Amazon goes down. Everybody flips out.

Everybody in the world is talking about the Big Amazon Outage yesterday. It hit us pretty hard. A few of our sites were serving broken image links for several hours yesterday, and a service we run that relies on SQS was completely dead in the water.

You know what though? It's just not that big a deal. I think about how reliable my stuff was before I put it up on Amazon's machines, and really it wasn't any better. The only difference here is that I couldn't jump onto the server and do the hotfixing myself. I didn't get to spend all day writing a patch to some low-level shared thing that suddenly started misbehaving system wide.

Hey, wait a minute. Scratch that.

I didn't HAVE to do anything at all. It was somebody else getting that page at 3AM and scrambling to get my site back up. This is actually better from my perspective.

So yeah, my sites still see the rare hour-long down window. But now it's not my problem anymore.

Cool.

XSLT Test

You can safely ignore this post. I'm using it as a shortcut to get this page about vistacular margarine indexed as quickly as possible.

If you're interested in what I'm up to, view source on that page. It's a test to see if it's feasible to publish content as simple XML documents that look like HTML, and do all the site navigation and chrome using client-side XSLT.

At this point, I doubt it's going to work, but we'll see...

S3stat in the spotlight

Amazon's Jeff Barr was kind enough to do a writeup of S3stat on the Amazon Web Services blog. Thanks for that!

I doubt that S3stat will ever bring in enough income to pay the rent, but it's nice to see that people are getting some use out of the thing. At the end of the day, that's sorta why we build software in the first place, right?

A Naive Bayesian Spam Filter for C#

Human-powered comment spam has been piling up recently at Blogabond, so I spent a few hours putting together a C# implementation of Paul Graham's Naive Bayesian Spam Filter algorithm.

You can find a nice long-winded article along with the source code over at The Code Project. Let me know if you find it useful. Here's a link:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/BayesianCS.aspx

How to Watch the Superbowl over the Internet

The Superbowl may be the most important event in the American sports calendar, but most of the world just doesn't care about it. So what do you do if you're out of the country when it happens?

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, a place where it generally sucks to be most of the winter. As soon as I could do anything about it, I made a point of getting away for at least a month or so every winter. That did great things for my suntan, but I always seemed to be out of the country for the Superbowl.

In most parts of the developing world, that wasn't such a big deal. In Honduras, I watched the game in a beach bar over marlin steaks and beers. In Malaysia, it was just a matter of banging on the door of the local "english pub", waking up the barman, and finding the game on TV. On the beach in Thailand, all it took was a 6am raid to kick on the generator at one of the beach bars, thus waking up the staff and asking for a large pot of coffee while I figured out how to work the TV.

Europe, however, is a different matter. Try convincing the surly Basque behind the counter to keep his bar open until 2am on a Sunday, and you'll see what I mean. If you can find a hotel room with a TV, maybe you'll be in good shape, but only if they happen to have a good satellite provider that happens to carry the game.

So here I am, with 11 hours to spare, furiously scouring the web, looking to find a way to stream the game to my laptop. If you're reading this article on Superbowl Sunday, chances are you're doing the same thing. Here's the story:

The big players in streaming video don't seem to be much help. Yahoo's NFL Game Pass doesn't do postseason games. The NFL doesn't seem too interested in streaming their games, even after a petition from football fans asking for it. DirectTV will actually let you watch the Superbowl live! You just need to sign up for their $269 football season pass and then give them another $99 for their "SuperFan" program that gives you access to the Big Game. Uh... Thanks?

Cricket to the rescue!

What to do then? This obscure British website called Cricket on TV will give you a pass to watch the Superbowl for $15. It's that easy. Just sign up at their site, give them your credit card details, and go start stocking up on beer & pretzels. Sorted.

Again, for those just scanning down:

This site has the Superbowl on Streaming Video for $15

Too bad you can't get it for free. But hey, if you're a football fan, you know that this is important. It's worth the money.