Happy 2009 every­one! I plan to keep this weblog updated more fre­quently this year, men­tion­ing any­thing inter­est­ing I’m doing, espe­cially with tech­nol­ogy and photography.

I switched from using the Panosaurus panora­maic tri­pod head to a Nodal Ninja 3, and am hav­ing good results. I’m sure the Panosaurus is per­fectly ade­quate, but I couldn’t for the life of me assem­ble it!

Some tech­nolo­gies that I have been exper­i­ment­ing with recently include Ama­zon Cloud Ser­vices, includ­ing the Cloud­front, S3 stor­age, and Ama­zon Elas­tic Com­pute Cloud. I have also made use of the Ama­zon Mechan­i­cal Turk, and have plenty of ideas for how it could be used. The Mechan­i­cal Turk allows you to request tasks to be done by a huge human work­force of around 100,000. As an exam­ple, you could ask for 1000 voice­mails to be tran­scribed, the work­force would tran­scribe them, and the result could be returned. All these ser­vices that Ama­zon offer are open­ing up many horizons.

One such hori­zon that per­haps shouldn’t be opened, is the fact that with just a credit card, a nefar­i­ous pro­gram­mer could spawn hun­dreds or thou­sands of high-powered vir­tual servers, and launch Inter­net attacks, break encryp­tions etc. I hope Ama­zon have a strat­egy in place for such events so they can be avoided. Such an attack could be on some­thing like the weak­ness found in MD5 SSL cer­tifi­cates which may be exploited using a large amount of com­put­ing power.