After 18 months of ongoing development, I am proud to announce the immediate availability of Tarzan 2.0! The Tarzan platform has complete support for six different AWS services (S3, CloudFront, EC2, SimpleDB, SQS, and Amazon Associates) and has been built from the ground-up to be fast, memory-efficient, easy to use, and easy to build on top of by providing a solid set of core tools for your (and our) web application. You can download the 2.0 release from http://bit.ly/tarzan2, and please Digg us at http://bit.

Recently, I became the owner of a shiny new black, 16GB iPhone 3G. I’ve had a BlackBerry Pearl (8100) for the past 2 years, and the iPhone is a significantly better device for me. Here’s why. For starters, I’m an avid Mac user. I’ve spent many years on Mac and Windows systems, and I overwhelmingly prefer Mac. One of the biggest problems that I had as a Mac + BlackBerry user is that the syncing tools suck. PocketMac is a disaster, and the Mark/Space app (whatever it’s called) only works about one day per year.

Today we announce an updated Tarzan pre-release build for any developers not using the subversion trunk. A lot of work has gone into Tarzan over the past 2 months since the last release, namely: Added the ability to change the content-type of an existing object in S3. Fixed some minor bugs in SimpleDB and S3. Re-wrote all of the documentation in the entire project (which enables us to generate awesome documentation which can be found on the Tarzan documentation page).

If you’ve been following my blog over the past few years, you might remember an old project I was working on back in early 2005 called Tarzan. At the time, the only Amazon web service was their e-catalog (e-commerce) service, and that was was Tarzan specialized in. I ended up scrapping the project around the same time as Geoffrey came to me and said that he wanted to help work on another one of my little side projects, SimplePie. Of course, as most of the web development community knows, SimplePie has gone on to be wildly popular and Tarzan essentially bit the dust.

If you’re a fan of Joss Whedon (Firefly, Serenity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Nathan Fillon (Firefly, Serenity), Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser M.D., How I Met Your Mother), musicals, and comedy, you should take the time to check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Doogie, I mean Barney, I mean Neil Patrick Harris plays a fantastic Dr. Horrible, who is trying to get into the “Evil League of Evil!” Nathan Fillon (who played “Captain Mal” on Firefly/Serenity) plays Captain Hammer, the shallow jerk of a superhero who steals the girl (Felicia Day) from Dr.

I’m visiting my best friend Eric in Chicago this weekend. I’ve never been to Chicago before, but I must say that the few blocks of downtown that I’ve seen are simply breathtaking. Beautiful architecture and tall buildings give this place a very different feel from the more familiar San Francisco or San Jose, CA. Between the flights today, I didn’t have a chance to eat dinner. So when I got here, I decided to get something to eat. That, and I wanted to go exploring a bit.

I’ve spent a bit of time working with Amazon EC2 recently. One of the things I’ve been working on is getting a stable build of FFMPEG and FFMPEG-PHP running on a Fedora 8 image in Amazon EC2. This is essentially going to be a tutorial to get things up and running. Of course, your milage may vary. These instructions apply to a 32-bit Fedora 8 installation. The hardware I primarily use happens to be on EC2, but these instructions aren’t specific to EC2.

Internally known as “Aurora,” the new Yahoo! Messenger redesign has finally launched! I was going to write something up about it, but Ryan Doherty and Adrien Cahen have all written plenty. Check it out! :) Also, Digg it!

Twitter has tweaked their design as of this morning, and they added a link titled “Tell us your story,” in which they ask about your thoughts as a Twitter user. Here’s what I had to say. I’m an information junkie with a limited attention span. Twitter has all of the interesting links and thoughts of a Digg, Newspond, del.icio.us, or Ma.gnolia, but is filtered by people I follow, giving me a much higher signal to noise ratio for links and services that require my attention (or that I may want to give my attention to).

I was born and raised a fundamentalist Christian Republican. I voted for Bush both times — not because I liked him, but because he was the Republican candidate, I didn’t really care, and the Democratic candidates seemed like a worse choice. But over the past few years, I’ve really been digging into the details of legislation that affects me most as a technologist — DMCA, Net Neutrality, Internet Radio Royalties, NSA spying via telecoms, and the outright suspension of my digital 4th amendment rights (e.