Author Archives: Jay Andrew Allen

Suppose you’ve already created an Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) server, and are able to host simple content. Now, how do you get your existing content onto the machine? What if you need to install a new Unix program that’s not available through yum? You could install and configure an FTP server. But enabling FTP […]

Previously, in our continuing discussion of Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), I showed how to set up a simple EC2 virtual server, and how to host basic content (HTML pages) using Apache. This week, I’ll examine how to configure a domain name to point to your server. Fortunately, compared to everything we’ve done so far, […]

I’m taking a break from my series on Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) to talk a bit this week about programmer’s editors. Like most programmers, I’ve been trying super-powered text editors since I could type printf(“Hello, World!”);.  For the past few months, I’ve been using Notepad++ as my programmer’s editor du jour. It’s an improvement over […]

Two weeks ago, I demonstrated how to sign up for a free Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) account, and how to log into your virtual server. Today, let’s look at how to do something useful – to wit, hosting static content. First, however, I need to address a problem with the previous article. In demonstrating […]

Last week, I began discussing how to get started with Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service. I covered the differences between virtual hosting and cloud computing, particularly when it comes to scalability of services. What I didn’t cover is the more basic question of how much cloud computing services such as EC2 and Microsoft Azure […]

Recently, Amazon.com announced that they were offering software developers and small businesses a full year of Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) for free. I’ve been wanting to dig into cloud computing for some time. And, being human, I regard “free” as too good a price to pass up. Signing up for EC2 was the easy […]

While I still consider myself a code monkey, my primary work these days is writing technical documentation. Recently I was asked by a client to create a visual map for their REST-based API. The map, we decided, would have fly-out boxes that showed the API method at a glance – its name, URI endpoint, query […]

I used phpMyAdmin for a dog’s age before using MySQL Workbench on a regular basis. While MySQL Workbench on Windows 7 is much heavier (and slower) than the super-slim Adminer, it provides a number of features that make creating and maintaining schemas in MySQL easier – including the ability to print out a visual depiction […]

There’s a neat little framework for Ruby called Sinatra that makes it simple to configure REST-style API endpoints with just a smidgen of glue code. But why, asked PHP developer Josh Lockhart, should Ruby devs have all the fun? Josh has been busy these past few months creating his own PHP-based REST DSL (Domain-Specific Language) […]