Afterweb

Had fine time yesterday watching MTV's Deadliest Warrior on big TV screen and Loyalize's servers on my laptop screen crunching numbers from users' vote during the show. Personally, I have more passion for software then for Zombies or Vampires, so I found it to be much more fun watching my laptop screen then TV. What struck me is that just a few years back, numbers that I saw on my laptop will be if not impossible but extremely difficult to achieve. So, I am glad to report, that common (open source) technology is finally is at the level that it allows a relatively small team of good engineers to write an application that works for TV-audience scale. What worked for us is the combination of: Nginx Tornado Server with epoll Redis EC2 and CloundFront Of cause, it's a lot of work to make them work together in scalable and reliable fashion but, at least, finally, we do not need to mix sand and clay to make bricks first if we want to build a house - all bricks are are read...

This morning Amazon announced availability of a bulk email delivery service called " Simple Email Service ". Anyone who knows how much pain is it to set-up scalable email solution (and it is not just spammers who need it!) should celebrate the occasion. I know of a company that spent several years cleaning ip addresses it sends email and found itself locked into the contract with internet provider since it would take forever to reach required level of email deliver ability anywhere else. Anyway, this evening I decided to check the Amazon claim that the service is "simple". Found out that it is indeed simple! Since there is not much in terms of the documentation yet, here is my code where I used AWS PHP library : // Enable full-blown error reporting. http://twitter.com/rasmus/status/7448448829 error_reporting (- 1 ); // Set plain text headers header ( "Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8" ); // Include the SDK require_once '../sdk.class.php' ...