Entries categorized 'Software'

Just incase you been living under a technology rock for the last week or so, please go check out the Google Wave demo video before continuing reading this post.

Continue reading "Smile and Wave via Google App Engine"

Last night I asked on Twitter if anyone had signed up for Pandora One and thought it was worth the $36/yr price.

Omar Shahine quickly responded that he felt it was and also said, “I consider it a donation for such an an awesome service”.  He is absolutely correct. Even if Pandora One sucked, making a donation to such a useful service is definitely worth it. So this morning I went ahead and signed up and I have to say it is an absolutely fabulous experience on a couple fronts.

Continue reading "Pandora One – Simple Done Right"

It is hard to imagine why a major hotel chain would impose these kinds of limitations on their customers.

Continue reading "An Unnecessary Usability Compromise"

Lost in yesterday's announcement about Google App Engine's support for Java was a new feature, Cron.

"schedule tasks like report generation or DB clean-up at an interval of your choosing."

Not a ton of details, but this enables some much richer functionality on what is arguably the simplest platform for building cloud applications.

Continue reading "Google App Engine - Cron"

The pace of change is really picking up in the cloud space. Today, Amazon announced a very significant update to their Simple Queue System.

AWS is also introducing additional permission features that control access to Amazon SQS and to each of its fundamental actions on a very fine-grained basis. You can exercise this control at two levels:

1. At the higher level you can use the new AddPermission and RemovePermission functions to set and remove particular access rights for each queue. Access rights, including the ability to send, receive, or delete messages, change message visibility, or to retrieve queue attributes, can be granted to any AWS user via their AWS account number.
2. At the lower level you can use our new Access Policy Language. This expressive language makes its debut as part of this SQS release; over time, we plan to employ this Access Policy Language with our other services. The Access Policy Language enables the creation of complex rules to enable access to queues based on identity (AWS account number), source IP address, date, time, and more.

Continue reading "Amazon SQS Features Access Policy"

I originally saw this great link 11 Useful Free APIs for Developing Twitter Apps in a tweet by Jon Galloway.

While there are a couple of them that are focused on just twitter, there are quite a few others that have usage far and beyond twitter.

Continue reading "11 Useful Free APIs for Developing "Apps""

I love to see competitors who can comfortably and politely write about each other. Ryan Stewart, who is an evangelist for Adobe wrote a very nice over on the differences between Silverlight Out of Browser and Adobe AIR.

Continue reading "SLOOB vs. AIR"

I am still not a huge fan of SimpleDB API (especially via Amazon’s C# wrapper), but with Microsoft’s decision to change course on SDS, if you need a cloud scale queryable schemaless entity store, it is likely your best option.

Recently they announced to two major changes:

Continue reading "SimpleDB Batch and Attributes"

.Net Services is the hidden jewel of in the Azure stack. It is often overlooked, neglected, and rarely talked about, but for anyone who needs to integrate existing or external applications with something hosted in Azure, I am sure you will become close before too long (among other uses).

Continue reading ".Net Service Bus Queues"

I am only a handful of days removed from Mix09. So a quick warning that there still may be some lingering fanboy in air. :)

Mix is by far my favorite Microsoft conference. It has an energy about it that you don’t find at PDC, Tech-Ed, or any of the smaller one off Microsoft events. If you have never made it to a mix, I highly recommend attending next year.

One thing that happened at Mix this year is my opinion of Silverlight drastically changed.

Continue reading "Silverlight – Eye Opening Moment"