AlexH

Thanks to everyone who came out to the presentation tonight.

I’ve put the presentation online if you want to download it. Hosted by S3, natch.

Here are some links with some more information:

• Amazon Web Services blog
• S3Fox Organizer for Firefox
• Web interface to AWS
• EC2 plugin for Firefox
• Amazon Web Services forums

From flylady.net:

Italian Lentil and Barley Soup

Several of my friends from high school and I have a long-established tradition of getting together for a “reunion” during the Christmas season. As I’m the only one who still lives in the area where we grew up, I’ve become hostess to our annual gathering. I plan for a light, healthy lunch as a counterpoint to all the rich food that’s served during the holidays. This soup was a big hit when I made it for my friends. Add a simple loaf of Italian or French bread and some olive oil for dipping, and you’ve got a great meal!

I made this soup yesterday and it turned out really well. I had some carrots/celery/onions chopped up and frozen that I was going to use for a soup stock, but they still looked palatable and not freezer burned, so I used those. Everything was ready the night before except for the stewed tomatoes and minced garlic. All I had in the pantry was whole tomatoes, so I had to cut those up in the morning. Morning prep time was about 5 minutes, and would have been shorter with stewed tomatoes. I’ll definitely make this recipe again.

Kids these days!

Police use Facebook to douse party plans

Ontario Provincial Police used the Facebook networking site to thwart an illegal bush party planned by teenagers over the weekend.

More than 700 teens had said they would attend the bash, on private property in the Tillsonburg area, about 175 kilometres southwest of Toronto. Party details had been posted on a public page of the social networking site.

Now get off my lawn, dagnabbit!

I’m only a casual hockey fan. I’ll watch the Canucks playoff games, and I’ve gone to a couple of games when Tracy’s brother and dad had an extra ticket in their Ice Pack. I didn’t know until today that some players are wearing mics on the ice. Check out this fight, and listen to the replay when they play the audio.

I cannot believe how cool this is! Photosynth combines flickr.com with an image processing algorithm to create an infinitely zoomable image.

The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest – and, we hope, most exciting – way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

People are drooling over Drobo:

Data Robotics, Inc. | Drobo Product Specifications

Drobo Product Specifications

Four Bay Disk Interface
• 3.5″ SATA I or SATA II hard disk drives
• Full or half-height, no carriers required
• Choose the drive manufacturer, capacity (mixed capacities ok), and spindle speed or cache that fits your current storage needs

It looks like a cool device, and at $500 USD, it’s a bit pricey. I’d rather go with a more open solution that doesn’t need special software to run on the clients. Something like Openfilter:

File-based networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV and FTP. Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes) and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5.

Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, iSCSI (target and initiator), scheduled snapshots, resource quota, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols a breeze.