Pat Niemeyer's Page

Today Amazon introduced "reserved instance" pricing for users who tend to run long lived instances.



The usual pricing for a small instance is $0.10 per cpu-hour, which works out to about $73/month if you keep your instance alive 24x7.



With the reserved pricing you can pay a fixed amount for a term of 1 year or 3 years and get a reduced hourly usage rate of $.03 per cpu-hour For 1 year the up front fee is $325, for 3 years it's $500.



If you run your instance all… Continue

Moxie Marlinspike gave a presentation titled: "New Tricks for Defeating SSL in Practice" at the Black Hat conference last week and released code that demonstrates practical, man in the middle based, attacks on browser security.



The results are a bit depressing, but not entirely new or unexpected. The attacks that he presented in the talk mostly skirt around SSL and while they… Continue

In this post I will take a walk through our preferred Java application stack from end to end, noting what I consider to be some useful practices along the way. While it's a never ending process to re-evaluate packages and tools as time goes on, I have found that this basic architecture has held up quite well for many years. We've used it on numerous large commercial applications ranging from critical banking and finance apps to high volume entertainment sites. I'm not going to try to… Continue

In this morning's headlines I came across the following pair of articles:



Apple to Integrate 'QuickTime Pro' Features into Snow Leopard?



Average User Only Runs 2 Apps, So Microsoft Will Charge for More



The first is about how Apple, as part of the upcoming release of… Continue

In this post I will describe how we are using server side GWT RPC serialization at Ikayzo to both improve performance and simplify client code logic.





First, let's have a quick recap of the normal startup sequence of a GWT application. As depicted below, it begins with the client requesting an HTML page containing a GWT script reference and static application text. All that is required in this initial page is a one line script that includes the GWT application's "nocache" file.… Continue