heyPanda

Originally posted January 22, 2008 at masonbrowne.info:

This entry is a bit of a "catch up" post. Not very much technical material. Ignore at your own discretion.

Back From New York

There's been a bit of silence on the blog for a while. I don't normally travel, but I feel like the past two months has been filled with it.

After my return from Seattle WA/Vancouver BC, I began work at a fantastic place known as Boom Design Group. After only a few days, I was informed that they were trying to bring all their satellite workers into the NY office to plan out some of the new software we're making. So, on the 13th of January, I had my first New York experience. Fun stuff.

Unfortunately, my hotel lacked reliable Internet access (instead providing a locked-down, virus-infested Windows machine hooked up to DSL), so blogs have been put on hold, which is unfortunate, because quite a few blog-worthy things have been going down.

Amazon Web Services

Some of the software I've been developing for Boom has given me the chance to play with Amazon's web services. The three I've used so far are S3, EC2, and SQS. While I've heard a lot about how S3 can save you money by offloading storage and bandwidth to Amazon, utilizing the three in combination with each other is where stuff gets cool. Since all three lay within Amazon's data centers, transfer between them is free and fast.

EC2 was a particularly unique beast. It feels odd being able to just... request a machine and have it available to you. I started with a generic Debian Etch distro, installed all the junk I wanted on it, then froze an image of it and threw it on S3. Now I can make clones of that image with a single command, and have them running in minutes. It's flipping scary.

SQS is particularly helpful for job scheduling between the machines. Since it's low-latency between EC2 instances, communication happens fairly quickly. I'm able to post a job to the queue, and let one of my instances take care of it. Because of the lock-on-read, I don't have to worry about scheduling between instances, and because I'm using S3 for storage, I always know the file is available to any given machine. What one ends up with is an interface to a processor farm. I'm using the instances primarily for media transcoding. All I have to do is upload the file to S3, pass a transcode message to a queue, and wait for a "job complete" message to be posted on another queue. It doesn't matter which machine does it, or how it's done. I just know that when I get that message, the new file is on S3 waiting for me.

Distributed programming is great.

New Vehicle

After driving home to Bozeman from Billings over icy roads and high winds, and then not being able to make it down the street into my driveway due to all the snow, I acted on a thought that's been slowly chipping it's way towards my attention, and bought a new vehicle. It promises to handle much better than my 2003 Ford Focus, though I know I'll miss the excellent gas mileage. And that's all I have to say about that.

Asus Eee PC

After seeing just about everyone I know on Pownce get an Asus Eee PC, I decided to go ahead and buy one. Given that my Macbook Pro is pretty much a dedicated desktop/development machine (with its being plugged into about a bajillion different things on my desk), something I could easily tote around was called for. Not wanting to throw down $1700 on a Macbook Air, and desperately wanting something with a smaller footprint, I investigated the Eee PC options and settled on the 4GB Pearl White with the larger battery capacity, and a 2 GB stick of RAM to throw in there when it arrives... which hopefully should be some time this week.

Though Carolyn Sonnek assures me that the default Xandros install is no issue, I'm leaning heavily towards throwing Ubuntu 7.10 on there. Having access to the full Ubuntu repository (and knowing everything works) is something I see as a major benefit. I also want to play with Compiz, apparently works fairly well out of the box. Woo.

I do wish it ran at the advertised 900 MHz, so I wouldn't have to resort to a possibly warranty-voiding overclocking procedure, which I will likely do. I normally stay away from such nefarious practices, but with a $400 price tag, I can afford to fry one if it comes to that. But I still hope I won't.

Fin + Pownce

So ends my catch-up post. Much more has happened in the past month, but I'm betting it's nothing interesting enough to warrant a write up here. I did want to say one thing though: Now that Pownce is public, why don't some of you readers add me as a buddy? Be sure to mention that you're a blog reader in your request, else I'll likely leave you as a fan.