Curia

Every so often I find myself working on that odd job that requires syncing files with Amazon’s S3. In the beginning, I tried some of the various S3 FUSE interfaces—hoping for something that would play nice with rsync—but FUSE’s stability always left something to be desired and more often than not I’d be left with that one transfer that never would quite finish correctly.

Eventually I discovered boto and settled in to using a hacked together (but stable) Python/boto solution for these type of tasks—all the while wondering why nobody took the time to write a “real” rsync-like client for S3.

Well, this last time around I finally decided to stop whining and take matters into my own hands. After a couple of late nights fleshing out my original boto solution, I’m happy to announce what I’m calling “boto rsync”—an rsync like wrapper for boto’s cloud storage interfaces (both S3 and Google Storage).

Please take a look at the project on github and let me know what you think: http://github.com/seedifferently/boto_rsync

It’s been several months since I’ve had a chance to update The Great Web Framework Shootout, but this weekend I decided that it was time to dig in and freshen things up a bit.

Not only have most of the frameworks seen new releases since the last revision, but I finally decided to move all of the tests over to Amazon’s “release” version of the Ubuntu LTS AMI.

Below is a quick summary of what’s new in this revision:

• All tests were performed on the updated Ubuntu LTS AMI (ami-fbbf7892 ubuntu-images-us/ubuntu-lucid-10.04-amd64-server-20110719.manifest.xml)
• The updated AMI was configured with Python 2.6.5, PHP 5.3.2, Ruby 1.9.2p290, Apache 2.2.14 (default config), mod_wsgi 2.8 (embedded mode), and mod_passenger 3.0.9
• Rails 2.x and 3.0 were dropped from the “full stack(ish)” tests in favor of Rails 3.1.
• CakePHP 1.2 was dropped from the PHP tests in favor of 1.3, but Symfony and Yii were added as they seem to have considerable market share.
• CakePHP’s caching engine was incorrectly configured during the last round of tests, and this has been corrected.

Circle me on Google+ to keep track of further updates, and feel free to contact me there with any questions or comments.

I’ve been on Google+ since week 1 and while the initial mood has been overwhelmingly positive, I couldn’t help but notice the content of my stream becoming a bit skewed over the past few days as Google began opening it up more and more to “the laypeople.” Google was wise to restrict G+’s initial membership base to the tech-savvy, because we’re already on to Google about where it’s going with this thing; but now that the rest of the world is jumping onboard there seems to be a bit of confusion about what it’s good for.

In response to this, I thought I’d share a few of my own thoughts on G+, and why I believe it is a valuable and needed addition the online social ecosystem:

1. It’s not Facebook, and it’s not Twitter—it’s a bit of both, and the key is Circles.

What Twitter does best is giving busy professionals, celebrities, and business entities an outlet to interact publicly with their audience on a pseudo-personal level in 140 characters or less. What Facebook does best is giving people an outlet to interact somewhat privately with people they trust on as personal of a level as they like. For many, the separation between Twitter vs. Facebook mirrors their own separation of business vs. personal. For example: A picture of your 2-year old squeezing the cat is more likely to wind up posted to a limited audience on Facebook than publicly shared on Twitter, while a quick blurb updating anyone interested on a recent professional achievement often needs a more public forum such as Twitter to gain the visibility you want it to have. Even in each of their post boxes you can see the difference in what’s expected to be shared: Twitter asks “What’s happening?” expecting you to want the whole world to know, while Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” which is quite a bit more personal.  (continue reading…)