• a NFS file server for other UNIX systems
• a Samba file server for Windows systems
• a LDAP server for keeping a single location of contacts
• an Apache web server for an internal website of links and other information (photos, etc)
• a Slimserver daemon that provides support to my Squeezebox
• a MediaTomb server that provides support to my DLINK DSM-520
• an internal Domain Name Server (DNS)

and more!

I use this setup to hold all my digital photos, audio (mp3) files, and I’m now in the process of scanning in my DVD library. So let me take a moment to say “Just say NO to piracy!”

I personally have found it to be cost effective to buy used CDs or DVDs and scan them in to get good quality recordings, and all my media stays only on my local server that is inaccessible from the Internet. Aside from the legal issues, who wants to clog up their Internet connection with unnecessary traffic for others?

I’ll pass along some things I found while building my setup. I never went the iTunes route because I’ve always used smaller mp3 players that were smaller and cheaper than the iPod. Plus, I want to use a generic format like mp3 and not be limited by what I can play it on. With mp3 I can play all my music on my computer, laptop, stereo (through Slimdevices Squeezebox) or even my DSM-520. It is simple enough to get your CDs into mp3 files so I won’t go into that.

Next, the video portion. I chose the DSM-520 because I wanted a cheap box that had no moving parts (i.e., no hard drive) that would talk nicely to my fileserver. Well, it turns out that it doesn’t just look for a fileserver using something like Samba — it requires a UPnP type server to be running. DLINK gives you one, but it is for Windows, and you can’t really have a Windows box on all the time to that purpose. At least, not reliably Seriously, I have linux boxes that have been up for 450 days with no problems. I can’t let a Windows box go for 3 weeks before all hell breaks loose.

So, I looked around for some UPnP server software I could use and chose MediaTomb which I could easily add using Yum. It is simple enough to run, and lets me add video/photos/music that puts references of those files into a MediaTomb database.

Now you need to scan your DVDs into your library! There are various free packages (like handbrake) which I looked at, but in the end I settled on CloneDVDMobile which is by SlySoft, a great little company that I’ve used for their AnyDVD software which allows me to watch my DVDs on my PC (believe it or not, some DVDs refuse to play nice on a PC).

When you use this software, you are given a whole slew of formats to choose from. I used the generic DivX one that produces AVI files. Most DVDs will offer me the 852×480 resolution, and I max out the quality which goes to 25-29 usually. I use 2-pass deinterlacing and prefer saving it as one big file.

The AVI files it produces look great on my win media player, and I had some trouble figuring out how to make it look nice on my DSM-520, and after much hair pulling it turned out that I just had to alter the aspect ratio in the DSM-520’s settings screen to 16:9 and then it was perfect!

So now I can kick back on my couch and flip through all my DVD titles and watch anything I want with a touch of a button!

Of course now my wife says, “There’s nothing here to watch! It’s all The Matrix and James Bond!”

So now I need to scan in a bunch of Julia Roberts movies.

There is one hand I had in the early rounds which goes as follows. The blinds were 25-50, I had about $3500 in chips, and I had in early position. I open raise to $200, and I get three callers.

The flop is . I am first to act and bet out $500. The first person folds, the second and third people call.

The turn is . I bet out $1000 and he calls. The river puts another possibility out there, . At this point, I check. The fact that both of these guys are hanging around doesn’t make me happy. I have bottom set, and there is a potential straight and flush out there.

The first guy checks, the second guy goes all-in and has me covered by a little bit. It is early in the tournament and I figure that I don’t want to bust out so early, and I still have enough chips to get back in the tournament, so I fold.

The first guy calls and turns over . The second guy turns over for two pair. Man, I almost jumped out of my seat for laying down to these guys!

I really figured one of these guys either had the Ten or a Club or even a better set. It turns out later the guy who won said he was playing very loose and aggressive to try and chip up fast. Well, poker is a series of lessons, isn’t it?

I swear this hand left me steaming for a good 15 minutes, but I managed to stay tight until I calmed down and then ramped up my chips for a bit until I lost steam at the end of the day. I can’t wait until next year

[Ac]

to show the card of Ace of Clubs for example. You use a two-letter code that is Rank and Suit to show a card. The ranks/suits are as follows:

Ranks: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, T, J, Q, K, A

Suits: c, d, h, s, x

where c=Clubs, d=Diamonds, h=Hearts, s=Spades, and x=Unknown

So go ahead and tell people how you had your cracked by a donkey with !

Download the plugin here

I assume you have already done the basics, like created your developer account (and know your secret key), and installed the command line tools.

Note that you will need Java installed on your system for the tools to function.

You can find the official EC2 docs here.

Now, on to my tips!

Find A Starter Image

You can browse the images at Amazon via the command :

You’ll see a bunch of images that are out there, in different UNIX flavors, and some with LAMP already installed. I found that whatever you pick, you’ll want to do your own package installs anyway, so just pick a baseline that you like, i.e. Ubuntu or Redhat or whichever you feel comfortable.

Note that you need the AMI string of your choice to continue. Not only will you see a number of Amazon created AMI’s, but other folks have created some public AMIs that you can choose from. Here are some AMIs for Ubuntu you can check out.

Choose A Server Size

Note that EC2 provides a small, large, and extra-large version your can use. I’ve found that the small instances are incompatible with the the large and XL, so be careful! You should start with the large if you plan on any expansion whatsoever.

