ale machina, Bryant Cutler's blog

Prognostication is a hard problem

Friday, December 14th 2007

Jeff Barr, the famous and clever Amazon Web Services evangelist, visited our campus yesterday evening to see a presentation by the CS 462 class that Sam TA's. As part of the discussion, most of it feedback about EC2 and S3, Jeff was asked whether any more game-changing services were going to be released by Amazon soon. He told us yes, that something would be coming out before year's end, but then didn't give us any details. Sam immediately guessed it'd be a database-in-the-cloud, while I thought it might be a more modest map- or search- related extension of existing APIs.

Well, Amazon SimpleDB. Sam, I hereby admit publicly that you were right... now if only his new vision of a future-super-über Android-powered computing cloud were already a reality. Maybe Amazon will announce it next month...

Welcome to the blog and online resume of Bryant Cutler, currently a graduate student in the BYU Enterprise Computing Lab. If you like reading this stuff, follow my blog feed or my bookmarks feed.

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Malcolm Gladwell on invention: This is a must read - it is absolutely the case that there are more good ideas out there than people realize. To bad the IV's invention think tank is based on a patent-centric business model though!
Unholy: Ruby to Python compiler: Why The Lucky Stiff's latest project, this is perhaps the best-named software project in history :)
The "future" of the web: My thoughts exactly.
Young Engineers: Clever commercial. I think it's great when TV encourages you to do something cool instead of telling you to stay put in front of the tube :)
13-Step AppEngine/Django Process: The more I look at AppEngine, the cooler it gets. YES, it's got limitations and YES AWS is still better for a "real" app but having a Django-based playground that I don't have to maintain... AWESOME.
Google's new Python-centric BigTable/GFS Platform: Holy cow! I mean, wow!
Google Static Maps API: This is so awesome! I had no idea there *was* an static API for Google Maps. I totally need to roll a plugin into my blog that uses this.
Short Words to Explain Relativity: You might think that an explanation of the Einstein's Theory of Relativity using only words of four or fewer letters wouldn't be all that funny... but you'd be wrong. This is hilarious reading.
YouTube - Alan Kay bashing Edsger Dijkstra: Oh, snap!
YouTube - The Real Perspective on the Solar System: This is pretty cool stuff... if you like "Powers of Ten," you'll like this. I wish they'd also show something like the relative size of the heliosphere, though, instead of just stars.