A free one day gathering of people interested in how to blend technology and creativity for use in their businesses, organisations or to promote their creative work.

There are lots of interesting talks are already lined up, one of which is on Building and working in a distributed startup which I’ll be giving/leading based on the ‘process’ (if that isn’t too scary a word to use) we use inside nooked. I’m sure there’ll be plenty more added on the day in true barcamp “user generated conference” style.

If you are around, come along, it’ll no doubt be a nice desert after the veritable breakfast, lunch and dinner of events that are on this week in Dublin – IWTC – shaping up to be a big event, the ISA Annual Conference, xCellerate 2008 and of course the Irish Blog Awards. I’ll be popping in and out of both the IWTC and ISA events, if you wanna meet up give me a shout.

Mike Culver gave an interesting briefing and demo of some AWS technologies yesterday in the Digital Exchange in Dublin. Quick summary from my notes:

General

• No European data centers at the moment (see Justin’s comment)

EC2

• Now have several flavours – Small (10c/hr=$70/month), Medium (40c/hr=$280/month), Large (80c/hr=$560/month) if left running for the whole month.
• All the official Amazon Machine Images (ec2-public-images*) are still Fedora 4 based. This is a relatively old linux distro but is rock solid. Lots of unofficial images though I suspect building your own from a stock distro is probably the way to go
• There is market for ‘Paid AMIs’ where 3rd parties sell images and earn a commission based on total instance uptime from Amazon. Interesting market!
• Mentioned Elastic Live and RightScale as providers who offer a degree of support for managing EC2 instances (Amazon don’t offer much by way of support for EC2)
• He ran through creating a AWS image and starting it up using some Java based command line tools (wrapper for their HTTP APIs), nothing earth shattering here.

SQS

• Only a very high level overview, the only technical note of interest is that SQS cannot be treated as a FIFO queue – messages not deleted will re-appear.

FPS

• US only, no indication that would change
• Interesting rules scripts support for controlling payments
• Option to charge fees to either end of the transaction (as opposed to credit card companies who always charge merchant)
• Micropayment (to as little as 1c) support via commission % fee model.

S3

• From 800 million objects in Aug ‘06 to 10 billion objects in Aug ‘07, no details on average object size.
• Does not automatically set HTTP cache control headers (Last-Modified, Etag etc) on objects when serving them over HTTP so that they won’t be cached by internet caches (or browsers) – bit naff! Suggested this might be achievable via object metadata though I havn’t checked this yet.
• No support for rename or symlink type operations. They mentioned that JungleDisk acheive this by using EC2 instances to do the rename via copy/delete – traffic between EC2 and S3 is free.
• No indication of support for OAuth to support delegated authority. Shame.

Coincidently, FOWA Dublin is happening on the evening of the 13th so I’ll pop into that too as I am off to FOWA London in October. They have an amazing lineup, as ever…

Update: Here’s the FOWA Dublin Event Page for all you Facebook users…