SimpleDB now lets you: SELECT foo FROM bar ORDER BY foo.field DESC LIMIT 1

This is important, because that is a very common query to get the latest/last item from the DB and you could not do it before.

My next project will be using SimpleDB. I've played with it, and SQS, and the inability to do that last query was the holdup.

SimpleDB is now a viable choice for many applications.

Follow-up: SimpleDB's perl library does not function as of this release.

FAIL WHALE

Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon SimpleDB - Now With Select

08_chinprep.jpg (JPEG Image, 990x628 pixels)

Welcome to ShotPut Ventures (SPV). We are a technology startup accelerator fund that focuses on capital-light web services companies and assists in the conception phase.

We invest $5,000 per team and $5,000 per founder as part of a coordinated program that will have eight companies in the summer of 2009.

There is already money committed - Atlanta is getting a Y-Combinator clone this summer!

Amazing. Monumental. Newsworthy.

Gold star. Five gold stars.

Welcome - Shotput Ventures - ATLANTA GETS A Y-COMBINATOR CLONE THIS SUMMER!

Like most System Engineers at Sun, I'm often called upon to demonstrate Sun's technology especially Solaris 10 and Sun Ray thin clients. In the past, demonstrating Sun Rays meant bringing a customer into our Sun office OR setting up a network server and device at the customer's location.

To make this much easier, I decided to follow the example of others and turn my Sun issued MacBook Pro into a Sun Ray server. As a result of this configuration, I can set two devices on my customer's desk with only one ethernet cord and no power cords (have to keep those batteries charged) to display the power of the Sun Ray thin client. I also have a configuration (thanks to Matt) the provides a multi-level Solaris environment via Solaris 10 Trusted Extensions along with the ability to display an MS Windows desktop using Win2003 running in a separate virtual machine on the same Mac. Very Cool!

Thinking about getting a Mac Pro and working on a SunRay notebook terminal.

Using your Mac as a Sun Ray server : Jim Laurent's Weblog

There are "better" languages than Perl — hell, there are lots of them, if you define "better" as "not being insane". Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, gosh, I could probably name 20 or 30 languages that are "better" than Perl, inasmuch as they don't look like that Sperm Whale that exploded in the streets of Taiwan over the summer. Whale guts everywhere, covering cars, motorcycles, pedestrians. That's Perl. It's charming, really.

But Perl has many, many things going for it that, until recently, no other language had, and they compensated for its exo-intestinal qualities. You can make all sorts of useful things out of exploded whale, including perfume. It's quite useful. And so is Perl.

Funny.

Stevey's Home Page - Tour de Babel 

TableTools sorts, filters or copies any HTML table. Two filtering modes supported: select filtering (each column has one drop down menu allowing you to select a certain value); search filtering (each column has one search box allowing you to...

Now if only someone would make 'Center It' which generates the CSS to center any div you click on...

TableTools :: Firefox Add-ons

The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore's law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller. These changes have pushed the cost of starting a startup down into the noise. In a lot of startups—probaby most startups funded by Y Combinator—the biggest expense is simply the founders' living expenses. We've had startups that were profitable on revenues of $3000 a month.

Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?

I got a shock yesterday.

An interview with a "local" tech company turned out to be one with a company 3,000 miles away. Appcelerator CEO Jeff Hainey, a veteran Atlanta entrepreneur, told me straight-out he found himself getting more done in a single Mountain View afternoon than he could do in a month from Buckhead.

For me this was the last straw. I have spent nearly my entire journalism career covering Atlanta technology. The state has long claimed the most active tech-development operation in the nation, with an incubator called the ATDC, an active software trade group, and a host of VCs and angel investors, not to mention the "economic development engine" of Georgia Tech.

Check the comments, yet another Atlanta startup cat fight!

Dana Blankenhorn: Georgia Tech Scandal

What makes CloudFront so great is that it is, in my opinion, the first consumer-friendly CDN service. That is to say that it is cheap for its low-latency CDN offerings, easy to sign up for and start using. It also holds its own against professional CDN services like CacheFly. There are small downsides to CloudFront compared to expensive CDN solutions. For one, it takes some time (up to 24 hours) for file changes and updates to be pushed out to CloudFront edge servers. Regardless, I was eager to test it out for myself.nullnullnull

How To: Getting Started with Amazon CloudFront - PaulStamatiou.com

At first, it sounded like Williams was a bit lost on the revenue front. "We will make money, and I can't say exactly how because...we can't predict how the businesses we're in will work." As he has before, he hinted at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users.

But as the conversation went on, one got the impression that Williams actually has a plan. He revealed that the company is in talks with large consumer packaged good companies, and whether that's to sell the company internal services or to help the company monetize its own Twitter feeds, it's promising.

Williams said, "We're looking at Q1 for revenues." This is a change from the original, pre-economic meltdown plan. "The original plan was to focus on revenues in 2010. That's no longer the case, since I don't want to raise money in 2009."

The revenue plans aren't just ads or sponsorships. "We want revenues to be product-based. Google built something that can really scale, and that's our intention as well."

Twitter CEO: The revenue's coming soon, but I won't tell you how | Webware - CNET