Brian Hartsock's Blog

Amazon just recommended Hadoop: The Definitive Guide to me. My coworker Stu and his use of Hadoop is featured as a case study in the book. How does Amazon know me this well?

Elasticfox was good while it lasted, but I definitely think Amazon took a step in the right direction with their console. Now almost anyone can play with EC2 without much of a commitment.

I am playing around with S3’s REST library for fun. I started writing the request signature code and quickly realized something, the .NET HttpWebRequest object doesn’t allow the date header to be set. You can’t send the Date header. No matter what. Unless you implement your own TcpClient…

Am I missing something? Does this make sense to anyone? Encapsulation doesn’t mean restricting behavior, it means restricting knowledge of implementation details. Maybe Microsoft had a reason for enforcing this behavior, but I would like to at least know about it.

Luckily, Amazon supports the alternative x-amz-date header.

I started playing around Amazon EC2 today. After hearing cloud this and cloud that all day long for the past few months, I decided to get some experience with cloud computing myself. Unfortunately, Amazon Web Services aren’t as casual user friendly as I had hoped. Here are just a few thoughts on EC2 after 24 hours of use.

Elasticfox to the rescue. Elasticfox is a must have for the trial EC2 user. All the functionality of EC2 is right at your finger tips in a single Firefox extension. As a side note, I also found S3Fox as well so I can see what Jungle Disk is doing behind the scenes and manage my buckets.

The base Windows images are fairly worthless outside of testing SQL Server 2005. Installing Windows components is a pain. Amazon has an article on how to do it, which being the casual user I am, I chose not to read.

I attempted to bundle an AMI after installing SQL Server SP1, but it required a shutdown, which is apparently different than an image terminate. I lost interest after that. I will probably play around some more tomorrow.

What’s the final word? I tried it out and it cost me about $5. It might be useful, but getting everything setup the way I would like is going to take a decent amount more time. It wasn’t the super easy to test things development environment I was hoping for though. Maybe $50 will get me there.

Yesterday I found this gem of an article on Amazon’s website. I wish I had known about it sooner.

I got home, and immediately tried it out. After about 1 minute, I was watching an on-demand video on my TV, through my XBox. Before, I thought I had to go through a VGA cable directly from my laptop, which is a pain. This is much better.

The quality isn’t HD; it looks to be about DVD quality. Even still, I think it is enough for me to cancel my satellite subscription and be completely on-demand. I only watch 2 TV shows, and the rest just waste my time. If only Discovery and History channels streamed over the internet, I wouldn’t miss satellite at all.

Also, I think this is the catalyst to get me to ditch my Ubuntu desktop for a Windows machine. Being able to easily have on-demand video is a perk like none other. At long last, I have given up what I so fell in love with a few years ago. I am sure this isn’t are last meeting, goodbye Ubuntu.