An uber cool use of web services, Amazon has released the “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)” web service, it’s in limited beta right now.
Amazon utility computing web service
Reply
Monthly Archives: August 2006
Interesting reading for August-05-2006
A Spec-tacular Failure – A rant by Jeff Atwood on why the ID3 spec totally suxx.
Google Code Project Hosting – A replacement for Sourceforge? – A good overview of google code base.
An Idiot’s Guide to Neural Networks – Something a programmer can use.
What’s new in JavaScript 1.7 – Looks like they took a lot of pages out from a Lisp book 
Code checkins after 5 P.M have higher probability of breaking the build – Interesting.
Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math – I’ve been reading a lot of CS papers lately and I can feel the pain.
Java Programmers are the Erotic Furries of Programming – Programmer hierarchy, hilarious!
Is Kevin Rose of digg.com really worth 60 million USD? – Jason from 37signals.com and Scott Rosenberg of salon.com comment on this business week article.
Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft – Nothing more to add.
Looks like Vista still has some security issues
Lenovo preloads Suse Linux on Laptops – Could this be the small crack that opens the floodgates to wider alternative OS adoption?
The seven deadly sins of programming – Nice series of articles by Eric Gunnerson.
Innovative use of blogging as a marketing medium
Check out PDF Online. This blog talks about the site http://www.pdfonline.com, I think it’s a very nice way to get your google rank up plus serves as a good marketing channel for the actual conversion product.
Dynamic web service proxies need to be loaded from disk
In our application we generate web service proxies at runtime itself using something similar to this. Initially we were generating the assembly in memory by using ICodeCompiler interface and setting CompilerParameters.GenerateInMemory to true. This works fine but throws an exception when you try to invoke a web service, the message of the exception goes something like “Unable to generate a serializer for type
It turns out that for use with XmlSerializer the assembly needs to be loaded from disk! So now we write the assembly to disk, load it using Assembly.LoadFrom() and invoke the web service using reflection. Works like a charm
Interesting reading for 1-August-2006
Getting system level access from a limited account in WinXp – This video shows how you can get “system” level access very easily on a WinXp box. Looks totally possible. The basic crux is that we run a scheduled task that launches command prompt, since scheduler is run by the system account, we get a command prompt that is owned by system!!
Google’s Bigtable – I had seen this before while reading about google code base. But this is a nice technical overview of the google system for storing large amounts of semi-structured data. This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to work at Google.
ZuluPad – The personal wiki notepad. Looks interesting.
Jakob Nielsen on screen resolution and page layout – Always a crucial decision, web design guru Jakob Nielsen offers some advice.
Schrödinger’s cat is dead. – Funny, if you know the story behind schroedinger’s cat.
How I got mobile phone reception where there was no signal – Wow, finally all the univeristy education put to use. Really geeky stuff. The guy basically built a directional antenna but the way he did it is a very interesting read.
How to make a corporate butt pucker – Rick really makes the corporate butt pucker… LOL
The most important software innovations – I found the section on software patents and non-innivations very interesting too.
Feed2JS – Incorporate any RSS feed into your web page easily.
TunnelVision – A really wierd utility that provides security by hiding the entire screen except the area around your cursor.. LOL
Ruby books sales pass Perl – Interesting commentary by O’Reilly
Get Google spreadsheet and writely invitations – For free.
ATA Over Ethernet – Putting hard drives on the LAN. About a year old but still a very informative read.
Wanna know who’s ripping off your content? – This site can be used for some very interesting stuff. I think it may just be using the google related pages tech underneath, but the results looked good at first shot.