The initial version of which, has just been added to the development version of WordPress. The commit message explains the philosophy of Twenty Twelve:

Initial import of the Twenty Twelve theme, by Drew Strojny. This time around we’re trying something different than the previous twenty-something themes, a much more minimalist approach that affords easy use as a CMS in addition to being blog-forward. More information will be on wpdevel soon. Props drewstrojny and lancewillett.

Source: Trac Ticket #19978

I have set up a Twenty Twelve Demo Site here: http://twentytwelve.jamesc.id.au/

I’m very interested to see how it pans out!

Update: The Twenty Twelve Development Team has posted an update:

This is not yet a fully working theme — we’ll be adding in more features and lots of missing styles over the next 3–4 weeks. Including post formats, comments, archives and page templates, more in-post styling, and a nav menu rework so the main content comes ahead of the navigation.

What’s new you may ask? The best way to find that out is to visit the new About WordPress screen in the dashboard:

(this screenshot was uploaded using the spiffy new drag-and-drop media uploader of course!)

For the more technically inclined, see the WordPress 3.3 Codex page for detailed information on 3.3.

Simone Brunozzi (AWS Asia Pacific Technology Evangelist) kicked the night off with an informal presentation covering EC2 Security Groups, ElastiCache, SQS, and several other questions from the 35-person audience.

The Audience

Simone Brunozzi presenting

Adam and Joseph from Melbourne-based IndexMedia gave a brief presentation about how they use AWS for their in-image advertising tool. Very cool!

The audience then attempted to eat the large amount of pizza that provided. We got close, with 12 out of the 15 pizzas being eaten

Rob Linton gave away several copies of his new book: Amazon Web Services: Migrating Your .NET Enterprise Application.

We are currently looking for speakers for the September meetup, so please contact us if you’re interested in speaking. We’d love to hear about:

• how you’re using AWS
• the problems (and solutions) you’ve encountered whilst using AWS
• your favourite AWS tools/libraries
• almost anything else AWS-related!

Thank you to the speakers, the sponsor (SysTalk), and to everyone that attended. It was great to see a strong turn out for the first AWS meetup.

Take a look at my previous post on what’s new in 3.2.

However, for performance (and privacy) reasons, many Australian business owners require their website and other data to be physically hosted in Australia.

As an Australian user of AWS, one of the recurring conversations I continue to have with other Australians is if (and when) will Amazon Web Services add an Australian region to their service offerings?

The Current Situation

Currently Amazon EC2 (AWS’ virtual server solution) is available in five regions – two in the USA, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo.

Amazon CloudFront (AWS’ content delivery network) currently uses 19 edge locations throughout the US, Europe and Asia, however they don’t currently have one in Australia.

The most recently added edge location was Sweden.

Why no Australia Region?

In my opinion, there are a lot of factors to take into account when evaluating adding a new region. For example:

• consumer demand in that region
• reliability and redundancy of networking/datacentre infrastructure
• costs of this infrastructure
• availability of government grants

Personally I think the main reason AWS isn’t already in Australia is because of our high networking and datacentre costs. I also can’t imagine the Australian Government offering any grants for this either – although I’d love to be proven wrong on this!

I’m guessing that there are quite a few Australian customers already using AWS, so consumer demand is probably not the cause.

Some Progress

In May AWS sent out a survey to their Australian clients:

Dear AWS Customer,

Amazon Web Services currently serves customers in over 190 countries. As part of our ongoing effort to provide better services and support to our global customers, we are conducting a short (17 question) survey to better understand your needs and requirements.

We sincerely appreciate your time and feedback.

Best regards,
The Amazon Web Services Team

After receiving the survey I tweeted it, and so far almost 40 people have clicked on the link (and hopefully filled in the survey).

If you haven’t already, please complete the survey so Amazon are aware of our demand for AWS in Australia!

The Future

I think if Amazon is to have a presence in Australia, the first step would be adding an Australian-based CloudFront edge location. This would help them evaluate costs, and if things work out then Amazon could introduce their other services such as EC2 and S3.

Your Thoughts?

Why do you think AWS doesn’t have an Australian region?

How likely is it that we will see AWS in Australia?

I don’t know about you, but I have my fingers crossed!

In the last few hours these changes (still a work in progress) have been committed. See below for some screenshots of the new UI:

WordPress 3.2 Dashboard

WordPress 3.2 Posts Listing

WordPress 3.2 Add Post

Although still far from finalised, I’m already a fan of the new Dashboard

Ref: Trac Ticket #17324 | Make WordPress UI

I didn’t want to clog this technical blog with a heap of photos, so I’ve set up a separate photoblog website: photos.jamesc.id.au.

I’ll be using the new site to explore my interests in photography.

If you’re interested, please take a look

Macbook Pro

If you’re an iPhone user and haven’t checked out Instagram yet, I recommend getting it from the App Store (its free)!

Interestingly Instagram use Amazon Web Services too!

Simone and I organised the event – please read on for a summary.

Step one involved Simone and I having a quick coffee at Degraves Espresso Bar (he loves Melbourne coffee), then picking up a few cases of beer for the meetup:

Around 25 people attended, with approximately half the crowd already using AWS.

Simone started with an introduction to AWS, followed by a demo involving spinning up an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance using the AWS Management Console, logging into the server via SSH, installing a web server (Apache), then testing the server using its public IP address.

Next was a demo of Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS), where he launched a MySQL instance in the cloud.

For both demos he used the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region, which is commonly used by Australians because Amazon doesn’t currently have a presence in Australia (more on that here).

There was then an informal Q&A, where the audience asked a wide range of questions. Personally I think this was the most valuable part of the meetup because the audience was so broad.

Lisa Lang from Sitepoint was nice enough to attend and give away a few copies of their Host Your Web Site in the Cloud book.

After the meetup a few of us (Mark, John, Simone and I) headed to Degraves Street for a quick pizza before Simone had to return to his hotel for a late night conference call (the guy works some pretty long hours!).

Amazon Web Services in Australia?

Currently most AWS products are only available in the US (east and west), Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo so one of the main discussion points of the night was whether or not AWS will be available in Australia.

Simone was not able to confirm whether AWS will add an Australian region, however he did say that Amazon is always investigating the feasibility of new regions, and requests for an Australian region are quite common. Fingers crossed

Now What?

It was a fantastic experience organising the meetup with Simone, and I hope we can organise another one for the next time he’s in Melbourne.

Thanks again to Simone for taking time out of his busy schedule and providing free beer and credits, Openhub for letting us use the venue, and thanks to everyone that came along.

Everyone seemed to learn (at least) a few things, and we’ll all be receiving free AWS credits early next week