Drupal

Back in 2010, I gave a talk about the use of OpenGL shaders to accelerate image and video processing on mobile devices. The response from that talk was strong enough that two years later I started work on the open source framework GPUImage with the goal of making this kind of processing more accessible to developers. In an attempt to broaden the reach of this framework, today I'm introducing the completely-rewritten-in-Swift GPUImage 2 with support for Mac, iOS, and now Linux. This isn't just a port, it's a complete rewrite of the framework.

Read on for how GPUImage 2 differs from the previous iteration, and why I rebuilt it from scratch.

A while ago, I wrote an article about the steps required to set up a web server that runs the Drupal content management system (like this site).  Enough has changed in the interim that I figured I'd revisit this article with more up-to-date information.  In particular, Amazon just introduced their micro instances, which offer you the ability to host a website for as little as $5 a month.

Read on for a step-by-step guide in setting up a micro instance for hosting Drupal.

As I described in my previous post, this website is currently running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The underlying architecture of the site is based on the Drupal content management system, something that I've also described previously. I was not completely happy with the performance of my previous host (Media Temple), and Amazon EC2 promises to give you the ability to host a virtual machine running whatever you want within Amazon's data centers. You get access to the bandwidth and processing power of a huge online business, but you only pay for what you use.

In my limited testing so far, EC2 flies as a web host and appears to be able to scale for traffic spikes. It also provides a number of unique features, such as incremental snapshots of your data that are stored on S3 and the capability of creating throwaway clones of your server for doing development and testing.

Read on for a step-by-step guide to configuring a Drupal website like this one on the Elastic Compute Cloud.

You might notice that this site is running a little faster. This is because I have decided to try out hosting my site from within Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 is part of Amazon's Web Services, which also include the popular Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB, and Simple Queue Service. Briefly, Amazon has decided to open up the computing capabilities and bandwidth of its data centers to the world, and has been steadily adding services and features over the last couple of years. A couple of weeks ago, they added a feature to their EC2 service that made it practical to run a web site from their cloud.

Read on for more.

Recently, I presented this site at the Madison (WI) Drupal meetup and promised to put in writing my comments on its design, as well as post the code for the theme that I used. Read on if you are interested in the details of how I built this site.