AlexH » Programming

Paid EMIs from Amazon EC2

admin — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:17:23 +0000

Paid AMIs allow AWS developers to charge other Amazon EC2 users for the use of AMIs they have created and shared. Sellers of AMIs set the price, and their customers then purchase one or more AMIs and are billed through Amazon.com for their use of these paid AMIs.

Right now, only a select group of people can create paid AMIs, but hopefully they will open it up to more in the future.

Drupal Presentation

admin — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 04:34:51 +0000

Thanks to everyone who came out to the presentation tonight.

I’ve put the presentation online if you want to download it. Hosted by S3, natch.

Here are some links with some more information:

Simply Amazing!

admin — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 23:13:57 +0000

I cannot believe how cool this is! Photosynth combines flickr.com with an image processing algorithm to create an infinitely zoomable image.

The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest – and, we hope, most exciting – way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

Swapping caps and ctrl keys in Windows

alexh — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:38:12 +0000

Another step in my mouse reduction:

Francis Tang: Geek Stuff | Win2k/XP Ctrl-Caps swap

XEmacs/Emacs users will understand this well: the Ctrl key is in the wrong position on modern PC 102 key keyboards. A better place for the Ctrl key is where it used to be, i.e. where the Caps key is now.

MS Compiler

alexh — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 18:29:40 +0000

Fatal Error C1061 (C++)

Nesting of code blocks exceeds the limit of 128 nesting levels. Simplify nesting.

It’s not nested you stupid compiler! It’s just a list of if – else if statements. Ah well.

S3 and torrents

alexh — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:46:52 +0000

BP answers the question on how you can serve files through S3 initially to jumpstart the swarm, but avoid paying massive bandwidth bills.

BP’s Weblog: Fun with torrents, and Amazon S3

And, that’s what I did. I downloaded the original file, uploaded it to a bucket I have on S3. Then, I copied the generated S3 .torrent to my own server, and told the Nerd Vittles folks where to find it. Meanwhile, I had copied the original file up to my hosted server, and started up a seed there, as well (this saved me having to pay for an extra download from S3).

The advice at the end of the post tells you how to do it. Great idea!

S3 can log traffic per key

alexh — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:25:58 +0000

This was one of my problems with using S3 for hosting purposes, is that I couldn’t find a way to track per key (file). Turns out it’s a beta feature right now. I doubt that it will be taken away though.

Server Access Logging Overview

An Amazon S3 bucket can be configured to create access log records for the requests made against it. An access log record contains details about the request such as the request type, the resource the request worked worked with, and the time and date that the request was processed. Server access logs are useful for many applications, because they give bucket owners insight into the nature of requests made by clients not under their control.

In the log you get the following data, amongst other things:

Request-URI “GET /mybucket/photos/2006/08/puppy.jpg?x-foo=bar” The Request-URI part of the HTTP request message.

Bytes Sent 2662992 The number of response bytes sent, excluding HTTP protocol overhead, or ‘-’ if zero.

Perfect.

A solution to the digital dark age?

alexh — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 17:08:27 +0000

Something I worry about is the archiving of my data. We take a lot of pictures with Tracy’s SLR, and also some movies with our DV cam, and currently it’s backed up on a hard drive, and to DVD. But that’s still quite fragile, and I’d like to make sure our data could be preserved for future generations. Could this be a solution to the problem?

Scientists: Data-storing bacteria could last thousands of years

Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus announced the development of the new technology, which creates an artificial DNA that carries up to more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence, according to the JCN Newswire.

The universities said they successfully encoded “e= mc2 1905!” — Einstein’s theory of relativity and the year he enunciated it — on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis.

Replacing a substring in MySQL

admin — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:39:15 +0000

UPDATE tablename SET tablename.column = REPLACE( tablename.column, “oldtext”, “newtext” ) WHERE tablename.column LIKE “%oldtext%”

Amazon EC2 and S3, what it is, and what it isn’t

admin — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:36:48 +0000

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.

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