Back to No Kindle in Canada

I just tried to order the new international version of the Kindle and got:

When the announcement first came out I specifically went and checked Canada and I'd swear it said it was available. (my previous post)

It really annoys me to continually run into products and services that exclude Canada. I don't think Amazon has anything personal against Canada, so I have to assume it's our industry and government that are blocking it. Stupid and short sighted.

Canada snubbed as Kindle goes global - The Globe and Mail

Nice UI Feature on Amazon

Up till recently on amazon.ca the Add to Wishlist button would always add to your default list. If you wanted the item in a different wish list you then had to move it with a second step.

Now they've made the obvious improvement, you can pick which list to add the item to right from the start, avoiding the second step.

Buttons with pull down options are becoming quite common. I think they're a good way to handle this kind of thing.

Of course, I'm never satisfied! Next I'd like to be able to add to wish lists directly from the search results rather than having to go to the items page first.

CouchDB

I found CouchDB referenced from one of the posts about Amazon's SimpleDB since they are both apparently written in Erlang.

It's interesting that people are exploring some alternatives to relational databases.

It's also interesting that people are implementing "real" products in alternative languages like Erlang.

I recently picked up Programming Erlang but I haven't read it yet.

One thing that caught my eye looking through the CouchDB web site was a brief note that they compact the database while it's running, by copying to a new database. Currently Suneido requires you to occasionally shut down the database in order to compact it. I had always thought about "on line" compaction in terms of doing it "in place", but that gets tricky due to updating indexes to point to new locations. But if you build a new copy you don't have that problem. You could copy the bulk of the database in a single read-only transaction (like the current on-line backup does) and then pause activity briefly to get any updates done during the copy, and then switch over to the new database. Hmmm... actually doesn't sound too bad. (famous last words!)

Amazon SimpleDB

Amazon has announced a new service - SimpleDB

We are pretty happy with our use of Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service)

I've been curious to try Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) but I haven't found a good application yet.

One of the big limitations with EC2 is that it's not well suited to running database servers. I've been waiting for them to improve support for this, but instead (or at least, first) we get SimpleDB.

I wonder if someone will make Rails work with SimpleDB as the database? How would the performance compare?