Google

My Amazon EC2 discount contract is almost up, and I’ve been playing with Google Compute Engine (GCE). Initial impressions are that it’s faster and costs less money, particularly if you don’t want to pay up-front for EC2 reserved instances. Google’s web console is more modern than Amazon’s, though slightly less sophisticated. Google’s CLI tools are much faster and don’t require Java. Google’s API uses JSON instead of XML. In terms of capabilities, GCE is not as advanced as EC2, but it’s vastly more powerful than Linode, Digital Ocean, and the like. [Read More]

Since switching from Android to iOS, I’ve been looking for an instant messaging client that works well with Google Talk. Push notifications are essential for the “instant” part of instant messaging. Unfortunately, most iOS Talk apps only have push capability until the application times out in the background (10 minutes); One client, Verbs IM Pro (App Store link), has server-based push notifications, but it times out after a week, and has some bugs and reliability issues. [Read More]