Valentine Gift Idea

Amazon Rekognition is one of AWS' artificial intelligence services. In addition to detecting objects, scenes, and faces in images, Rekognition can also search and compare faces. Behind the scenes, Rekognition uses deep neural network models to analyze billions of images daily.

Amazon Rekognition returns an array of attributes for each face that it locates in an image. On February 10th the service added a new attribute, an estimated age range. This value is expressed in years, and is returned as a pair of integers. The age ranges can overlap; the face of a 5 year old might have an estimated range of 4 to 6 but the face of a 6 year old might have an estimated range of 4 to 8. You can use this new attribute to power public safety applications, collect demographics, to assemble a set of photos that span a desired time frame, or just for fun and games.

Try it on https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/home?region=eu-west-1#/face-detection.

Why not surprise your beloved with an estimated age range tomorrow? You will also get suggestions (expressed as confidence in percentages) of whether she "appears to be female" and "appears to be happy."

Let me know how you get on.

If This Then That

Pippa (Icons passim) found a flat and moved out just before Christmas. I find it astonishing that she was with me for nearly two months. It seems like no time at all.

It has, however, freed me to start messing about with If This Then That, and particularly its integration with my Hive heating system. I could hardly have it switching on and off based on my whereabouts when there might be someone else in the house.

The idea behind IFTTT is simple. It is a web-based service that allows me to create chains of simple conditional statements, called "applets", which are triggered based on changes to other web services.

The day before yesterday I created an applet used Android Location automatically to set the thermostat to schedule whenever I arrived at or near home. It didn't seem to fire at first, but it worked a charm yesterday.

Last night, I created an applet to set the temperature to 7 centigrade (enough to stop the place freezing up) whenever I left. That didn't kick in until lunch time even though I was at work before nine. With any luck it will bed in like Monday's effort.

Now Open – AWS London Region

Jeff Barr

Last week we launched our 15th AWS Region and today we are launching our 16th. We have expanded the AWS footprint into the United Kingdom with a new Region in London, our third in Europe. AWS customers can use the new London Region to better serve end-users in the United Kingdom and can also use it to store data in the UK.

Nor rush but I guess it would be prudent for us to look at migrating all our AWS properties from Ireland to London; Brexit?

curate's egg

I fancied listening to some Diana Kraal yesterday as I was pottering about in the kitchen only to find myself floundering in a senior moment in which I could remember that she was Elvis Costello's wife but couldn't put my finger on her name.

"Alexa, who is Elvis Costello married to?" I asked my Amazon Echo.

"Diana Kraal is the spouse of Elvis Costello" she replied.

You could have knocked me down with a feather.

Later I tried "Alexa put meet Ollie in the pub in my schedule at four o'clock."

She checked if this was four o'clock in the morning or in the afternoon, and then added an appointment called "Volume king of pop" to my Google diary.

Back to the drawing board.

Late on parade

Our auction system was featured on the Money Saving Expert weekly email again last night (see Icons passim).

It has already sent us 400,000 more page views than we would normally get.

That is why I have neglected you till so late in the day, dear reader.

Must Dash

That'll be the one for me then

WHAT IS DASH BUTTON?
Amazon Dash Button is a Wi-Fi-connected device that reorders your favourite product with the press of a button. Each Dash Button is paired with a product of your choice, which is selected during the setup process. When you're running low, simply press Dash Button—ensuring you never run out of your essentials again.

SIMPLE TO SET UP AND USE
Dash Button is set up and managed through the Amazon App on your Android or iOS smartphone, and works in any location with a Wi-Fi connection. Once setup is complete, a notification (if enabled) is sent to your smartphone every time an order is placed.

ORDER PROTECTION
With this setting, Dash Button will not place a new order until your prior order is delivered—regardless of how many times Dash Button is pressed. In addition, you will receive an order notification (if enabled) for every order placed, allowing you to cancel an order before it is dispatched. You have a free return policy here for products purchased through Dash Button.

£4.99 DISCOUNT AFTER FIRST PRESS
Buy Dash Button for £4.99, and get a £4.99 discount after your first press.

EXCLUSIVELY FOR PRIME MEMBERS
Dash Button is available for Prime Members only.

Chicks dig it

AWS Certificate Manager is a service that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services. SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the Internet. AWS Certificate Manager removes the time-consuming manual process of purchasing, uploading, and renewing SSL/TLS certificates. With AWS Certificate Manager, you can quickly request a certificate, deploy it on AWS resources such as Elastic Load Balancers or Amazon CloudFront distributions, and let AWS Certificate Manager handle certificate renewals. SSL/TLS certificates provisioned through AWS Certificate Manager are free. You pay only for the AWS resources you create to run your application.

