Again, not that any of them are not simple and easy to understand - but there seems a big difference in how much language you are overcoming in Java and PHP vs how much work you are doing. To me, the Perl version is doing the exact same work but is much cleaner and easier to take in at a glance. In the example there wordpress seems to have some difficultly displaying any indenting - but it’s there and makes it even more obvious, but even flattened it’s very very easy to see what all the attributes are instantly. As code gets more complex keeping things obvious like that becomes a great boon to maintainability.

It is interesting how BAD Perl's SDB interface is, and yet it is still by far the best compared to the others. However, with the forthcoming release of Net::Amazon::SimpleDB::Simple, pushing hashes in and out of SDB is utterly simple. Perhaps simpler than any of the other languages, although I haven't used Ruby's ActiveRecord SimpleDB hookup.

What I like about Perl: Amazon SDB interfaces compared

Haven't gone through the procedure to get it on CPAN, but I wrote my first CPAN module: Net::Amazon::SimpleDB::Simple.

Give it a perl data structure like a SimpleDB store, it will put it on SimpleDB. Ask it for SimpleDB, it will give you the corresponding perl data structure.

Prior to this, using SimpleDB from Perl was too hard. Now it should be easy. Go me.

Net::Amazon::SimpleDB::Simple - A simple wrapper to Amazon's Perl libary, inspired
by and adapted from Eric Hammond's simpledb CLI: http://code.google.com/p/amazon-simpledb-cli/

Requires the official Amazon::SimpleDB library from AMAZON, not CPAN.

It is not currently available on CPAN (working on it) and can be found here:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1136

=head1 SYNOPSIS

use Net::Amazon::SimpleDB::Simple;

my $attributes = {name => 'Jim', hobby => ['jogging', 'climbing'], job => 'cop'};

my $sdb = Net::Amazon::SimpleDB::Simple->new(
{
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID => $ENV{AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID},
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY => $ENV{AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY},
domain => 'MyDomainName'
}
);

$sdb->put_attributes('555ABC', $attributes);

my $output = $sdb->get_attributes('555ABC');

my $select_output = $sdb->select('SELECT * from MyDomain');

$sdb->delete_attributes('555ABC', $attributes);

Net::Amazon::SimpleDB::Simple

I just created a 40,000 GB (40 TB) RAID 0 device across 40 EBS volumes

RAID 0 on EC2 EBS volumes (Elastic Block Store) using mdadm - ec2ubuntu | Google Groups

The important bit first: If you are making Query (aka REST) requests to Amazon SimpleDB, to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), or to Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) over HTTP, and there is any way for an attacker to provide you with data which you use to construct your request, switch to HTTPS or start using AWS signature version 2 now.

Perhaps this is why Amazon broke version 1 in the Perl lib a few days ago.

AWS signature version 1 is insecure

Utah is the nation's fastest growing state, increasing 2.5 percent from July 2007 to July 2008, according to new population estimates from the Census Bureau.
Barack Obama greets one of the newest members of the U.S. population this year on the campaign trail.

Barack Obama greets one of the newest members of the U.S. population this year on the campaign trail.

The main reason for Utah's growth is a "natural increase" -- births minus deaths -- said Census Bureau demographer Greg Harper.

"Utah has a strong rate of natural increase and domestic migration, where more people move into the state and [are] not moving out," he said.

We need to put legislation in place to stop Mormons from breeding.

Utah is fastest growing state, Census Bureau says - CNN.com

Moose makes Perl5 objects not suck. It makes Perl fun again.

Look below. For one thing, I do not have to do a new() or Perl's silly hacked object shenanigans. Moose does that for me. If I want code to run at instantiation, I can make a BUILD() sub, but instead of doing that I can define properties of the object that save me from writing code.

For instance, look at $sdb. I initialize it to a default in the declaration, so I don't have to bind the variable in new(). $separator and $replace are required arguments (in a hash) and so they are declares as such. Moose will do the complaining for me if we don't get them.

I'm not usually an advocate of meta-code, but in this case the payoff is instant. Moose is great.

