Copacetic

I found this recipe for egg free sponge cake from the vahrehvah.com cooking site. It uses condensed milk and icing sugar (they call it powdered sugar) along with coca-cola to give the necessary lift and binding that is missing when you remove eggs from a sponge recipe.

It works really well. The cooking times are pretty aggressive and I bottled out and left it in for 25 minutes instead of 15, which was a mistake. Go with the timings they give you.

The full text of the recipe is available on the vahrehvah website.

I made this chocolate icing which was extra yummy.

Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,

We are excited today to introduce the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, a plug-in for the Eclipse Java IDE that makes it easier to develop, deploy, and debug Java applications on Amazon Web Services. With the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, you’ll be able to get started faster and be more productive when building AWS applications.

The initial launch of the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse is targeted at Amazon EC2 developers and provides basic management features along with tools for deploying and debugging Java web applications.

The AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, based on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform, guides Java developers through common workflows and automates tool configuration, such as setting up remote debugger connections and managing Tomcat containers. The steps to configure Tomcat servers, run applications on Amazon EC2, and debug the software remotely are now done seamlessly through the Eclipse IDE.

The AWS Toolkit for Eclipse is available at no additional cost for Amazon EC2 developers. We encourage you to check it out and contribute code to the project.

To learn more about and download the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, go to http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Web Services Team

So you’ve bought a new NetBook (as millions of people have, its the most popular new kind of computer to buy), but it has two problems, the screen is too small and the processor is a bit sluggish. So a few simple steps can address some of these issues fairly quickly. All that follows presumes you are running Windows XP.

• Change the Performance Settings on Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Settings to “Adjust for Best Performance” (stops visual cruft slowing you down)
• Change the taskbar to autohide by selecting “Auto-hide the taskbar” on Control Panel -> Task Bar and Start Menu -> Taskbar (gives you more display real estate)
• Now reset the fonts and border sizes on Control Panel -> Display Properties -> Appearance Advanced.  Set the Active Title Bar size to 16,  Active Window Border to 0, Captions Buttons size to 14,  Icon size to 24, Inactive Title Bar size to 15, Inactive Window Border Size to 0,  Menu Size to 15, Palette Title size to 15, Scrollbar size to 10 and  Selected Items to 15. This will scrunch all your Window’s decoration and widgets while still leaving them legible.
• Turn off all those manky little apps on the right hand side of the tasbar at the bottom of the screen
• Keep you disk drive at least 20% empty (Windows needs this amount of head room)

• Make sure to empty your recycle bin regularily

Blobs

• Two kinds of storage in Azure. SQL Data Services and Windows Azure storage. This is about the base storage offering
• Three kinds of storage, blogs, tables and queues
• All accessible via a REST API
• Access secured via 256 bit (SHA256) key
• Two separate data centres in US (Northwest, Southwest)
• Affinity for storage and computation to reduce latency (available April)
• Blobs – named objects, accounts, containers and blobs. (containers are like S3 buckets)
• Tables – structured storage (like SimpleDB)
• Queues
• Sharing policies are set on a container basis
• 8kb of name/value pairs can be associated  with each container
• Listing abstractions for blobs in a container
• Blob name space http://<Account Name>.blob.core.windows.net/<Container>/<BlobName>
• Blobs can be up to 50GB in size
• PutBlob, GetBlog, DeleteBlob
• 8kb of metadata per blob
• Support for MD5 checksum native to Storage API
• Can use range get to retrieve a part of the  blog
• Support for block level upload to allow interruptible uploads (S3 doesn’t do this)
• PutBlock 1-N, then commit with PutBlockList
• Blocks can be uploaded out of order or in parallel
• Blocks can be uploaded twice, newer overwrites older
• PutblockList will delete unused blocks
• Blocks can be up to 4MB
• Blocks can vary in size
• Each block has a 64 byte ID, scoped by blob name
• Overlapping get and put? Get will always see a single version of the blob. So while put is in process old blob is all that is seen
• First PutBlockList wins in the case where multiple PutBlockLists occur.
• Conditional Put/Get operations to support optimistic concurrency
• Use a hash of Block to represent block ID