So when you are ready to create an instance, you’ll need to specify the size (m1.large or m1.xlarge) on the command line otherwise it will default to small, i.e.:

You’ll need to create a gsg-keypair file first of course. This is described nicely in the command line docs, you’ll use “ec2-create-keypair”.

Note that you can apply a firewall to your instance via the “-g <name>” option, where you define a group with the name of “<name>”. You can see what groups you have via:

You can create these groups using commands like:

Access Your Instance

After you run an instance, you can check on the progress via:

And you can provide the instance name also, e.g.

Then you can SSH into it when it is ready by using the domain name it returns, e.g.

Customize Your Instance

You should now make sure your instance has all the packages you want, and configure them how you like. I install the latest Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, etc, and edit all the configuration files to my liking.fone

Make sure you stay in “/”, and do not use “/mnt” since this will go away if you reboot and won’t be saved when you save your instance.

If you need more space, you can use the extra storage service from Amazon although I have not done that at this point.

When you have everything the way you like it, you should save your instance. You will use ec2-bundle-vol to create the image, and ec2-upload-bundle to upload it to Amazon’s storage service.

You’ll need your secret key, access key, cert key, user id and a sample command set is as follows. You will run these from your Amazon instance (where real keys and numbers are replaced by X’s and fake numbers):

Once it is uploaded, you will need to now register it as an AMI image you can access later. You need to do this command from your local host:

This will output your AMI string that you need to note so you can use it later to use your new instance on new Amazon servers.

Cleanup When Done

Don’t forget to make sure you terminate instances you don’t need to use anymore, or you will continue to be charged for them! Run “ec2-describe-instances” to see what you are running, and then you can use “ec2-terminate-instances” with the instance string as an argument to remove them.

Every now and then I can spy a group of around 20 tourists in single file segwaying around the streets of San Francisco. On this particular day I watched as five of them got into a big pileup and fell over on top of each other in the middle of an intersection! These things are supposed to be easy to ride, but apparently not too easy.

I couldn’t get my camera out in time to catch the tourists flailing around with their segways on top of them, but here they are trying to drag these things up and out of the way of traffic.

To do this, you can create this actionscript class in your main mxml directory (or get fancy and name it within subdirectories) as ” ObjTimer.as” and the contents are simply:

// ActionScript file
// ObjTimer is just a timer that can hold an object of variables to pass along
package {
    import flash.utils.Timer;
    public class ObjTimer extends Timer {
        public var obj:Object = new Object;
        public function ObjTimer(delay:Number, repeatCount:int = 0) {
             super(delay, repeatCount);
        }
    }
}

and then you can access it from within your mxml like so for example:

var newTimer: ObjTimer = new ObjTimer(900,1);
newTimer.obj["myvar1"] = "test";
newTimer.obj["firstname"] = "joe";
newTimer.obj["count"] = 10;
newTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, handleFunction);
newTimer.start();

private function handleFunction(e:Event):void{
    var value:String = e.target.obj["myvar1"];
    var fn:String = e.target.obj["firstname"];
    var count:int = parseInt(e.target.obj["count"]);
}

This example is really quick-n-dirty, you can make it nicer by adding setters and getters in the new class, but for an easy implementation this should get you going.

Just over my house alone I spotted 10 helicopters, I assume a bunch of them are the media. But who knows? They could be packed with SWAT police ready to rappel down and save the torch. Photos below, click for larger versions.

The crowd was excited and peaceful, I did not see anyone charging the torch with a fire extinguisher or any other fire-intimidating device. Which is great, because, really, why protest the torch for crying out loud! The torch didn’t hurt anyone. And certainly the 80 year-old man carrying the torch in one hand, and his cane in the other, doesn’t need anyone yelling at him for the block or two he gets to participate. You want to protest China? Here’s an idea — go to the embassy. Trust me, you don’t want to cross the San Francisco police.

Ujogo Poker: This is a more condensed version of the official Ujogo.com website, and allows the FB avatars to be shown, adding friends, seeing user’s profiles inside the app, and various alerts to users based on performance, etc. The backend code is done in J2EE using the Java API.

Confessions: This is a game to let users create confessions that are put in front of their group of friends for judgement. The backend is done in PHP using the FaceBook PHP API.

The Driving Test: A test-taking game where you can add your own questions into the database. The backend is in PHP. It is a good thing I have an approval process function for when people submit their own questions, some of the stuff people submit is crazy! Perhaps I’ll post some of it someday.

All the applications are Flash (SWF) developed in Flex, communicating with standard backend services.

I struggled with finding a way, as I talk about in another posting, and found that using the dataChange event does the trick, and I always create the ItemRenderer as a separate component instead of trying to put all the logic in the main mxml. The component gets the initial setting of the value for that cell via “.data” and then you need to maintain and check it within the component. This can end up with the coder doing some hacking, and my example is only that — an example. I’m sure there are more elegant ways to achieve this. But that’s one of the things I think Flex shares with Perl — there are always multiple ways to get something done!

Take a look at the first flash example, where I DON’T use the dataChange — then see how it works nicely on the 2nd example.

First example (Try sorting columns and see it randomizes each time):

This movie requires Adobe Flash Player — Download at www.adobe.com

Second example (Works!):

This movie requires Adobe Flash Player — Download at www.adobe.com

Download my code sample here.

The Flex folks have some good solutions, see more on Flexcoders.