While reading Don’s blog (from the last post) I saw that SmugMug was having a contest this month for who could build the coolest application using the SmugMug API. The winner gets a free iPhone. So, I think I’m going to enter and make something cool. Wish me luck. As a side benefit to using their API, I get a free lifetime Pro account, so I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos I had sitting on my computer. You can view them here.
I just watched a really good presentation called Set Amazon’s Servers on Fire by Don MacAskill, CEO and Chief Geek at SmugMug. It’s an interesting look into one of probably the largest users of Amazon’s S3. He talks about how they are using S3, and are going to use Amazon’s EC2 soon as well. He’s candid about what Amazon Web Services doesn’t currently provide that is needed for a company like his.
[via AWS Blog]
Note: I would put a link here to the AWS Blog article that had a bunch of presentations, but I don’t want other people to suffer the CPU stranglization (?) while loading all the SlideShare presentations.
Wow… this is big. Nokia, a cell phone manufacturer buys Navteq, a map data provider for more than $8 billion in cash. Nokia has just made a huge leap off a cliff hoping that halfway down their homemade paraglider that they are going to pull out of their backpocket lifts them up to new heights.
I guess they think that this will allow them to take over the budding location based services market. Buying Navteq may allow them to take competitors out of the market by simply not providing data to them, or charging them a heafty sum of money for it.
I expected this kind of thing from Google, but not a cell phone company. I guess even Google doesn’t have $8 billion just lying around. Then again, I don’t think Google really wants to be a data company. They want to be a technology company that builds software around the data that other companies and individuals provide.
So, what happens when some other big phone manufacturer decides to buy the other major map data provider Teleatlas and both decide to no longer license data to Google? Oh… I guess no more Google Maps… even on the Apple’s iPhone…
[via All Things Digital]
While trying to give Microsoft Office Live a spin, which proposes to give out free domain names and web site hosting, I get this error message:
“In order to use Microsoft Office Live, you will need to have Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later running on Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Microsoft Windows Server 2003. You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer from the Internet Explorer downloads page.”
So, basically, anyone using Firefox and/or a Mac will not be able to view your site. Isn’t that like half of internet users out there these days?
Last Sunday, I went with my friend Preat, who is working at Boeing this summer, to the Boeing factory in Everett, WA for Family Day. It’s the one day per year where Boeing employees get to take their friends and family into the factory. The building itself is the largest building in the world by volume. They make the 747, 767, 777, and the brand new 787 there. The building was packed with thousands of people. I got to walk under the wings of 3 of the four types of plans, and also got to see two huge cargo planes called Dream Lifters which they use to transport the wings of other plans.
Today felt like a really productive day, even though I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night. Today I actually did some real development as opposed to bug fixing and small tweaks to our websites like I have been doing for a while now. I did quite a bit of refactoring today, which is fun if you understand what’s going on with the software. The best analogy I’ve heard so far for refactoring is reshaping a piece of clay. You take a glob of code here, and move it over there. Take some extra code out that you don’t need, and make the code look nicer. Nicer looking code is easier to maintain. Basically, if you have to fix or change something later it will be easier to understand and fix without too much work. Refactoring can be frustrating if the code is too ugly in the first place. If you don’t really understand what the code is doing, you can really screw it up by moving around those globs of clay, or code in this case. But, this code was pretty clean and simple. It just needed some minor refactoring.
After work I went to an entrepreneur networking event at Del Ray hosted by nPost. I met some cool people working on some really cool startups. Several people from Zillow were there, and I talked to one of them. I talked to a VC who was working on his own business plan for something in the mobile shopping arena. I met the two guys, John and Tom from Wishlisting.com. You should check out their site. It’s pretty nifty. I think I’ll start using it. I was directed towards another entrepreneur, Matt, who is working on a site for online video tours of real estate. We talked about how he might be able to use my Gmap Uploader for the floor plans on his site. Definitely check out his site called Cool Toors (a second o instead of the u) if you have property for sale or rent and want a good way to put up a virtual tour.
So, Ajay, my current roommate and I have a running challenge going: See who can run the most miles before he leaves on the 24th. Right now he is kicking my butt. He ran 12 miles in the past three days. I ran 4 miles one day, but I need to keep that up in order to beat him in the challenge. Wish me luck.
I just wanted to say that my Lovesac is really comfortable. It’s this giant bean bag-ish thing as Matt has pointed out below. I have the Super Sac which fits three people. It’s huge! I know it has been sounding like I’m getting paid to promote products, but I’m not, these are just really cool things.
I bought the Nike+iPod the other day. It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from Apple and Nike. The user interface on the iPod nano is extremely simple, with only the features you need most often. When you plug your iPod into your computer, it syncs your runs to Nike’s website at the same time as all your music and such. You can then view the Nike website which will show you pretty graphs of your runs. You can set goals, and challenge other users, although I haven’t tried those features yet. I have, however, added the Nike+ widget to my facebook profile so that you can see my last few runs there. I’ll probably put the widget here to if its easy enough to do. The actual device itself is actually two pieces. One fits in your Nike+ shoe (or other shoe’s laces, or shoe wallet or something) and the other attaches discretely to the bottom of your iPod nano. While you run, it tracks time, distance, and speed. In addition to listening to your own music while you run you can opt to download customized workout music along with a pre-recorded trainer who takes you step by step through the workout. These of course cost money, and can be bought through iTunes.
So, Amazon (the company I work for) just launched Amazon Fresh a couple days ago in Seattle (Mercer Island according to the newspapers) and it looks like its going to be pretty sweet. Basically, its fresh groceries ordered online with three delivery methods: Pre-dawn delivery, daytime delivery, and local pickup. I hope they can get the user interface right, because I tried using Safeway‘s the other day, and it was kinda annoying. Maybe that’s just because there were like 10 different kinds of milk, and it wasn’t easy to just pick the standard skim milk from the list.
