot (we’re already using and loving S3). I’ve only taken a cursory glance at the forums, API and other documentation, but it seems to me there are two missing features that are extremely desirable: persistent storage and support for Windows (currently it only supports Linux). The AWS guys seem to be pretty on top of things though, so if enough people request them, I’m sure the features will get implemented.

I can’t wait to see what Amazon releases next!

Read: TechCrunch

Geotagging at Flickr

Post ImageJust came across a pretty neat feature that Flickr launched on Monday! You can now geotag your pictures, meaning you can assign them to a physical, real-world location:

Adding location information on Flickr is done through the Organizr, under the Organize tab.

Users can search for photos by location in the Explore area. Set the map to a location (world down to street level) and type in a search query. Markers will appear on the map with photos that contain that query in the tags or description of the photo.

I just tried it out with a few of my pictures, and it seems to work pretty well. It’s all Ajax powered, so it feels pretty natural. You can check out my Flickr map here.

Read: TechCrunch

Back in the office!

Had a busy last couple of days that kept me from the computer for the most part. I was moving stuff on Monday, and took my brother to Red Deer yesterday to look for a place to live (and the trip was successful I think). Dickson was going to help me move the rest of my stuff today, but the rain put the kibosh on that plan! Thus, I’m back in the office today, Starbucks in hand.

Lots more messages to go through, then it’s back to work on Podcast Spot! And maybe some blogging too 🙂

Notes for 8/27/2006

It’s been a very busy day, which for me started at 5:30 this morning. Here are some notes:

  • Dad came and went this weekend. He was here getting some stuff for the new house in Yellowknife!
  • I’ve been at J&M’s most of the day today, helping them pack and prepare for their year long trip to Salzburg. They’ve got a blog too, so check it out! Tomorrow’s the big day.
  • Dickson returns tomorrow. He’s going to help me move, and we’re going to do some big updates to Podcast Spot this week too! I’m really excited for adding more testers and features/updates.
  • I am not, however, excited for my last year of University which starts on the 6th. I think.
  • And here’s at least one non-personal item – Google is launching a new service that sounds a lot like Office Live.

Blog Control Update

Just a quick note to mention that I changed the “enter the code you see” control (known as a CAPTCHA or HIP control) found on the comment form for my blog. Instead of letters, numbers, and a bunch of random characters, all you have to enter now is a three-digit number. Should work more reliably I hope.

The same change has been made on the Paramagus Blog, my Dad’s blog, and all of the Blogosphere blogs. If you encounter any problems, please let me know.

In case you’re wondering, the control I am using now was created by Timothy Humphrey for Community Server. It appears to work fine in CS 1.1, CS 2.0, and the old .Text 0.95!

Another Update

I’ve had so many things to blog about, but simply haven’t been around enough the last few days to do so! I guess that’s what happens around this time of year. Maybe starting testing for Podcast Spot at the same time as I am moving and getting ready to go back to school wasn’t such a good idea! Not that the testing is going badly or anything, on the contrary, it’s been great so far. We’re expanding it next week which I’m pretty excited about!

Here are some things I have been thinking about:

  • I did take some time to see a couple Fringe plays this week. I intend on writing a review of one of them, as a friend from high school wrote and starred in it!
  • I knew Apple would announce a recall sooner or later! The cause was the same as for Dell – Sony batteries.
  • I don’t know why everyone is so attached to the former planet Pluto. I think it’s great that we have accepted that objects we found decades ago are less like planets and more like other, smaller objects. And as the headline reads, solar system’s “loss” is collectors’ gain (quotes are mine, its not really a loss, just a new label!)
  • I’m sad that SOAP didn’t make more money at the boxoffice. It was still an awesome experience though!
  • Have you heard “Candyman” by Christina Aguilera? Catchy song! Makes me want to dance, though I’m hopeless. Either “Candyman” or “Hurt” will be her next single according to Wikipedia.

I’m off soon to pick up my brother from the airport! My Dad also is coming to town for the weekend. I start moving Sunday, and Dickson returns to Edmonton on Monday. Should be a crazy next few days!

Internet Explorer 7 RC1

Post ImageInternet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 was released today by Microsoft. This is supposed to be the last test release before the final version of IE7 is made public, though more release candidates could be added depending on the feedback Microsoft recieves. I hope someone from Microsoft reads this post.

