AlexH

Today I found out that Telus lets me pay by credit card for no additional fee.  My phone bill is generally $85/month because it includes Internet access.

This means that I pay about $1020 annually.  At 1 RBC point every 2 dollars, that means that I get a $25 Future Shop gift card every 6 years, for doing nothing.

One feature that I really like is the ability to set a maximum debit amount, because I don’t really trust Telus to bill me properly.

I really need to get a card that gets better points.

Having upgraded MythTV, the new timestretch feature defaults to 1.0x, which isn’t what I want. Here’s how to fix that:

From a shell prompt:

mysql -u mythtv -p mythconverg;

Where ‘mythtv’ is the username used to access the database. It will prompt you for a password. After typing in the password successfully, type the following command at the mysql prompt:

update record set tsdefault = 1.1;

That’s it!

EDIT: Hmmm maybe not.  There is also a timescale column in the recorded table:

update recorded set timescale = 1.1;

There’s something wrong with the collision detection code, and I fell through the floor today.

If I was winning, I would have stayed down there with the flag.

There is a lot of confusion going on about Amazon EC2. I know I didn’t fully understand it when I signed up, but now that I’ve played with it for a while, I feel that I can comment on how it works.

• It is a full Linux machine. You can install anything on it. The only thing you can’t change is hardware. Kernels are a bit complicated, but doable. If there are things missing from the base images, the Amazon crew can provide it, if there is demand.
• It’s on a ram disk. That’s how you think about it. If you turn off the power, it goes away. BUT! If you reboot, it’s still there.
• You can save your images. They get saved to S3, and can be reloaded in the future. However, this is a time consuming process.

What it’s not:

• Something that private data can be stored on. There are too many variables, too many places a hacker can get in. When I talk about private data, I mean something that is under NDA or legislated to be private. I don’t mean passwords to a website.
• An infinitely expandable server.  1GB RAM, 160GB disk space, that’s it.  If you want more, you create a new server, and it’s up to you to deal with load balancing, new hostnames, getting the data to the image, etc.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, EC2, Elastic Computing Cloud, S3, Simple Storage Server, Web Hosting, Data Center, Utility Computing

After a long day of working on the Amazon EC2 servers, why not relax with a game of UT2004?

cloud-1.chronosdigital.com port 7777

The servers will be available from 5:00pm* to 6:59pm PST every day.

Please let me know how they perform, email cloudgame at the above mentioned domain (without the cloud-1 subdomain), or post a comment here.

* Depending on how long it takes to load the maps from S3.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, EC2, Elastic Computing Cloud, S3, Simple Storage Server, Web Hosting, Data Center, Utility Computing

Just a hint, if your PHP installation isn’t working, make sure you don’t have mod_suphp installed.  It breaks things, for no reason.

Arrgh.