Most visited: Ride Across America | Hodgkin's Disease | Trainster | Pam's Ride Across America Fundraiser | Urldiff

I finally found a decent Exposé clone for Vista: Switcher. Yes, Mac people, no need to leave a comment about how this is built-in to Macs. I already know it's an awesome feature. That's why I want it in Vista. I'm not sure why Microsoft didn't build this feature in themselves, but Switcher seems to do the job. Of course, if anybody knows of something better, I'd love to hear about it.

The Illusionist **** : Is there room in the world for two prestidigitation movies that were released almost simultaneously? It appears so. While not as good as the Prestige, this movie is beautifully filmed, has great acting from Edward Norton, and is worthy in its own right.

Three more reasons I prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL:

First: MySQL only supports constants in default clauses. In other words, this is forbidden:

 create table times ( time1 datetime default now(), time2 datetime default now() );

Things are even more complicated when you look into why MySQL has the very confusing situation of a datetime type and a timestamp type. And, in my opinion, the MySQL documentation on the subject is poorly formatted, at least in comparison to PostgreSQL's documentation.

Second: MySQL date/time fields don't support microsecond resolution! Aye-yah. Yet another feature that needs to be handled in application code when it really belongs in the database.

Third: The MySQL time zone support seems very clunky to the point where it's easier just to store everything as GMT and handle conversions at the application layer.

PostgreSQL handles all of these issues no problem.

Kurt turned me on to Bikely, a sweet bike route mapping site. It has a great user interface, provides an elegant Google Maps mashup, offers elevation profiles, and can print out turn-by-turn directions (cue sheets). Here's an example, the Portland Century route.

Up until now, the venerable gmaps-pedometer had been my favorite way of conveying this information, but I'm switching to Bikely! It has a few areas for improvement (such as its search) but development seems active so I'm sure they'll get resolved.

Three Cups of Tea ***** Very important book that everybody needs to read. Guy gets lost after climbing K2. Pakistani village nurses him to health. He pledges to build them a school, starting life-long mission to build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. By the end of the book, I was convinced that this is the only long-term solution to stopping terrorism.

One of my favorite new sites is SlimTimer. It's the best time tracker for tasks that I've found, either as a online Web 2.0-ish service or an offline installable application. SlimTimer offers a basic mode for free and premium services for a small fee.

I am hooked after using it for a couple of months. When I free up some project time, I am going to contact the author and see if he is interested in some collaboration opportunities. One thing I could help out with is a Windows Vista sidebar companion gadget.

After reading a glowing review from Wired, I finally got around to signing up for an Amazon Web Services account and playing around with Amazon EC2. It's cool!

At first, I didn't understand what exactly EC2 was. The Amazon promotional material could be a little more clear in this area. It's a virtual machine (what I refer to as a slice, Amazon calls it an instance) that is billed out by the hour (real world time, not CPU-used time). It has an impressive set of client command-line tools that let you control your slices from any Windows or Linux box on the Internet. Everything uses public key cryptography.

To get started, Amazon has an online forum that offers free, pre-configured instances. They have all of the Linux flavors, Solaris, OpenBSD, etc. I found a slimmed down version of Gentoo enabled with PHP and Apache2 and was up and running in under 5 minutes.

Another cool concept that Amazon has is the ability to purchase IP addresses and them route them to any machine on the EC2 network. Amazon calls this concept "elastic IP addresses". All of your instances run with private IP addresses on the Amazon network. For them to be accessible to the outside world, you use the client tools to connect your public IP address with the private one. One of the obvious advantages of doing this is that it makes it extremely easy to re-route your traffic to a different instance any time you want with zero DNS downtime.

Getting back to instances, they are ephemeral in the sense that when you shut them down, they are gone forever. I figured this out the hard way when I configured an instance to serve up a custom web page, shut it down, and then started it back up again and discovered that my changes were gone. If you want to preserve any changes you made to the pre-configured image, you need to store them on Amazon S3. Luckily, Amazon provides tools to make this very easy to do.

In addition to getting up and running very quickly with minimal capital, AWS provides essentially unlimited scaling. Read this blog post about Animoto's launch of their Facebook app for a case study. SmugMug is another good case study.

One interesting facet of Amazon's web services offerings is the ecosystem that's starting to build up around them. Look at RightScale as one example of a company offering value-added services to AWS.

All in all, a very impressive offering: compute, storage, queue, database, and (with third-party help) scaling. Everything you need to launch whatever you want to.

But you do pay for everything: Instance time, data transferred in/out of AWS, storage. I estimate the minimum monthly cost of a basic instance at around $100. Still dirt cheap compared to buying your own equipment for colo, but not as cheap as Slicehost or some of the other VPS vendors (around $20 including quite a bit of bandwidth and a fair amount of storage).

Interested in starting your own EC2 instance? These may help: link1, link2

Next up on my to-investigate list: Google App Engine.

I finally made the upgrade to Firefox 3. The speed enhancements are incredible - it screams! Other notable improvements include an incredibly improved address bar (it's very Apple-Spotlight-inspired), a very nice new download manager, and some significant usability enhancements to the add-on manager. MozillaLinks has a thorough review of the changes.

Unfortunately, like all Firefox upgrades, there are quite a few of my favorite add-ons that are no longer compatible. Hopefully they will be updated soon, because now that I've used FF3 for a few days, there's no going back now!