The Gmagick, Amazon, Windows, techPortal, php|architect and Zend DevZone Hamper Blog

It's been a while since I last blogged so I am packing it all up with a tags-like title for a change.

Over the past few months, there had been several Gmagick releases that incorporate a few fixes and some new features. Check out the release notes on PECL for more info. A big thank you to all that had tried it out and had contributed fixes.

For Windows users, Gmagick is now available for Windows, grab the DLLs from Mikko's valokuva.

On the evangelism side of things, I wrote about using Gmagick along with Amazon's Elastic MapReduce cloud service to do color searching. This appears on techPortal. Yes, it is indeed quite long, according to Cal Evans. It showcases how Amazon's cloud allows developers to be flexible with the precision of both the pixel scope for color quantization and the proximity of colors to search within a 3D colorspace. This burrowing into Elastic MapReduce is part of some other cloud spotting that I had been enjoying while working on an upcoming book with Ivo Jansch.

That's not all!(Intercom speakers) There's an article on Gmagick in the October issue of php|architect as well. In this article, elephpant visits the museum. Curious? Check out the October issue!

For those that are interested in more Gmagick related documentation (besides the manual), Vikram wrote a nice and rather comprehensive tutorial on Zend Developer Zone.

That's about it now.

On techPortal: PHP and the Cloud

I wrote about using Amazon's cloud services from a PHP perspective on Ibuilding's techPortal. Do check it out! I think Cal Evans and the Ibuildings gang has something special going on, and there is a growing list of other really interesting articles and tutorials as well.

What excites me most about Amazon's cloud is the huge computing resource that it makes accessible to practically anyone. So that ceases to be an excuse nor a worry when innovating. There are also a bunch of challenges that I had faced in the past that could benefit from the presence of such easily accessible utility. Really, I could had been more relaxed during month-ends in a previous project when processing and requests spikes due to heavy reporting while operations goes into overdrive trying to hit closure targets.

Another good use of it is to tackle archival and document sharing requirements for legal and billing purposes (the 7 year burden of records). Accountants will love the variable cost conversion effect of cloud pricing and I can already see sales grinning from an easier, more meaningful sell for such 'unavoidable value-add'.