Tables

• Billions of entities, TB of data
• Highly available, durable
• Account, table, entity are the key concepts
• Table names are scoped by storage account name
• A table is a set of entities (rows)
• A entity is a set of propeties (columns)
• Every table has a partition key column
• Table partition, all entities in a table with the same partition key
• Application controls granularity of partition key
• A heavily partitioned table makes it easier to load balance
• Entities in the same partition will be stored together
• Multiple operations over multiple entities can be handled atomically in the future
• Partition key and row key gives primary index
• If partition key is part of query its fast, if it isn’t then the query ends up scanning
• Each entity can have up to 255 properties, mandatory properties are partition key and row key
• All entities have a system maintained version
• No fixed schema, just name/value pairs
• Access via ADO.NET Data Services (supports REST API)
• Default number of connections is 2
• 100-continue is default. Turn this off to save round trips.
• Turn tracking off for read only queries
• Bug in ADO.net relating to de-serialisation fix is to name the entity class the same as the table name
• Be prepared for partial results from your queries
• Query is limited to 60 seconds. After this results are returned and you must continue to get the rest
• Not a relational database, no joins, foreign keys

Queues

• Web Roles, Worker roles
• Reliable message delivery
• Access via REST
• Account, Queue, Message
• No limit on messages in queue
• A message is stored for at most a week
• Messages <= 8kb
• http://<Account>.queue.core.windows.net/<QueueName>
• Create/Delete/Clear Queues
• Enqueue/Dequeue/Delete
• Dequeue makes message invisible. You delete after processing. If delete doesn’t get called timeout will make message visible once invisible time expires.
• Queues are designed to be idempotent. Each message can be processed at least once, may be processed twice.
• No fixed ordering for dequeue of messages, but approximates to FIFO
• Use queue length to scale your worker tasks

Platform contiuum.

• On premise servers. Capital intensive.
• Hosted servers. Need to carry idle capacity.
• Cloud Platform. Shared, multi-tenant. Virtualised, dynamic, scalable. Pay as you go.

Azure Services

• SQL Services
• .NET Services (communications and identity)
• Live Services (consumer focussed applications)
• SharePoint (planned for future)
• Dynamic CRM (planned for future)

Core Services

• Compute: Hyper V scalable virtualised instances.
• Storage: Flexible storage with blobs, tables and queues.
• Management: Model driven service lifecycle management i.e. load balancing, instance monitoring, deployment.

Project Templates in VS 2008 that support roles within Azure.  Project contains all the config data and can generate a zip file package to deploy to Azure.  Vs 2008 has a developer fabric that allows local deployment for testing and debugging.

Very nice web UI for deployment and management of production and staging instances of an application. The potential to get locked in is enormous.

Full Trust Frameworks, FastCGI, multiple data centers (North America only for now).

SQL Services:

• Core SQL Services (Relational Capability)
• Data Sync (synchronise data from on-premise to cloud or cloud to cloud
• Built for high availability and scale
• Interoperable with PHP, Ruby and Java
• Consistent programming model with existing .NET APIs.
• Existing apps only need change the data connection string to use Azure cloud services

.NET Services:

• Integration of on-premise application with cloud
• Connect through firewalls
• Control permissions to apps and services
• Reuse existing user accounts
• .NET Service Bus (ESB anyone?)
• Service composition and workflow. Allows you to run on-premise or in cloud.
• Access Control, define requirements for connection to services via a claims based identity model.
• Event management

Live Services – Building blocks for consumer applications, users devices, applications and Data Sync.

• Identity
• Directory
• Storage
• Comms and presence
• Search and GeoSpatial

Roadmap:

• Fall 2008. CTP Beta. Customer technology preview.
• Sprint 2009.  Update CTPs with PHP support. Extended access. New data centre. Open CTP, no invitation code required.
• Summer 2009. Pricing and SLA.
• Fall 2009. Commercial availability.

Arrived late to keynote. Full house, standing room only.

Launching this week:

