The Codebelay Blog

It’s not that difficult to store data into your Amazon S3 account and share that data with 50,000 or so people on the cheap.

Armed with just your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, you can use these two cool storage clients.

S3 Webmaster

For Windows, you can download the S3 Webmaster for free, and you just simply drag and drop your files and S3 will automatically set the permissions for public download.

S3Hub

For Macs, there is S3Hub, which works whether or not you have an S3 account. If you don’t have an S3 account you can view other public S3 buckets. If you do have an account you can easily upload and share the assets you stored.

Transmit

If your data storage needs run the gamut from sftp, webdav, iDisk, automated upload workflows, and S3, you’ll want to plunk down some cash like I did and get Transmit. At $17.95 it’s a bargain. I use it’s webdav and S3 features almost daily.

How fast can you get on the web? With newLISP it’s about as fast as typing:

How fast can you create a backdoor with newLISP?

If you telnet into port 1234 in localhost, you’ll see something that looks like this:

This opens up a lot of possibilities for distributed computing.

For example, you can set up a newLISP server that’s ready to respond to a newLISP client with this command:

Your newLISP client can have code that sends a computing problem to be solved to the server:

Or let’s say you had a farm of newLISP servers:

If the above example reminds you of Gearman, you get +12 points.

If you work with ACL, this may be the most important video you watch ever. Zed shows how ACL is not Turing complete, which explains all the problems you’ve been having with control lists.

Zed Shaw – The ACL is Dead from CUSEC on Vimeo.

Pre-requisites:

• An EC2 account. Click on the sign-up for ec2 button.
• Some version of *nix.
• Download the ec2 tools.
• Generated an ec2 keypair.

Now we’re ready to build an EC2 LAMP Server.

You’ll find that a lot of ec2 stuff happens in the .ec2 directory.

To list the possible servers that you can set up run:

I ran

and got 1477 possible servers. Some are Windows.

Let’s say we see this listing:

If we want to start up the ubuntu server listed above we just type:

And then we run this command:

We should see either “pending” or the actual instance running with its FQDN listed in the 4th column. An example FQDN is this:

ec2-173-33-159-95.compute-1.amazonaws.com

And if we go to:
http://ec2-173-33-159-95.compute-1.amazonaws.com/

we should see a webserver.

And if we ssh:

we’ll get the root prompt:
#~

That’s basically it. Now you can go in and mess around with server settings.

In the next blog post, we’ll look at how to save your custom server settings and set up using S3.

I was really inspired by the story of Pownce., and how they used S3 for storing media assets.

I really liked how easy it was to share media with Pownce. Alas, it’s no more and shut down on December 15th of last year.

What’s a guy to do? Well, using a combination of Transmit, a file upload and synchronization client, and S3 I can hack my own file sharing. I just upload the files I want to share and send the links to friends.

Here’s a link to an S3 media asset.

Once I felt comfortable about S3, I took the dive into EC2.

Pros: You can have a server of your choice, in my case LAMP, running in less than 5 minutes.

Cons: If the server crashes, all your data is gone.

Solution: Use ESB for database storage and S3 to back up files and custom executables.

How much does it cost?

For 1 LAMP server with 1.7GiB RAM running with a virtual 1.7Ghz CPU, and about 160GiB of storage will run you about 10 cents an hour, which is not bad considering that a colo will charge you around $100 per 1U or 12.5 cents per hour, and you’re stuck with the hardware you have.

The savings are even greater if you’re just setting up servers for prototyping and tearing them down. My last EC2 bills averaged at about $35 per month.

The next few blog posts will go into more detail about how to set up your own EC2 virtual server, and the pitfalls I’ve run into.

The NY Times now has ads in their RSS feeds. When did this happen? I’m off to research Pheedo who does the ads.

OH HAI -- We'ze Ads

At Codebelay we work with a number of recruiters who have helped secure jobs for a lot of our friends. Right now there are two recruiters who will loyally work for you in your corner.

• Lindsay Wolfe
• Geoff Zunker

If you have expertise with Javascript, especially jquery, or SQL Server, or PHP, these are the folks to talk to.

These things were just my absolute favorite in 2008.

