Months ago Amazon announced S3, which promised unlimited, fast, and inexpensive storage of any kind as a web service. For $.15/gig/month storage and $.20/gig/month bandwidth, it instantly gives anyone with some programming knowledge the ability to use an enterprise class storage network with zero up front cost.

Anyway, today I stumbled upon jungledisk and elephantdrive. JungleDisk seems more like a project than a commercial venture, since you download one of their clients and plug in your own s3 account. You pay nothing to jungleddisk (for now) and pay Amazon for only what you use at s3. Elephantdrive is definitely a commercial venture and completely hides their affiliation with s3, but they do extend amazon's SLA to the end user. I signed up at Elephantdrive, but unfortunately for now they only have a Windows client and so I'm forced to wait until their cross platform comes out.

JungleDisk's linux client (I believe written in C# and then mono'd) seems to work in that it allows me to upload and download files using my personal s3 account. There's something wrong with it however, in that it pegs my CPU at 100%. I verified this on two machines and posted on their forums to see if there's a known reason.

Amazon is truly proving themselves a technology company and not just a glorified online bookstore. With bittorrent support, we're bound to see some more really cool stuff in the near future.

Check out this Flickr to S3 backup script.

Chrys lent me his Canon 100mm macro lens a few weeks ago, and I haven’t really played with it until now. Rebecca and I came back from Obi with a ton of new plants and flowers for our balcony, after we planted them I had a good excuse to use the lens. Wow, what a sharp lens. I’m impressed.

If you like the Beatles, you'll find this video clip amazing. I keep expecting him to drop something, but he keeps rocking out.

He's much better than the jugglers I see here on Stuttgart's Koenigstrasse. :)

Brian Fioca of Jobby recently talked to Owen Bryne, senior software engineer and one of the co-founders of digg.com, about the scalability of PHP on big sites.  It turns out at digg.com, PHP scales really well:

To get a better idea of what was in store for a heavily loaded PHP application, I set up an interview with Owen Byrne, cofounder and Senior Software Engineer at digg.com. From talking with Owen I learned digg.com gets on the order of 200 million page views per month, and they’re able to handle it with only 3 web servers and 8 small database servers (I’ll discuss the reason for so many database servers in the next section). Even better news was that they were able to handle their first year’s worth of growth on a single hosted server like the one I was using. My hardware worries were relieved. The hardware requirements to run high-traffic PHP applications didn’t seem to be more costly than for Java.

Mr. Fioca claims to have more experience working with Java and traditional big iron databases, and so he spends most of the article comparing his Java experience with digg’s PHP architecture.  What’s really interesting is the tidbit about digg’s tremendous traffic being served by only 3 web servers (and 8 database servers). 


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