From mydigitallife.info:

1. SiteUpTime - Free account monitors 1 service from 4 monitoring location at the frequency of 30 or 60 minutes with email alerts.

freelanceswitch.com lists the 12 most useful Firefox extensions for web developers. Here's a summary (just in case the page disappears).

1. FireFTP
2. ColorZilla
3. IE Tab

According to MachTech and summarised by MacDailyNews:

• Boot Camp is faster for simply running Windows
• When running Mac OS X and Windows together, you get the best performance using XP
• VMware Fusion and Parallels generally have similar performance
• Parallels is generally faster than VMware Fusion when using XP

"Tersely put, SimpleDB is hugely disruptive. It will take some time to evolve the new thinking patterns and new design disciplines that this technology forces us to consider. To do so, consider this breakdown of the similarities and differences between SimpleDB and conventional relational databases..." Full article: Amazon SimpleDB 101 & Why It Matters

Another great article on the johnandcailin.com site: Never loose your data again: backup remotely using rsync ssh and rdiff-backup

We've recently been asked by a client to look into creating a Drupal installation that can cope with heavy load. Here's some useful instructions from johnandcailin.com. I'll post a follow-up in the near future explaining what we ended up doing and how successful it was.

• Scaling drupal - an open-source infrastructure for high-traffic drupal sites