Author Archives: Diego Caravana

Cloud Demystification

Posted on by Diego Caravana
1

Something weird and unexpected happened lately: the big Amazon cloud failed. Anyone on any media is talking about it, and everyone is communicating just this sense of surprise.

Wait a second and let’s ask to ourselves: why is it weird and unespected that AWS failed? The cloud is something human, so it has failed, as expected, and will fail again. By the way, I am sure that it failed a number of times in the past, but the failures weren’t so big to be noticed like the last big event. Continue reading →

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URL Shortening

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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Introduction

If you want, you can read everything about URL Shortening on wikipedia (i.e. http://​bit​.ly/​b​g​k​uGT or http://​d3w​.io/​9​K​i​lxK or http://➡.ws/蔤囦 ) but I would like to shortly (sorry, pun intended) say a couple of things.

The “URL shortener” concept is very simple: take an URL and transform it into another (shorter) URL, then use redirection to go back to the first URL. So what’s the deal? Continue reading →

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A simple SimpleDB use case

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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I’m happy to say that I had the chance to use Amazon AWS for a project of my customer Deltatre.

The news is particularly good because it offers a real argument in the “use or don’t use it” debate, and offers practical innovation to the company.

Technically, we decided to go on with SimpleDB during the development of deltatrePULSE (or simply Pulse) product: the idea of CTO Carlo De Marchis is to create a new distributed system that will open more the Deltatre web/sport platforms. Continue reading →

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Apache, SSL/TSL and SNI status

Posted on by Diego Caravana
4

I’m trying to host my handful of web sites on Amazon, but in EC2 machines there’s support for only one IP (private and public) and, as you know, SSL/TLS encryption let you have only one domain name per IP address: this is a heavy limit (with a reason), but it’s unacceptable for some reasons (public IP addresses scarcity, cost and management overhead).

Besides other solutions (multi-domain certs for example), I would like to go for the most reasonable way: virtual hosted SSL/TLS web sites, exactly the same way we all use today for non-encrypted web sites. I use Apache and for it there are a couple of solutions in the works that implement SNI or Server Name Indication: an extension to TLS protocol that “… permits the client to request the domain name, before the certificate is committed to by the server”. The support in browsers can be also a problem, but every recent browser supports it (with the exception of IE 6 and 7, apart from Vista); try your browser here. Continue reading →

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500.000 ebooks gratis da Google per Sony Reader

Posted on by Diego Caravana
2

L’annuncio è importante: Google, grazie al progetto Google Book Search, ha messo a disposizione gratuitamente tutta la sua collezione di libri di pubblico dominio, ma solo per Sony Reader.

Per accedere a questa enorme libreria, bisogna scaricare il software apposito dal Sony eBook Store (che, però, si può installare in Italia solo con un trucco, vedi per esempio post).

Personalmente ho provato scaricando Flatland sul mio Sony Reader, e devo dire che il risultato è buono (anche se il libro è stato digitalizzato, quindi con tutti gli sporchi e i difetti del caso), e l’idea di avere a disposizione tale enorme numero di libri alla distanza di un click ha dell’incredibile.

La notizia è ormai diffusa e potete trovare i dettagli su tutti i maggiori siti di informazione; è interessante osservare come questo annuncio venga messo in diretta concorrenza con Amazon e il suo Kindle, e questa concorrenza non potrà, secondo me, che fare del bene a tutti noi amanti del libro nella sua forma digitale.

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Google Chrome Mac Builds

Posted on by Diego Caravana
1

Here you can find the builds of Chromium (the open source project on which Google Chrome is built) for Mac OS X that the fine guys at Google are preparing for us.

Waiting for an official version of Chrome (and for Firefox 3.1), let’s continue the browsers’ war on features and not on the garbling of web standards!

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