Yesterday, Amazon finally delivered the Magic Mouse that I had pre-ordered a couple weeks ago. (Since I was in the market for a Bluetooth mouse anyway, this seemed like a perfect excuse to pick one up…) The final verdict is still out, but I figured I’d share my initial impressions. Obviously, the biggest feature the Magic Mouse adds is Multi-Touch, very much like the iPhone or iPod Touch. And I can confirm that this indeed works flawlessly....
For some reason I derive immense gratification from hacking cheap commodity consumer devices and making them do much more than they were originally designed to. Not that I can’t claim all that much credit (as I generally just apply readily available hacks that others have figured out), but still… Some of my favorite past hacks include: Original Xbox: I haven’t played games on it for years, but with XBMC on it, it remains a formidable media center....
Amazon Web Services Over the course of the past 6 months or so, I’ve had the opportunity to explore various cloud hosting services, starting with Amazon Web Services. I don’t want to go into detail about AWS here, but suffice to say that I like this suite of services a lot, and it was a great fit for an SMS app / messaging server I deployed on this infrastructure. The application consisted of a set of loosely coupled components running on EC2 (some daemon apps and some Merb based web frontends), communicating via the Simple Queue Service (SQS)....
Today, Amazon removed the beta label from their EC2 service, along with a bunch of related announcements. This is great news! Over the past half year, I have become an enthusiastic user of the various AWS services, including EC2, which has been very stable for me thus far. But now Amazon is formalizing this by offering a 99.95% availability guarantee as part of the new EC2 SLA. I don’t personally care about the new Windows support, but I suppose this might make some Microsoft aficionados happy…...
I realized that it’s been quite a while since my last update. Unfortunately it seems like the amount of interesting stuff I have to write about is inversely proportional to the spare time I have available for writing… ;) Anyway, I figure I’ll try to get back into the habit of publishing smaller posts, but hopefully more regularly. Let’s see how it goes… Ever since I went back into startup life four months ago, I’ve had the chance to play with a lot of exciting technologies, so there’s plenty of stuff to write about....