Amazon AWS EC2 cloud failure

Amazon has finally published it’s write-up of the outage that occurred starting 4/21/2011 - http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648 .

Honestly I have to hand it to Amazon for single-handedly creating the cloud-computing race. Remember they were an online store, not a datacenter hosting company. They have to be the healthiest company around in terms of constantly improving, expanding, driving into and inventing new products and markets.

But I want to challenge them here. They’ve made something where there was nothing. But I don’t think they have gone far enough yet in cloud computing in terms of offering server computing as a service. I think they owe it to their customers to make some more of this complexity disappear. I’m talking about geographic fault tolerance. I can’t believe in this day and age companies still think they can bet their business on single-site deployments, no matter what kind of clustering and zoning is in place. Amazon needs to take over another layer of the stack here, and make global load-balancing automatic and standard, just build it in to everything.

Sure it’s hard. But right now Amazon is asking the customer to do that hard thing as a one-off baked into their application infrastructure design. Imagine the world-wide cost savings if Amazon does it once, and bakes it into it’s services. Sure the little guy doesn’t want to pay for it. But Amazon ask yourself if you want to have to write another letter like this. And maybe enough big guys will come sniffing around once you add it to the sales literature, to offset those admittedly significant development and ongoing increased resource utilization costs.

UPS pulls an Amazon

Got this message for a package I am tracking today, “Due to severe thunderstorms in Louisville, KY (our major air hub), UPS Next Day Air Early A.M., UPS Next Day Air, and International Express delivery times will be delayed today” … “ for delivery throughout the United States.”

Folks that’s called a single point of failure. That’s called a lack of redundancy, and it’s called no geographical fault tolerance.

It’s just like Amazon last week, got all these poor websites run through a single datacenter. C’mon we knew better than that a decade ago.

Spend the money, have two or three. It’s not optional. Do it right, make them hot-hot.

Tablets = Convenience

Dunno why this never occurred to me before. I guess I spend so much time trying to push the characterization that tablets are  “content consumption devices” rather than content creation devices down everyone’s throat that the simpler truth got by me.

What I mean is, there’s not a single thing you do on a tablet (consuming all that content) that you can’t do on both your PC and your smartphone. So why do we need the tablet? It fits in a convenience niche. Where the smartphone is a little too small, and the laptop a little too unwieldy, and the e-ink device a little too single-purpose, that’s where the tablet comes in.

You’re in the kitchen using it for recipes, then you carry it with you to the dining room where maybe you use it to read some newspapers with your food. Next it’s to the living room where you look up songs from your favorite TV show, or read the latest bestseller during commercials or even pull up a Netflix movie (with headphones) while the kids are watching Disney channel. In between all these things you’re keeping up with Facebook and Twitter and the latest news via the web.

There’s nothing the tablet does, that we don’t already have. But it make enough things easier and better, to create a value proposition that is selling millions of devices a year.

Watching multiple streams on Netflix

I did not know this, but it sounds like if you have the streaming only Netflix plan, you can only watch 1 stream at a time, whereas if you have a DVD plan, you can watch as many streams as the number of DVDs you can have out.

This becomes interesting if you have more than 1 way to watch Netflix streams. For instance the kids can watch a Netflix movie on the TV via the Wii, while Mom watches a Netflix TV show on the iPad in the bedroom. Meanwhile Dad watches a Netflix movie on his iPhone while traveling for business, all at the same time.

http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-multiple-streams-family-plans/

Sync-able iOS savegames

Anybody else out there have an iphone and an ipad? How cool is it to start reading a book on Amazon's Kindle app on the iPad in your living room, and then pick back up on the page you were on, from your iPhone, later while standing in line at the grocery store? It's awesome!

How annoying and aggravating it is then, to make some serious progress in Angry Birds or some other great i-game, but then to be unable to continue the same session on your other device?

