I got an email this morning that made me realize how long it had been since I had updated this site. I’ve been a little bit distracted since I got my book deal. Originally I submitted a proposal to write a book on Erlang, but through a series of events I’m actually writing a book on on of my other passions; yoga. You can find more details and eventual updates about the book at http://www.yogaforhackers.com
So now that you all know why I’ve been off the grid for a while, I have a new project to announce as well. I’ve started to create my modules for the Amazon Web Services, which I am calling EIFAWS and it is hosted on Google code at http://eifaws.googlecode.com . I know that there is already one project doing AWS modules in Erlang, but I wanted some specific things in the code to make sure that it was compatible with the EIF, so I decided to create my own.
The EIFAWS project has at least one feature that I haven’t seen yet in the other AWS libraries, which is version support. I’m intended to create specific modules for each version which will allows users to continue to use an older version of an AWS API until they are ready to switch.
I am currently working on the EC2 modules, and to go along with them I am going to launch a public AMI later today. (Right after I finish the EC2 code to make it public.) I have two AMIs one 32-bit and the other 64-bit based on Fedora Core 9. I’ve gone through and disabled just about all of the processes and removed some packages that I know useless on EC2 or I will not want to use, like sendmail and gpm. I also installed the latest Erlang RPM from the FC9 repo.
The 32-bit AMI will be ami-01b55168 and the 64-bit AMI is ami-30db5959. Also my amazon account number is 920563975665 in case you will want to search for other AMIs in the future. All of my AMIs will end up in a /erlsoft_ami/ folder on S3 as well.
These AMIs are meant to playing around with EC2 and Erlang and will be improved upon as I learn more of what I need to do and how I want to do things. They may be removed at some point int he future, when I have new and better AMIs for everyone to work with 
And one last note on the EIFAWS project. One of my test projects that I intend to write will be a FTP server front end for S3 that runs on EC2. The hope would be that with this as a front end, anyone with an FTP client would be able to access S3 and since it would be running on EC2 the FTP/S3 bandwidth charges would not apply, only bandwidth charges to and from EC2. Basically I didn’t liek any of the S3 explorer type packages that I saw and thought an FTP front end would open up S3 to many more uses. So well see where that ends up.