AWS provides multiples services that adjust sizes to your actual usage. This is not really the case when it comes to EBSEBS. You can see EBS has a hard drive that you can attach to a running EC2 instance. The attached EBS will be accessible like any other driver under /dev/xvdX. The idea here, is to provide a way to increase and decrease the size of the used EBS volumes according to the actual usage of the disk, and even allow you to increase the partition size beyond the 1TB limit.

Back in the 90’s, there was no Ajax or HTML5. There was no Flickr, Picasaweb, or Instagram. The most common way to publish your photos on a website was to create a static html page for each album with all the thumbnails and images associated to it. To solve this problem, one project emerged: Gallery. Since the beginning, the tagline was “Your photos on your website” and it did exactly that.

If, like me, you are still using an old style LAMP stack combining Web and E-Mail, then you certainly made a “stay over” in SPAM-paradise. The Stack I self-host my E-Mails, using QMail and vpopmail with a bunch of intermediate tools like Spamassassin, Clamav, Greylisting, DNSBL checks. This helps to clean out incoming SPAM. Messages are delivered to users through courier-imap or qmail-pop3d. For outgoing messages, Qmail sends (via qmail-remote) the messages via SMTP to the concerned MX servers.

Yes, there are still peoples serving content through flash, and yes there are still peoples using DRM. I was struggling getting movies with Adobe-Access DRM to work on Ubuntu Raring (13.04), and the cryptic “3323 error” didn’t help much.

For the Android app we developed at Spuul, we needed to redirect users to the app when they opened certain links on their device. The first problem was that not every link should open the app, since some pages are ment to be visited by a mobile device. The second problem was to redirect users to Google Play when the app is not installed. Opening the app for certain links only Android apps have the ability to interact with the network stack and launch an app according to known patterns in an URI.

I was looking to find a usage for my (RaspberryPI)[http://www.raspberrypi.org/]. Why not a headless Squeezebox-Client? To control the player, the Squeezebox app on your Android phone is the perfect choice.

Everybody is aware that WordPress is a heavy truck to display some “mostly” static content. Each Plugin or Widget that is added ads some stylesheet calls, javascript calls and database requests. This all together slows up the loading time of your blog. And it gets even worse when the site become popular and has to deal with thousands of requests. Why request for each visitor something from the database when the content only changes once in a while? Why go through all the PHP logic when the final rendered HTML is always the same?

While writing about Cloudfront, I came accross another CDN service called Cloudflare. The free entry price made me suspicious, hosting and transport has a price. Since I had nothing to loose and that this domain was new, I decided to give it a try. So far, didn’t find any dirty trick. What is Cloudflare? CDN is one of the features, but in fact, they do more than just delivery. Content Delivery Network They place themselves in the CDN category.

The server hosting this domain is a VPS hosted in Switzerland by Nimag network SàRL. Access speed from Asia is pretty bad, specially due to network latency on the pipes Singapore-US and US-Europe. In using a CDN to serve assets, we improve global page loading time in lowering the loading times of assets. The VPS has a good European connexion, there is not much need for visitors in Europe to use a CDN.

Everyone is aware of tools like speedtest.net to get a sens of the Internet connectivity speed to certain regions. While it works on mostly every device it allows you to test speed to only one server at a time. And is primarily meant to test the speed of your ISP. I wanted to test connectivity to several part of the world in an one click way, usable on multiple devices. The answer didn’t struck me at once, but it all can be done with some Javascript and mainly with the xhr object.