Amazon Web Services Blog

Size Does NOT Matter!

Size does not matter anymore!

zSlide, privately held company in France, just released a new "express" feature in its Podmailing.com service. Podmailing.com is simple P2P-based email service that enables anyone to send and receive e-mails with attachments up to 2GB. 2GB!! did you read that?!. Wow! Last I knew, Internet world changed when email giants increased the inbox size to 2GB. And now each email attachment can be up to 2GB in size.

Podmailer Express, powered by Amazon S3, says:

Today podmailing.com introduces a new feature called "Podmail Express" which assures a fast and reliable delivery in every situation, for files up to 2GB. The files in transit are stored on a highly scalable infrastructure that we have built on top of the Amazon S3 web service.

"We create the simplest applications based on Peer-to-Peer technologies in order to provide unskilled users with the most efficient services", says Louis Choquel, CEO of zSlide. "To solve the issue of quality of service, podmailing.com introduces a new breed of Peer-to-Peer services. Our idea is to support our Peer-to-Peer network with a rock-solid and highly scalable infrastructure that can grow in symbiosis with it. It has become a reality thanks to Amazon S3."

As I did more research, I started to learn more and more about Podmailing. I installed the windows client and played with it. They have embedded the power of BitTorrent in emails to deal with big attachments. Damn! Why-did-I-not-think-of-this-idea-first ?. Most interesting part was when I realized how creatively they solved their technical problem and how Amazon S3 was a just a perfect fit for them. Here's how...

Podmailing is email++

Instead of including the attachment into the e-mail, they use the BitTorrent protocol in order to transport the file (P2P fashion). So the file can be of any size, and if there are several recipients they all contribute to the delivery of the file between each-other. Smart, isn't it?. They do this by simply embedding a small "link file" as attachment into the e-mail which contains all the cues needed to transport the data. This "link" is similar to a ".torrent" file with some extra info (proprietary ".zed" extension)

The Problem

The downside to this type of P2P system is that the sender and the recipient must be online at the same time for the file to be transfered.

The Solution

Smart Guys at zSlide decided to use Amazon S3. Now that I think of it, I get that made-for-each-other feeling just like what we get when we see a happy cozy couple walking in the park hand-in-hand. Let me explain why I think its made-for-each-other:

Amazon S3 is used as a relay to store the big attachments in transit.

Now

• The upload can start right away even if the recipient is not connected.
• Because of server-based relay, the transfer becomes possible even if the sender and the recipient are blocked behind firewalls.
• Once the upload to Amazon S3 is completed, the sender can turn off his PC and be sure that the file will be delivered in a fast and reliable way.
• Because Amazon S3 is already supporting BitTorrent OOTB, they can still benefit from the network effect of P2P. So if there are many recipients, or if the e-mail is forwarded many times to many people, each user will contribute bandwidth to others.

And this is how Amazon S3 has started to change people's lives :)

-- Jinesh

And This Too...

Jon Boutelle, CTO of Slideshare.net (previously featured here) sent me some cool comments that just happen to reinforce the Web-Scale message I've been talking about recently. Here's what he had to say (links are mine):

The dedicated hardware we were initially considering would have cost $1000 to startup, and $800/month in ongoing costs. Most importantly, this would have meant 1 month in time-to-market lost as we configured the hardware and customized and tested our software on it!

Hearing about the success that SmugMug had, we looked at their html, and realized that it would be simple to use S3 for our purposes. It took less than one day to switch our code over to S3 (using the Ruby library provided by Amazon), with no support from anyone at Amazon.

S3 provided a scalable solution from day one. A massive surge in traffic doesn't stress our own system: in fact on the first day our site was hosting embeds on techcrunch and similar sites without any problems. And our costs using S3 have been 16 times lower than they would have been using dedicated hardware, since we only pay for what we use.

What more can I say? Jon's doing my job for me, and I couldn't be happier!

-- Jeff;

This is Web-Scale...

There's a really interesting post over on the Texas Startup Blog. Here are some tidbits:

• "The Amazon web services products (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - EC2 and Amazon S3) are built for the little guy AND the big guy."
  
  Yes, absolutely. And let's not forget the little guys who want to become big guys -- start small and then grow, or as we say around here sometimes, "From dorm room to board room."
• "I know of more than ten startups in Dallas that are using Amazon’s services as a way to start without spending any money on servers, bandwidth and colocation.  This is big."
  
