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Category Archives: General
Amazon EC2 “micro instances” vs. Google App Engine
A note in my inbox this morning announced that Amazon’s EC2 virtual computer hosting service now supports “micro instances” for $0.02/hour ($0.03/hour if you’re confused enough to want to host a web site using Windows): Instances of this family provide … Continue reading
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Google Voice (sort-of) available in Canada
I installed the Google Chat Voice plugin today, and found that I was able to make free Google Voice calls from Canada to both a US and a Canadian POTS number. I’m still unable to register for Google Voice at … Continue reading
RIP Java, 1995-2010
Java is dead. A lot of developers have thought they were too hip for Java, but I still liked it. I implemented SAX in Java first of all, and have developed software in Java and encouraged my enterprise customers to … Continue reading
Balisage 2010 Silent Auction
The Balisage 2010 conference runs next week in beautiful Montreal, focusing on XML and other markup technologies. I cannot make it this year, unfortunately, but I gave some help (far too little) to Sam Wilmott to organize the silent auction. … Continue reading
The thing about creativity …
I left this comment on Simon St-Laurent’s interesting and thoughtful post How dare Apple … (which, in turn, was partly a response to Tim Bray’s post Nothing Creative). I don’t believe that most things, including the iPad, are obviously right … Continue reading
What's the value of a life?
What’s your life worth to you? “Priceless” is the obvious answer, but in reality, you put a price on your life all the time. Safety vs. money Here’s a simple example: let’s say that you want to go on a … Continue reading
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Lessons about web sites for mobile browsers
Working on ourairports.mobi, the mobile version of OurAirports, I’m getting a crash course in writing for mobile browsers. Here, in no particular order, are some of my lessons: The OpenWave browser is horrendous, ignoring character encoding, randomly skipping some simple … Continue reading
Costing out Google App Engine
The Google App Engine (GAE) is the newest of the major cloud computing platforms for hosting web applications. I’ve been experimenting with it for a couple of days, and will post my impressions later. For now, I thought it might … Continue reading
Mixing GPL and non-GPL: a different perspective
Dual-licensing is a popular Open Source business model, especially using the (very restrictive) Gnu General Public License (GPL). Popular opinion, as reflected (for example) in the comments on this blog posting, says that it’s either forbidden or highly questionable to … Continue reading
ohare-airport.org link scam: phishing for pagerank
I discovered an interesting link scam in my inbox this morning, with the subject line “New Chicago O’Hare International Airport website”. The message informed me that Chicago O’Hare Airport has a new website at ohare-airport.org, and asked me to update … Continue reading
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