Great news from the Amazon EC2 team. They've dropped the "beta" designation and are now rolling in full production.

They're even hosting Windows instances in the cloud for $0.125 per hour (SQL Server is also available).

That's about $85 per month for a fully managed Windows server instance. Not too bad.

It's rare that Microsoft issues patches outside of their regularly scheduled "Patch Tuesday", but apparently a critical vulnerability was recently discovered.

Some hosting services will be temporarily suspended tonight for up to 10 minutes to apply this update.

I just can't see how Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt can sit in the same room now that their respective iPhone and Google Phone products are competing (Eric sits on Apple's Board).

I've been using my G1 for a couple days now and became instantly 20% more efficient with the Google Apps integration. Amazing.

So, it was announced back in July that Journey will play Dreamforce. Then Mark at SalesforceWatch spots a change on the Dreamforce website announcing Foo Fighters will play.

hmmmm... seems like deja vu all over again.

Update 1: Added link to cloaking definition.

For the past several years the practice of displaying page content to GoogleBot that was inaccessible to actual users could get you in "Google Jail", resulting in a PageRank of 0 and removal from their search index. This is known as "cloaking"... aka "stealthing".

This practice is now encouraged under a new feature named "First Click Free", which allows publishers to serve protected content to GoogleBot, but requires users to register for subsequent page requests. More discussion here.

Now, if Google would just remove the jail sentence for programmatically retrieving PR for each page, then CMS and marketing analytics vendors could comfortably contribute to the virtuous cycle of helping Google organize the worlds information.

Python is here! A couple months ago I mentioned the need for more dynamic language support in SaaS solutions. Last month we announced support for JScript and this month I'm happy to announce support for IronPython in i-Dialogue.

I spent the weekend learning some Python basics and created a simple (and I mean simple) Python demonstration in the i-Dialogue Developers Sandbox. You're welcome to modify this source and experiment on your own.

After years of working with the Salesforce API using statically typed languages; such as C#, Java, and Apex; it is refreshing to re-approach old problems through new eyes. After only a few days of playing with Python, I see now what others have been raving about.

Web developers will really enjoy using Python with Dialogue Script:

• Cleaner code. Easier to read and manage
• No need for thick IDEs. Too often, an IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio stands between you and the desired solution. Dialogue Script development is 100% browser-based (yes, it even works in Chrome!)
• Agile business rules management. Work side-by-side with business users and apply business rules directly in web pages
• Dynamic typing

Wow... one day I'm recognizing a company for their innovative approach to using rich clients for CRM, and then suddenly they're laying off almost the entire workforce and the CEO/CFO are arrested by the FBI.

Ouch... that's a set back.

There's been a reshuffling of booths at Dreamforce. We're in the same location, but the booth number is now #211 (was 311).

I'm really looking forward to finally placing names with faces, and meeting lots of new people at this event

Last January I shared some thoughts on keeping hosted services up and running 99.9% of the time. eMarketing Websites and portals often do not have the luxury of going down for 3 hours of maintenance (or even 3 minutes), leaving me to often envy the planned maintenance notices I receive from Salesforce when logging in .

As you can see from the daily report below, our monitoring service loves to occasionally tease us with uptime reports hovering at 99.89% uptime.

Some key things we observe and monitor:

• "Downtime" in the report is measured in blocks of 5 minutes, so what may have actually been a 10 second outage gets reported as a 5 minute outage, skewing the actual results.
• Sub-second response time (< 1000 milliseconds), while not contractually in the SLA, is a key metric in determining site performance and customer experience.
• Customers who deploy changes to a staging server first (available in Unlimited Edition) have a much higher likelihood of sustaining 100% uptime day over day.
• Reliance on a good datacenter partner is critical. Our offices are not the most luxurious, but we spare no expense on our datacenter location and services.

Inevitably, some Developers need to apply advanced business and content manipulation rules to web/portal pages that display collections of Salesforce records.

This trick of using Javascript Arrays works very well. The basic components of this pattern are:

• Create a Javascript object that mirrors the Salesforce object and fields to be managed
• Use a Dialogue Script Repeater control to select a collection of records from Salesforce and package them into a client-side Javascript array.
• Render the web page using the Javascript collection of objects.

Very powerful technique. I can foresee the need to extend DScript controls to return results in a format such as JSON, which is already in use in our AJAX library.

You can view a source code example in the Developer Sandbox.

As the Financial Institution's fall one-by-one, I'm drawn to the influence that software is having on Wall Street.

I've long been an admirer of James Goodnight, CEO of business intelligence company SAS, and the SAS culture. The SAS value proposition was originally represented to me several years ago as "We help banks identify risk using data warehouse technology".

So I wondered what role SAS may have had in the mortgage crisis. At it's peak, WAMU, and several other banks were advertising "Mortgage approvals in 10 minutes!" The assumption being that they were using massive data warehouses, like those powered by SAS, to quickly determine whether or not a customer was credit worthy.

But apparently these risk management systems were either skewed to accept unnecessary risk, or they were simply ignored. SAS derives the majority of it's $2B in revenue from Financial Services (yes... that's 2 Billion with a "B"... and they're still a private company) so I was somewhat amused to find this article where Mr Goodnight says:

“It doesn’t really matter what Wall Street wants. They’ve proven they don’t know what they are doing. They’ve made a mess of their own companies.”

“I think we need to get to the point where we don’t worry about what Wall Street thinks all the time because it’s clear Wall Street has not performed at all. Bank after bank has been going under with the exception of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase”

The latest issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal has an article titled "Is Your Next Language COBOL?", where they report that 70% of Merrill Lynch's business runs on COBOL... a 50 year old programming language. Merrill purchased 5,000 seats of Salesforce back in 2005. They've since been acquired by Bank of America.

Last year, Salesforce was betting big on wealth management and selling into the board rooms of financial instutions. I don't think the latest fallout impacts this strategy negatively. If anything, the re-building process on Wall Street will force a critical review of SaaS and on-demand solutions as they build out next generation infrastructure.

One area worth following closely is algorithmic trading. It's estimated that one-third of all stock trades were driven by automatic programs in 2006. By 2010, that figure will likely reach 50%.

You can draw your own conclusions. Were financial institutions ignoring decision support systems? Were their systems outdated? Is automation moving too fast for humans to reliably intervene and prevent financial disasters?

Thankfully, no one is blaming technology for this mess. If anything, there is a universal concession that "this is the future" and we'll need to deal with it.

The Internet has enabled a globalized economy. Whether or not it makes sense to trust a geographic center of influence for financial services in New York is clearly being called into question.