Don Wilson thoughts and ideals of an internet magnate

So, Google announced tonight their venture into cloud computing, database crunching, and, all things considered, a bad ass approach to helping development of web apps significantly easier. See Scoble’s Qik stream of the announcement here.

Basically Google will host a certain amount of storage, computation limit, and bandwidth for each developer and will eventually provide opportunities to PHP, RoR, and possibly other languages. The current beta cycle is limited to Python, which is definitely a plus in my favor since I’ve been looking to dive into Python for quite some time. What’s odd is that I literally purchased Learning Python yesterday and brought it to read between classes today. Little did I know that I would have a chance to really start using it on a quite limited (10,000) userbase platform.

What am I going to write using Google Apps Engine? I’m not too sure right now. Depending on it’s ability to communicate with the outside world, I might develop something with my new friend, Twitter. In the past couple of days I’ve been thinking about what services are already out there and a few that haven’t been invented yet (at least that I know of). Perhaps some type of centralizing system for geographic location, so that you could add “DallasTwit”, ping @DallasTwit, and in turn, DallasTwit relays the same message to all of it’s followers. Message relays will be limited to one relay per XX minutes, allowing for the service to work but not spam.

Hopefully no one steals that idea, but if they do, I’ve got a few hanging under my wing that I could venture into as well. If you’re interested in working with their API, check here.

As I previously posted, Best Buy were true on their word and sent me the $50 gift card for purchasing the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive however many months ago.

Now to figure out what to waste it on…

I received a call earlier this week from a Best Buy automated phone system informing me that I’ll be receiving a $50 gift card due to my purchase of the now-dead HD-DVD player.

I purchased the Xbox 360 external HD-DVD player the day it came out from one of my local Best Buy stores. I rarely watched movies on it (I’m more of a fan of watching movies on my DVR) so it merely collected dust until I sold it to a nearby Gamestop for $50 or so. Now that I know I’m going to get a gift card for “losing out” to Blu-Ray, suffice to say I couldn’t care less what the end result was from the High-Def war (read: a “war” between two companies that will be forgotten five years from now when the next version war sparks).

Will I make a smart purchase or buy something that I’ll end up regret purchasing in a month’s time? Likely the latter, but I’m glad it won’t be coming out of my bank account this time.

This is one of the reasons why I’m glad to join customer programs such as Best Buy’s Reward Zone and the like. When a company feels compelled to reimburse their customers when a product sours (read: never), they have the necessary contact information and you’re usually first in place. The last time that I can remember this happening was when I was given the $100 in-store credit from my early iPhone purchase after their price reduction.

I’m not sure if this is a growing trend amongst retailers, however I’m glad to be apart of it when it happens.

I just fixed my server’s incorrect date/time within a minute or two via the command line thanks to a helpdesk message found here.

It’s great to fix something on your server using an easy to follow tutorial and get the exact results you’re looking for. Now, if only I could find something like this to setup personal business email for my server, I’d be substantially happier than a simple date/time fix.

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Found a great post regarding the internals of facebook by a blog entitled Scalable web architectures. Interesting, indeed.

This will really be just a placeholder for a real blog post, but I’ve just discovered how insanely easy it is now to watch my favorite torrent’d television and movie video files on my HDTV (via Xbox 360) now. It really is basically just copying files over to a certain path and boom.

Expect a real blog post about how to set it up, a couple of pictures, and my thoughts on the quality and ease of use.