Ex:

package Amazon::SimpleDB::Simple;

use Moose;
use Carp;
use Amazon::SimpleDB::Client;

has 'sdb' => (
isa => 'Amazon::SimpleDB::Client',
is => 'rw',
lazy => 1,
default => sub {
my $self = shift;
Amazon::SimpleDB::Client->new($self->AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID,
$self->AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY);
}
);

has 'max' => (isa => 'Int', is => 'rw', default => 100);

has [qw/AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY domain/] =>
(isa => 'Str', is => 'ro', required => 1);

has 'separator' => (isa => 'Str', is => 'rw', required => 1);

has 'replace' => (isa => 'Int', is => 'rw', required => 1);

sub put_attributes
{
my ($self, $item_name, @pairs) = @_;

my $response =
$self->sdb->putAttributes(
{
DomainName => $self->domain,
ItemName => $item_name,
Attribute => pairs_to_attributes(\@pairs, 1),
}
);
}

Moose - A postmodern object system for Perl 5 - search.cpan.org

The course of people's lives in the US now seems to be determined less by credentials and more by performance than it was 25 years ago. Where you go to college still matters, but not like it used to.

What happened?

After Credentials

The best way to fix CSS problems with IE6 is to generate random mutations on the style sheet until it looks fixed

So true.

Snowy day in New York - Joel on Software

I got bored, so I added this: http://rjurneyopen.s3.amazonaws.com/simpledb.patch

to this: http://code.google.com/p/amazon-simpledb-cli/

Now you can do something like this:

$ ./simpledb select "select * from SimpleDBTest WHERE id>'0' ORDER BY id DESC"

And if you have data in that domain suitable to the query, you get something like this:

Item: base_id=1 Name: id, Value: 7, Name: song, Value: Super Deluxe Fly Crew, Name: station, Value: WKRP,

I think this is actually my first contribution to a FOSS project. Go me.

I added SimpleDB's SELECT to the SimpleDB Perl CLI

New Economy Pitches to Old Economy

I read a blog post yesterday on the Atlanta Business Chronicle website regarding the open session of Startup Gauntlet, entitled “Startup Gauntlet: Helping build tomorrow's entrepreneurs.”  The post covered a special public session of Startup Gauntlet, which was unique in that it was judged by members of the TAG Top 40 judging panel, was open to the public, and the winner moved on to a spot in the TAG Top 40.

There was a powerful story at that meeting, and the post missed it completely.

The post may be summarized as saying that the entrepreneurs were unprepared for the market, unprepared for investment, and that most of their businesses have little chance for success, but with the help of the feedback from the panel they might stand a chance.  

I would suggest that the real story in that meeting was the gap between the investment community as represented by the panel, and internet companies in this state.  That is to say, the ‘New Economy’ was pitching to the ‘Old Economy,’ and the old economy doesn’t get it. Independent of the merits of the internet businesses presenting, the panel indicated repeatedly, from the questions it asked, that they had little understanding of the internet as it pertains to business.  Again and again, questions from the panel showed a complete lack of knowledge of existing revenue models on the internet responsible for billions of dollars of transactions driving profits for pillars of the new economy like Amazon, Google and eBay.  It was therefore difficult for many members of the panel to understand the value proposition of products which enhance those revenues, or exist on top of those business models.  Many of the questions posed were valid criticisms of the business models of companies like Amazon, had they been posed nearly 15 years ago before hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue had proven them.

Internet companies are not exempt from demonstrating the value of their products, but these questions highlighted the key challenge for tech startups in the state of Georgia, and indeed throughout the southeast: how do you teach those that control venture investment from the ‘Old Economy’ how the ‘New Economy’ works if they lack a basic understanding of the development of the internet as it pertains to business over the last 15 years?  The gap is wide, and yet it must be bridged if we are to grow the Georgia technology economy.

Good coverage of that event would have seen that divide, and would have reported it, rather than simply voicing the opinion of the ‘Old Economy.’  Adequate coverage of the technology industry of this state requires some knowledge of technology, and of business. I would ask that you devote the resources to covering these events that are required to make adequate coverage possible.

Thank you for your time,

Russell Jurney

An Open Letter to the Atlanta Business Chronicle