Posts filed under Learning

Amazon Elestice MapReduce

A new service by Amazon has surfaced. It combines their computing cloud with their storage surface to bring the power of super computers into your backyard. It is meant for heavy and intensive jobs like web indexing, log analyzing, or even scientific simulation. It is basically an automatic interface that will create your computing cloud instance, allocate the proper resources,

A Developer’s Furniture

I recently had someone at work call me a furniture expert. I don’t know if I’m an expert, but I sure am very particular about my work space and with good reason. For someone that spends as much time as I do in front of a computer, I need to take care of myself so that I remain efficient, comfortable,

AMember Cancellation Script

This script is a basic API to expire a membership in AMember. It will look up an AMember account based on AMember ID, or email, or first and last name. It will then set the expired date for a subscription to a date in the past. The effectively cancels the subscription, but it keeps all of the data intact in

Amazon s3 Storage

Amazon has began offering a new service that many businesses are beginning to utilize. Unfortunately the brains behind the service didn’t put much thought into good documentation. I’m going to write some of the things that I have learned in using this service in hopes that someone out there won’t have to go through the mess that I did.  Concept:

Zune Firmeware 2.5 Upgrade Mistake

I tried to upgrade my Zune’s firmware to the new 2.5 version a couple of days ago and really messed things up. Everything was going fine until my Zune froze for 8 hours on a screen saying “Please wait. Do not disconnect device”. Well, I know the dangers of interrupting a firmware update, but I decided that if it had

Trying to find freelance work

During the last several weeks I have found myself fervently trying to find some freelance work to fill in the gaps when my regular schedule dropped to part time. Here are some of the resources I used and some information about each one of them. ScriptLance (www.scriptlance.com) – at first glance I figured this was a winner. There was a

Object Overloading

The most fascinating thing that I read in this article was about being able to dynamically create getter and setter methods. Over the years some of my class files have really gotten bogged down with having getter setter methods for every property. Now, using a single function, you can accomplish this. The author points out a couple of drawbacks however,