• Web Platform Installer - Install your grid apps automatically. Both MS Stack and open source components like PHP. Looks slick, free to download from the MS site. Colloquially called Web PI.
• Commerce Server 2009
• Azure Services Platform. Now includes FastCGI support (yay for PHP). SQL support extended to Hibernate and other data services. Still in preview, commercial release expect later this year.
• GoDaddy and GoGrid are now Bizspark network partners
• Joel Spolsky/Jeff Atwood talking about stackoverflow.com (online help for programmers), a better search engine to solve programming problems. Votes for answers. Its a WIKI so people can improve the answers. Its built in .NET. Got great performance. UI is designed around the concept of search. Supports OpenID. URLs are clean. Optimise by denormalising the database, 64 bit architecture. Reputation system for users. They used Bizspark to keep costs zero. We did it because it was a neat “hack”.  Its not a .NET ghetto.
• Silverlight. Silverlight 3 is the latest incarnation. 300,000 users. 200 partners. New MS Telescope and Virtual Earth apps launching today. Netflix streaming 12000 shows via Silverlight.  Single player works on all platforms. Installers are evil.  20% of users won’t install/can’t install.  Content protection baked in.  Great platform for video. We can update the player transparently. SL3 GPU support (ability to seamlessly scale video).  New Codecs (H.264, AAC, MPEG-4).Raw biststream Audio/Video API. Better media analytics.
• IIS Media Services – Free streaming server. On demand smooth streaming. Bit rate throttling. No additional products required. Edge caching. Expression Encoder for encoding.  Auto archive. Web Platform Installer will install it.
• NBC’s Experience wtuh Silverlight at Bejing 2008 Olympics. 50m visitors, 1.3bn page views, 10m hours of video. 5000 clips every day. Largest digital video event ever.  People who used the web watched twice as much TV online. A higher quality experience leads to better audiences watching more video. Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010 will have rewind, superslow replay all in HD. Meta data overlays (all the juicy stats). Real time feeds of most popular content. Live ad insertion (ugh!).
• Rich Internet Applications. Perspective 3D. Bitmap and Pixel API. Pixel Shader effects. Deep Zoom improvements. Effects App. Nice demo of capabilities. Deep linking and navigation. SEO that works with all search engines. Page framework (back and forward buttons work). Better text quality (via cleartype). Multi-touch support.  Lots more controls via third parties. Library caching via separate downloads.
• Expression Blend 3. Sketchflow, layout your workflow screen by screen, very slick. Prototypes look like prototypes they use wiggly line.  Sketchflow Player allows client interaction without needing full Expression Blend App. Player allows the user to enter feedback via text feedback or drawing. Export to Word to create a full document about your website, including screen shots,  nice. Behaviours, add interactivity to yout app without writing code.  Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop support.  Demo makes stuff look very easy, but there is actually a lot going on that presumes a detailed knowledge of the application.
• Eclipse Support for Silverlight on the Mac (via third party).
• SAP Netweaver support for Silverlight (in future release).
• Silverlight outside the browser (just like AIR). Sandboxed environment. Auto update support. Offline awareness. Integration with underlying operating system. 5MB download. 40k smaller than sliverlight 2.
• Silverlight 3 will ship later this year. Beta available today.

I have created a new blog/website called Startup-Ireland to provide a single location where entrepreneurs and startups can find information about starting and running companies in Ireland. Its a little light on content at the moment but I plan to fix that in the coming weeks

The best thing about the site at the moment is an Irish Startups Search Engine. Thanks to to a little  help  we now have a serarch engine that contains the site of every High Potential Startup (HPSU) that has engaged with EI since 2003.

David Concannon has done a great review of the talks at  FOWA Dublin.

From Blackout Ireland.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact: Aubrey Robinson
Tel: 087 054 4985
Email: pr(at)blackoutireland.com

Blackout Ireland call for protest over threat of internet censorship by IRMA
Inspired by New Zealand’s recent internet blackout campaign, Blackout Ireland are organising a week-long protest, starting Thursday the 5th of March, in response to the recent court settlement deal between Eircom and the four major record labels.

Blackout Ireland believe that this deal could set a dangerous precedent of  internet censorship by private companies, as it enables the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) to ban someone’s internet access without due legal process.

Under the terms of the settlement, Eircom will disconnect users suspected of illegally downloading music based on evidence supplied by IRMA and without the need for a court of law. IRMA have also revealed that they will seek to block websites such as the Pirate Bay that they suspect of providing illegal downloads. Eircom will not oppose any such action under the new deal.

According to Blackout Ireland representative, Aubrey Robinson:  “These new policies have serious implications for internet freedom, as they open the door for other private companies to obtain similar powers in dictating, without due process, who or what is permissible online”.

IRMA have sent letters to the other Irish ISPs threatening legal action if they do not agree to similar terms, a move which has prompted the week-long protest.

As part of Blackout Week, Irish internet users are being asked to blacken out their profile images on social media sites, and to email their internet service provider to voice their oppositon to the move.

Blackout Ireland are a group of Irish Internet users who are concerned by the prospect of Internet censorship in Ireland. They do not condone piracy, and believe that music companies and individuals have every right to protect their copyright material through legal means.

They stress the following points:

•    Censorship is not the solution. The music industry must find alternative means of charging for music downloads that benefit both artists and consumers without threatening internet neutrality.

•    ISPs need to remain as impartial conduits of data and must not be required to monitor or filter internet traffic.

•    Banning someone from the internet is totally disproportionate in this context. Such a penalty should only be imposed by a judge in a court of law.

•    The technology being used to track offenders is not sufficiently accurate and will lead to people being falsely accused.

•    Blocking sites and disconnecting users will not stop piracy, as Illegal downloaders will always be able to circumvent these restrictions.

More information: http://www.blackoutireland.com