TIGR Team looks at Cloud Computing

As part of the transition to President Obama, a Technology Innovation and Governmental Reform Team (TIGR Team) has been setup. This would be a great team to be on and to work with. Obama effectively used the internet to win the election and it now appears that he has put together a team to continue to use the technology that is available now to help bring our government up to date. That is a huge undertaking, but it will be fun to watch and experience. I think that every state should have their own TIGR team to help reform their state. I have personally been talking with every person I can grab in the local, state and national political arena to drive this point with them. We can use cloud computing and web services to provide all the necessary computing infrastructure and data to anyone that needs to use it. Take a look at this video for a small glimpse into what is being talked about.

Skype BETA for Mac is out

Skype has resently posted a BETA (2.8.0.324) download of their client on their site, but I could not find a link to navigate to it on their main site. A little digging around and trying different URL combinations and I scored. Try http://www.skype.com/download/skype/macosx/beta if you want to grab the BETA now. The real meat in this release is that it now includes screen sharing and sports a slightly new interface for the video window. The picture below shows the new interface and a screen shot of our website while chatting with someone else.

AWS Management Console

Amazon announced today the beta release of its management console.  The use of the console, which can be found at https://console.aws.amazon.com is free and very easy to use.  If you are familiar with the services offered by Amazon Web Services, you will be up and running in no time on their management console.  The console currently allows you to manage your EC2 instances, Elastic IPs, Security Groups, Key Pairs and Elastic Block Stores.  Launching a new instance and even viewing the console output are only a click away.  This will be extremely helpful in just getting a nice consise high level view of the systems we are running in the Amazon cloud.