royans

Update as of Feb 28th 2009: Contradictory to my initial speculation, Amazon CloudFront is nothing like Akamai WAA. This is very depressing to me as an Akamai/WAA customer... I'm sure folks at Akamai don't share this opinion.  CloudFront seems to be a glorified S3 solution which is mostly used for static (non-dynamic) content. ------------- Amazon has finally opened the doors of its new CDN (Content Delivery Network) called CloudFront . But instead of building a completely new product it has interestingly expanded its S3 network to include content replication for lower latency content delivery. By not reinventing a whole new way of uploading data to the CDN network, Amazon has seriously cut down the cost for end users to try out this technology. Most of the CDNs I've investigated do very well with static content which needs to be periodically refreshed somehow. There is at least one service from Akamai called WAA - Web application accelerator which seem to understand the

Found some very interesting graphs of Internet connectivity as they grew between 1969 and 2007. Source National Science Foundation

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 throws a warning for self-signed certificate, and makes you do a couple of extra clicks to see the contents. Though some think its bad , I'm not sure what the fuss is all about. There are two reasons for the certificates. One is to encrypt the traffic, and the other to make sure no one intercepted your traffic using some kind of man-in-the-middle attack . One cant guarantee the second objective until a respected third party can sign/vouch the certificate. This is why these organizations exist. If this is such a big issue, the right approach should be for someone to setup a free certificate registry. There are few out there today like startcom , but the browser support on such registries is currently unimpressive. Speaking on behalf of the 99% of the Internet population who doesn't understand the significance of SSL certificates, I think the decision Mozilla took is courageous and admirable, and other browsers should do something similar if they don't a

There are a lot of traceroute programs out there. This one called WinMTR was recently recommended by Akamai support during one of the troubleshooting sessions. Its based of another Linux tool called mtr (Matt's traceroute) which is another one I had never heard off. I liked it so much, that ended up making an enhanced web interface to it. Check it out here at Webtrace.info . Webtrace provides extra networking information which is really helpful for folks who are trying to investigate networking issues. There are a lot of hyper links which allows them to quickly drill down into issues (like who is loosing packets). Technorati Tags: traceroute , network