Ideas….

Today the Open Cloud Manifesto was released.  Paul Miller has a great podcast in which he talks with Reuven Cohen about the manifesto.  Paul and Reuven do spend some time discussing the controversy surrounding the Manifesto, but then move on to the meat of the document.

Essentially the purpose of the Open Cloud Manifesto is to draw attention to the idea of cloud interoperability.  Right now there are a multitude of cloud platforms and with them come unique APIs.  This makes it difficult for users to port their applications to another cloud platform or use multiple cloud platforms in conjunction with one another without having to rewrite code.  The companies that signed the Manifesto are essentially stating that they are interested in making their platforms open to the rest of the cloud computing community.

The Open Cloud Manifesto covers the following topics:

• what identifies cloud computing
• barriers to adoption
• goals of an open cloud
• principles of an open cloud

Its nice and short so take 5 minutes next time your bored and read through.

Amazon announced they have a new Amazon Web Services Toolkit for Eclipse:

Today, we are introducing the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse. This free, open source plugin for the Eclipse IDE makes it easier and more efficient for you to develop, deploy, and debug Java applications on top of AWS.

By bringing the popular IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to AWS, they are making it easier for developers to create server clusters for their applications.

When people tell you that Verizon Fios is like the best thing ever, they aren’t lying.

Today Verizon updated my cable box.  Occasionally I read the little “here is what we updated message” and today I am so glad I did.  The message told me that the “What’s Hot on Fios Widget” was available (yes my cable box has widgets for weather, sports, etc.) so I decided to take a look at it.  To the left is an image of what I saw.

The “What’s Hot on Fios Widget” shows you the 15 most popular shows being watched right now.  No lie, right now.  When the time changed to 7:00 the top show was Access Hollywood (how unforunate but still its cool that I know that).  There is also one for the hotest movies being ordered On Demand.

I wonder if they have an API for this puppy.  Afterall, my cable boxes are all on the network.  I mean I could at any moment (if there was an API) find out from the comfort of my computer what the world is watching.

I can’t tell you how much more I love Verizon Fios (and honestly I didn’t think that was possible).