All Things Distributed

MAY 17, 2009

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) embodies much of what makes infrastructure as a service such a powerful technology; it enables our customers to build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. Core in achieving these levels of efficiency and fault-tolerance is the ability to acquire and release compute resources in a matter of minutes, and in different Availability Zones.

Infrastructure 78

Infrastructure Efficiency Cloud Technology 78

The Agile Manager

MAY 13, 2009

Global business faces unprecedented changes. Earlier this year, I wrote in an article for alphaITjournal.com: Revenue forecasts aren’t materializing, capital structures are proving unsustainable, and operations are being scrutinized for inefficiencies. This, in turn, means that businesses are being completely restructured in how they are capitalized, organized, managed and governed.

Government 40

Government Efficiency 40

Tim Kadlec

MAY 6, 2009

In Nate Koechley’s excellent talk on Frontend Engineering , he talks about the importance of building a “stronger DOM” By marking up your site with meaningful elements and attributes, you give your markup more value and provide a richer experience for both users and machines. In addition, a strong DOM provides you with numerous attributes and elements that you can make use of to style the content to your hearts desire.

Website 40

Website Engineering Development 40

All Things Distributed

MAY 20, 2009

Before networks were everywhere, the easiest way to transport information from one computer in your machine room was to write the data to a floppy disk, run to the computer and load the data there from that floppy. This form of data transport was jokingly called "sneaker net". It was efficient because networks only had limited bandwidth and you wanted to reserve that for essential tasks.

Transportation 60

Transportation AWS Cloud Network 60

Tim Kadlec

MAY 12, 2009

Today was a big day for Microformats - very big. First, they announced that the new value-class-pattern is ready for implementation. The value-class-pattern is a great step forward, as it provides needed accessiblity improvements, and in my opinion, gives the developer a bit more flexibility over how to structure their markup. That was a pretty big announcement in its own right, and I was very pleased to see the new pattern approved and garnering a bit of buzz.

Google 40

Google Engineering Development 40