When you're a casual user, it's awfully easy to forget what ec2 nodes you have running.
Maybe you thought it was a good idea to start a server in Europe and then you find that little bugger idling away a year later and suddenly realize why your bills were so high.

Here's python to list out your instances, with just a little attention, this could be ( Read more... )

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/04/persistent_storage_for_amazon.html

I just noticed that EC2 finally got persistent storage.  Very cool.   I don't suppose anyone has the inside track on this - I'd love to know what they used to connect this to S3 and provide snapshots.

I love seeing hardware destroyed by software

https://launchpad.net/bug59695.html

You are tasked with making relatively minor changes to some established code; the code is well vetted - maybe it's survived a few release cycles.  Unfortunately, the code is poorly written.  Do you rewrite for clarity/elegance/etc, and risk a regression?

Ed: Cross disciplinary posts acceptable - If you don't code, but can decode the above, then you ( Read more... )

I was recently informed that adobe offers CS3 as a free download, with a 30 day trial. (http://www.adobe.com/special/try_buy/trial_availability.html) Naturally, the idea here is that you download and install it; when the 30 days are up it locks you out and ( Read more... )

A friend of mine is looking for someone who can do some animation with flash. Hit me up if you know someone who might be interested ( Read more... )

Resumes can be sent to me ( Read more... )

My "I'll finish this post tomorrow" turned into 5 months later. Oops. In my defense I was busy with many things, including a rewrite of my website backend. That lavish bit of over-engineering will no doubt be the topic of some future post ( Read more... )

Today I'm-a-postin' about __declspec(align)! This is an extended attribute applied to user defined data.

Like So:
__declspec(align(8)) int foo;
...and there you have a nice 8 byte aligned int. A good reason to do this is to force data to align on cache lines. This attribute is easier to use for this kind of thing than "#pragma ( Read more... )

I'm very happy to announce that I wrapped up my disco computer project last weekend! The results are way more impressive than this video could ever depict, but until you (the reader) is able to drop by in person this little demo will have to suffice.

( Read more... )