Month: February 2009

Jungle Disk to Support Cloud Files

Jungle Disk started life as a way to backup local files to Amazon’s S3 — I use it to backup the 300gb or so of personal data on my local system and it works great. The company behind the software was recently acquired by Rackspace so in its next release, Jungle Disk will add support for Rackspace Cloud Files,

Since Jungle Disk was started our plan has been to support multiple online storage providers and give users a choice of where they want to store their data. However until recently there haven’t been any viable alternatives to Amazon S3. We’re pleased to announce that in the next release of Jungle Disk (2.6), we’ll be adding support for Rackspace Cloud Files as an option alongside Amazon S3. Like Amazon S3, Cloud Files is a distributed, replicated, Internet-scale storage service. Rackspace is the world leader in hosting and operates data centers across the US as well as in Europe and Asia.

We’re also excited to announce the pricing for Cloud Files with Jungle Disk. Cloud Files storage will cost $0.15 per gigabyte per month with no additional charges for requests or bandwidth in either direction. You only pay for the storage you use. We expect that this simplified pricing along with Rackspace’s reputation for quality and service will make Cloud Files a great option for many users.

They’re quick to point out this means they’re supporting Cloud Files in addition to Amazon S3. In the comments section, one of the developers notes that with the upcoming release, users will be able to backup to both services simultaneously. At some point, however, Jungle Disk will support some sort of replication — backup to S3 or Cloud Files and then data gets replicated between the two without having to double bandwidth usage. Nice.

As for the pricing, it makes sense for Cloud Files to drop the bandwidth charges that Amazon S3 charges since, for most backup situations, the typical user isn’t going to have a lot of bandwidth usage after the initial upload. Making it cheap to get things stored and those monthly charges going is smart business. (S3, however, gets used for a lot of purposes beyond backup, so it might not make sense for them).

WoW Character Display Plugin for WordPress

There are a number of WordPress plugins that are designed to pull character data from the WoWArmory, but WoW Character Display is head-and-shoulders above the rest. The main advantage it has is that it caches the armory data, so after its pulled once it only gets refreshed every X minutes, with the administrator able to set the frequency.

Most of the other WoWArmory-related plugins essentially pull in the data fresh each time a page featuring the character or guild is displayed, which is less than ideal. Since the WoWArmory data itself changes infrequently (it is usually updated sortly after you log out of WoW), reloading it for every page load is unnecessary.

I’ve got the plugin activated on this page and you can see my main toon here.

Last.Fm: TechCrunch Are Full of Shit

Wasn’t it just other day that Michael Arrington was whining about how unfair and mean people were to him? And yet that didn’t stop Erick Schonfeld from running a long story on TechCrunch about a completely baseless rumor that Last.Fm was sharing user data with the RIAA in order to track down people who had obtained leaked copies of the new U2 album.

The rumor Schonfeld chose to higlight was even third-hand as reported by his alleged source,

As a result, word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user’s listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA, according to a tip we received:

I heard from an irate friend who works at CBS that last.fm recently provided the RIAA with a giant dump of user data to track down people who are scrobbling unreleased tracks. As word spread numerous employees at last.fm were up in arms because the data collected (a) can be used to identify individuals and (b) will likely be shared with 3rd parties that have relationships with the RIAA.

What an asshole. If this were true, this would pretty much kill Last.Fm like yesterday. To run such a rumor based on “some guy told me he heard from this other guy …” is just idiotic. Schonfeld would be fired at any organization with ethics, but presumably Arrington is still crying like a goddamn baby about how no one is nice to him anymore to pay much attention.

At least Last.Fm didn’t release some boring denial,

So do us a favour – if you see people spreading the rumour, refer them to this blog post and mention you heard from a friend that “Techcrunch are full of shit.”

Yeah, I think we’ve known that all along.

JLA Trophy Room Green Lantern Rings Prop

Normally I pass on these DC Direct prop replicas because, despite how cool they are, the prices just don’t justify it for me. This JLA Trophy Room: Green Lantern Rings Prop Replica will definitely be an exception.

Green Lantern Rings Prop

According to the description at DC Direct,

An age-old prophecy foretold the coming of the Blackest Night, and the war of light between the emotional spectrum! The Green Lantern and (yellow) Sinestro Corps are confronted by the Red Lanterns, Agent Orange, the Blue Lanterns, the mysterious Indigo Lanterns, the (violet) Star Sapphires and, ultimately, the Black Lantern Corps.

Now, for the first time ever, all of these Power Rings are collected together in one spectacular display!

Eight plated metal rings (each a different color, signifying the insignia of the various Corps) fit into a battery-operated, light-up resin display base. The rings are protected by a removable glass dome that sits on top of the base.

$250 . . . or the low, low price of just $31.25 per ring!