I’ve been researching Amazon Simple Workflow Services. This is a product which is like Simple Queuing Services but on steroids. It allows you to develop complex workflows that you’re able to scale out each part of the workflow as you need. There are a number of used cases on their site, one that managed to catch my eye is NASA. They are using Amazon Simple Workflow to process images captured by the Mars Exploration Rovers.

Some time ago I did a small review of the changes in the Firefox 4 beta. If you go to download Firefox right now you will be downloading Firefox 13. I’m sure you have noted that the releases of Firefox and other browsers have been increasing. You can go a step farther and download pre-released versions of most browsers. For Firefox you have Firefox Beta, Aurora, and Nightly, which at the time of this posting is version 16.

One of the things that really gets me excited about my new job is being able to use new technology. Sure, sometimes new technology is risky but I see groups befitting more then failing due to using newer technology. As always when talking about new technology, NoSQL seems to come up because there are a good number of people switching parts (or all) of their application to use NoSQL databases to get by limits or to help with scalability issues.

If you look around the news you will always hear about some big name that has been hacked and had their password database compromised. In recent news, this has happened to many people like these guys and them, but if you keep looking you’ll find tons more. The topic of security and how you are storing passwords always comes up, but this is not the point of this posting. I wanted to take this time to point out a Mozilla based project which helps in this area.

Keeping with learning more about Amazon Web Services, I wanted to build on the examples I did for SQS along with using Amazon Simple Email Service. The Simple Email Service is, as you could guess, for sending emails. It gives you sending features of a large Email Services Provider but with a low entry point. Just like lot of the other Amazon services, you pay for what you use without any contracts.

I’ve been really taking interest in the Amazon Web Services and trying to learn how to use them best I can. I really do find the Amazon Web Services a great set of tools that let you work with very scaleable services, but one thing you need to keep in mind is they are very “sticky”. What I mean by sticky is once you fully integrate your applications into using them you are most likely not going to be switching any time soon.

Nothing too big but I did some small updates to two of my projects; amscotti.com and Nodejs map example. Node.js Geolocation Map Example This is a project that I did awhile ago when learning node.js. Because things are new in the node.js world, the libraries update often and the ones I used (Mostly Socket.io) did change and needed some updates to get it working again with the newer versions. I also wanted to move the hosting from dotCloud to Heroku, the new address is at http://nodejsmapexample.

I just got done watching “Mastering Grails 101” from O’Reilly last night. I enjoyed the presenters, having gone to many No Fluff Just Stuff talks of theirs. I know they are knowledgeable in many of the technologies in the Java ecosystem. Also they both have been in another video from O’Reilly, “Master Git” which I talked about before. I bought the videos because Grails is a framework that really interests me because I work with a good number of Java technologies.

So, as the title says, I’ve moved on to a new job. I’ve been focusing on learning things to help me at my new job, which hasn’t really given me time to sit down and write a new posting for the blog. I’m sorry about this and I hope to have something soon after this transition period is over and things become normal for me. I did get to buy some videos from O’Reilly, the “Mastering Grails 101” by Berglund and McCullough and “Agile Engineering Practices” by Neal Ford.