Virta Pay Digital Delivery

Finally, after a long wait, VirtaPay kicked off Digital Delivery project on May 15th. The launch was delayed more than once, but it is good to see it actually working. The project added ability for all registered users to buy and sell digital goods.


I got really mixed up when I was looking for items to test how to buy something. First I was disappointed to find most items for sale are either fake or pirated. Only a couple of hours later, I could see the rating system is working and genuine items are moving closer to the top.

With time, flaws in the process seem to be discovered. The most obvious in my opinion is that after an item gets rated 50 times, it becomes immune to becoming flagged as inappropriate. This is called an "Established Item". Today, VirtaPay announced that many items were removed, but the flagging process is not changed.


Regardless to all that, I find it quite amusing to watch a new born currency and see its value changing with time. I haven't played with Warcraft or Second Life currencies before, so this is all new to me. We'll see what the good old "demand and supply" has to say.

Cluster spot price in Amazon EC2

Spot pricing is a feature in Amazon EC2 cloud that enables users to bid for machines at prices usually lower than the tag price. Prices change quickly over time and several sites keep track of these changes. Till last month, the powerful cluster instances were not available for spot pricing. This includes cluster CPU instance (cc1.4xlarge) and cluster GPU instance (cg1.4xlarge).

On April 7th, Amazon made the cluster instances available for spot pricing on the US east region. Using spot pricing for these instances roughly saves 65% of cost compared to on demand price (CPU instance at $1.6/hour and GPU instance at $2.1/hour).

I could not find price history for the new instances maintained in any of the sites above, so I created a simple chart to do that. The chart displays instance price at different points in time and also the average of the price.

All time is GMT +2 (CLT)

The chart displays prices at discrete points in time; it does not display all changes between every two points. It can be useful to check how close current price is to the average price. Right now, the average for CPU cluster machines is based on 659 readings and the one for GPU is based on 679 readings. These are all readings available since March 20th 2:00 pm.

Currently the chart is updated manually and I will be working on automating the process. I will keep it available in a separate page in the blog. Stay tuned for another post about how the chart is created.

Sony: 10 million credit card accounts may have been exposed

Sony apologizes, says 10 million credit card accounts may have been exposed in network attack | Technology | Los Angeles Times:

"Sony has maintained that the company acted as quickly as it could to ascertain the nature of the break-in, hire security experts and assess the scope of the damage. During the news conference, Hirai offered a time line of the events, saying the company was notified of the intrusion on April 19 and shut down the service on April 20 to investigate. It hired three firms to conduct a forensic analysis of its computers."