Tech Stuff

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.

Amazon anounces Elastic MapReduce.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

If you wanted to do a large amount of data processing the past with EC2 you would have to setup the whole environment which can be time consuming for the first time user or over whelming just thinking about it. This will make it much easier for other companies to tackle tasks like the NY Times did when they converted a large amount of scanned articles in TIFF format into PDFs.

In the last couple of weeks I have been working with Amazon’s Cloudfront to deliver small javascript files.  It has turned out to be a pretty good experience.  The only problem we have had so far is that you can not invalidate the cache on the CDN servers and force them to immediately fetch new copies from Amazon S3.  You have to wait 24 hours for the content to expire.  If you plan on your files changing often you will need to find a way to version your files.  In my case the version doesn’t work too well as we can’t easily change the file references to these javascript files.

A new feature in Gmail Labs allows you to use your Gmail when you are offline.  Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail and when you are online again will sync.

About a month ago I made the switch from using a Blackberry to an iPhone 3G.  Overall I have been extremely happy with the decision.  The main problem I had is that the weekend I got the iPhone was the same time the OS 2.2 was released and AT&T had issues with the 3G network in Orange County.  The first impression was far from great.  It is not good when in less than 24 hours your phone has locked up twice and can not make or receive calls.  Had to pop out the sim card and push it back in or power the phone on and off.  Luckily after a few days the problems went away.

The main issue I have with the iPhone now is that it does not support MMS messaging!  How is that possible???  Every other phone seems to support it but not the media power house iPhone.  I get annoyed when I get a text message from AT&T saying that I have a multimedia message and have to go to a website to view it.  Mainly because the Message ID and password you have to type in to retrieve the MMS is long and obscure.  I end up having to wait to view the picture until I can get to my desktop.  Even then sometimes the AT&T site doesn’t work correctly and I never get to see the MMS.

A new addition to GMail under Labs is the ability to create a Google Doc from an email.

Xdrive.com will be shutting.com on 1/12/2009.  On their site there is more information on getting your data out.