Scripting News

Makezine, PT and today's bomb scare in Boston

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:39:09 GMT

There was a bomb scare in Boston today, the details are still sketchy, but on CNN they just said that the devices they discovered were part of a promotion for the Cartoon Network. And apparently a howto was published on Makezine.

If you work at CNN, Phil Torrone has more info on how this happened. Send him an email, pt at oreilly dot com, he's a friendly guy. ";->"

This must be a first

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:44:17 GMT

Telegraph: "There has mostly been silence from the big names, including 'superstar bloggers' such as Dave Winer and Robert Scoble."

The first time I've got a mention for saying nothing!? ";->"

There's a simple reason for me having nothing to say about Vista -- I don't know anything about it. All attempts to be included in their public relations program have been met with silence.

What makes it better than XP? I hear they have some screens from people on Flickr. Beyond that, the browser, which already runs in XP, has mostly uninteresting RSS support.

$500 million of marketing can't hide the fact that these days it's hard to find anyone who cares about Windows.

Virtual hosting with S3

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:31:06 GMT

Today I'm going to learn something about Amazon S3 that I've been planning on learning for a bit of time.

Virtual hosting is a feature that I asked for back in July of last year, and it turned out it had already been implemented.

It makes it possible to store static stuff up in Amazon space, instead of having to rent expensive server space, which I currently do. My server bills come to $1200 every month. I think I can get that down quite a bit, using Amazon, but first I have to figure out how this works.

1. I created a CNAME, pointing aws.scripting.com to s3.amazonaws.com. When I access this address, I get the error response, which is good, it's what I expected. Next, I'll create a bucket with the name aws.scripting.com, and put some files in it. There's still part of the puzzle I don't understand, which is what is to stop anyone else from creating a bucket with that name. How does S3 decide among several buckets with that name? (Right now there are none, so when I create one, that won't be a problem.)

2. I've created the bucket, and uploaded a bunch of files, including one called lincoln.jpg. I'm getting AccessDenied as the error code now, even though (I thought) I created the bucket with full read-write access.

3. I've got the bucket working, thanks for lots of great help in today's comments. Came across a Firefox add-on that makes it easy to browse and edit your S3 structure. It's almost an end-user thing (add a Godaddy account for domain mapping and you're there). Net-net, I couldn't use it to host scripting.com because there's no concept of a default file. Seems like such a small thing. However, I should be able to use it to offload a bunch of my static storage.

4:44PM: I'm moving over my first website to Amazon, an old static store, with early podcasts from the original crew, myself, Dawn & Drew and Adam Curry. We had big plans back then. I have a bunch of these sites, and as a result I should be able to retire one of my servers. Saving money, I hope. ";->"

The Flickr people are smart

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:30:40 GMT

Thomas, I don't want Flickr to do the dumb thing they're proposing to do, but I figure when they actually do it, and I no longer can get into my account, that's when I'll raise a stink. I wonder if they really thought this through, by the way. I have a Flickr account that somehow I created accidentally that's linked into my Yahoo account. How will we merge those two things? The old account is definitely the one I want to keep. In any case, the Flickr people are smart, and once they figure out how stupid this idea is, they won't actually do it. Count on it.

BTW, not only are they smart, but they're also nice! They won't screw this one up. ";->"

Apple hides the app

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:30:52 GMT

I wonder if anyone else has bought the $1.99 patch for Macs that enables 802.11n support. I just purchased it, and the order status page says "electronically delivered" but where was it electronically delivered? To me it feels like this is something I should have gotten through the software update mechanism, I'm not an accountant, but okay I paid the $1.99, now what? Any clues would be much appreciated.

Wes Felter offered a clue, there were no links in the email, but, on the Store website, the Your Account page has a section called Downloadable Software, and that's where a link to the download could be found.