Cloud computing is supposedly all the rage these days: the idea is that instead of running your own infrastructure, you just outsource everything.

There are some cases where this is almost self-evidently a good idea: renting a VPS is much cheaper and more reliable than sticking a server in your home and then dealing with the noise, electricity, and bandwidth that such a thing would consume. This blog, for instance, is hosted on a VPS at Panix. On the other hand, an Amazon EC2 instance at the seemingly low price of $0.10 per hour will cost $72 if you leave it on for a whole month—more expensive than many low-end dedicated physical machines.

But the cloud, we are promised, can do more for us than just save us money: it can run our services for us. Programmers no longer need know how to do anything but program the things specific to their application: everything else will be taken care of by “the cloud.”

I’ve traditionally run all my services on machines (usually VPSes) that I administer. But it would be nice to get out of the system administration business.

Presented without (much) comment.

I wrote a letter to the Commissioner of the NYC Department of Transportation, urging the marking of a safe route between the new bike lanes on Allen and Pike Streets and the East River Greenway. Here’s a copy.

I’ve created a new website, Twitter Revolution, which lets you shade your Twitter avatar red and black.

Why would you want to do that?

When Twitter was used as a tool to fight the Iranian regime, Twitter users around the world turned their avatars green in a show of solidarity. Now, Twitter is being used as a tool to fight repressive police practices in Pittsburgh, USA, and apparently the FBI considers this a problem.

The software is written in Ruby using the Sinatra “micro-framework”; you can browse or download the software, which is being made available under the AGPL, if you like. You could presumably use the code as a base for other small Twitter projects. Ideas (with or without patches) for improvement in the code, content, or design would be much appreciated.

So, color your avatar and enjoy!