Karmona Pragmatic Blog

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.9 – Carmen (named in honor of the jazz vocalist Carmen McRae) in less than 3 minutes…

WordPress 2.9 Highlights

* Global undo/”trash” feature
* Built-in image editor
* Batch plugin update and compatibility checking
* Easier video embeds
* Over 500 tickets, bugs and enhancements

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.8 in less than 3 minutes…

WordPress 2.8 Highlights

* Speed!!!
* Theme Browser and Installer
* Ability to add Custom Headers
* New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new Widgets API
* New ways to customize dashboard widgets
* Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
* Configurable Views on Management Pages
* Faster Loading Admin Pages

S3 (Simple Storage Device ) Overview

“Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.” (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/)

What can I do with this S3 thingy?

Many things… but I will focus on a pragmatic and more common use case – You can use S3 as the ultimate network drive to share your music collection, backup your documents or to store your blog images (a.k.a. CDN for the masses) etc.

Is it free???

Almost…   $0.15 per Giga (+ you can estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Monthly Calculator)

How do I start?

To use Amazon S3 service, you’ll simply need to open an Amazon account and register to the S3.

Interesting tools to simplify your S3 experience:

• Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer – Simple Firefox add-on that provides an FTP like interface (Windows Explorer) to upload and manage files on S3 – “S3Fox Organizer helps you organize/manage/store your files on Amazon S3. It is easy to install and use as it is integrated into the browser…”

• Amazon S3 WordPress plugin – This plugin will help you to stores your files on Amazon S3.

• DropBox – New Amazon-S3-backed-storage service (thanks to Shlomo for the introduction) – Very simple to use and with 2GB storage limit on the default (free) account and paid upgrade to 50GB of space for $9.99 / month which is not that much above the $7.5 they need to pay to Amazon (before optimizations ;)

P.S. If you liked DropBox you might also like many others…

WordPress 2.7 – “Coltrane” (named for John Coltrane) was released today and I have just finished a 25 minutes (including this post :) smooth upgrade using the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

Coltrane seems to have a very cool and much faster new inteface  (150 people contribution) and I didn’t have any issues until now…

Much more details (+ visual introduction) on the WordPress.org blog.

Enjoy.

My boss have returned from the recent techcrunch with a “brand new multimedia and Internet-enabled quad-band GSM EDGE-supported” iPhone and missed (yet again) the trendy next generation iPhone Killer gadget -  iPoor @ http://ipoor.org

I didn’t drink coffee most of my life (although it could be really handy during my army years or right after my daughters were born) but last year I decided to start drinking this bitter-black-magic and yesterday I bought my very first coffee-maker…

I bought a Bialetti-Moka-Express which was claimed (by Bialetti…) to be the world’s number one coffee-maker (I was customer number 200,000,001) and made my very first espresso two hours ago…

This tiny “espresso pot” (a.k.a. moka in Italy) is a simple device that uses steam pressure to force water through a strainer to make espresso so I did feel a little strange putting this tiny pot directly on the burner of my stove and I didn’t really believe it will produce the bitter-black-magic, but it worked like a charm and with very little experience I manage to produce a pretty damn good espresso!

Years of Italian experience have produced a 20$ state-of-the-art coffee-maker which re-defined simplicity… (especially when I first thought of buying a 1500$ one-button coffee-maker monster engine)

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Bialetti Moka Express @ http://www.bialettishop.com/MokaExpressMain.htm
This is how you do it @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huC3E1c4SBs