simpleenigma

This has been my hesitation for doing any reserved instances. I expect to need larger instances in teh next 6 to 12 months, so any reserved instances I purchase today would have extra time on them without utilization ... This at least gives a way to ease the pain of reserving instances that you know you will out grow ...

I've been a long time proponent of CloudFlare. Usually they just speed things up and life is good. I've had a few minor problems where they 'clean up' some JavaScript and break it in the process, but those got resolved without any effort on my part within a few days.

I recently got an message from a client who has a business email blocked because of a Spamhaus SBL listing for CloudFlare. I know they have already responded to this at http://blog.cloudflare.com/thoughts-on-abuse, but my client is paying them for speeding up their website, not to get blocked by an anti-spam filter. I see both sides of this, but the bottom line is that if they don;t resolve the problem with Spamhuas they will start to loose business starting with mine.

I know the developer and I just let him know that he is getting attention here ... and to get a donation link up ASAP ... He is a good guy and this has been an awful experience for him ... I've told him to get an account and start posting to this thread, so hopefully he'll be here soon ...

I've been moving my domain away for months as they expire ... I have a few that are ready to expire and I waited for today to do it ... Plus I'm going to move a few other important domains before the expire today ... The rest wilt have to wait till cash flow changes ...

I recently launched a B2B platform that required a VPN connection to each of my customers back end server running a proprietary software package on top of MSSQL. In order for my app server to have access to the client MSSQL server which was on a different computer than the VPN server itself I needed the advanced routing on AWS VPC ...

EC2 was enough for me to prototype my system to get 2 clients on board, but I needed VPC to accomplish the multiple VPN connections that I use ...

Also, my storage servers have no need to be addressable by my clients and/or the Internet at large. So while I could have done that with security groups, having them in a private subnet made things much easier ... and now I know that from an IP level the file storage cannot be found from outside of my VPC.

I'm sure if I sat down and thought about it I would come up with more ...

I second that

I use 3 Flip cameras to create a video podcast for my church each week. I'm not going for great quality, I'm going for good enough with a simple form factor and and ease of use. This is really disappointing and after what they did to Linksys I'll reconsider any product that I use or am looking at using after Cisco buys them ...

I installed the extension and blocked experts exchange first thing ... not sure if I'll even use it for any other sites ...

I've been working on an e-commerce project for a client that ended up having some major issues with database imports and the client wanted results now. Anyway, we got all of the items online and in Google with sitemaps, but the links were orphans ... You could find them in the built in site search and from a Google search, but not through any link path ...

After about 2 or 3 months like this we started to see the traffic going down and the item pages were getting de-indexed.

Since we fixed the import (and internal politics) problem (about 6 months after de-indexing) we have seen a steady increase in traffic again and the number of indexed pages is going up slowly ... very slowly ...

My take on this experience is that you need to have some sort of click-able link path to get to your content or any gains you might get from a sitemap will be taken away ... Sitemaps might get your pages crawled faster, they may even get into the index faster .. .but to keep them there you need good site structure ...

It is a tool and won't fix design problems ...

I ran into a project where I needed a cross platform GUI kit (needed Windows and Mac) and settled on wxWidgets after talking to a few developers. It's been great to work with, although some of the other libraries that are compatible with it don't work as well as the core.

The really wonderful part of the experience is that even after not programming in C++ for about 10+ years I was able to get things working pretty quickly and I'm productive with it. A lot of that is due to the wxWidgets documentation and it's well developed structure.

My only real problem is when I have to switch back and forth between Erlang and C++. Those days suck :-)

I've always thought that these certification programs were more of a game of trivial pursuit then a good gage of abilities.

If you are interested in this you might check out King Corn. It is a documentary about two guys who grow 1 acre of corn to see how it is done and where it goes. They also get into the fact that Americans are mostly made of corn because of the incentives to grow it.

This is my typical work flow and I am currently in a lull. I haven't figured out exactly how to get out of a lull except to wait it out and work on whatever hold my interest for the longest.

If I sit in front of my computer and after 15 minutes I can't get anything done on the project that I am wanting to work on, I know I never will. Forcing it will never make anything happen.

I often work alone, so I wonder if having someone else around to help motivate me would help. Talking about the project without any pressure to produce until my creativity start moving again.

