This article is a sort of series I'm writing with my experiences of learning the EC2 cloud while learning Sphinx search. The more I learn about Sphinx and use it, the more impressed I am. And also the more possibilities that I see. I believe this... Continue Reading
This article is largely for my own notes so I can remember what I did. I am just starting to get my feet wet in the EC2 world. I am a programmer by trade, but have been forced by necessity into being a system engineer also, but I'm absolutley not... Continue Reading

Installing Sphinx on Amazon EC2 and EBS

Okay, day two of learning EC2 and attempting to get a Sphinx Full Text Search server up and running on my Ubuntu EC2 instance and data on the EBS volume. As far as AMIs the web site Alestic has been a big help, but today I changed to the official... Continue Reading
I was amazed how much attention my last blog post about the speed tests I had done after after enabling CloudFront on my S3 static content. The post was re-tweeted over and over on Twitter and today I even saw follow-ups of people saying they were... Continue Reading

Cloudfront is Simply Marvelous

How big of a difference does Cloudfront make? I have been slowly transitioning more and more of our services to the Amazon Cloud with S3 and SimpleDB. We had a particularly busy weekend last week (which will continue to increase for the next... Continue Reading
Several years ago, back when I was a budding junior web developer back at MindComet--better known as the evil empire--I was part of a fantastic (if under-appreciated and under-paid) development team that included at the time folks like Jerry Jackson... Continue Reading
So I had a few minutes here before I head out the door, and I started thinking more about the coming merger of TV and Internet that has been fabled for years but finally seems realistic. I started thinking who stands to benefit from this? How can... Continue Reading

In the Cloud

So I'm really interested in trying to get working with Amazon's S3 this summer. I'm hoping I have time to do that. I have been worried about the additional responsibility of really opening up the floodgates for our huge user base to start... Continue Reading