  This really changes the economics for startups. Put your precious capital into building up your proprietary systems," not into depreciating infrastructure. I've personally talked to several startups that have used the Web-Scale model to forego venture capital entirely.

Read the whole post: 1000 Pounds Web Hosting Gorilla: Amazon. There's some good info in the comments too.

-- Jeff;

Flowser - Graphical Amazon Browser

Important Update: There seems to be some confusion about the creator of Flowser - I've seen a couple of blog posts which claimed that Amazon created it. In fact, a creative member of our developer community created it and he deserves all of the credit!

 

This past weekend I snuck a peak at the Programmable Web blog and found a reference to Flowser. 

Available in English (Amazon.com) and Japanese (Amazon.jp), Flowser is a very creative catalog browser. The name is apparently derived from the fact that search results are displayed in a format reminiscent of some flower petals, with a central key surrounded by search results grouped by their Amazon catalog.

Starting from the individual products shown as the search results, it is easy to get additional product details or to navigate to all of the products in the same browse node. Access to similar products or to other products from the same publisher is also at-hand, and some cute sound effects add some flair to the product.

-- Jeff;

Evangelists Gone Wild - Speaking Engagements for November, 2006

Isabel Wang's cool post reminded me that I need to update the speaking engagements calendar.

This is what we have planned so far:

• November 1st - San Jose, California - Zend/PHP Conference and Expo
• November 2nd-3rd - Mountain View, California - Startup Camp
• November 7th - San Francisco, California - Web 2.0
• November 7th - Victoria, B.C. - Victoria .Net Developer's Association
• November 11th - Edina, Minnesota - Twin Cities Code Camp
• November 14th - Fort Lauderdale, Florida - Florida .Net Users Group
• November 15th - Washington, DC - Washington D.C. Linux User's Group
• November 16th - Chicago, IL - Chicago Area Ruby Group
• November 29th - Seattle, WA - University of Washington AIS Forum

If your US, European, or Japan-based group or event is similar to one of those mentioned above and you would like to hear about the Amazon Web Services (lots of technical information, lots of demos, some code, and plenty of Q&A) sometime soon, send an email to awseditor@amazon.com and we'll do our best to be there.

I should also note that when we are in a particular location for a speaking event we are also more than happy to meet 1-on-1 with individual developers as time permits. If you want to pull together a group at your company to hear us talk, we can do that as well.

-- Jeff;

Linden Lab: Amazon S3 For The Win

Woke up this morning to find an awesome post from Linden Lab, creator and operator of Second Life.

In an article titled "Amazon S3 For The Win," developer Jeff Linden describes how they used Amazon S3 to buffer the crushing blow of downloads that they had previously suffered every two weeks when they released a new version of their 30MB client:

The client you download may just seem like a 5-minute nuisance to you.  Magnified ten thousand times, it becomes a severe issue for our webservers on days when we release a new version- tens of thousands of people all rushing to download them at the same time. An average of 30 MB per download, multiplied by however many folks who want to login to this Second Life thing, comes out to a lot of bits.

Solving this problem by hosting the bits on Amazon S3 is a perfect illustration of Web-Scale Computing in action. On average, they need to have enough infrastructure to deal with downloads by newly registered users. At peak times, however, their infrastructure requirements spike and they need enough to accomodate downloads by every active user. Over time the disparity between average and peak will become more pronounced.

Using a Web-Scale model you need not gear up for the peak. You certainly have to understand how you will deal with it, but you don't need to invest money up-front in servers, networking equipment, or bandwidth reservations. As Jeff says:

Rather than continue to pile on webservers just for this purpose, which has somewhat diminishing returns, we have elected to move the client download over to Amazon’s S3 service, which is basically a big file server.

In other words, their investment isn't sitting idle, except for those relatively rare times when they need to deal with peak traffic. Or, as a VC friend of mine told me recently, "We'd rather invest in brains than in servers."