• Github – Do you want to see nice graphs about your current coding project? Do you want to invite friends to code with you? As a consultant, there wasn’t a major client that I didn’t use Github for this year.
• The iPhone 3G – Thank you, thank you, Michael Parekh for saying that it’s the computer of the future and that you shouldn’t be developing for the web without it in mind.
• Grokking what Gearman is about.
• The Blogger.com SxSW gloves schwag. Ya, it was warm and rainy when Blogger.com passed these out but it was so good in the fall and winter!
• Katy Perry’s song “Hot N Cold”

What were your favorites of 2008?

Here we are, back again to share a love of learning. And now it’s time to discuss the topic on everyone’s mind in this economy: jobs! More specifically, green jobs. Not only is this growing atmosphere of environmental awareness creating previously nonexistent occupations, but it is largely taking old jobs and giving them a green twist. A little later, I will talk about how to green your office, but first let’s look at those new creations.

The Kansas City Business Journal on November 14, 2008, reported on the local efforts of local citizen David Crawford to connect unemployed workers with green jobs in the area. Another suggestion in the article is taking the displaced airline maintenance workers and putting them to work on wind turbines, where their skills translate well.

Another area where old skills can be translated to new jobs is in the area of emissions brokers. One of the self-proclaimed “largest and most successful energy brokers in the world” is TFS Green. Over at Forbes.com, in an article posted in July of 2007, emissions brokers are explained thusly: “In a market economy, credits to emit greenhouse gases can be traded on an exchange, and brokers facilitate the deal.” Pretty simple, right? The article also adds “[i]f the U.S. ever moves to a mandatory trading system, expect this field to boom.”

Another new position cropping up at many companies and universities is that of Sustainability Coordinator, presumably a person who would oversee the company’s environmental impact and how to make the company more “green.” To get a full run-down of the Sustainability Coordinator’s responsibilities at Duke University, just click here. Though the job description often sounds a little vague, you can go to sites like MySpace Jobs, type in “sustainability coordinator,” and get a number of hits.

Whole sites have sprung up devoted to landing a green job. Check here for green technology jobs, and for an excellent blog on where the jobs are by Joel Makower, click here. Green Career Central is another great source.

Everyday industries such as architecture and dry cleaning are also going green. Not only does having a green home or office building lessen its impact on the environment, they save us money, too! Though, admittedly, the initial investment can be high (such as with my parents’ low-flow toilets that, when flushed, sound like I imagine a black hole would, momentarily ripping through time and space), the long-term savings are equally so (ask my mother about her water bill).

Back in 2004, the World Franchising Newsletter wrote up a great introduction to franchising in the green industry, from organic lawn care to green dry cleaning. If you are thinking of opening your own business, start here. Even in these sad economic times, remember that green is growing.

So let’s say you have your own business already, or are simply looking to green your office. A good place to start is at your computer (because you are already sitting there right now reading this blog, don’t deny it). Are you as sick as I am of those wasted pieces of paper that pop out of your printer with only a web address and date or copyright information that you really couldn’t care less about? (Seriously, Yahoo, I couldn’t steal your technology if I tried.) Then you should consider downloading GreenPrint, a freeware I discovered just the other day. We haven’t had much of a chance to get to know each other, but so far, I like it! When printing a word document, it popped up with a print preview before printing and asked if I really wanted to print a page with only two lines on it. As this was a resume, no, I did not, and went back to correct the issue before attempting to print again. Ink and paper are expensive, and my poor college student mentality hates to see things go to waste, to say nothing of my hippie environmentalist upbringing.

Something else you can do with your computer to save money and energy is put it to sleep. Or, if you can do this, turn the darn thing off, then unplug it. (I switch off my power strip at the end of the night, which is as good as unplugging everything all at once.) In fact, do this with anything plugged into the wall that doesn’t need to constantly be on – TV, stereo, etc. It’s surprising what all these little steps can add up to.

I don’t think there is a doubt in anyone’s mind that our future is anything but green, and 2009 seems to be quite the year of promise for us. A new era is dawning, and I don’t just mean on January 20th. Just look at what Detroit’s offering up this week! As has been said many times before over the course of human history, it’s an exciting time to be alive.