Public versus Private cloud: AWS perspective and moving more towards Linux

Amazon Web Services, the world's largest public cloud provider slammed into private cloud providers during AWS Re:Invent conference.

AWS also lowers the cost of S3 by 25% and now is moving into the data warehousing market with RedShift, read it here. 

I have been a happy user of AWS for the last two years and while there are some issues (mainly the quite difficult to understand billing) - the service has been superb over this time. I can only assume that the per hourly costs will continue to drop down.

Ah Linux, long been a favour distribution of mine as it appealed to the inner geek of me but in the commercial world; it had only a small impact. However, 2013 may now change this and there are plans to roll out Linux (mainly CentOS) onto our build, stage and possibly live environments. This is exciting and scary at the same time. However, I have to admit that the stability of Linux and the ability to reuse a lot of older kit very effectively has turned a lot of my more skeptical colleagues around.

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So many lovely maps......

A colleague of mine pointed me towards a silver-light application titled 'Pivor for ArcGIS Online' - a very unassuming name but with the 1000s of webmaps (http://storymaps.esri.com/home/) being published and made available, Pivot allows you to find these maps in a nifty one-stop-shop type of application. As a starting point, click this link and type in 'rivers' or 'hurricane' and see what pops out, alternatively click on the graphics above and explore.

Finally, Santa has come to town: check out the Santa Dashboard by clicking on the picture. It's an old but a great idea and there's some very nice images there...

Santa's coming to town.....

http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2012/santa-dashboard/

Have a great christmas - and yes, the world hasn't ended.

12:12:12:12:12

A special day!

Just had to do it.

A very significant date and the BBC news has articles of people marrying on this day and other bits. A random post but I thought, why not join the bandwagon?

On a slightly more serious note: Australian police warn the public not to use Apple Maps (since fixed)...

Normal service will now resume!

Puzzle Maps?

Europe, but not quite as you know it...

This just caught me eye during my internet wanders and yes, it's another Esri Story Map but it came to me in a roundabout way. It illustrates very nicely how interactivity can really enhance a visually pleasing map. I love maps and quizzes and having both in one application is very cool.

Anyway, click on this link (or the image) and see if you can beat my time of 4minutes 28 seconds. It is harder than it looks! My last 20 odd seconds was spent trying to fit the missing shapes into all remaining countries!

This also caught my eye: http://hpc.vcea.net/ - old photographs from China, should be ripe for it to be geo-coded (as much as possible?) - so off to ArcGIS Online I go. Here's my first pass: http://bit.ly/VPTHiT

Treasure Hunting Story Maps

and get some treasure.....!

I love quizzes, especially geography ones. That's why when it comes to pub quizes and trivial pursuit, Geography related subjects are my first choice.

Here's a wonderful story map / treasure hunt from Esri Inc.

http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2012/treasure-hunt-cities/