My Thoughts » amazon

Fokke & Sukke widget live

Martijn — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:44:01 +0000

The last few weeks I have been working with opensocial quite a bit.
I’m planning on releasing 2 complex widgets soon. But while they’r not done yet, an easy one is: I build a daily Fokke & Sukke widget. You can add it to your hyves (or any other opensocial container, hopefully), by adding this url as a widget:

http://cdn.panman.nl/xml/foksuk.xml

If you are on hyves you can add it by simply clicking this link. An example can be seen at my hyves page at http://martijnpannevis.hyves.nl and it’s in the Hyves Gallery.

As an experiment I also don’t host any of the content on a traditional server. The data processing is all done by Yahoo Pipes. And the small bits of static content (the images and XML) are served by Amazon Cloudfront. Cloudfront offers a CDN layer over their S3 service. One of the advantages over other CDN’s is the fact that it has no setup costs: you transfer the files to S3, add some settings ( I used the Firefox addin S3 Organiser) , add a CNAME in your DNS records, and your done.

While a CDN might be overkill to distribute a few kb of images (which also will be cached by the opensocial containers), just the fact that it’s possible without any barrier of entry makes it cool .
So, have fun with Fokke & Sukke, and all add the widget to your hyves profile!

Desktop on EC2

Martijn — Mon, 05 May 2008 12:52:22 +0000

I’m still, sometimes, playing with EC2 (although I haven’t found a project where I really need the massive computing power that they can offer). Today I found a page with Ubuntu images, also offering some with desktops. I decided to start one, and it just worked ^(tm).
The whole process was remarkably easy: Find the right image in Elasticfox (thanks to the new search field, that was easy), select my credentials, login, run the 2 lines from http://www.alestic.com/ and login with the nomachines client.
Now I can start thinking what i can do with my 10 cents (that’s only 6 for us europeans) an hour second computer, besides taking screenshots….

It Boots!

Martijn — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:15:15 +0000

Yay! This is a screenshot of the first EC2 instance, I just booted! I have been planning to experiment with it for a long time, and thanks to the nice tutorial it actually was easier than I thought. EC2 enables everyone to rent an unlimited number of servers, for 10 cents/hour (and up). No fixed costs.

I’m a strong believer in cloud-computing, especially for small companies/startups, so this is something I plan on experimenting more with, as with other Amazon web services. Now let’s think of how we can actually use this.

Now if only there was an European Ec2, like there is for S3… The latency to the US is still an issue. And in other news, light still travels at the speed of light…