Jeff was able to include some actual numbers in his post, and they are staggering:

In case you’re curious, we switched over halfway during release day; but even for the tail 8 hours of the download rush, we averaged roughly 70 gigabytes of viewer download per hour. Then it settled down to a relatively steady stream of about 20-30 gigabytes per hour. In the last 23 hours we’ve transferred a total of ~900 gigabytes so far- which I’d estimate to be around 30,000-38,000 downloads. This does not include the first several hours of the download rush, which are typically the highest.

He also points out another advantage of the Web-Scale Computing model. Specifically, they don't have to spend their time worrying about this anymore:

Hopefully your SL experience will be either unchanged or changed for the better- but on the webserver, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

Clearly downloading bits from a website is important, but ideally you would like this to be a part of the infrastructure -- reliable, transparent, and doing its job so well that you can almost forget that its there.

Welcome to the Web-Scale world!

-- Jeff;

Update: As is often the case with a blog, the post itself is only a starting for an interesting conversation. I found this followup note in a comment to the subject post:

It just turned out that the S3 solution was ready for deployment immediately, where akamai requires more negotiation. In other words, we already had an amazon S3 account where I was test something out, and then when we noticed the bandwidth was pegged, we made a fast decision to speed up our plans to put our viewer elsewhere, and chose S3.

Yes, there's that Web-Scale thing again. You need a place to make some bits available for high-volume downloading, you push it up to S3, set the ACL for public read, and start handing out the URL. No planning, no negotiation, no setup charges or residual fees.

This guy really likes the Mechanical Turk

Ok readers, let's make this guy a star:

Of course, this video was itself the product of a Mechanical Turk HIT that paid $8 to the star. If you would like to star in a video of your own, there are some $10 "Make a 5 Minute Movie" HITs in there right now (that link won't last forever, sorry historians).

Pass around, link, watch lots of times. I happen to think that this is pretty cool.

-- Jeff;

Slideshare - Upload and Share Slideshows

This has been the pseudocode for my day so far:

while (Cool AWS Stuff In Inbox)
{
    Read About It
    Visit It
    Take A Picture
    Blog About It
    Delete Email
}

Today's newest find is Slideshare.net,  a site for storing and sharing slide shows, powered by Amazon S3. The slides are served up directly from S3, so this image-heavy site probably doesn't have any heavy duty proprietary server infrastructure behind it.

There's some pretty cool stuff in there already, including Paul Kedrosky's Sheer Hype By Desperate Men.

Each slide can have a transcript, and it is easy to navigate to related slide shows, similar slide shows, and other slide shows with the same tag. The site accepts uploads in PowerPoint and Open Office format.

-- Jeff;

Update: The CTO of Slideshare posted a must-read note in the comments!

Game System Wars

One of the interesting and common threads found in the creative applications built with the Amazon Web Services is the fact that they can take data that's been laying out there in plain sight for a number of years and turn it on its side (so to speak) to provide a whole new look at it. We saw this several years ago with applications like Live Plasma and the Hive Group Honeycomb.

Earlier this year I blogged about The DVD Wars, which used Amazon data to provide a bird's-eye view of the market for two the competing next -generation DVD formats. Sites like this can help consumers to make purchasing decisions based on real data about which format has the most available titles, and how well those titles are doing. Personally, I have sometimes found myself buying "none of the above" in these situations, since I don't want to bet on the wrong horse (yes, I did buy a Betamax VCR, how did you guess?).

There's a new multiple-choice purchasing decision on the horizon now - which next generation gaming system should you buy? The author of The DVD Wars has built another site to help with this decision. The Game System Wars compares a number of metrics for the Nintendo Wii, the Microsoft XBox 360, and the Sony Playstation 3. There are a number of charts featuring live and historical data showing trends in sales rank, number of titles, number of accessories, and lots more.

Very cool!

-- Jeff;

iSearchBetter - Find New Products Eligible for Amazon Prime Shipping

iSearchBetter simplifies the process of finding new products that are eligible for Amazon Prime shipping. As the site says: "Try it out: I think you'll agree that I search Amazon better than they do."

-- Jeff;

Update: Now with links! Thanks Jeremy.

Zettabyte Storage zBox

Astute readers of this blog will notice that I have added Hardware as a new category!

The zBox is a new storage device from Zettabyte Storage. A zettabyte is either 10²¹ or 2⁷⁰ bytes of storage, not that the exact amount really matters at that point.

