So far this year, I've probably spent $40 in charges I could have
avoided by terminating instances when I stopped needing them. Often,
I know when I start an instance that it is only to test a short
process and I don't expect to have it running more than the first
hour.

Here's a trick which can be used to start an instance and have that
instance shut itself down in 50 minutes:

ec2-run-instances AMIID --key KEYPAIR --user-data '#!bin/sh
shutdown -h +50 >/dev/null &'

Last night I left 14 small instances running while I slept. Will be running this command first from now on.

tip: Temporary instances with automatic shutdown - ec2ubuntu | Google Groups

On February 10 at approximately 1656 GMT, the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 communications satellites collided over northern Siberia. The impact between the Iridium Satellite LLC-owned satellite and the 16-year-old satellite launched by the Russian government occurred at a closing speed of well over 15,000 mph at approximately 490 miles above the face of the Earth. The low-earth orbit (LEO) location of the collision contains many other active satellites that could be at risk from the resulting orbital debris.

The following videos, interactive 3D Viewer files, 3D models, and high-resolution images are available to better understand this event.

See also:

... POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION...

I don't understand how this could happen.

Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 Satellite Collision

How to get stuff done.

How to get stuff done

UbiGraph is a tool for visualizing dynamic graphs. The basic version is free, and talks to Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C, C++, C#, Haskell, and OCaml.

Very impressive graphs.

Ubigraph: Free dynamic graph visualization software

We all know that no one really spends much time hand-writing SQL anymore. Whether you think it’s a good idea or not (and we might just get in to that, too) the majority of people out there who aren’t using PHP are writing applications using ORMs. Hibernate, JDO, JPA, SQLAlchemy, ActiveRecord. It’s what people are doing, and it allows them to focus on writing the objects their application needs.

But there is an efficiency problem, and many of the real performance nuts get hot and bothered when confronted with ORM’s generating SQL Queries. SQL isn’t exactly the best medium for serialization of data, and trying to generate optimal sequences isn’t always successful.

What happens when we take the abstraction of ORMs, and match it with databases exposing lower-level interfaces to send queries?

With the NDB API in MySQL Cluster, you get storage engine level calls like “fetch tuple” or “scan index”.

In Drizzle we’re talking about the possibility to pushing parsing to the client and sending serialized parse trees or maybe even query plans to the server directly.null

SQL is dead: MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 - O'Reilly Conferences, April 20 - 23, 2009, Santa Clara, CA

Finally, we have updated the NCBI's Genbank data. Weighing in at a hefty quarter of a petabyte, this public data set contains information on over 85 billion bases and 82 million sequence records.

Genbank is on S3/EBS as a snapshot. Wow... 250TB!

Amazon Web Services Blog: New AWS Public Data Sets - Economics, DBpedia, Freebase, and Wikipedia

I realized the other day that on OS X, the Spotlight indexing process is started using launchd. This makes it very easy to modify the launchd configuration script to insure that background indexing uses the least amount of CPU and I/O bandwidth possible.

Edit the configuration script by running this command as root:

# open /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

You should find yourself in the Property List Editor application. Now add two keys at the top-level, one named LowPriorityIO, which is a boolean set to true, and another named Nice which should be an integer set to 20.

Now whenever the mds spawns mdworker processes to index recent changes to the file system, it won’t get in your way quite as much as before. (Without this change, mdworker processes run at the same priority as user processes, according to output from the ps axl command).

Hoping this helps, because mdworker OWNS my macbook pro.

Run the Spotlight indexer at a lower priority - Lost in Technopolis

Agenda:

7:00 Hadoop

Don Brown of TwitPay and Divvs will be giving a presentation on Hadoop and Map Reduce. For those of you who missed Don's presentation at Cloud Camp Atlanta, this is a great presentation. We are planning video taping the presentation this time so that we can show the world that not only does Atlanta have cloud, we also got "Hadoop".

Hadoop is interesting not only if you want a Java map/reduce system but... because most of the public domain discussion on map/reduce is about Hadoop, and it applies to other systems.

AWSome Atlanta (Cloud Computing User's Group) March Meetup - AWSome Atlanta (Cloud Computing User's Group) (Atlanta, GA) - Meetup.com

Philosophy

The server AMIs are base installs built with the minimal Ubuntu or Debian system. No assumption is made about your intended purpose or desired software choices. Given that this is Ubuntu/Debian, it is generally trivial to turn a base install into a web, database, or email server, complete LAMP system, or just about any other application.

The desktop AMIs are provided as experimental systems. It takes over an hour to install the Ubuntu desktop on EC2, so I figured it would be nice to give folks a chance to try one out without this wait.

Ubuntu EC2 - Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2 - Alestic.com

One of the most commonly discussed, requested, and suggested development projects that comes from the RipIt user-base is a program to manage the hundreds of thousands of movies you have ripped so far. We've actually been thinking about it since before RipIt was released!

Turns out, we needed a solution as much as you do. We purchase and test hundreds of DVDs from around the globe. After six months of selling RipIt, we have quite a collection of rips - so much so that we recently set up a 15 terabyte storage solution for them all!

About 5 months ago, we set about developing such a solution. After countless hours of sweating the details, we're happy to introduce Multiplex - the easiest and most beautiful way we could think of to manage our DVD collections.

Ripit DVD Viewer - Mailer 21