Upgrade Netbook Hard Drive

The controller (?) appears to have went south in the 160GB 5400 Seagate in one of the Asus EEE-PC 1005HA netbooks in my house. After a lot of troubleshooting I reluctantly decided to upgrade the hard drive to a 200GB 7200 Seagate I happen to have on hand, that I really had another use for. Oh well, at least I have it to use.

Now I upgraded the memory in these netbooks when I got them, and it was no big deal. Take the plate off the bottom replace the board boom done. I’ve also done lots of other hard drive replacements in laptops, and it is usually essentially the same deal, pop off the cover, a couple of screws maybe a ribbon cable, 5 minutes tops.

A netbook hard drive is a whole ‘nother ball of wax unfortunately. They aren’t meant to be end-user replaceable. There’s no little door! The operation reminded me a lot more of the time I spilled soda into a tiny Dell laptop I had, and I took the whole machine apart, every component separated from the motherboard, and various skeletons of the laptop all separated, to dry. Also it reminded me of the game, “Operation”!

Here’s a couple of resources that helped for this particular netbook, and I’m sure to a certain extent other EEE’s and other netbooks:

• http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=71741
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH3wECqC5d8

At this point (reinstalling Windows) the operation appears  to be a success, so a story with a happy ending rather than a cautionary tale. How nice!

Mobile Website Usability

Ok, you’ve gone to the trouble of sniffing my browser to see I’m coming from a smartphone. You’ve spent good money building a mobile site or experience separate from your full web site. That’s great and I commend you. However, if what I need isn’t present in the feature set or content of the mobile view, and you don’t provide a way for me to view your full site, then all that money was wasted, sorry. Take a look at Google or Facebook (which allow you to switch back and forth).

Disney World – personal tech lessons

Turn off windows automatic updates when you go on vacation - especially if you are operating over a mifi. Set a calendar item for when you get home to turn updates back on.

iPad does not work at Disney. You need full laptop at night for entering data, or triaging pictures, or catching up on business, etc. During the day in the parks, you never have a hand for it if you are a camera carrier. The iPhone works better, because it waits in your pocket for that quick moment you need it. There's also the weight, and the extra data plan. I really wanted the iPad's help in the parks - easier to see maps and apps. But I never had a moment where I wanted to fumble it out of the bag, plus worries about the cachet factor and having it stolen. Wanted to make it work, it just didn't. The iPad is a content consumption device. Disney is a theme park. Oil and water.

The Canon SX30IS is am amazing camera for Disney. If you don't have $1000+ for a DSLR, it's the one to get. First off it's wonderfully cheap for what you get. I paid much more for the G10 a couple of years ago. It has amazing zoom, 35X. This is crucial for Disney. Otherwise you have no faces in your pictures. It has great image stabilization, so if you are trying to take a shot while walking or while riding a ride, if it can focus the fact that you are jittering some will make no difference to the final shot. It has a wonderful sports mode with continuous focus and shooting. It does insanely amazing in low light without a flash, which is great as rides don't allow flashes. This camera is the absolute sweet spot for Disney. I even dropped it once with no problems.

Make sure you have lots of storage space for pictures (backing up off sd cards). With camera megapixels ever increasing, it's important to have literally 10-20 Gig free on the hard drive you back up to.

iPhone Facebook app can’t upload pictures

This applies at least to the iPhone 4, and probably to older models as well. I’ve seen this before from time to time. Here’s the fix that worked today:

1. Go to Settings/General/Location Services.
2. Scroll down to Facebook.
3. Turn on location services for Facebook.

Found it at the following link from a Google search:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6628568379&topic=22408&post=127058

Open Windows Explorer to your folder

This is an oldie but a goodie. A tip I can never find when I need it.

How do you create a shortcut that opens Windows Explorer to a certain folder, but with the Folder Tree visible and synced to the folder you are in?

%systemroot%/explorer.exe /e, “c:\yourfolder”

Thanks to:

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/xp-tricks-save-time-with-windows.html