The zBox is offered as part of a complete online backup service known as ZettaBits. The zBox runs on your local network and automatically backs up data to Amazon S3. Once you commit (I'm not sure if the proper term is buy, lease, or rent) a zBox and place it on your network, data stored locally will end up safe and secure in S3.

The ZettaBits service is offered at standard and pro levels. The standard zBoxes feature 30 to 690 GB of local storage and can handle up to 5 simultaneous users, at prices ranging from $49 to $299 per month. The pro zBoxes feature 140 to 690 GB of local RAID-1 storage, and can handle up to 100 simultaneous users, at prices ranging from $199 to $499 per month. There's more info on the Service Plans page.

-- Jeff;

7 Easy Steps to Building Your Idea Around Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jinesh Varia just posted a really nice article on codeproject.com . The article documents Jin's implementation of an idea that he and I discussed shortly after he joined my team earlier this year.

Building upon the concept pioneered by the seemingly defunct Usenix Faces project the application in this article shows how to use Amazon S3 to store individual face graphics and to use a Greasemonkey script to show popup faces on unmodified web pages.

For you youngsters out there, the Usenix Faces project dates back to the late 1980's, when digital cameras of any type were expensive and rare beasts. At each Usenix conference there would be a booth with a camera. The operators would take pictures on request and then upload them to a central FTP server, indexed by email address. Applications (typically email clients and Usenet news readers) of that era would download faces and show them next to email messages and news postings.

-- Jeff;

PS - If you look at my picture and think "Wow, Jeff looks like he left his vacation in Mexico on a Sunday evening, flew all night, got to Seattle at 2 AM and then showed up at the Amazon headquarters in time for an 8:30 AM orientation," you'd be right on target.

Send in Your Clowns

A recent HIT posted on the Amazon Mechanical Turk asked workers to draw a clown...

Taken at face value (so to speak) as a collaborative art project this is very similar to The Sheep Market, and it produced results that were colorful and entertaining.

However, behind all of the pretty faces there's something even more interesting. I was in transit and didn't get to see the HIT myself, but based on reports from my earthbound colleagues I'll describe it to you. Each HIT used an IFRAME to host an instance of VNC. VNC provides a virtual view into a running copy Linux. In this case the copy of Linux was running on Amazon EC2  and hosting a paint program in a locked-down environment.

This is some pretty potent stuff and I can think of lots of ways to use it.

Some of my favorite web sites offer "drawing contests" on a regular basis. The details vary from site to site, but each one requires entrants to offer a creative interpretation of a particular theme. In order to participate entrants must have a drawing program and a place to host their finished work. As this exercise in clown-generation has shown, this is no longer the case. The ability to dynamically and economically host many instances of a powerful drawing or painting program like The Gimp or TuxPaint, collect the results (maybe even storing them in Amazon S3) would work really well in a classroom or training environment.

What about a new problem-solving site for developers or system administrators? How about contests to optimize a MySQL database query, solve a thorny networking issue, fix an Apache configuration file, or to debug a complicated bit of Perl code? Wrap some forums around these and pay for it all with some keyword-powered advertising and you could have a nice money machine.

Yes this is a great mashup, and it is also a great example of crowdsourcing.

-- Jeff;

PS - Some of those clowns look like pumpkins. Clearly, the raw images could be passed through Mechanical Turk with a request to flag the clowns as such.

Updates:

This application was developed by Santa Cruz Tech. Through their Von Kempelen identity, they offer consulting and custom development work for companies looking to use the Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Turns out that they also asked for dolphins, logos, spaceships, and monsters.

Lots of Good Stuff!

A few of the cool things that I have sitting in my inbox today:

• Mechanical Turk API in PHP - "PHP implementation of the Amazon Mechanical Turk API, allowing any PHP application to access the mTurk system and perform all available actions."
• Dave Winer: It's an S3 Tuesday - "S3 is truly useful."
• John Eberly: How I Automated My Backups to Amazon S3 using S3Sync - "After testing many tools available for S3 currently, I decided to use the ruby program s3sync to backup my data to S3."

Elliott Smith: S3 + Rails - "I spent most of today obsessively coding a simple Rails front-end to S3 called s33r."

