What is Browsershots?

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

Check Browser Compatibility, Cross Platform Browser Test - Browsershots

Today we are proud to bring you the first shwack of insight from Indie Flash Developer Troy Gilbert, proud creator of Mockingbird - The Game Making Game . In this 3 part piece we open up with some basics about flash, lead into a general overview of why Troy loves Flex so much and finish off with how to use PHP to dynamically generate your code for your flash games. Great stuff for anyone looking at getting into Flash Game development and we can’t wait to broadcast more from Troy in the Future!

IndustryBroadcast » Audio Article #46(A-C): Getting Started with Flash + Flex + Dynamic Code Generation via PHP

Dear Amazon Web Services developers,

We’re excited to announce a new feature that makes it easy and cost-effective to broadly share data stored in Amazon S3. This will enable you to provide other developers access to your buckets without incurring their access costs, and even use Amazon Web Services to sell data for a profit.

You can now configure an Amazon S3 bucket to bill the requester, rather than you (the bucket owner), for both request and bandwidth fees associated with access to the bucket. Requests against such buckets must be authenticated and bear a header that signifies consent to be billed for the request. Bandwidth between EC2 and S3 within a region remains free of charge when this option is enabled.

Used in conjunction with Amazon DevPay , the new “Requester Pays” option also enables selling access to data stored in Amazon S3 either as a subscription or by marking up individual request fees.

Guidance on getting started:
- Using Amazon S3 “Requester Pays” Option
- Using Amazon S3 “Requester Pays” with Amazon DevPay

Thanks,
The Amazon S3 Team null

If you collect valuable data, you can provide direct access to it with this service.

Google is the new Microsoft - big, no innovation, every company they buy dies. Amazon is the new Google - new hot disruptive shit all the time.

Amazon Web Services Developer Community : Announcing “Requester Pays” Option for ...

We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure websites. As a proof of concept we executed a practical attack scenario and successfully created a rogue Certification Authority (CA) certificate trusted by all common web browsers. This certificate allows us to impersonate any website on the Internet, including banking and e-commerce sites secured using the HTTPS protocol.

MD5 considered harmful today

A series of Paul Graham's articles has led me to something I'm calling the Innovation Problem. Essentially it started when I read his article After Credentials. I enjoyed it article, but found this part is odd:

Do they let energetic young people get paid market rate for the work they do? The young are the test, because when people aren't rewarded according to performance, they're invariably rewarded according to seniority instead.
...
If people who are young but smart and driven can make more by starting their own companies than by working for existing ones, the existing companies are forced to pay more to keep them.

This statement about motives seemed out of sync with his essay Great Hackers:

Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it.

Perhaps this is because Graham is talking about a general case of person in the first essary and a subset of people (Specifically great programmers) in the second.

Now, I don't consider myself a super hacker and nor would I ever compare myself to someone like RTM or others Graham has mentioned. Quite the contrary I've gone out of my way to deny unwarranted comparisons. I do however consider myself a hacker and I understand exactly what Graham means in his 2nd essay.

I think that performance metrics are one half of a two sided coin, depending on what drives you are a person: pay or project.

Let me explain. I work for a Fortune 15 technology corporation. They pay me very, very, very well. However in return I'm subjected to (with a fair bit of good things) unbelievably stupid bullshit. They don't seem to realize that I couldn't give 2 shits about their money otherwise I'd have alot less bullshit in my life.

Jay Chaudhry met with me twice in the spring of 2008 and asked me to join his new start up Zscalar. I turned him down for a couple reasons, the biggest being he kept appealing to the wrong side of me. He kept talking dollars, he never talked projects. How are you doing "in the cloud" security. Are you buying or building? ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

The Innovation Problem

The in-the-works Janus Privacy Adapter is, hands down, the coolest piece of networking hardware I’ve seen (via hackaday) all year. The so-called Privacy Adapter has two RJ45 ethernet jacks and is intended to be placed in-line between your computer and Internet connection. After plugged in and given around 60 seconds to fire up, it anonymizes your web traffic through your choice of the Tor network or OpenVPN.nullnullnull

Anonymize Your Web Traffic with JanusPA - PaulStamatiou.com

Each PARTITION clause may specify either an INDEX DIRECTORY, a DATA DIRECTORY, or both, where the partition's indexes and/or data are to be stored. Suppose our orders database has grown to the point where it holds records relating to several million orders, tens of thousands of customers, hundreds of stores, thousands of salespeople, and so on, and it's threatening to outgrow our single 250-GB disk. We're going to upgrade our database server by adding 3 new disks, and the four disks are mounted as /data0, /data1, /data2, and /data3. We'll partition the table into 4 partitions - one per disk - and use HASH partitioning on the orders table to obtain an even distribution of data. On each disk, we'll create an orders directory and within this directory we'll create separate subdirectories for the corresponding partition's indexes and data. Using the orders_hash table described previously as a model, we can create a table that follows this scheme like this:

Using this, you could put each partition of a table on a different EBS store.

MySQL Partitions - Different Data Stores for Each

# And then some bloat because I happen to like the ISO 8601 time
# format.

sub time2iso (;$)
{
my $time = shift;
$time = time unless defined $time;
my($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year) = localtime($time);
sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02dT%02d:%02d:%02d",
$year+1900, $mon+1, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec);
}

Perl ISO 8601 T Separated Formatting Code

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