I didn’t want to write about the iPad on day one, because I was fairly negative overall. I’m still not completely sold on it; it’s missing some things for me. Granted, I’m not the target audience for this device, and all these things I’m going to talk about are my pressure points. It you think the device will work for you, fine, but for what I want to do with it, it’s not quite there. No card slots The thing...

In case you missed it, the Coding Horror, Stack Overflow and Haacked blogs died in almost a literal fire. Well I don’t think there was an actual fire, but basically they all hosted their blogs in virtual machines on the same physical server, and the backup process never backed up the virtual machine files since they were always in use. The backup process was managed by the hosting company and silently failed on these files. Oops. While I...

I’m writing up some scripts to automate some EC2 setup, and SSH is required. All the examples for Net::SSH show using just a username and password, which is all good, but the Amazon stuff requires a key file. Here’s how to do it: Net::SSH.start('my.amazon.hostname.amazonaws.com', 'user', :keys => '/path/to/keypair.pem') { |ssh| ... } According to the docs, the :keys named param takes an array of file names of private keys to us...

I was looking around for an Amazon S3 browser and cam across digital inspiration talking about CloudBerry Explorer. The first thing that caught my eye was this screenshot. If you read around it, you can see you have two options of moving files between S3 instances. While options are nice, I’m not sure why anybody in their right mind would want to select the slow and expensive way. If you move between S3 instances on S3, it costs zero do...