Great Site for Austin Crime Information

I just discovered krimelabb, Austin’s citywide crime data site.  It pulls information directly from APD’s crime incidence reports.  You can research by zip code and view results as a list or graph and also on a Google map.  It is very simple and easy to use.  I will definitely be using this more often when researching crime in different neighborhoods.  It is great to see the city making this information easier to use.

Moving to the cloud

I am working on a rails-based project that we have decided to host in the cloud.  We have decided to go with Amazon Web Services.  We will be using EC2 and with an Elastic IP.  We are looking into Cloudfront as well.  So far I have created my account and launched my instance which was based on Webficients prebuilt Ubuntu image.  It is geared towards rails apps with Passenger and MySQL already installed.  It also has enterprise ruby which I will look into when I have more time.  So after configuring my keys, I was able to ssh into the server and poke around.  My next step is to get the command line tools installed and configured.  Then I hope to my image customized and save it.  Since server admin isn’t really my expertise, I am hoping this image will help me automate a lot of it.  I can simply relaunch a new instance as needed with my preconfigured AMI and off I go.  At least I hope it will be that easy, we shall see.

Just auto-upgraded WordPress to 2.8

I just ran the auto-upgrade for this blog to bring it to 2.8.  This is the first time I have ever used the built-in auto-upgrade.  Most of my sites and clients’ sites are hosted on Dreamhost so I have always used their one-click installers which have been awesome.  Then WordPress came out with the built-in upgrader which makes it even easier.  Well it worked perfectly.  It’s as easy as upgrading your modules.