congrats to aws

Lots of news in Amazon Web Services country.  EC2 now has a service level agreement and is officially out of beta.  More importantly, Amazon has announced that load balancing and automagic scaling is coming.  These are both big deals, although directly competitive with products other companies have built on top of AWS.  Interesting to watch how that will play out in the community.  

Autoscaling and load balancing are both keys to the work I'm doing at EMI.  In particular, as we consider different models for viewing and accessing data, capabilities -- an approach to access control central to Second Life over the last 2 years -- are looking like a likely solution to some of challenges we face.  EC2 with load balancing and scaling lends itself nicely to supporting caps.

Thanks, Amazon!

missing use case and the hidden media library

[Edit: Comments have pointed out that I almost had found all the pieces, as download delivery is available from the Media Library. Although maybe not from the UK, where I was. Apparently, you order it, then go to the media library for a download.]

Several people recommended Clay's new book on this trip. Here Comes Everybody was on my list, but with extra endorsements it moved to the front of the queue. Now that I have my Kindle, I'm trying to minimize my physical book purchases. Amazon's Whispernet -- their wireless delivery mechanism to Kindle -- only functions in the United States, but since Kindle is obviously targeted at travelers, there must be a "download to my computer and copy via USB"-option, right?

Nope.

Now, in this case, I'll wait to get home and purchase the book then, but what if I was out of reading material and just grabbed it here? Lost opportunity for Amazon.

Speaking of Amazon, the link to Clay's book is Amazon Associate enabled, so in theory I get a small payment if you buy via that link. I hadn't used the associate links before and wanted to see their user-experience. Quite nice, although it has some bugs. Attempting to build an associate link to Kindle generated an empty page and the link generator failed to find the Kindle edition of the book. [Edit: the link is to the Kindle edition but I'm not sure why the link generator picked that one]

In clicking around trying to find a download option for the Kindle book, I discovered Amazon's "your media library", which I hadn't seen before. Is anybody using this? Does the web camera bar code reader work? It seems to aggregate your Amazon purchases, as well as any item that you click "I own this" when adjusting the recommendations. Odd to find a feature with a lot of work thrown into it just lurking on Amazon's site.