Here’s how it started… Lisa (my wife) [shouting from office into the kitchen]: Tim, what’s this Amazon charge for $193? Me [thinking what I may have purchased and not remembered]: Um, don’t know…let me look. I then logged into my Amazon account to see what order I may have forgotten.  Surely I didn’t order $200 worth of MP3…that’s ridiculous.  Sure enough nothing was there.  Immediately I’m thinking fraud.  I start freaking out, getting mad, figuring out my revenge scheme on the scammer, etc. Then it hit me: Amazon Web Services account. The Culprit...

One of the great things I like about some of our platform products is that they are building in extensibility more and more.  Take Windows Live Writer as an example.  It’s no secret on this blog that I’ve got a geek affair with that tool.  I use it daily and have customized it (via plugins) and my blogging platform (Subtext) to make it even more of a best experience for me for web authoring. Writing plugins for Writer has been a lot of fun and a great way to get the functionality I want/need into a workflow without having...

Amazon just released into public beta their EC2 features of enabling Windows instances.  I’m a fan of Amazon’s services and the route they’ve been taking.  I use S3 a lot, even only if as a file storage for now.  I’ve written a plugin for Live Writer so that S3 is basically my repository for everything non-text on this site and others.  Of course, if S3 goes down (like it did hard a while back) I’m screwed.  Maybe something like Reserve Chute will help me in the future. I’ve not messed with the EC2 side of their offering only because...

After posting my sample implementation of accessing Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) via Silverlight, I reflected quickly and also chatted with some AWS engineers. Cross-domain Policy One thing that you should never do is just deploy a global clientaccesspolicy.xml file blindly.  Often times in samples, we (I) do this.  I need to be better about this guidance to be honest, so I’ll start here.  As an example, for the S3 cross domain policy file, we really should add some additional attributes to it to make it more secure.  Since we know it is a SOAP service, we can...

I ran into an interesting situation last week…the desire to access some of my Amazon S3 services from within a Silverlight application. Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) is a pay service provided Amazon for object storage ‘in the cloud.’  Although there is no UI tool provided by Amazon to navigate your account in S3, a SOAP and REST API are available for developers to integrate S3 information into their applications or other uses.  You can view more information about Amazon S3 on their site. What is S3? Since S3 is a pretty flexible service, it can be used for many different things including...

man i wish microsoft would buy tivo.  when tivo came out, i was skeptical.  it took some friends to really convince me that i was missing out, that i'd actually watch less tv, yada, yada.  after years of being a tivo user, i still love it.  i have two of them, they share recordings, i use the tivo desktop app...it is just a great experience (other than their customer service). they've nailed the simplicity in the user interface, the 'season pass' concept rocks, online scheduling...it all is just bliss for tv viewing.  high def?  well, okay, every company screws up...