This kind of thing is my bag.

My fascinating life

Be still my beating heart

we've got about 160,000 auction photos to archive so this new AWS offering looks handy, not that S3 ever cost that much anyway.

Dear Amazon Web Services customer, 

We are excited to announce a new, lower-cost Amazon S3 storage class for data that is accessed less frequently. Amazon S3 Standard - Infrequent Access (Standard - IA) offers the high durability, low latency, and high throughput of Amazon S3 Standard, but with prices starting at $0.0125 per GB per month, $0.01 per GB retrieval fee, and a 30-day storage minimum. This combination of low cost and high performance makes Standard - IA ideal for long-term file storage, backups, and disaster recovery. 

Additionally, effective September 1, 2015, we are decreasing the price of Amazon Glacier storage by up to 36% for the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) regions. Today's price drop continues the AWS tradition of reducing our costs and passing the savings along to our customers. This price reduction will take effect automatically and no action is required on your part. 

You can now choose between three Amazon S3 storage classes that are designed for 99.999999999% durability: Standard, Standard - IA, and Amazon Glacier. Amazon S3 Standard is secure, highly scalable object storage with very low latency, high throughput, and a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.9% availability, making it suitable for a wide variety of applications and workloads that frequently access data such as business applications, dynamic web sites, content distribution, and big data analytics. For data that is less active, but must be immediately accessible when needed, the new Amazon S3 Standard - IA introduces a reduced per GB storage price, with an availability SLA of 99%. For longer-term archiving where immediate access is not required, Amazon Glacier is the lowest cost Amazon S3 storage option, available for as little as $0.007/GB per month. 

Amazon S3 also allows you to define configurable lifecycle policies at the bucket level that will automatically move objects to the preferred storage option. For example, you can store data into the Amazon S3 Standard storage class, move it to Standard - IA 30 days after it has been uploaded, and then to Amazon Glacier 60 days later. These transitions happen without any changes to the application, or to the Amazon S3 bucket where the object is stored. 

For more information on today's announcements, read the AWS blog and visit theAmazon S3 webpage. 

Sincerely, 
The Amazon Web Services Team

Simplified Reserved Instance Options for Amazon RDS

Reserved Instances have been a part of the AWS pricing model for quite some time. You can reserve an instance and receive a significant discount, along with a capacity reservation, when you purchase a Reserved Instance (RI).

You don’t need to make any code or administrative changes in order to benefit from Reserved Instances. We’ll automatically apply Reserved Instance rates first when we compute your bill in order to minimize your costs.

New Payment Options
We are simplifying the Reserved Instance options that are available to users of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). The new model is payment-based and provides a single type of Reserved Instance, with three payment options:

• No Upfront – No upfront payment is required. This option provides a substantial discount (typically about 30%) over the one year term of the RI when compared to On-Demand.
• Partial Upfront – With a balance of payments between upfront and hourly, this option replaces the previous Heavy Utilization RI and provides a high discount (typically about 60% for a three year term) over the course of a one or three year term.
• All Upfront – This option allows you to pay for the entire RI term (one or three years) with one upfront payment, and provides the best discount (typically about 63% for a three year term).

Yes, this is the type of thing I spend my days thinking about. Oh the insane glamour of it all.

Amazin'

Technology giant Amazon has said its web services business generated sales of $1.57bn (£1.04bn) in the first quarter of the year and is profitable.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing offering that makes money by charging businesses to host websites and other applications.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in a statement: "Amazon web services is a $5bn business and still growing fast."

And I was on to it from the very beginning, sagely observing on August 26, 2006:

Amazon have just launched a limited Beta of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - "a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud", and I think that the ground may be shifting in our business.

Good for me.

Why go out?

AWS: Today we are making Windows on EC2 even more powerful by giving you the ability to seamlessly join EC2 instances to a domain that you have configured with AWS Directory Service. After you configure this new feature using the AWS Management Console, the EC2 API, or the AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell you can choose which domain a new instance will join when it launches. You can also seamlessly join existing instances to a domain.

Prodnose: Whatever floats your boat.

Myself: After you have joined your EC2 instances to a domain, you can use Domain Administrator credentials to access the instances via RDP (the generated local administrator password can still be used).

Sheila Heti: I wonder why I am up here on this stage when I’d rather be at home, when being at home would be so much more comforting.

get your fee, with Route 53

I had a couple of existing domain names transferred from another registrar to be managed by Amazon Web Services' Route 53 yesterday. It didn't offer registration until comparatively recently.

