Technobabble

With OSX El Capitan 10.11 (build 15A204h), the Amazon Workspaces client is still broken. Now the "Internet Connection" works but the next check for the "Registration service" fails.

With OSX El Capitan (version 10.11 build 15A204h), I am unable to connect to my Amazon Workspace . The Workspace client (version 1.1.80.347) gives me a weird error about a local certificate (and completely messes up the UI) and at other times is not able to verify the Internet connection. Looking at tcpdump, it seems like the client normally tries to connect to https://connectivity.amazonworkspaces.com which resolves to 54.230.147.12 . However for some reason the client is now connecting to server-54-230-147-12.sfo4.r.cloudfront.net which is what the IP resolves to in reverse. Visiting https://server-54-230-147-12.sfo4.r.cloudfront.net gives a certificate with the name connectivity.amazonworkspaces.com and therefore makes the connection untrusted. No idea how to workaround this. Help?

Amazon has a added a new offering to AWS: Amazon DynamoDB . This is a fully managed NoSQL database. One of the most interesting items to catch my eye was this: "All data items are stored on Solid State Disks (SSDs) and are automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones in a Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability." Does this mean that Amazon is now the largest owner of SSDs? I wonder who they buy from. Amazon's pricing structure for this service is a little weird. They have introduced the concept of "Write Capacity" (one write per second for items of up to 1KB in size) and "Read Capacity" (one strongly consistent read per second or two eventually consistent reads per second of items of up to 1KB in size). Why not just define pricing in terms of data reads and writes per second per KB? With the added bonus of Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) integration, this should be a useful service for all NoSQL users.

As part of Sun’s cloud computing push , the Sun Cloud APIs have recently been made available to developers. It provides RESTful APIs for creating and managing cloud resources, including compute, storage, and networking components. You can get a quick start by looking at the “ Hello Cloud ” examples. Looks like Amazon AWS is finally getting some competition but it remains to be seen if Sun can follow through with their delivery.

This week Amazon released a free iPhone app that provides more native access to the Amazon store experience. It has the expected features like product search, product data, reviews and of course, 1-click purchases. In addition, Amazon has introduced a new experimental feature called Amazon Remembers . Amazon Remembers allows customers to snap photos of objects of interest and upload them to Amazon. Once uploaded, Amazon uses MTurk to identify the product and within minutes the app notifies customers with a link to the matching product. In my tests, an iPhone snap was identified as the iPod Touch (since Amazon doesn't sell iPhones), a Pepsi can returned a link to Coca Cola (since Pepsi is not sold on Amazon or some MTurker has a wicked sense of humor), a Palm Z22 was not identified, and a book was identified perfectly. Get the app from the iTunes app store .