brainsik

As a customer, security is important when you are testing your internal, firewalled, infrastructure. This is one of the main reasons Sauce Labs (where I work) gives every test its own VM that's destroyed afterwards. Using a shared or reused VM opens the door to malicious code running in the background.

There's an article devoted to this topic here:

Security Through Purity — http://sauceio.com/index.php/2011/09/security-through-purity...

On OS X, I highly recommend Dripbox. It automatically SCP's files that change on your local filesystem to a remote location.

https://github.com/epall/dripbox

I use it every day, editing files locally in Sublime Text 2, and then cmd-tabbing to Terminal to run tests. It's fast enough that I never even think about the delay.

As the author of the article, I agree, it should be obvious. Unfortunately, the security implications of a service like ours is less appreciated by the general user community. Today, there are other services similar to Sauce Scout you can try where you'll see VMs getting reused and sometimes even catch a glimpse of the previous browser session. So we thought it would be helpful to outline our approach and why it matters.

Ookla — the folks who run speedtest.net — have interesting displays of the data they've collected:

http://www.netindex.com/

Top download speeds by country:

http://www.netindex.com/download/

X Prize is holding a press conference tomorrow to announce the prize:

http://www.xprize.org/media-center/press-release/x-prize-fou...

There will be a live webcast at 1pm EDT:

http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp?id=71238

Buildbot is used for continuous integration, which is a big step along the path to continuous deployment. A lot of companies are doing this today. Fewer are doing continuous deployment. kaChing has some posts about their setup:

http://eng.kaching.com/2010/05/deployment-infrastructure-for...

http://eng.kaching.com/2010/06/applied-lean-startup-ideas-co...

And I believe many of the companies featured in the Startup Lessons Learned conference are doing continuous deployment:

http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/videos

There's a lot of momentum towards this. The company I'm at is working to get there.

True, but if you are on OS X, most of the apps will use the System Preferences proxy settings, so most of your apps will Just Work.

Of course, you'll have to get tricky to use SSH via the SOCKS proxy, but it can be done.

This is a nice overview of the iPhone vs AT&T debacle, but the conclusion is sensationalized. It may be that Apple and Google are helping the wireless carriers reach new levels of poor service, but the reality is the carriers have never been that good.

In the 10 years I've had a mobile phone, I can't think of any time when people weren't complaining about their carrier and wondering if any of the others were better. It didn't seem to matter who you were with. Like the Mutt motto: "All mobile carriers suck. This one just sucks less."

1 MW is the rated capacity. The actual amount of energy produced depends on where it is deployed. They go into detail about how much energy is produced on the "fundamentals" page:

http://www.makanipower.com/concept/fundamentals/