I will gradually transfer all of our, and our client's registrations over as they come up for renewal.

When it is complete I will be managing all our IT requirements with the exception of PCs, tablets and phones we own and broadband subscriptions in AWS.

Amazon Web Services was launched as a limited beta just over eight years ago.

The Cloud

"Nobody understand the cloud. It's a fugging mystery!"

A birthday is a day for looking back and getting some perspective. Now that Hollywood is making mainstream sex farces about cloud computing and online voice search, I have to acknowledge that what we do is scarcely esoteric any more. (The technology that is, not the sex.)

Sex tape is released on 3 September.

Feed Me!

Forbes

Feedly is currently suffering a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, it announced earlier this morning on its blog.

You may have noticed that you can’t access the website or load any of your feeds via the app. Feedly explained in a short message two hours ago that the DDoS perpetrator is holding Feedly to ransom and asking for money to stop the attack, Feedly has refused to comply.

CEO of Feedly, Edwin Khodabakchian, said in a short statement: “Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can.”

This is quite incredibly inconvenient to me and my daily checks. Actually it is ridiculous to be so dependent on it.

head in the clouds

I'm on record (see BuyCons passim) as thinking that Amazon Web Services was a great idea from the moment I heard of its release as a limited beta.

Shares in Amazon on 25 August 2006, when I first picked up on Web Services were trading at 28.03. Today they are 357.35.

I know you can do the maths as well as anyone else, but if I had followed my nose with a punt of a grand back then, I would have twelve thousand seven hundred and fifty quid today.

The Internet of Things

I'm very far from sure I would want my fridge gossiping about me to my washing machine behind my back. I know this because I would like to eavesdrop on other peoples' fridges gossiping about them with their washing machines behind their backs.

Fans for the memory

Some time ago, we shut off our last physical server, having moved everything to the Amazon cloud.

Now that  I am using a Surface Pro 2 as my main machine, plugging it into a docking station when I am at work, there are now no conventional desktops running either.

So, for the first time in I don't know how many years, there isn't a single cooling fan humming in the background as I work.

I should get rid of all the junk and chill in this new Zen workspace.

How many people work at Pornhub?

How many people work at Pornhub?

We have over 150 employees across the world, with about half of them being engineers. Keep in mind, we are an IT company.

The ACA website totally fumbled upon launch, leaving just a select few (including yours truly) able to access the site—but millions more unable to even get pages to load. How complicated is it to create a website that millions will use a day?

Hosting a website that over 35 million people a day flock to is no easy task. To create a website that can handle this type of traffic has to be done in steps, first building a scalable model, and continue adding capacity as the traffic volume grows. Everything must be done step by step. You can’t take any shortcuts.

What could you offer the Obamacare / ACA site?

Overall, I’d offer to lend them our engineers. We work very hard to train everyone to be able to handle any challenge. It’s no small task to accommodate the traffic volume they intended to. Since we specialize in high traffic websites, we are one of few companies who would have been able to get the site back on track. That’s why we made the offer -- we have the utmost confidence in our teams to accomplish anything.

For all that I am chuckling, there is a strange sort of logic to this.

Blame it on my youth

I got an email from Amazon yesterday which said, "you may have noticed that CD albums purchased from Amazon since you became a customer have been added to your Cloud Player library." (I hadn't noticed by the way.)

I tried it out on the web as well as in the iPhone and iPad app versions.

On iOS the Cloud Player lets you play your iTunes purchases as well, which is all rather splendid.

Gathering all my music together is a great thing in principle, but the trouble with my jazz vocal standards itch is that alphabetical order does tend to raise questions like "how many versions of Blame it on my youth does one person need?" Yes I am talking to you Victoria Tolstoy, Kurt Elling, Jamie Cullum., Keith Jarrett etc. etc.

If I expected love when first we kissed
Blame it on my youth
If only just for you I did exist
Blame it on my youth
I believed in everything
Like a child at three
You meant more than everything
All the world to me
If you were on my mind all night and day
Blame it on my youth
If I forgot to eat and sleep and pray
Blame it on my youth
If I cried a little bit
When first I learned the truth
Don't blame it on my heart
Blame it on my youth
If you were on my mind all night and day-ay
Blame it on my youth
If I forgot to eat and sleep and pray
Blame it on my youth
If I cried a little bit
When first I learned the truth
Don't blame it on my heart
Blame it on my youth

Sniff.... I'm only crying because I'm happy. If you need me I will be in the cupboard under the stairs with boxes (one of each) of Milk Tray and Kleenex.