Me and the Jake
Jacob at the doctor’s office last week
Amazon Rocking EC2
EC2 to gain persistent storage. From the Amazon Web Services Blog:
In the same way that your running EC2 instances, your Elastic IP addresses, your S3 buckets and your SQS queues can be thought of as items contained within the scope of your AWS account, our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.
These volumes can be thought of as raw, unformatted disk drives which can be formatted and then used as desired (or even used as raw storage if you’d like). Volumes can range in size from 1 GB on up to 1 TB; you can create and attach several of them to each EC2 instance. They are designed for low latency, high throughput access from Amazon EC2. Needless to say, you can use these volumes to host a relational database.
You will also be able to perform “snapshot” backups of your volumes to Amazon S3. You can use these snapshots to create new volumes or to roll back your stored data to an earlier point in time.
The volumes are accessible via a new set of APIs, with functions like CreateVolume, DeleteVolume, AttachVolume, and CreateSnapshot. The same functionality is also available via the EC2 Command-Line tools.
Amazon is doing a fantastic job at tearing down barriers to entry for scalable web apps.
Small Volume Adjustments
⇧⌥+volume up and ⇧⌥+volume down to make smaller changes to the volume on Macs. Via Waferbaby at 2 AM.
Git Bash Completion via MacPorts
sudo port install -u git-core +svn +bash_completion
Big Smile
The Jake showing off his new smile
Moo Sticker Compeition
Moo (and how I love Moo!) is running a sticker competition on Pixish!
Ruby Internals
Gabe attended the MountainWest RubyConf and turned me onto Patrick Farley’s talk “Ruby Internals” as being the one talk that I absolutely did not want to miss. I’m fifteen minutes into it and this is the single best coverage of this material that I’ve encountered.
Git Goodness on OS X
Install Git with svn-git via sudo port install git-core +svn
Buy the Git Peepcode screencast.
Read “Git for Computer Scientists” so that you know what’s going on under the hood and aren’t a cargo culter.
Grab the Git Bundle for TextMate.
Optional: get an account on github (Sorry, I’m out of invites.)
Go to town referring to the user manual, core tutorial and how to’s as needed.
If you’re still accessing svn repositories you’ll want to check out, “An introduction to git-svn for Subversion/SVK users and deserters,” and the git-svn crash course.
Ah, another article worth checking out is “Using Git to Manage and Deploy your Rails Apps,” and Tim Lucas has posted a “Standard git config on OS X.”
Textism
My heart leapt with joy at the news that Dean has resumed posting to Textism.
Table Schema in Textmate
⇧⌃⌘S with the cursor in a model name to get a popup containing the table schema for that model. Farewell annotate_models! Thanks, Gabe!
Pixish Commit 999
Commit 999 to the Pixish svn repo
Turning Japanese
Awesome LiveJournal entry about dating and sex in Japan, written by an American woman living there. And I totally agree with the showering bit.
Boing Boing's Moderation Policy
Not surprisingly, Boing Boing moderation policy is an interesting and amusing read.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity
One day, sitting in his office overlooking the suburban parking lot, I ask Kurzweil if being a singularitarian makes him happy. “If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would be getting a fire to light more easily,” he says. “But we’ve expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge and casting a wider net of consciousness is the purpose of life.” Kurzweil expects that the world will soon be entirely saturated by thought. Even the stones may compute, he says, within 200 years.
Comcast to Stop Hampering File-Sharing
Comcast Corp., an Internet service provider under investigation for hampering online file-sharing by its subscribers, announced Thursday an about-face in its stance and said it will treat all types of Internet traffic equally