Author: Jeff Barr

The newest release of ECS provides both an API and a set of RSS feeds to allow developers direct access to promotions. What are promotions? Glad you asked! Promotions are short-term special deals that help customers to make purchases sooner rather than later, and which allow merchants to provide more attractive offers in a competitive […]

John over at Texsy sent me some information about his new advertising system. Texsy analyzes the page and inserts advertising links which popup on a mouse-over. The ads use content drawn from Amazon, Shopping.com, and eBay and include the appropriate associate or affiliate links from the content / product supplier. 20% of the links will […]

Over the last couple of months I have been corresponding with Fred Parnon, CEO of Jnana. Fred’s company has built a software platform targeted at domain experts who don’t happen to be software developers. Using this platform, domain experts can built sophisticated rule-based systems to make “intelligent” decisions, check large data sets against complex sets […]

I’m 2/3rds of the way through a trip that will take me to three cities in the UK and then on to Boston before returning home. Late last week I gave the keynote at the d.Construct conference in Brighton, and received quite a bit of nice blog coverage: Suw Charman was happy that I was […]

Fixed costs are the enemy of any business. Money that must be invested up front to pay for land, buildings, furniture, machine tools, and computers all constitute fixed costs. Regardless of the amount of income that’s coming in, interest must be paid on the capital expended on fixed costs. In a post titled “Amazon S3… […]

There’s a handy (and timely) editorial in Dr. Dobb’s today. In A Grid Is a Grid Is a Grid…, Jon Erickson reviews the history of grid computing and also links to some tools and programming models to exploit the grid. I expect to see many of these tools and models running on Amazon EC2 before […]

Here are some interesting links I dug up this morning: Neurofuzzy: Amazon S3 PHP Class Update. Jonathan Siegel: Sandboxing Amazon EC2. Jonathan also runs the Amazon EC2 blog. There’s some good traffic on the Hadoop mailing list about Hadoop and EC2. Hadoop is the open source version of MapReduce that I mentioned in my previous […]

Innovation never takes a break, and neither do I. From the steaming hot beaches of Cabo San Lucas I would like to tell you about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, now open for limited beta testing, with more beta slots to open soon. Amazon EC2 gives you access to a virtual computing […]

I simply couldn’t wait until next week to post a couple of new items! In S3 Meets R3 (Reliability, Robustness, and Resilience), the authors benchmark Amazon S3 against the venerable SCP (Secure Copy) protocol. You can read the entire article to see the details, but the conclusion pretty much sums it up: Amazon’s S3 Services […]

I am posting from the beach to tell you about the Openfount S3 Manager. To get this running you simply click here. Once you do this, an invisible applet is loaded to gain access to the file system and the GUI is displayed. AT this point you need to enter your Amazon keys. After you […]