Cloud computing, PaaS , AWS VPC and VLAN's

My Amazon AWS account has been quietly dust for over year, though a number of recent and current projects are a good fit for the PaaS paradigm especially with Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud and the recent news of their ISO 27001 certification.

This makes it an interesting option for environments which can be quickly setup and torn down for Proof of Concept / evaluation / testing etc

One downside is that the AWS VPC doesn't support multicast - not a major problem for some application stacks (e.g. Oracle Coherence can use Well Known addresses) but one interesting alternative I'm looking at is Cohesive FT's VPN Cubed - which provides an overlay network.

One of the most significant advantages of this approach is the cost - several hours of usage last night was only a couple of dollars ...

Slowed cooked Lamb with Onions and Thyme

Tonight's inspiration - used whole leg and covered top of the joint with tapenade then added a few carrots and some tomato puree. Taste test seems OK - will wait for the verdict

Coherence 3.6 Released « Brian Oliver

Very Nice

quoting Mr Oliver ...

Transactions

"You can now do fully distributed server-side grid-based processing across caches transactionally"

Coherence Query Language

"Coherence Query Language (CohQL) is designed as light-weight SQL and JPA-like query language for querying caches"
e.g. update "employees" set salary = salary*1.10, vacation = vacation + 50 where grade > 7
and a Console tool (think sqlplus - sort of...)

and a Quorum facility and .Net session manager

Microsoft Announces Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 - Microsoft Robotics Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Microsoft Announces Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 - Microsoft Robotics Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Along with the excellent CCR and DSS - will be very inersting to see the uptake now this is free of charge

Death of a star in 3 dimensions

Death of a star in 3 dimensions: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Blink Logs Into Windows with Sunglasses-Proof Facial Recognition - Logins - Lifehacker

Interesting idea Blink Logs Into Windows with Sunglasses-Proof Facial Recognition - Logins - Lifehacker

National Geographic Italia

National Geographic - now in Italian National Geographic Italia

Top 10 Things You Didn't Know Google Maps Could Do - Google Maps - Lifehacker

Top 10 Things You Didn't Know Google Maps Could Do - Google Maps - Lifehacker

Getting LeakDiag / LDParser

Links to download LeakDiag and LDParser

Couple of useful debugging tools - currently hiding under

ftp.microsoft.com/PSS/Tools/Developer%20Support%20Tools

LeakDiag
LDParser

Mitsu's blog : C# 4 expressions: blocks [Part I]

Interesting article on Mitsu's blog : C# 4 expressions: blocks [Part I]

TinyIoC - GrumpyDev

Interesting lightweight IoC Container

VisualVM 1.2.1 - The All-in-One java Troubleshoting tool

Nice app for the toolkit

Quoting from their site

"VisualVM is a visual tool integrating several commandline JDK tools and lightweight profiling capabilities. Designed for both production and development time use, it further enhances the capability of monitoring and performance analysis for the Java SE platform"

visualvm: Home

Videos :: Microsoft PDC09

Session Video's from PDC 09 are now available ... good way to while away the dark evenings

Videos :: Microsoft PDC09

J A K E M O R L E Y » 100 CDs. EACH ONE UNIQUE. COME CHOOSE YOURS.

Already brought my tickets for the gig :-)

J A K E   M O R L E Y » 100 CDs. EACH ONE UNIQUE. COME CHOOSE YOURS.

ETH - Entrepreneurial Risks - Entrepreneurial Risks

Listened to Material World (3/9) with interesting conversation with Didier Sornette, a physicist analysing the dyanamics of the the financial markets to predict the recent collapse of the Shanghai stock market - c.f. ETH - Entrepreneurial Risks - Entrepreneurial Risks

Surface Area Required to Power the Whole World With Solar and Wind Power : TreeHugger

Interesting - though need to work out the numbers sometime...

Surface Area Required to Power the Whole World With Solar and Wind Power : TreeHugger

InfoQ: .NET 4 Beta 1 Now Supports Software Transactional Memory

InfoQ: .NET 4 Beta 1 Now Supports Software Transactional Memory

Project Tuva: Messenger lectures with Feynman lectures

Richard Fenman is one of my all time hero's and his books like 'Six Easy Pieces' were one of my favourite reads when I was younger Project Tuva now presents his Messenger lectures

Google Chrome OS - coming next year

Google Chrome OS - lightweight OS for netbooks etc - now announced on their blog site

Several snippets from insideHPC

Slightly disappointed this wasn't MS's answer to extreme ironing but nevertheless interesting

New Extreme Computing Group at Microsoft | insideHPC.com

and double tag from Gigaspaces and MS on financial analytics

Gigaspaces and Microsoft team on financial analytics | insideHPC.com