Tech Stuff

Amazon has announced that later this fall that they will offer the ability to run Windows Server and SQL Server in the EC2 environment.

If you were not aware of it today is Talk Like a Pirate Day.  To help ensure that Pirates can search for the content they are looking for online Google has added support for the pirate langauage to their search engine.

This week Gmail made availible in the Labs one of the more helpful options, the Forgotten attachment detector. Atleast twice a month I seem to forgot to attach a file and it always seems to be one of those more important emails.  Hopefully this will help.

Amazon announced that it is expecting to roll out a Content Delivery Network before the end of the year.   As a user you will store your files on S3 and then make an API call and get a new domain name to use for your web pages.  This is different from the functionality already availible in S3 because when the website visitor accesses your file they will be routed to the nearest edge location.  This will allow for latency and the highest data transfer rates.  Below are Amazon’s goals for the content delivery service:

• Lets developers and businesses get started easily – there are no minimum fees and no commitments. You will only pay for what you actually use. 

• Is simple and easy to use – a single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content. 

• Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use. 

• Has a global presence – we use a global network of edge locations on three continents to deliver your content from the most appropriate location. 

Google released a comic book to help explain Chrome.

Google recently announced the launch of their new browser.  I downloaded it as soon as it was availible.  I have been very impressed with it.  I figure if I am running GMail, Reader, and Analytics in a browser I might as well do it in a browser designed by Google.  Good to see some more innovations in the browser space.  The JavaScript engine that it is using (V8) was designed for speed.  I don’t know if it is the fastest out there as I have seen some speed tests where it did beat Firefox, but in some others it did not.  With more and more sites using JavaScript and Ajax to improve the user experience and make online applications more like desktop ones hopefully Google as a player will help push along the development of JavaScript Engines. In term allowing even more interactive sites.

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It is good to see that Amazon released a pretty detailed statement detailing the events of the S3 outage on 7/20.  Some people have been complaining about the stability of the environment, but I think it has been overall really good.  When there are problems they are fixed extremely quickly and if there was going to be any delays they kept everybody up to date.  I think the Service Health Dashboard is great information tool.  I may not be happy when there is a problem, but atleast I don’t feel like I am in the dark like I have in the past with some other hosts/service providors.

Today I found out the hard way that if you have Crystal Reports XI already installed on your machine and you are going to upgrade to Crystal Reports XI Release 2 you should uninstall the original as the Release 2 “Upgrade/Service Pack” is a whole new installer and doesn’t remove the previous version automatically.  Once I had installed Release 2 each time I tried to access a report in Visual Studio I was prompted that Windows needed to setup the software.  This process would take about 10 minutes.  Also if I tried to save changes I had made to a report they would be lost and I would get an Active X error.  After several hours of researching the problem I found the solution.  It was a “good” waste of a day.  After uninstalling Crystal Reports XI and Crystal Reports XI Release 2 and then just installing Crystal Reports XI Release 2 I had an installation that works correctly.

A friend told me about this cool SSH client that you can run on your Blackberry.  It has already come in handy for me when I needed to reset a service on linux box and I was out running errands.  It is called MidpSSH.