technology

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....

Earlier today, TechCrunch’s poorly researched claim that Twitter is abandoning Ruby on Rails in favor of PHP or Java generated a lot of buzz in the Twitter and Ruby communities (the claim was later refuted by Twitter developer Evan Williams). Of course, the article’s comments attracted the usual, ignorant TechCrunch trolls. Most took the opportunity to pitch their framework of choice (such as PHP, Java, .NET, or Django), which they claimed would of course magically solve all of Twitter’s scalability issues....

For the past half year or so, I have mainly been using my MacBook Pro - particularly for the past few weeks since I hooked it up to my new 22" widescreen LCD monitor. However, I have still had to keep my Linux PC running as a print- and fileserver (serving, among other things, my mp3 music collection), which has been bothering me. So yesterday I picked up an Airport Extreme, and so far I am extremely impressed with it....

Until recently, I have mostly used my MacBook Pro without an external mouse, but I recently hooked it up to a KVM switch that allows me to share my external keyboard, mouse, and monitor with my Linux box. I always felt that the mouse support in OSX was lacking, even though I wasn’t quite able to pin it down. But now that I’m comparing the same mouse on two systems, the difference is quite pronounced....