-- Jeff;

Amazon S3 Backup Tools

Jeremy Zawody followed up on his promise to use Amazon S3 for backup by compiling a list of S3 Backup Tools. The article itself is very helpful, but there's also a lot of good information in the comments. At this point Jeremy is in the process of enumerating and examining the alternatives. I'm sure that he will give his chosen solution a thorough workout and I'm looking forward to what learns.

-- Jeff;

PS - To answer MrRat, yes I am still posting, evangelizing, and so forth. In fact I will be doing  a presentation in Second Life on Tuesday night at a place called Info Island. If you are in Second Life and want to see me speak, please come by the open air auditorium at 5 PM. More info here.

All new and improved S3Fox Organizer for Amazon S3

Earlier today Jeff barr told me that he uploaded all his photos to amazon S3 using S3Fox Organizer. S3Fox Organizer, developed by Rahul Jonna, is a firefox extension for managing your objects in Amazon S3. We had blogged about it earlier. Motivated by the number of hits he received, Rahul released a new version (v0.3) of his tool with some really cool features:

1. Synchronize folders : By mapping your local folder with remote folder (on Amazon S3), it will automatically sync up all the files in the folders.
2. Drag-n-drop files from the system (windows explorer, etc) to Amazon S3 : By clicking on the "s3fox" icon in the firefox statusbar (which will open a new panel) and simply dragging-n-dropping your files onto that panel, files will be uploaded to the remote directory you are currently in.

In this new version, he also fixed some content-type related bugs.

His slick "ACL manager" and very-useful "Copy URL to clipboard" features are also worth a look!!

Best part of this is: the tool is just a 70KB download and takes less than 5 seconds to install.

Nice Work Rahul!

--Jin

Amazon Web Serices in Winnipeg

Amazon Web Services has a number of evangelists, as previously noted, so I'd like to introduce myself (Mike Culver).

Last night I had the opportunity to deliver the first in the series of presentations that Jeff recently announced. We had a near-record turnout of the Winnipeg .NET Users Group, with approximately 60 developers in attendance. Special thanks to Kent Sharkey for making initial introductions!

Winnipeg is home to an interesting mix of developers, running the gamut from consultants to IT Pros to ISVs. We discussed all of the Amazon Web Services, and then looked at how to create a simple WinForms app in C# that uses Amazon Simple Storage Service to access the object store as if it were a local resource. You can download the sample for yourself from the Amazon S3 Resource Center. The interesting thing in my opinion is that most of the development effort for this sample went into the Windows code; the actual Amazon S3 calls were simple, thanks to a helper class in the code sample. Maybe not as easy as falling off a log, but certainly close.

As Jeff pointed out in his initial post, we'd love to come talk to your user group--whether .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, or some other group. (In the end, most developers share a common language, known as Pizza.) Just email us at awseditor@amazon.com.

-- Mike

My First Post and thoughts about standards-based world

Hiya, I am Jinesh Varia!

This is my first blog post on the AWS blog. Its so cool to be an evangelist, travel around, talk about what cool things people are building and most importantly talk about what cool things YOU can build.

Nowadays, Anything and everything that has a high "coolness-factor" gets immediate attention from the crowd. This is indeed leveling the playing field. With services like Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, I believe there will be no difference between the student in the dorm room and the executive in the board room. The one with the best idea or coolest idea will win the game. And the one who gets there fast will be rich ;-)

I hail from the standards world of IT. Prior to joining Amazon.com, I was involved in evangelising XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) to FFIEC. We managed to evangelize/design/implement this standards-based technology to the Federal Government banking agencies and now over 8600 banks are reporting to FDIC/OCC/FRB every quarter in XBRL format.

Like SOAP, WSSE and other standards, XBRL is not easy. There is significant learning curve to understand the concept of taxonomies, linkbases, xbrl concepts, tuples, arcs and extended links. Normalizing Semantic Data, creating business rules using XPath and XLinks can be nerve-cracking easily.

But now, after working through various web based standards, I am feeling standards are always going complex for majority of people and they are meant to be. The elaborate and makes-me-sleepy-when-I-read nature of standards totally makes sense as it helps two entities "talk" in the same language.

