Cloudsearch for Merlin

Now that we have COVE indexed in cloudsearch, I decided to try my hand with the Merlin API to see.  Adapting the code for the COVE project made pretty short work of the Merlin API.  It took about 4 hours of work.  And it takes approximately 15 minutes for the script to iterate through all off the Merlin documents and submit them to Cloudsearch for indexing.  The search resutls quality continues to be excellent.

Summary of Performance Monitoring at PBS

At PBS we use a number of different tools and approaches to proactive monitor the state, performance and uptime of our various audience facing applications and services.

2012 AWS Summit

I had the unique opportunity to share the stage with Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO for Amazon, at yesterday's AWS Summit held in NYC.  There were more than 3000 registered attendees and many thousands more watching via AmazonLive streaming.

Playing with Amazon's new CloudSearch service

With a bit of downtime at the hotel in NYC, I decided to see how far I could get prototyping a new COVE API search based on the new Amazon CloudSearch service.  The results were pretty amazing.

Pycon 2012 - PBS Kids GO! Login

Cosimo Felline from the PBS Kids GO! team presented at PyCon 2012.  His presentation was "PBS KIDS: Building a login system for kids and teens in Python."

Our challenge was to create a login system for little people who might barely read, maybe no email, perhaps no home computer. And we had to watch out for privacy laws - especially tough for minors. But these kids want to play games, write stories, and create online avatars to share and compete against their buddies. Listen to how we developed the PBS KIDS login and moderation system in Django

These are his slides from the talk.