Monday, May 26, 2008

AWS Meetup Chennai

We, the motley crew from Impiger (Ashok, Abi, Ram, Priya, Umaima and myself) just returned from AWS Chennai meetup. It was a great evening and we were able to hear what's new in AWS from Jinesh Varia, the evangelist from Amazon.

One of the highlights of the event was the demos. The coolest, imho was from nboomi. It has some cool 3D models of homes which you can customize. It is flash based and the demo was fascinating. It seems they store the models in S3. When I tried it out though, my Firefox memory usage shot through the roof and I had to kill it. I'm sure they will fix those kinks pretty soon. Also, our demo of Boxcloud was received well. I also got introduced to Hadoop and TimesMachine.

One problem with AWS is the barrier to entry for developers, as they are required to sign up with a credit card. I suggested that Amazon lower that barrier by providing sandbox APIs. They can control it by clearing out the data periodically and limiting the number of hits from an IP per day. Jinesh is going to look into that. I hope one day it will happen :)

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Funny (but true) Quote!

Seen on the tagline of Slashdot user eldavojohn

"Can god code something so unusable even he can't use it? No, but I can and so can you: http://www.microsoft.com/careers"

*lol*

Sunday, May 4, 2008

RoR Scalability

I have written about this earlier. Now here we go again. It's about Twitter having problems scaling.

Volume Fade Out Sleep Timer

I usually take a nap Sunday afternoons, and I like to hear some streaming radio during that time. I wanted something that would fade the volume down to 0 after a certain period of time (say half hour). I decided to give it a shot myself. It's Tcl and Snack to the rescue! After twiddling with the Snack API for 5 mins, here is the code:


package require snack

set line [lindex [snack::mixer lines] 0]
snack::mixer volume $line v1 v2

set totalTime 1800; # half hour
set delay [expr $totalTime*10]

for {set v 100} {$v>=0} {incr v -1} {
set v1 $v
set v2 $v
puts "[clock format [clock seconds] -format "%T" ] - $v"
after $delay
}


It worked out well. And for the record, after I woke up, I googled to check if there is something out there that will do the same thing. There were many utilities, but the one stood out was this, based on something called AutoHotKey. I 've never heard of that before, but sounds very impressive.