So what will make these complex standards more easy-to-use and easy-to-implement? Code Samples / Starter Kits / SDKs / Software tools / Helper classes / libraries are going make the standards more "readable", more implementable. Not many people have to know or worry about what is Unique Particle Attribution Error in XSD schema specification or Exclusive canonicalization of XML transforms in WSSE Header specification. Let those who make the starter kits go through the pain and worry about that. Concentrating on your idea, using starter kits and not worrying about the muck,  will get you where-you-want-to-be faster! and remember one who gets there fast becomes rich ;-)

I will be down in Los Altos, CA at siliconvalley code camp this weekend. If you are around, please ping me and I would be more than happy to hear your comments/suggestions/criticism.

-- Jin

Amazon Prime Search

Superstar developer John Krystynak  (he also built Texsy and Aytozon) dropped me a little "by the way" about his latest creation, the Amazon Prime Finder.

Amazon Prime, for those of you who don't know, is our "all you can eat" (or read, or listen to) shipping plan. After payment of an annual fee, all of your eligible purchases are shipped using two-day shipping at no further cost.

John notes that he was inspired by Alan Taylor's use of JavaScript and JSON to call Amazon ECS directly from the browser. John told me:

It's one of the simplest things I've done - but I've got a ton of people who are happier with it than anything else.  Really credit goes to Kokogiak, because I just modified his stuff and added the "Amazon Prime" search parts.

One of my Amazon buddies told me:

His Prime hack is awesome.  My mom has been asking me about something like this for months, so I sent it to her.  He'll get some nice fees from her alone.

-- Jeff;

PS - Given the intriguing domain name hosting Amazon Prime Finder, I don't think we've heard the last from John.

Are You Using Ruby on Rails with Amazon EC2 and/or Amazon S3? Do you Live in Seattle? We need to Talk!

If, as many of my readers do, you have scrutinized this blog from side to side and top to bottom, you have probably seen the Media/Analyst Inquiries link.

Earlier this afternoon we received a request (via said link) from a prominent Seattle-area podcaster. He would like to interview a developer who is using Ruby on Rails as part of an application that runs on Amazon EC2 or which uses Amazon S3.

Ideally this developer would be located in the Seattle metropolitan area so that the interview could be done face-to-face.

If this describes you, please send an email to awseditor@amazon.com and I will make the connection.

-- Jeff;

Inbox Cleanup

Lots of stuff queued up today:

• Jeremy Zawody has "done the math" and has decided to replace his home backup server with Amazon S3. Jeremy computed the cost of his hardware and his power and also took the "hassle factor" into account. All things considered, S3 came out ahead.
• The Daily Radario displays the top 10 products from Amazon.com and a number of other sources. As the site says, "Daily.radario.com is the source for informative and entertaining top 10 charts, tracking the most popular products like digital cameras & MP3 players to the most frequently purchased music and movies."
• The Amanda open source backup tool now supports full and incremental backups to S3.
• The AmazonECS.Net package has been updated to support version 2 of the .Net framework. It also includes support for all Amazon.com locales, some bug fixes, and use of the newest ECS WSDL.

-- Jeff;

Using SOAPSonar to Provision Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Mamoon Yunus, author of the SOA Testing Blog and advisor to Crosscheck Networks sent me a link to an interesting and relevant How-To document.

Using SOAPSonar to Provision Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud covers downloading and installation of a free trial version of Crosscheck's SOAPSonar product and then shows the steps needed to load the X.509 certificate, set up SOAP authentication, and finally to call the Amazon EC2 SOAP APIs.

The document is very clear and explicit and definitely simplifies and makes obvious some steps that have proven to be difficult for some developers to master.

There's also information about how to load the EC2 and Amazon S3 WSDLs into SOAPSonar simultaneously and to use them to as the basis for a mashup.

Is This You?

Early today someone who reads this blog posted the following comment:

how do i contact for disputing charges
ec2 crashed on me and my account is still getting charged
i wnt to be reimbursed

We'll be happy to help, but you didn't leave a good email address with your comment! Send a note to awseditor@amazon.com and I'll get this taken care of for you.

-- Jeff;

Viewing Big Images Using Amazon S3

A recent post on the O'Reilly Radar blog pointed me at Tom Larkin's Zoomatron. The Zoomatron uses the Microsoft Research MapCruncher to provide a pannable view of a large graphical data set, which just happens to be stored in Amazon S3.

The site includes a hand-drawn elevation map of an island, a high-resolution picture of Tom's right eye and some NOAA charts.

-- Jeff;