For me, I can have entire months where all I do is the bare minimum to keep life moving and then one week I manage to do what it would take most other people an entire month to accomplish. I know that this is part of my cycle and I've learned to life with it and let if flow however it does ...

But days like today I sure wish I could make things move on their own ...

Among the other things I'm doing right now, I actually have a book deal to write a book on yoga, that includes information on meditation and breath control along with the standard postures. It's going to be directed toward people who spend too much time in front of computers. My plan is to give them quick and easy ways to relax and reduce stress and hopefully open more people up to the benefits of yoga and meditation.

I have done quite a bit of work in Erlang over the past 4 or so years. I even wrote an anti-spam engine hat was heavy on parsing.

The best thing Erlang has going in the parsing area is the binary pattern matching, which if you convert a string to a binary works wonders and is much faster. IN fact switching a string to a binary, doing your parsing with binary pattern matching and switching it back to a string CAN be faster in Erlang than using Erlang's string functions.

I won't go into comparisons to other languages, mostly because my personal opinion is that Erlang has so many other great features that not being good at string processing is a minor issue.

I personally believe that this is where the data you collect about a persons voting should be used to recommend articles for them specifically. Then you can go to the main page to see what the community votes up, or you can go to a personalized page that is designed for you based on your voting and what other similar users vote for.

Its a mix between democracy and personalization and it allows for the users who really do want to be the lowest common denominator.

The things you would end up learning about Erlang while writing a web server aren't as much about processes but more about pattern matching.

Most people focus on Erlang as an easy way for multi-core/multiprocessor and distributed computing and it is wonderful at that, but the core of the language is a pattern matching engine that is simply amazing.

Also, anyone who thinks that Erlang is slow with regular expression should convert the regular expressions into a binary and try some pattern matching. That tends to be more of the Erlang Way of doing things ...

A friend of mine is working on a comet server in Erlang at http://code.google.com/p/erlycomet/

For those of us who program in Erlang calling it 'weird' is a compliment :-) I think it's like complaining about parenthesis to a Lisper ...

Both Lisp and Erlang make you think is a different way that once you get into that mode of thinking you really do become more efficient.

LOL ... He hit most of my points except for the insane complexity of the FETCH and SEARCH commands. Each of these commands could be broken down into smaller commands that could be implemented in a hour or two instead of one huge command that takes weeks to perfect...

At the moment I am currently writing an IMAP server in Erlang (google Erlang IMAP and you'll find me pretty fast) and the IMAP protocol is crazy complicated.

Although after you get far enough into the syntax you start to see why the protocol is as complicated as it is. The protocol itself is written as a series of design patterns so each command had a predictable request pattern and a response pattern. After you get past the initial parsing of the command and response strings the protocol become much easier IF you think of them as a series of patterns.

Curently writting my own in Erlang ... again ...

The ultimate analog hackers tool ...

That looks like a great book. I'm going to check it out the next time I'm at a book store :-) Which seems to be almost daily these days ...

As far as I know it does ... the 32bit limitations in Erlang are more about the OS then anything else.

I've always wanted someone to create a touch screen device that was the size of a pad of paper. I don't even care how much storage it has, although you can fit more into the form factor then something the size of a phone.

So if it had a touch screen the size of a pad of paper, had an iPhone(ish) interface, had some decent productivity apps, could play music and most importantly surf the web, I'd pay $1,000 to $1,500 for it.

That is a limitation of the 32-bit OS ... If you are using a 64-Bit OS that is no longer a problem.

I have a 64-bit Xeon with 8GB of RAM and I have created tables lareger the 4GB as a test ... to make completely sure ...

I'm not sure that we will ever find the one silver bullet. IMO, you need to choose the right tool for the job and sometimes that means leaving your favorite programming language behind for a project or two.

Speaking as an Erlang advocate it is great for communications and concurrency, but the string processing leaves a lot to be desired. It is good enough, but if you are doing text manipulation as your primary task Erlang may not be right for you ...

But if you are working on communications technologies, you really need to look into it ...

Maybe we need to start a national start-up writing month :-)

I have several freind who do NaNoWriMo every year and say it is simply wonderful.