dcinput

David Lynch on product placement in films. Very funny.

Playing with Amazon Web Services

Spent several hours this evening reading tutorials about and playing around with some of the Amazon web services: S3, EC2 and SQS. I found a great tutorial by Mitch Garnaat explaining how to use all three to build a massively scalable solution to video conversion. At very short notice you can deploy hundreds maybe even thousands of machines to number crunch, pay for what you use, then give them all back. No maintenance headache, no need for massive up front investment.

Mitch has written set of Python libraries called Boto that wrap up some of he Amazon functionality. The tutorials have some good examples and seem pretty straight forward to use. I came across some authentication issues which I hope to resolve in the next few days.

In around a year or two mobile devices that can take great video will be standard. What are all these millions of people going to want to do with their video? That’s the million dollar question.

Eric Nicoli CEO of EMI: “Our goal is to give consumers the best possible digital music experience. By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans”.

This is very exciting. When I was at school and at university I used to spend many hours everyweek finding new music, reading about bands, going to gigs and more generally being part of the music scene at large. I found that when I started work, after a few years a significant part the free time I spent doing these activities was no longer there to spare.

Digital music was supposed to help me here, but until now I’ve been mostly dissapointed and frustrated. I don’t have time to waste anymore so I re-aligned my priorities and music took a back seat. I’m hoping DRM free music will allow me to get excited about music the way I used to be and guess what, I’m not a poor student anymore, I’ve got money to spend now.

Make my life easy.