Last week I wrote about whether Google’s potential acquisitions might be stifled by its focus on its own infrastructure software projects but noted that by releasing App Engine the company was encouraging a wider ecosystem of applications based on its platform.

What I didn’t discuss at the time was the potential risk of application vendors finding themselves locked-in to the App Engine platform. Of course Amazon also has this issue, the potential impact of which was …

I will be speaking on July 29th in New York at an Entrepreneurs Forum on A Free Panel on Cloud Computing. With a number of experts including Hank Williams of KloudShare, Mike Nolet of AppNexus, and Hans Zaunere of New York PHP fame is should be a great event.

The focus of my presentation will be on “Extending existing applications to leverage the cloud” where I will be discussing both the advantages of the cloud, and the complexities and issues that you will encounter such as data management, data consistency, loss of control, security and latency for example.

Using traditional MySQL based applications I’ll be providing an approach that can lead to your application gaining greater power of cloud computing.

About the Author

Ronald Bradford provides …

Thanks to my friend Dustin, and his EC2 demo using Elasticfox Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2 I got an EC2 image setup. With other references Link 1,Link 2,Link 3 I was also able to create my own AMI.

Some notes specific for my configuration.

Pre-config ElasticFox key for launching directly from ElasticFox SSH connections.

mkdir ~/ec2-keys
mv ~/Downloads/elasticfox.pem ~/ec2-keys/id_elasticfox
chmod 600 ~/ec2-keys/id_elasticfox
chmod 700 …

JavaOne wrapped up on Friday. We hosted individuals from across the globe, and from every industry: consumer electronics and gaming, to enterprise IT, space exploration, factory automation, the automotive industry, academia - like the network itself, Java delivers something for nearly everyone, everywhere.

This year's biggest announcements centered around Java's role in the future of rich internet applications (or RIA's). What's a rich internet application? It depends on your perspective - from mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.

On the one hand, I'd claim Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one. Early Java applets delivered interactivity, but at the expense of development complexity and, in the early days, performance - when a browser, and more recently Javascript, would …

Here is number 5 in my series of six podcasts from last week's MySQL conference and expo.

Just after lunch on Tuesday, I was able to corner Brian Aker, former CTO of MySQL, introduce myself and ask him if he was up for a podcast.  Without any convincing or arm twisting he happily agreed. :)

My interview with Brian (9:18)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

Brian's lenses adapt to match the art around him. 

Some of the …

Is 2008 going to be the Year of the Acquisition? Activity in 2007 was on the rise but now things seem to be at full speed.

• I remember when Alta Vista and Excite! were the hot search engines, my how the world has changed.  It looks like it’s narrowing down to a two horse race with Microsoft putting the moves on Yahoo! for about $44.6 billion (Notes from SearchEngineLand). I guess it’s really on now, Google versus Microsoft in a search engine death match.
• Yahoo! acquired Zimbra last year. I wonder …

I haven't been blogging about the things I used to -- how-tos and technical hacks -- because I've been working quite hard on MySQL Toolkit and, believe it or not, innotop. I've made it possible to write innotop plugins, which have been very useful to our team at work, and I'm working on documentation. Plugins won't make it into the upcoming release; it'll just be bug fixes and documentation. These projects have taken up most of my free time.

I've also tentatively joined a group of people working on a very large, exciting, secret project which may consume the rest of my summer and/or much of the rest of the year. (I've been turning down consulting gigs and other projects because of this). If this secret project works out, I'll be writing more about it here, you can count on that.

In the …

I got an email today from O'Reilly today about the MySQL Conference (coming up at the end in April), it looks like a pretty good conference, but one of the sessions caught my eye. It was called A Storage Engine for Amazon S3.

Amazon's S3 is a web apt-oriented storage service, making storage available to both ordinary HTTP browsers and to sophisticated applications via SOAP and REST interfaces. Learn how useful it is to make this storage accessable to MySQL users via a plug-in storage engine.

I did some quick googling but I couldn't find the plugin, so I am guessing that it will be released at the conference. Anyone have a link?

This gets interesting when combine this with Amazon EC2, because you are not charged for bandwidth from within amazon's network, and you are connected to S3 on a fast network.

The following is what i wrote on “43people.com” about the boss. I thought it was worth keeping in my own archives, since it’s actually a story about my life as it pertains to Mr. Bezos.

Back a few years ago, I was taking some classes down in Edmonds. The one I’m thinking of in particular was on the care and feeding of unix. We were using red hat linux 6.0 or some crufty version that wasn’t so crufty at the time.

Anyway, the prof didn’t require that we buy any books, but he made some suggestions. And he also suggested that we buy them on this new fangled “Internet” thing through a few of his friends down south in Seattle at this place called Amazon.com.

And thus was my introduction to O’Reilly and Associates. I soon thereafter bought a book called “ …