What a Day for WikiLeaks

Wow. What can I say its been one hell of a day as far as what was released by WikiLeaks! Releasing thousands of classified documents out into the wild. The United States State Department must be running around trying to put out fires left and right.

But can you blame WikiLeaks? I mean the United States Government really tried to put the squeeze on this guy. After trumping up Paedophile charges against him, did they really think he was going to turn around and hand them the documents? I mean after that the damage to his reputation is kind of already done... You dont recover from that. Clearly this is a case of a mishandled situation.

Now Julian Assange has told Forbes that he has emails and documents about the banks. Could get interesting. Some of the stuff that has come out of the US documents was fascinating, so you can only imagine the look were going to get at the inner workings of the banking world. “It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” Assange told Andy Greenburg of Forbes

It has always seemed to me both prior to the banking bailout, and after that the banks were trying to pull some kind of trick. Im not sure how they managed to get away with having almost free money handed to them (almost 0% interest from the Federal Reserve) and yet are being stricter on lending to individuals and small businesses.

Starting with Amazon Web Services

As a Software Engineer (and nerdy tinkerer), I have always been interested in trying out new technologies. Luckily I've had the chance at work to play with Amazon Web Services for a few things here and there. Played around a little with Windows EC2 instances (prior to them getting Windows 2008 which meant no ASP.NET MVC for me at the time). Did a little bit with S3. But the thing is as an Engineer who has spent an inordinate amount of time playing in the Windows realm I have been trying to diversify.

I've spent my own time playing with Python, Ruby and Haskell. I even managed to convince work to buy me Macbook Pro. The problem being that since I spend a lot of time living in the Web space, generally my ideas for coding involve the Web. I dont really have the extra income to have a Linux server at my beck and call when I want to try something out, so I've been pretty much not doing a whole heck of a lot. But Amazon has recently fixed that for me!

For those of you looking to try out cloud computing, or for someone trying to get that startup off the ground for a very low price Amazon now has a Free Usage Tier!

Thats right! Now I get the chance to not only play in the Cloud (hooray! Resume buzzword! sigh.) I also get a Linux instance that is up all month! That means I can pretty much spin up an idea check it out, see if I like it and if I want to continue. For those entrepreneurial folks out there. It means you can have a free server to create your web application on, and you aren't out any money for things like data centers.

Dig it!