Digital Sanctum

Amazon has announced Elastic MapReduce, the latest product under it’s web services umbrella starting at $0.10 per hour. This latest offering leverages two of it’s existing products EC2 (cloud computing) and S3 (simple storage service):

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (AmazonEC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

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Earlier today it was leaked and later confirmed that Google is releasing it’s own browser called Google Chrome.

The news has spread like a wild fire today and the source of most of the initial information has been gathered from a comic strip book which details some of the inner workings of the open source browser. The comic strip was produced by Scott McCloud which has since written a brief post about his involvement.

Here are some of the technical highlights of Google Chrome:

• As previously mentioned, Chrome is entirely open source.
• Omnibox – address bar has an auto-complete feature called Omnibox. Omnibox will offer search suggestions, pages you have recently visited, as well as others you have not but are popular around the Internet.
• Webkit – used for rendering the web pages. WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. More recently, Android also uses Webkit.
• V8 JavaScript Engine – built from scratch by a team in Denmark, promises performance improvements, real garbage collection, and browser independent.
• Google Gears – I’m guessing will be used to provide offline capability for applications running on Chrome.
• One process per tab – prevents the entire browser from crashing from a single web page. This also will be a new and welcomed way of determining what pages have memory leaks.
• Incognito privacy mode – which is a window where nothing that occurs in there will ever be logged on your computer
• The default home page will show your last nine visited websites as thumbnails, as well as your recent searches and bookmarks

The disappointment for many (mac and linux users) will be that the initial release will be windows only.

Update 1: Get your Google Chrome screenshots here.

My development on a photo sharing site has ground to a halt in the wake of an outage that’s lasted since this morning. Amazon S3 and Simple Queue Service are affected according to the AWS Service Health Dashboard.

Sites such as SmugMug are also experiencing an outage as a direct result.

The high availability shortcomings of S3 today reminds me of one of the Google mantras which is to “design with failure in mind”.

Marissa Mayer gives some insight into how Google flourishes with innovation in a Forbes article. Number five caught my eye:

5. SHARE AS MUCH INFORMATION AS YOU CAN
“People are blown away by the information you can get on MOMA, our intranet. Because there is so much information shared across the company, employees have insight into what’s happening with the business and what’s important. We also have people do things like Snippets. Every Monday, all the employees write an email that has five to seven bullet points on what you did the previous week. Being a search company, we take all the emails and make a giant Web page and index them. If you’re wondering, ‘Who’s working on maps?’ you can find out. It allows us to share what we know across the whole company, and it reduces duplication.”

Imagine what could be done at a much larger scale with the catch being that there would be no firewalls, no corporate security…no isolationism. Everyone knows what every one else is doing…no fear…just effective and pure synergy on a planetary scale.

Take the red pill.

Sun has launched a project called the Da Vinci Machine, also being described “a multi-language renaissance for the Java Virtual Machine architecture.” The project includes prototype JVM extensions to run non-Java lanugages on the JVM. The intent is to address JSR 292 Request and have the extensions included in the next release of Java SE, Java SE 7.

It should be pretty interesting how far John Rose (project lead) can take this and whether it will truly lead to a renaissance for Java in light of the popularity of dynamic languages.