Just got an email from Amazon with their announcement of the beta release of the AWS Management Console. This helps users manage their EC2 resources though an easy to use web interface. No more third party browser addons and custom code to check the status of EC2 instances and playing around with Elastic IPs and EBS. I’m sure everyone’s been waiting a long time for this move from Amazon.

Their new interface is quite a help in getting the regular chores done and taking a look at the current activities on EC2. Here’s how the screen looks when you log in (click on the image for a larger version):

Looks like I’ll be using ElasticFox less after getting used to this clean interface. Here’s what you can do with this version of the console:

• AMI Management: browse and search AMIs, launch instances from AMIs, deregister and register AMIs
• Instance Management: launch, reboot, terminate, get console output, RDP/SSH help, etc.
• Security Group Management: create and delete security groups, add and remove permissions, configure firewall settings, open and close ports
• Elastic IP Management: create and release IP Addresses, associate IPs to instances
• Elastic Block Store: create, delete, attach and detach volumes. Take snapshots and manage snapshots.
• Key Pair management: create and delete public/private key pairs.

Though this initial version does provide all the basic interfaces for managing EC2, Amazon’s got a lot planned out for the AWS Management Console. Here’s what’s coming up in the future:

• Tagging – Label and group Amazon EC2 resources with your own custom metadata to make it easier to identify and manage your instances, volumes, and other EC2 resources.
• Monitoring, Load Balancing and Auto-scaling – View real-time monitoring of operational metrics within Amazon EC2, configure load balancing and auto-scaling rules through a web-based UI.
• Amazon S3 Support – Create and delete Amazon S3 buckets, upload and download objects through your browser, edit permissions, set log data, and manage URLs.
• Amazon SimpleDB Support – Construct SimpleDB queries through a point-and-click query expression builder and explore your data through a graphical dataset viewer.
• Amazon SQS Support – Manage your SQS queues, add and retrieve messages from you queues, test and build your applications with help from the AWS Management Console.
• CloudFront Support – Setup and administer content delivery distributions on Amazon CloudFront using a simple web-based tool on the AWS Management Console.

Links:

AWS Console
Amazon Web Services Blog: Manage Amazon EC2 With New Web-Based AWS Management Console

Looking for an easy way to provide social features on your site without having to go through all the hassels of creating login scripts and member databases? Google Friend Connect allows you to do that in a few simple steps. Just signup for an account, upload 2 html files and embed a javascript for the gadget you’d like to use – as simple as that !

Visitors can sign in using their Google, Yahoo, AIM or Open ID accounts, which makes it easier to pull in more interactions without having them to register on your site. Currently Friend Connect provides a few gadgets like the Wall and Review & Rate. You can also create custom gadgets if you’re up to it.

The Wall and Review gadgets can also be set in moderation mode where you get to choose what goes up on the site and delete unwanted posts.

Link: Google Friend Connect

AdsBlackList.com is a unique project designed to enable you to dramatically reduce the amount of MFA (made for ads) and LCPC (low cost per click) sites which appear through the use of PPC systems such as Google Adsenseâ„¢, Yahoo Publisher Networkâ„¢ and Chitika eMiniMallsâ„¢.

To get started with this service, you’ll first have to create an account for free. You can submit your sites and the popular keywords for your site. This service uses these keywords you define for your site to generate a list of MFA and LCPC sites. You can take this list of sites and add them to the Competitive site filters in your Google Adsense account (Adsense Setup>Competitive Ad Filter). This means that ads from the filtered sites won’t come up on your site, and effectively increasing your earnings.

The free account from AdsBlackList is limited to just 200 sites, which is fine for me, since Adsense allows only 200 URLs in the Competitive Ad Filter.

Link: AdsBlackList.com

Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

This site’s currently got some good HOWTOs on Web security, DOM manipulation, CSS and styles and more. A worthwhile place to check if you’re looking at some quick reference and help.

Link: Google Doctype

G.ho.st an acronym for Global Hosted Operating SysTem is a service which provides an free online OS, storage space and an email account.

I’d checked this service out and found it a pretty good concept, which allows you to upload your files to your online storage space, work on them on their Virtual Computer and save the changes online. The apps which this Virtual computer provides are pretty cool, since they’re all online services. The spreadsheet and document editor are actually Zoho’s apps which are embedded here. This service uses Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services behind the covers to provide the virtual machines and the storage space.

The only problem I see with these online OS services is the requirement for decent bandwidth to access these. These services tend to crawl on slower lines, rendering these really useless. But then if someone gives me 3GB space free, why should I complain !

G. ho.st (“ghost�, the Global hosted operating system) provides a free and complete Virtual Computer (VC) service, including personal desktop, files and applications, available from any browser. G.ho.st is the world’s first and only true open Web Operating System (Web OS), working seamlessly with leading third-party web applications. The G.ho.st VC delivers a mature computing environment to every person, which is free of charge, available everywhere and admin-free. The G.ho.st VC service is available at http://G.ho.st.

Screen shots:

Link: G.ho.st

Google’s just released a preview version of Google Friend Connect, which allows you to add social features on your site with minimal coding. This is still a preview release so you’ll have sign up to get into the queue.

Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.

Here’s a video introduction of Google Friend Connect:

Link: Google Friend Connect

Microsoft has taken the wraps off a Technology Preview of its new Live Mesh platform, which promises to connect disparate devices so they can seamlessly share information. But beyond the surface, Live Mesh portends that Microsoft doesn’t just want to compete on the Web; it wants to be the Web.

Links:
Microsoft’s ‘Live Mesh’ aims to become the universal window to the Web
Live Mesh Site
Live Mesh Tech Preview Screenshot Gallery

Here’s a new addon called Zementa for Firefox, which suggests content for your blog as you create your posts. This plugin currently works for Wordpress (hosted and self-hosted), Typepad and Blogger. The content suggested by Zementa are all copyright cleared so you don’t have to go trolling for content and licence issues for your blog.

I’ve installed this on my blog to see how it works, and the suggestions given by this seem to be pretty good. It adds new sidebars to the Wordpress Edit post screen for the sugestions presented.

In this article image on the right,  the in-article links and the related article links below are all from Zementa’s plugin.

Link: Zementa
Download Zementa

Adobe has just announced the beta version of Photoshop Express, which is an online service which allows users to perform basic editing and apply effects on your uploaded images. They also provide 2GB of image hosting.

Photoshop Express was created with Flex, Adobe’s free, open source framework for building RIAs. Flex applications provide a consistent, rich user experience across operating systems and all major browsers, including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and others. An Internet connection and an up-to-date Flash® Player 9 are all that are required to experience Adobe Photoshop Express. In its early phases, Photoshop Express is available to US residents-only in English. Users may experience slow performance if accessed outside of the US. Future plans include availability in other languages and countries.

Link: http://www.photoshop.com/express

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Here’s a site I came across, which has a boat load of links to Open Source software.  The list is divided into various categories to ease your search. So if you’re looking for open source tools to get work done, check this one out first.

Link: Open Source Living 

Flauntr allows you to embed their services on your site for free. API programming knowledge not required! Click on the image above to see how one of the embedding methods work.

Flauntr provides 3 different ways you can embed their service on your site:

1. LightBox : Get a nice little graphic you can put on your blog post, panel or header. When one of your readers clicks on it , flauntR appears in a popup.
2. Iframe: If you want to allow your readers to enjoy flauntR without even a pop up, meaning flauntR sits right in your site.
3. Linkback: f you want to set up an image or set of images for editing or viewing through flauntR this is the right widget for you.

The method I used to embed code you see above this post is using their Lightbox method. If you’re running a image gallery site and would like to allow people to edit the photos straight off your site, I’d recommed integrating the Linkback method for your images.

To get more information on this, head over to: http://www.flauntr.com/flauntr/login/intro.html and get the embed codes to try them out.

While you’re out there, also check out their new apps – photomobilR and photoprofilR. photomobilR allows you to resize your images to fit ask the desktops of about 250 models of mobile phones! If you haven’t created a your own custom desktop background for your mobile yet, this is the right time to start.

photoprofilR is for those social network junkies to allow you to resize your photos to fit the profiles of 30 social network sites.

Here’s an online service which allows you to edit and style your photos online. flauntR currently provides two services – photoeditR and photostylR. Both services allow provides an interface to upload images from the desktop as well as pull images from flickr though the flickr API.

photoeditR is a basic photo editing service which allows you to perform basic actions and effects on your photos. You can resize, rotate, colorize, remove red-eye and spruce up your photos here. If you’re looking for more advanced features, you’ll have to use the photostylR service which provides much more to spice up your pictures. There are predefined effects here which you can apply to your pics. Effects include digital scrapbooking style ‘compositions’, textures, light effects, overlays and colorations.

Once you finish editing your pics you can save them on flauntR in an album, download them to your system or directly send them to flickr.

Link: www.flauntr.com

Here’s something I cooked up in flauntr in a few minutes:

Have you ever wondered how you would look if you were to appear in one of the Simpson’s episodes? Here’s your chance to find out. Head over to Simpsonize me and upload a pic of your self and out comes your Simpsonized character!  You can tweak and accessorize your character to make it look more like you.

If you’ve Simpsonized yourself  do share your character too here.

Here’s another shot of me outside Appu’s Kwik-e-mart at Springfield.

Link: http://www.simpsonizeme.com

Here’s a cool app from Google India Labs called Google Indic Transliteration. Here’s what Google says about the app:

Google Indic Transliteration offers an option for converting Roman characters to the DevanÄ?garÄ« characters used in Hindi. This lets you type Hindi words phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation — it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other, not their meaning.

When I typed in my name, here’s the Hindi text which came out of the app : वीनू थॉमस

Link: http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/

Here’s a cool service called MapmyIndia which gives you driving directions in some of the major cities in India.

Link: http://mapmyindia.com

Onyourmo is a location based service which gives you the nearest restaruants, bars, atms, cinemas around your area of interest.

Link: http://www.onyomo.com

For users on the go, a wap version of the site is available at:  http://owap.in/

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Link: http://recaptcha.net