I apologise for it being absolutely ages since I have last blogged. During this time I have moved flat into my first mortgaged property and also planned more weddingy things. I have also painted the walls of said flat brightly coloured, as opposed to the (boring!) off-white magnolia colour the previous occupants thought would suit every single wall.

Also, da da daaah, lowmanio.co.uk has moved TO THE CLOUD! It is no longer hosted on a PC under my desk at home, but in Amazon’s mass of condensed water vapour floating in the internetmosphere. This seems to have fixed a problem I was having with memory leaks and having to reboot the server every day and also reducing my monthly electricity bill by up to £10 a month! I am using Amazon’s ‘free for a year’ cloud, although so far I have paid £1.55 as I went over the limit in the first month (oops). Now that’s it’s all set up it’s very easy to run, however when I signed up I was completely lost on how to do anything at all. Just like Amazon’s main website, user interface design is definitely not something in the front of their software engineer’s minds (Amazons front page has not changed significantly in the last 6.5 years – see The WayBack Machines capture of May 2006). Amazon's EC2 website is incredibly different to navigate. It offers everything you could ask for in terms of controlling your cloud applications, but its information overload in lots of different sections and tabs and links and for the novice user, it’s all a bit much. Luckily I have Steven who spent 2 weeks trawling through documentation to set it all up for me!

I promise some more computer forensics related blog posts coming up soon – one on open-source people searches and the other on forensic reports.