A little over a month ago, I was finally pulled into the rapidly growing thing that is Minecraft. Like many of you, I ended up happily breaking blocks and constructing crude huts and castles into the wee hours of the night.

As is the case with many other things I ...

We have been helping one of our clients moves their massive collection of audio and video media to S3 over the last few weeks. After most of the files were in place, we saw that our usage reports on for one of the buckets was reporting much higher usage than ...

We’ve been working on transitioning a larger customer’s website from an Exchange-based email server to Amazon Simple Email Service, in an effort to improve reliability and eliminate one more bit of reliance on internal infrastructure. I’ll share our experiences here for others considering the same thing.

Evennia, the Twisted+Django MUD server, has just finished bringing in shiny new support for IRC and IMC (Inter-mud communication) as of revision 1456. This allows users to bind a local game channel to a remote IRC or IMC room. Evennia transparently sends/receives messages between the game server and ...

Maintaining, monitoring, and keeping a mail server in good standing can be pretty time-consuming. Having to worry about things like PTR records and being blacklisted from a false-positive stinks pretty bad. We also didn’t want to have to run and manage yet another machine. Fortunately, the recently released Amazon ...

One of the previously annoying limitations of Amazon S3 was that you could not specify things like Content-Disposition on a per-request basis. If we use an MP3 as an example, if you uploaded it without a Content-Disposition header set, viewing it in a browser via the S3 URL would likely ...

There are a good number of choices for deploying Django projects, whether they be Fabric, Chef, Puppet, Paver, or something else. However, each may be more suitable for some types of deployments than others. For example, Fabric’s lack of parallel execution may leave you frustrated if you have many ...

For the benefit of others either considering Amazon’s EC2, or who are already there, I thought I’d point something out. I am not sure if this is an Ubuntu EC2 AMI issue, an EC2 issue, an EBS issue, or some combination of all of these, but we are ...

I took a moment to give Amazon’s new Appstore a quick run-through today, and thought I’d mind dump a few assorted thoughts.

The Django-based Evennia MUD Server took another great step forward today in adding support for the excellent South migration app. This should knock down another barrier for those considering beginning development on their own games. The kinds of schema changes from this point forward should be fully covered by the ...