Into iSpace Blog

How to survive being popular, with Amazon's S3

Years ago IBM produced a very funny video to market their web servers.  It showed a forlorn newcomer at a 12 Step meeting, who began by saying "I'm Bob ... and I'm STUPID".  Everyone rushed to reassure him that no one there was stupid, etc!

Bob then told his tale.  How he and friends had a promising web company, and how they borrowed a huge sum of money for a TV advert, ... and how their (non-IBM) web servers then crashed with all the extra traffic, so that all the money for the advertising was wasted.

There was a long pause in the room after the story, and then one of the participants piped up, "Well Bob, that WAS stupid!".

Suddenly becoming popular on the web can be tough.  A chance mention in a blog read by millions of people can result in a tsunami of traffic that can overwhelm your servers - or leave you with a staggering bill.

Follow along with me in my latest article on Storing files on Amazon's S3 to discover one way to survive being popular.

Upgrading to darkness

You've just made yourself comfortable in front of the TV to watch an episode of your favourite series, and ... off goes the power again.  A familiar scenario if you live in South Africa - and even more frustrating if you are trying to finish important work.

My new article Working without electricity covers some useful strategies for surviving without Eskom - and seeing your favourite show.

(Blogging tip:  The image above is a royalty-free photograph from iStockPhoto.  Read more in my article finding great images for your blog)

Please subscribe to my email newsletter to get more news like this.

Backup strategies

It was a quiet Tuesday afternoon at the Realtime office in Cape Town in Wale Street.  Suddenly, a distraught man rushed into our reception. "It's gone," he exclaimed to our receptionist, "it's all gone, everything ... I don't know what I'll do...".   Lynn asked him to sit down, and he gradually regained his composure and told her the sorry story - a system crash, all his files gone, ...

Read my latest article, Backup Strategies, for the rest of the story - and to see how you can best protect your precious photos and files.

Blu-ray wins the DVD war, Hitler admits defeat

A war has been raging for the past two years over the format for new high-definition DVDs.  The announcement last week by Warners that they would back the Blu-ray format has all but ended the war though.

You could read the New York Times article on the news - but it is far more dramatic to watch Hitler admitting defeat for the HD DVD side!  (Warning: language)

[ This video has been removed - the New York Times explains why ... ]

The video clip is from the movie Downfall.  This process of combining your content (here, the subtitles) with someone else's content, is called a "mashup".  The availability of easy tools (often free) for editing media have led to to an explosion of innovative mashups in iSpace.  If you would like to do your own mashup like this, you can do so using tools like Overstream and BubblePLY.

Another popular form of mashup is re-cutting movie trailers, to create a very different story!  There is a good selection of these at TrailerMash.  The classic trailer mash is The Shining as a romance; another great one is West Side Story as a zombie horror movie.

Welcome to the Into iSpace Blog

This blog provides a regular guide to new articles on the Into iSpace site, plus general technology news.

You can read it on the site, or subscribe to its feed, or subscribe to receive it as an email newsletter.