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.