A Yoda Backpack for the Masses!
Posted on August 28, 2006
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So…
Who’s going to buy me a nice, plush Yoda backpack? Man, I wonder how successful I’d be rocking this thing in Europe? I’ve always wanted to learn more foreign swear words…
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Posted on August 28, 2006
Filed Under Daily Thoughts, Entertainment, Ranting, Travel
Amazon releases Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Beta
Posted on August 27, 2006
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Amazon is on a roll! They already have their S3 grid storage system and now they’ve release their EC2 elastic compute cloud. Basically image (Amazon Machine Image AMI) driving, instant virtual servers that can be setup and running in minutes. From what I can see its very similar if not using general virtualization technology.
You setup an AMI image or can choose from several already available that have various open source server stacks (such as Apache, MySQL etc) pre-installed. Once uploaded to their compute cloud, these servers can be brought up and act just like a regular linux VPS or dedicated server would. Just like the S3 service, since it comes from Amazon it comes with the scalability, stability and reliability we’ve known Amazon to have.
And just what does “Elastic” mean?:
“Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.”
So what exactly are you getting from them?:
“You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.”
The pricing is pretty good as well.
* Pay only for what you use.
* $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
* $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
* $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).
$0.10 cents per hour, roughly $70 per month for a server with 99.99% uptime with resources roughly equivalent to almost 2Ghz and almost 2GB RAM. Another great thing is that if you setup your servers to work with the S3 storage service, any bandwidth transfered between the EC2 server and S3 is free.
These two services tethered together are quite the dynamic duo. As some have pointed out, now all they need is a grid distributed SQL type data storage engine to interface with S3 and EC2 and people can make entire web apps simply built upon these services. I know this is definitely a viable option to switch to for SugarStats a little while down the line.
This just start to really open up opportunities for new services and companies needing these types of resources. Need to scale your web service? No need to buy another managed dedicated box, if you’re app’s software is configured to do so, just throw up another image and you’ve got almost instant scalability. At this time, you can setup up to 20 image virtual servers and need to contact Amazon for more. Check out the Amazon EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud.
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Posted on August 27, 2006
Filed Under Analytics, Business, Daily Thoughts, Design, Hardware, Hosting, PHP/MySQL, Productivity, Ruby on Rails, Tech, Web
Blogbeat refunds all around!!
Posted on August 23, 2006
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So I’ve been a paying user of blogbeat.net for around 8 months or so and its a really great service. Effective, efficient and to the point blog statistics that I’ve used for marstononline.com.
They had this special back then which basically broke down to $4/month, how could I beat that? I actually would have paid more. But recently they were bought out by feedburner whom themselves planned to have it as a free service.
I didn’t think much of it as the service itself has not changed, but to my surprise I get an email giving me a full refund for the blogbeat service I paid for! Here is the note they gave:
“As you may know, FeedBurner recently acquired Blogbeat (read all about it here: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/bigstats). Currently, the FeedBurner corps of engineers is working hard to integrate Blogbeat functionality into FeedBurner’s StandardStats service, which is free.According to our records you purchased Blogbeat services, and the way we see it, a paid service divided by a free service = a free service (we were never very good at math). Please accept this refund which has been credited to your PayPal account. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Giuliana Summer at **************.
P.S. Welcome to FeedBurner – we’re happy you’re here! If you have not yet checked out FeedBurner’s services for blog publishers, here’s a handy link: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/blogs. Stay tuned to the FeedBurner weblog for the latest news and updates about the Blogbeat integration.”
So yeah, I thought that was a cool thing and made me a bigger fan of feedburner and a even bigger fan of blogbeat!
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Posted on August 23, 2006
Filed Under Analytics, Daily Thoughts, Mobile Tech, SEO, Tech, Web
People don’t use social software?
Posted on August 21, 2006
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An interesting post over on the Vitamin blog where Ryan Carson has a post titled: “Why I don’t use social software”.
There are many interesting points and I threw my 2 cents in the comments. The basic gist of it is how can there be so many different options for social networks and web apps when everyone is pressed for time as it is and have a million things to do?
What I think is basically it comes down to what people perceive to be valuable to them and their lifestyle. Yes there may be MySpace and 20 other websites just like it, but the people will choose (atleast those exposed to them) which one suits them best. He made this good point:
“I believe there is a huge market for more web apps that are aimed at users like me. We’ve got specific problems that need to be solved and we’re willing to pay good money for solutions.”
Which I couldn’t agree with more. In fact, this is the whole concept behind SugarStats.com as well. The point is to help solve a specific issue that affects A LOT of people (70 million they say now). Now this may not be social software or for entertainment purposes, but it serves the point that there are problems out their that need attention and that we can use these technologies to help solve them. These are what I like to call “LifeStyle Management” apps but the possibilities span even much farther than that.
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Posted on August 21, 2006
Filed Under Business, Daily Thoughts, Design, General, Marketing, Mobile Tech, Ruby on Rails, Startup, SugarStats, Tech, Web
Rails Graphing, RJS and Back from the states
Posted on August 20, 2006
1 Comment
Yup, finally back from California after a nice 3 week trip. Lovely weather, great people and I’m glad I had the chance to visit old family and frineds. Good times indeed. But it is also great to be back in Europe as well, time to get back into schedule and focus on things.
Over the paste 3 weeks I’ve gotten amazing feedback on SugarStats along with a bit more clarity on some of the feature sets and the overall direction of the website / business. I also found a great new Ruby on Rails graphing library called Scruffy. We’re using the Gruff Graphing library at the moment, but we might incorporate Scruffy as well as it looks very flexible.
I’m also going to be doing a full RJS (Ruby Javascript) implementation for SugarStats.com as well. For the most part its partially Ajax, but once I do this the core of the application will have a great desktop application feel to it. As a matter of fact, if you want to get your hand into RJS but haven’t, I can recomment the peepcode.com video tutorial that was just released. I bought it for a cheap $9 and it is well worth it. It’s broken down into section and does a good job of covering the basics and giving examples of how to apply the technology. Heres a snip from the website:
“This 50 minute Quicktime video tutorial shows you how to use the basic RJS methods from scratch. You’ll be adding to your skills and using RJS to make more responsive and interactive applications”
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Posted on August 20, 2006
Filed Under Business, Daily Thoughts, Design, Ruby on Rails, Startup, SugarStats, Tech, Travel, Web
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I'm Marston and here you'll find my rantings, rhetoric and other useful info. I dig tech, photography, quantum physics and organic food. I'm the founder of SugarStats.com and thats my days developing.
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