Railo in the Cloud

I’ve been playing around in the Clouds again, this time I’ve been giving the Amazon EC2 Railo instance a run.

Following a great tutorial on getting an EC2 instance up and running, I had a publicly accessible website and the developer version of Railo running in about 20 minutes.

After tweeting about my instance, I returned to the website overnight to find my developer version of Railo had outgrown its maximum 10 ip limit.

The initial experience in getting Railo up and running in the cloud was a good one. As I struggled to upgrade my developer version of Railo to the community edition and contacting Railo support, I realised it wasn’t going to be that easy.

I’ve decided to install Railo locally and investigate it a bit more in the comfort of my hard drive. I’ll stick to experimenting in the Stax cloud at the moment, which I’ve found to be a more streamlined process.

Filed under: general

Playing around in the clouds…

I’ve just come down from a little experiment in the clouds.

I received my invitation to the Stax beta today, and was a little too keen to get my hands dirty.

I gave myself a quick 15 minutes to write a simple weather application, and deploy it to the Stax Cloud (I had already created my application and downloaded a local development version via the Stax SDK). In short, Stax is a breeze to use and I think it will become a very compelling platform in the future.

The Stax Cloud allows you to easily deploy web applications straight to Amazon EC2. You can deploy many popular Java based technologies including ColdFusion and Flex.

It’s the first platform I’ve seen allowing you to deploy the Adobe ColdFusion application server to the cloud. Other than Stax, I’ve only heard of Railo being deployed to Amazon EC2 because of all the licensing problems with Adobe ColdFusion. I still haven’t investigated how Stax are overcoming the licensing issues (that’s on my todo list).

You can visit my weather application, and I managed to get it done within 15 minutes.

I really like the Stax Cloud. It makes it so simple to get an application up and running, which essentially is an Amazon EC2 instance. I’ll definitely keep playing around with this technology.

Filed under: cloud, coldfusion, technology, web 2.0

twitterfeed.com

I just signed up to twitterfeed.com to alert all of my twitter friends, about any blog posts I make.

Not quite sure how it is going to work yet, but the process seemed simple enough. I guess this will be the first blog post that automatically reaches Twitter!

Filed under: social networking, technology, web 2.0

Twitter cybersquatting is rife!

I’ve just stumbled across cybersquatting on Twitter.

I was Googling ‘Twitter market research’, and came across this page and realised it was a form of cybersquatting.

I looked at a bunch of well known brand names on Twitter and realised cybersquatting on Twitter is rife!

• American Express
• Nike
• Adidas
• Telstra

A few more searches on Google and I realised the practice of Twitter cybersquatting has been going on for quite some time. I feel like I’ve been sitting under a rock somewhere!

Filed under: general

Market Research via Twitter

I’ve just been the target of some directed market research via Twitter.

A couple of days ago I posted a tweet about livingsocial.com. Today, I received a reply from LivingSocial asking if I had any suggestions for categories.

So I responded with a few suggestions, and told them about my thoughts on how I intended to use LivingSocial once I first heard about it.

I think this could definitely be considered and is considered a new and valid option for market research. I was happy to provide my feedback via a quick Twitter, but I rarely fill out the 10 minute surveys from companies like Dell, Microsoft and Adobe.

It is definitely a large task to compile bite-sized chunks of market research into something worthwhile however. It’s an interesting space to watch over the coming year or two.

Filed under: marketing, social networking, web 2.0

That one darn strip of cloud!

We currently have an interesting problem with Google Earth. There is a nice big cloud directly over a location we want to zoom in on.

The strip of cloud appears directly on top of the location we’re interested in, and it is proving rather annoying!

Google hasn’t updated this part of the world (or specifically this strip) for quite some time, so I thought I’d dig around to see what I could find out about the frequency of updates to the satellite imagery.

I found some interesting information, but in short, I didn’t find any real public information about how and when Google update the imagery, or what the selection criteria is (blurry vs obstructed, etc). It all seems rather random.

• Google Earth FAQ : Age of satellite imagery and data
• Google Earth Community page, apparently where Google provide information about updates to their Primary Database
• A Google Lat Long Blog post about updates to Google Earth and Maps

I should probably use the database report page, maybe Google might pay attention to this one silly strip of cloud? I can’t even imagine how many reports they receive to fix insignificant strips of the earth.

Filed under: google maps, technology, web 2.0

Improving chance in randomisation

The term random denotes any control over the outcome, frequency or chance of reoccurrence. However, as programmers sometimes we need the ability to persuade a particular reoccurrence to be more or less frequent.

A common and easy method to randomly pick an item from a list, is to use an Array. Fill the Array with the available options and then randomly choose one, like so:

var a : Array = ['first item','second item','third item','fourth item'];
var s : String = Math.floor(Math.random()*a.length); 

What happens when you want to increase the chance of the ‘first item’ being selected? A simple option is to add more occurrences of ‘first item’ into the Array, as follows:

var a : Array = ['first item','first item','first item','second item','third item','fourth item'];
var s : String = Math.floor(Math.random()*a.length); 

I’m not a mathematician, but in my experiments this method increases the chance of ‘first item’ being selected; yet still being completely random.

Filed under: coldfusion, flex, programming

New Years Resolution

My New Years Resolution was to try and Twitter more. So far, I’ve succeeded in Twittering regularly. It is a really odd and unusual website/service – but I’m actually getting used to it. As such, I’ve decided to add ‘blogging more often’ to my New Years Resolution.

I’ve resisted the urge to use FarCry and NearCry, and have opted to simply revamp the look and feel of my WordPress.com blog. I tend to waste too much time tinkering with the code when I use open source blogging software such as BlogCFC and NearCry.

Filed under: general