Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

National Geographic has stopped coming in paper envelopes. It's now in just another clear plastic wrapper...

This is wrong. Bad and wrong.

Actually it's bad, wrong, and more than a little bit sad. I've been seeing those yellow envelopes coming through the letterbox for my entire life, opening them to get a taste of wonder and beauty. I didn't really mind when they shifted to brown paper a few years ago, as I could still tear them open to see just what wonders were held in the glossy pages.

The end of an era.

One of my favourite bits of Watchmen is the comic-within-the-comic, one of Moore's alternate world's pirate horror comics, "The Tales Of The Black Freighter". Images from an issue of the comic interspersed the story, adding a counterpoint to the big picture of a world tumbling into chaos, and highlighting its darker moments.

And now someone has extracted the Black Freighter from Watchmen, giving us a full 20 pages of speech and illustrations from a comic that never was.

Amazon is launching a new service - the Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2 to its friends).

Like S3, its storage service, EC2 is a "cloud" service, treating compute resources as a commodity that can be charged for as a utility. Machine images are used to handle applications - with templates available to ease configuration. Amazon is currently supporting Fedora Core 3 and 4 Linux OSes with a 2.6 kernel, though it says any 2.6 kernel--based distribution should work. Each image is the equivalent of:

a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.

S3 will be used for storage. Pricing is good, too, especially when compared to Sun's $1/CPU/Hour:

• Pay only for what you use.
• $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
• $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

Worth looking at as a prototyping facility, or as a source of quick compute power when required.

It's only limited beta to start with, though. So don't start piling on to it yet!

There's a FAQ here.

Crossposted to A New IT World

No more Period.

The IAU has decided that Pluto is a trans-Neptunian body and not a planet...

Astronomers meeting in the Czech capital have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

About 2,500 experts were in Prague for the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) general assembly.

Astronomers rejected a proposal that would have retained Pluto as a planet and brought three other objects into the cosmic club.

And there I was looking forward to a horoscope with Xena Rising...

...just the same.

Welcome, my friends, to Area 404.

It's been a while since I've done anything to the look and feel of this ole blog. So, I've switched theme to something that gives it a look that's a bit more like my other blog.

With the launch of the new CSS-based Expressive style today, I've switched to using its London Cityscape theme from the grey Component theme I was using. I've quite liked the idea of a London cityscape look, and as this is a London-based blog. There are some nice touches too, including a Tag browser and proper permalinks for each entry, so you don't have to go prying through the comment HTML to link to an entry.

There will be some CSS tweaks to come (I want to change some of the fonts to start with).