csarva

Not quite.. it seems the Go app is just a webapp run on the origin server(s) that their CDN pulls from. Chrome installs/upgrades would only fail once whatever caches expire.

The status site is on heroku/ec2 while the main services are on rackspace. Appears both are being attacked by one very unhappy camper.

Social Bicycles is another company doing something very similar based out of NYC -- http://socialbicycles.com/

Depending on the particular program, you may not be able to break it down and sell it for parts as some of them use custom parts that wouldn't otherwise work on a regular bike.

Well, since you mention it.. this happened back in 2000 when Adobe sued Macromedia over "copied" IDE elements (before eventually buying them out..).

http://www.pcworld.com/article/18000/adobe_sues_macromedia.h...

Yes. This issue notwithstanding, you should be running ntpd.

You can only do so much with gigabit ethernet. Add to that the fact that whatever apps you're running are competing for that same bandwidth and it's super hard to get good I/O out of it.

If only they could come up with something better than cmd.exe, Windows could be a fairly decent system to work on. With Cygwin and other tools, the environment is fine, just lacking a decent local terminal and most of the 3rd party ones are just as bad last I looked.

Constrained by your team? I can see you making that case for Instagram with only 12 people, but according to Yahoo Finance, FB has about 3500 people. Not one of them is thinking about how to increase revenues? And they don't have enough engineers to try out some of the ideas?

Actually, current zoning laws in NYC require [most] new developments to have some minimum number of parking spaces available (usually underground) based on the size of the building. Just look at any of the new condos that have gone up in the last 10 years. Found this recent article while looking for a reference:

http://www.streetsblog.org/2012/01/06/times-architecture-cri...

Readability seems to handle it ok:

http://www.readability.com/articles/c1xma652

Safari doesn't have any selective blocking capabilities but there's always 3rd party browsers for that. Check out Ghostery for iPad which is focused on privacy & blocking 3rd party trackers:

http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016022066

At AWS Summit back in June they said that all (US only?) pages are now rendered via servers on AWS. The databases are still big-iron type boxes due to them being on, IIRC, Oracle and I/O being what it is on EC2.

If you're looking to Google for a solution then I think you're looking in the wrong direction. Just look at the latest crop of anti-competitive complaints against them -- like Yelp for one.

We've observed the bottleneck to be an upper limit on packets/sec for a given instance type. On an m1.large this is about 100k/sec. I believe it's due to the virtual NIC just not being fast enough to handle high traffic loads.

The rightscale folks found the same thing:

http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/04/01/benchmarking-load-bala...

It only took spamming the entire internet on twitter to get someone to notice. If you look at @thomasmonopoly, you'll see what I mean.

The api site lists this as the correct url for dojo 1.6:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/dojo/1.6.0/dojo/dojo.xd...

and this one appears to be working currently.

This is how links are rendered on Wikipedia's SSL server. The standard non-SSL page is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnunet

re: #3 - My tests show that the virtual NIC can only handle about 100k packets/sec. I don't have the results of my tests up anywhere, but Rightscale confirms this in their tests as well:

http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/04/01/benchmarking-load-bala...

So I'd say YES, other workloads would be affected during heavy EBS I/O, though I've never tested/measured this specific case.

Any text editor will be able to save .rb files; they're just plain text files. Also, you didn't say which OS you're on, but assuming you're on Windows, notepad++ is a good free editor.

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Google Romance: http://www.google.com/romance/

This macworld article has the actual quote:

http://www.macworld.com/article/54948/2007/01/80211nfee.html

“The nominal distribution fee for the 802.11n software is required in order for Apple to comply with generally accepted accounting principles for revenue recognition, which generally require that we charge for significant feature enhancements, such as 802.11n, when added to previously purchased products,” said Teresa Brewer, Apple’s Mac hardware public relations manager.

This is my basic use case exactly -- living in an apartment building in NYC, I have packages sent home all the time. The building staff sign for and hold them, but I have no way of knowing they arrived so I can go and pick them up (no 24/7 doorman).

Other possible use cases: sending gifts, work-related purchases going to various locations/offices, returning items, etc.

Thanks for the input. There's definitely a lot more that can be done, especially for those who need to track a large number of packages. More features, possibly requiring a login, is something I've thought about, however this super simple service meets my needs perfectly, and my guess is that I'm not alone. Depending on how this goes, I'll be looking at building out more functionality.

Thanks, fixed! I tested it in FF3.6/Mac and it looked ok. What version are you on?

Not too focused on monetizing at the moment. It's something I built cause I needed it for myself.

re: gmail - you can very easily setup a filter to automatically forward shipment confirmation emails from the places you most frequently shop (e.g, Amazon).

Sending alerts for other events is definitely something I've thought about as well and plan to add in some way. I haven't quite figured out the best way to enable optional features like this -- perhaps a separate email address or something in the body?

As you hinted, I'd like to keep things as simple as possible and avoid signups if I can (criminal, I know), at the very least for the basic feature of being notified on delivery.

Thanks for the comments. Privacy is very important to me as well and I plan to get something up there soon, I just wanted to get it out the door in the meantime.

buildr is actually an extension of rake. It essentially adds tasks for building Java projects (classpaths, libraries, etc) and for packing standard formats (jar, war, ear, etc). I've been using it for a while now and it's great.

I've thought of this before as well. PHP's changing syntax for different functions is particularly annoying. Self-documenting is an added bonus.