Web services seem to be multiplying like rabbits these days. For a good sampling of just how many there are check out the Programmable Web API list. In general it is pretty easy to consume basic REST web services but after you have done it enough it starts getting old. Thankfully for those of us who like to tinker with a lot of the new APIs there is HTTParty to make it quick and easy.
Recently I had a hard drive failure that pushed me into getting a little NAS device that I could back up to S3 easily. After consolidating a lot of data to the NAS I was left with a few old hard drives that I needed to do something with as well as some existing hard drives that I've collected over the years. Some of the drives I have are from family members that I have recycled computers for but kept the hard drives out of fear that personal data might still be on them. At the same time this was happening I read an article claiming that a single drive wipe protects data.
I have been seeing people talk about the Windows 7 Beta being available to download so I went to see how hard it was to sign up. It turns out that it actually pretty easy so I decided I would give it a try under VirtualBox just to see if it would work. The following is a list of steps I took.
There have been times recently when I wanted to pull a VirtualBox Linux instance I had into Xen. I kept thinking it had to be fairly easy but I kept putting off trying it until recently when I ran into something I wanted to install from a CD image into an Amazon EC2 AMI. It turns out the main hurdle in transferring an image is lack of documentation.