I just installed the browser, and had nothing but problems. Compared to beta 3, the installation for RC1 was a total nightmare. I downloaded the setup, closed all my programs (knowing I’d have to restart), and launched the setup. It did its thing for a while, then said I needed to restart, so I did. Upon restarting, Windows XP did something in the DOS-like blue window before the login screen, then booted normally. Right after logging in, the setup opened again (which required me to click Yes on the security box because the file came from the Internet). Almost immediately, svchost and the Generic Process Service crashed. I had to kill the setup as it was then stalled (no CPU activity whatsoever), and launch it again. After a second restart, the browser was installed properly.

After the first restart, when the processes crashed, my audio didn’t load (I only noticed because Skype popped up an error message). That was fine after the second restart. Worse though, is that something happened to my external hard drive. Maybe it was just a coincidence that it happened at the same time as the install, maybe not, but Windows thinks the drive needs to be formatted. I am currently running chkdsk on it now, and it’s found a bunch of unreadable segments. I can’t imagine that the IE setup would have touched the drive, but you never know. I didn’t have anything on the drive that I couldn’t afford to lose, but still, it’s very annoying. I’m hoping chkdsk will fix it (it’s fixed a ton of errors so far it appears…and as I type this, I see that chkdsk just encountered an unspecified error…so much for fixing it…).

Other than that, I really like IE7. It does a great job of rendering CSS and the other standards (in my opinion) and RC1 feels much faster at loading pages than beta 3. Perhaps my only complaint right now is the find feature (CRTL-F). Why doesn’t IE7 have the inline search that Firefox and Opera have? That stupid, useless little find box feels so 1996.

Overall though, I quite like IE7.

UPDATE: I ran chkdsk one more time, just for kicks, and it seems to have fixed everything! As I said I didn’t need anything on the drive, but there were a few things I wouldn’t have minded keeping. I am now copying them to network storage, just in case the drive dies again.

Signs the world is small

Post ImageYou know how people say things like “it’s such a small world”? Well, it’s true. As a few of you noticed, I was quoted in the National Post today in a story on Suresh Sriskandarajah, a University of Waterloo graduate who has been arrested and faces charges related to an FBI probe of the Tamil Tigers. Turns out he was one of the Microsoft student representatives in 2004 (as was I), and we both attended the same training weekend in Toronto. I ended up taking a group photo at the time, which reporters from the National Post found yesterday and asked permission to use. I sent the photos I had in higher quality, and they used one of them for the front page of today’s paper. Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo credit, as I didn’t reply to their email asking if they should use my name or not until after the paper had gone to press. The photo will also be used in tomorrow’s Ottawa Citizen.

I can’t say that I know Suresh, other than meeting him that weekend back in September 2004. My quote is pretty spot on:

“He seemed like a normal guy,” said Mr. Male, who kept a souvenir group photo of the occasion. “We had a lot of fun together that weekend…. Nobody really stood out.”

I don’t know what is going to happen to him.

The whole experience just shows what a small world it really is, thanks in large part to the Internet. In a matter of hours, a simple photo I had posted from an event almost two years ago made it to the front page of a national newspaper. The other thing is – do I really know someone who could be a terrorist? I don’t know if the FBI are right or not about Suresh, but if they are, that’s a scary thought isn’t it?

Made me stop and think for a moment – who else do I know that might be a terrorist? I quickly caught myself, and metaphorically slapped myself in the face. If I lived my life wondering who could be a terrorist, I’d only be making Bush’s campaign of fear successful. There’s no harm in being cautious, about anyone, but I think if people become paranoid we’re going to have problems.

[Oddly enough, the story in the physical paper I picked up about an hour ago is different than the one online. In the physical paper, on page A3, the part with my quote has been replaced with more about Suresh’s work abroad.]

Read: National Post

Notes for 8/21/2006

I was hard at work on getting Podcast Spot published for testing, so I didn’t post any notes yesterday. Here they are today instead!

  • Closed beta testing for Podcast Spot just started! I’m very excited 🙂
  • I went camping on Friday and Saturday with Megan, Greg, and some others. It was fun! I took a few pictures.
  • My sister, Kim, returned to Edmonton on Saturday evening! She’s now in training to be an RA at Grant MacEwan.
  • Remember the Windows 95 launch? I don’t – I was too young to care I think. Here are some great old commercials though!
  • Get a graphic for your name, Web 2.0 style.
  • I’ve definitely got to look into Windows Live Contacts a bit more. Looks very interesting!