2009-03-24
Addressing App Engine Lock-in
One of the biggest criticisms of Google App Engine is the lock-in factor. Although the App Engine SDK is open source (Apache 2.0 license) and you can use Django to make your app more portable, there's no easy way to port your App Engine code to Amazon EC2 without creating your own datastore, etc.
AppScale addresses this concern. It's a cool looking project out of ...
2007-10-01
Adobe Share out in beta
Adobe Share service lets you store and share documents online. To test the service, I tried to use the embed feature to share a short story. Unfortunately, my Drupal blog filters some of the crucial tags, even using the "full HTML" setting.
2005-11-14
Audible Wordcast: Hijacking Podcasts?
Last weekend, Audible unveiled their Wordcast system for tracking spoken word downloads. It’s an innovative system that packages hosting, support, and most importantly, a system that supplies a number of tools and metrics necessary to advertisers—dynamic ad insertion, measuring how many people actually heard the ads, relaying where they stop listening, etc. It’s a system that’s technically not possible with MP3 because it requires ...
2005-11-10
Cracking passwords using 500GB tables
Most web sites are protected by passwords that have been transformed into long hashes using presumably one-way functions. You enter a password like “cat” and the hashing function translates this into a unique and long string of characters like “FEAFjelaKFJAOWI0382lFKEFKJ…” If you store only the hash (the transformed password) into the database, crackers who read the hash strings still can’t generate the original password because the reverse ...
3
2005-06-25
Run Don't Walk from Yahoo Small Business
Summary: Yahoo! accidently deleted an entire web hosting service for my father-in-law's business. No warning, no cause, no e-mail to any of the addresses of the account holder (me) or any of the service administrators. On Friday morning, the account was closed for "other reason" by a program. Several people at Yahoo Billing could not tell me why the account was unilaterally closed. But the business got ...
