Tech Stuff

I recently started using  Cloudberry’s Backup Desktop edition as my Carbonite (Online Backup) subscription is running out.  In their newest version 2.0 they have added the ability to backup to a local folder or network share.   With storage space so cheap now I would much rather backup my music and videos locally.  I just bought a 2TB external eSATA drive for $100.  The plan is to backup documents and other smaller files to Amazon S3.  So far this is working out really good.  The only thing that it is missing is version control for the local backups.  It maybe there someone in the options, but just haven’t found it yet.  I have been really happy with Cloudberry’s products and at the speed that they keep up with new functions that Amazon rolls out for S3 or Cloudfront.  I have come to rely on Clouberry S3 Explorer for managing my CloudFront distributions.

Google announced last week that they will start rolling out the ability of Google App Administrators to require a 2 step verification process for logging in.  Many of us are used to this with company VPNs when using a RSA SecurID.  Google is offering many options for the 2 step which is great.   The best option as I see it is the application that you can install on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device.

When you thought it couldn’t be cheaper to start running a server on EC2 Amazon announced micro instances.  You can get the micro instance for windows ($0.03/hr) and linux($0.02hr) with 613 MB of RAM.  If you get a reserved instance the price drops even lower.

I got to “play” with the PayPal SOAP API last week for a website I was building on.  It was very easy to work with and I was surprised at how quick I could could get a checkout page going in ASP.NET/C#.  It could have been quicker but some of the documentation on the PayPal site was either out dated or confusing.  Luckily with a quick Google search I could find the correct way to create the main SOAP object.  If anyone needs an example of how to do a Direct one time payment let me know.

At the end of August Amazon announced that CloudFront now has an invalidation feature which can clear the files from the edge locations before the expiration period.  The other day I got to try out this new feature when I had a file I needed to update and didn’t really want to wait the 1hr TTL that I had set.  I downloaded the newest version of CloudBerry Explorer which supports the new feature and gave it a try.  It didn’t seem to be instantaneous, but the roughly 10 minutes I had to wait was much better than waiting the hour.  Not sure if this time delay is what everyone else experiences or if it was something on my computer caching it longer.

I just recently read that you can now set the TTL of an object on Amazon’s Cloudfront to 1 hr instead of the 24 hr minimum that it used to be.  I only found this out because I was reading through the discussion forums looking to see if there was an ETA of when this could be done.  Didn’t know this had been around since April.  Since Amazon didn’t include it on any of the monthly announcements of new/improved features I figured I would share.

The default for an object is still 24 hours, but you can use the HTTP Header Expires to set a different expiration.  If the time is less than an hour, Cloudfront will default to 1 hour.  I still wish there was a way to expire a given object at anytime, but this is a big step forward.  However, it would be nice if there was a tool out there that would allow me to set a default expires time period when I upload an object to S3 based on the content type.  In my case, I can usually have my images set to a 24 hour TTL, but there are some HTML, CSS and Javascript files that I would want at only an hour.  Right now I use S3Fox and Cloudberry to manage my S3 buckets.

Amazon has rolled out a new website specializing in cell phones and wireless service plans.  The site offers great deals for new activations and upgrades.  Click here to check it out.

I have been using Amazon’s EC2, S3 and Cloud Front a lot over about the last 9 months.  Last week I just started looking at Amazon’s Associates program for some display advertising.  While looking the info I discovered the Product Advertising API.  In my quest to improve my ASP.NET/C# skills I decided to put together a little website that was powered by the web service.  The result of a few hours is http://searchforgiftsonline.com/.  The site allows the user to search by keyword and category the Amazon inventory.  The search results are displayed on the site and then linked to the product description on the Amazon site.  There is also a list of the major categories from Amazon.  When the user clicks on a category they get the Top Selling, Most Gifted, Most Wished For and New Releases.  The API is pretty easy to work.  Now I just need to figure out new things to do with it.

Last week Skype rolled out an application for the iPhone.  If you are on a WiFi network you can make calls to other skype users or phones.  I have used it to make phone calls to land lines a couple of times the quality of the call was really good.  The main problem is that currently you can not make calls through Skype when you are on the 3G network.   Here is an article on the Wall Street Journal about Skype on mobile phones.

In celebration of S3′s 3rd anniversary Amazon has announced the reduction of the transfer-in costs for data from $0.10/GB to $0.03GB for April – May 2009.  Now is the time to transfer all the home videos and music that isn’t backed up else where.