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Google today announced Google Compute Engine, an IaaS platform for Linux VMs on Google's extensive infrastructure, and a direct competitor to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.

One of the most interesting notes from the announcement is that Google have been working behind the scenes with both Chef and Puppet to provide integration with GCE from the outset:

At launch, we have worked with a number of partners - such as RightScale, Puppet Labs, , Numerate, Cliqr and MapR - to integrate their products with Google Compute Engine. These partners offer management services that make it easy for you to move your applications to the cloud and between different cloud environments.

While it’s no Sydney AWS datacentre, Amazon recently announced the release of a Sydney edge location for their Route 53 and Cloudfront services.

With the vast majority of Australia’s international Internet connectivity terminating in Sydney, this should provide the opporunity for drastic latency improvements to Australian consumers of Amazon’s DNS and CDN services.

Women&&Tech

A Simple Plan

We’re going to share stories about smart women doing important things

We will ask a group of clever women out for coffees to pick their brains and share our conversations. We’re not endorsing the obvious; we want to get under the surface of what it’s like to be a woman working in tech.

…

We will interview these women about their experiences, and present that content as public recognition for their efforts and encouragement to put themselves out in the community.

Sounds good to me - taking steps to help redress the unequal representation that women have in IT, and showcase their work.

Oracle agrees to $0 damages in Google v. Oracle trial

Oracle could have sought damages for the small amount of code copying Google was found guilty of, but it chose not to. A stipulation and proposed order that Oracle and Google submitted to Judge William Alsup in US District Court in San Francisco today called for $0 of damages “related to Google’s infringement of Oracle’s copyrights in connection with (1) the rangeCheck code in TimSort.java and ComparableTimSort.java, and (2) the eight decompiled files (seven ‘Impl.java’ files and one ‘ACL’ file).”

Upon seeing the proposal, Judge Alsup asked, “Is there a catch I need to be aware of?” …

Judge Alsup continues to go up in my books.

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time

21. One minute on the system clock has exactly the same duration as one minute on any other clock
22. Ok, but the duration of one minute on the system clock will be pretty close to the duration of one minute on most other clocks.
23. Fine, but the duration of one minute on the system clock would never be more than an hour.
24. You can’t be serious.

R18+ computer games legislation passes Australian Federal Parliament

Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Justice Jason Clare today said that an R18+ category for computer games would now become a reality after it passed the Federal Parliament.

The legislation tonight passed the Senate without amendment.

The reforms bring the classification categories for computer games into line with existing categories used to classify films. It also makes the Australian classification regime more consistent with international standards.

This is great news for Australian gamers.

I needed to extract some browser version information from some Splunk-indexed S3 / Apache access logs today. A quick Google search was unilluminating, so I thought I’d document my own work here.

Rather than delving into the dark arts of defining Splunk extractions and transforms, I figured it would be a good chance to learn about using rex for ad-hoc field extracts while searching. What I’ve come up with is just a quick braindump for now, and only supports a subset of all browsers, but I’ll try to update this snippet as it evolves.

It all began with a strange email - how Yanis Varoufakis became Valve’s economist-in-residence.

“I’m the president of a videogame company (www.valvesoftware.com).”

I thought to myself: Oh, not another “business proposal” from a crackpot… However, something in my head stopped my finger from pressing DEL while my eyes pondered the next line:

“We are running into a bunch of problems as we scale up our virtual economies, and as we link economies together. Would you be interested in consulting with us?”

This looks to be the first of (hopefully) many posts on economics in Valve’s games — I’m looking forward to them.

Melbourne’s Astor Theatre recounts a close call with modern cinema DRM.

… the major studios within the industry are moving towards what is being hailed as the “digital revolution”. The term itself is terrifying. Whilst there are many advantages to digital presentation there are, as with anything, pitfalls too.

…

The KDM we received for Take Shelter didn’t work. We discovered this about ten minutes prior to show time.

Via HackerNews

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, today released the list of applications for new Top Level Domains.

While there are over 1900 individual applications, there are only 1409 distinct TLDs under application. TLDs like .app, .inc, .home and .art are all highly contended, with more than 10 applications vying for the rights to each.