• hosting environment exclusively for web applications
• initially free up to a certain site load (500 MB storage, 10 Gb bandwidth a day, ~5 million pageviews/month — I wish that was a problem I had!)
• supports Python (initially) but will eventually support more languages
• they seem to have their own api and their own web application framework, I wonder if they’ll support more like Django (Python) or, of course, Ruby on Rails

How this compares to Amazon:

• This is not a general purpose web hosting or grid service like EC2 — this is tailored specifically to web applications
• Free up to a certain amount of usage (probably only something Google/MS could afford to offer)

My Thoughts

The main thing that struck me at first was that it was based off Python. Not a surprise because Google is pretty much the largest promoter/user of Python on the internet, they even hired Python creator Guido Von Rossum. But apparently from the talk, Python is only the first supported language. More will be added over time.

The other thing that struck me was that they seem to have chosen to develop their own web application framework. I wonder why. There are plenty of good ones out there (like Django for Python). I hope this isn’t just a case of programmers always wanting to implement their own version of a certain app just for problem-solving satisfcation and the joy of learning something new.

But again, if they allow other languages to be supported, I’m sure they’ll eventually allow various frameworks. If I had to guess, I’d think their framework probably handles caching and database persistence really well with their backend, which makes it the most ideal. But knowing Google, they will probably open up all the protocols being used to interact with their infrastructure, and allow the community to develop mappings in other languages. Nothing wrong with this inherently open source approach.

The final thing to note is that this is a preview release, and a lot of my worries will most likely be put to rest by the time they release a final version.

This is quite promising for developers. These are very interesting times for small companies. It is growing ever easier and cheaper to have an IT infrastructure that supports more and more users. There are startups that run entirely on Amazon S3 and EC2, and don’t own a single server. This is just possible because of the internet and a lot of its supporting technologies becoming cheaper.

Now that I think about it, it’s actually a very Apple-like approach to this problem. We give you the whole ecosystem where all the pieces work together perfectly, and as long as you use our tools and technologies, your app will work beautifully. It has limited appeal.

Now I’m waiting for Yahoo and Microsoft’s reponses They better be working on something worthwhile to compete. This is the future of startups.

Overall, I think Amazon is still king of this space. This thing got a luke-warm reception from myself (and apparently most who attended). Hopefully it’ll mature into something more useful for a larger number of people.

So we decided to show attendees information that is immediately useful to them, such as the conference event schedule.SO this weekend, Michael Herndon from OSC, and myself, started to build what would become CID.

We decided from the beginning to open source the project and host it on Google Code, so that others can benefit and learn from our experience, and also so that it could be extended easily in the future. This series of posts outlines some of the things we learned in the process.

WPF

Firstly, a short intro to WPF. WPF is short for Windows Presentation Foundation, is a set of Microsoft-based technologies (namely, XAML and a .NET 3.0 Presentation Framework) that allow developers to build rich media applications which take advantage of graphics hardware that’s common in today’s computers. For a better overview of WPF, go to WPF.

Goals

There were three goals to this project:

• Bring people to the OSC Booth and make them talk about it
• Show off OSC’s skills in cutting edge technologies (like WPF)
• And most importantly, it gave us an excuse to play with WPF.

Tools we used

Not much of a surprise, but we used entirely Microsoft-based tools, since they were optimized for building WPF applications and writing XAML.- Visual Studio 2008 (with .NET 3.5)- Expression Blend 2 February CTP

The App

Click above for a screenshot of the final app (final as of this weekend). In the coming days, I’m going to outline how we did various things with CID and WPF. I want to cover the following topics:

• Part 2: Layouts
• Part 3: Databinding (Relative, Elements, DataContexts)
• Part 4: Animations, Per-character Text Effects, Calling Storyboards from C#
• Part 5: Code-behind events, programmatic animations and storyboards, and wrap-up 

So stick around!

In a nutshell, it’s a kit to build your own electronic devices by piecing together blocks in a Mr. Potato Head style. You can then write code that controls how all these pieces talk to each other.

This is a very exciting new platform especially for programmers that don’t have the electronics know-how, but have a lot of ideas for creating their own gadgets. I had attempted my foray into electronics by researching AVR microcontroller kits, but I chickened out as soon as I read about BUG.

The guys behind this new startup seem to genuinely want to make the (geek’s) world a better place. Their mission is littered with good intentions and the execution seems top notch. I’m really excited to get my BUG and start playing with it.

My first idea is to build a fitness gadget. I’m going to use the accelerometer as a pedometer, and the GPS receiver to track my position. Hopefully this will result in a full-fledged treadmill-in-a-box.

I’d also like to use the accelerometer/pedometer to calculate the rate of my stride and maybe adjust the tempo of music according to it.

How cool would that be?

Well, here goes nothing. Hello World! This is going to be my foray into tech blogging. At any given time, I’m full of ideas and wanting to work on a ton of projects. Why don’t I share the knowledge gained? I’ve gained so much knowledge others doing the same, so this is my way of trying to pay it back.