dcinput

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.

Dave Winer on the Viacom vs Google business: “It’s a negotiation with users, not a war with Google. Forget Google. The users want something you aren’t providing. So provide it and stop arguing so much.”

That’s pretty much the bottom line.

The uglybooth

Today’s daily self portrait is another photobooth experiment, this time it’s the ugly booth. I did it using the Sony K810i phone, it has some pretty interesting warping features built in to the camera which lead to very amusing photos indeed. There’s something very amusing yet very wrong about seeing your face all distorted.

Ze Frank speaks out on ugly.

By the way if you haven’t been watching Ze Frank this past year, it’s not too late [this is the last week of the show]. Go ahead and watch from the beginning. What he has done this past year is truly remarkable. Not only are his shows great, what’s really outstanding is how he’s manage to engage his audience.

People send in all sorts of bits that he uses in the show, he runs bizarre competitions like dress up your vacuum cleaner or who can create the most ugly MySpace page. There is a massively active forum where members interact and collaborate on projects and there is even an apprenticeship.

The “Messages from the Sportsracers” episode a couple of days ago was extremely long and consisted entirely of clips sent in from people all around the world thanking him for the past year. I watched the whole thing and was really quite touched by it. Ze doesn’t care who you are or what you look like, he’s inspired people from all walks of life and from countries all over the globe to do really important things.

Ze Frank is a real life Ferris Beuler or Van Wilder: the people’s hero.

Remember it’s not about being cool, it’s about being more awesome.

I haven’t really been in the mood to write this past week. No idea why.

Though I haven’t been producing any words, I’ve been playing around with digital cameras, taking a daily self portrait. The battery on the camera I’m using went dead on Sunday. We’ve got carpenters and decorators in the flat currently so everything is in boxes and under protective sheets.

This unfortunately meant that I couldn’t finish this weeks photogamer challenge, though the one photo I did upload to the Flickr group has had quite a lot of attention.

I’ll be at the MiniBar this coming Friday. Last month was a lot of fun so if you are going drop me a mail - dcinput at gmail dot com.

My latest self portait was inspired by Bre Pettis’ photobooth experiments…

See my other photos here.

I need to fill some space so that the photo on the right fits in nicely without doing something wierd with the posts below. It’s late and I’m not feeling very inspired so I’m filling it with a Hugh MacLeod quote that I like a lot:

“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”

The Beat Box Fame Game. Superb video.

Marshall Kirkpatrick on the Four Eyed Monsters: “The promotional model is one that many future independent film makers will likely study closely”.

An interesting IT Conversations podcast with Doug Kaye and Jeff Bezos about how Amazon Web Services can be used to create a massively scalable solution for digital audio and video manipulation. Outsource your infrastucture.

Amazon offers it’s own queueing service but I’m wondering whether it would be possible to setup a render farm on EC2 and S3 controled by a specialist render queue manager such as Rush. A pay as you go render farm, yes please.

Update: Greg Ercolano from Rush emailed me to suggest RenderRocket which is a virtual render farm. Very interesting, I’ll have to check it out.

Dave Winer: “There once was a time when we entertained each other. If you wanted music on a Saturday night you’d have to perform it yourself or listen to a neighbor. Before there was broadcast radio, music was personal. It will be personal again, and it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, because the joy of creating is something we should all share.”

Happy Valentine’s day to all the ladies!

How great is this stop animation? Really great.

Dave Gray: “Every company has a culture, but it can take time to learn, and the stated culturecan often differ significantly from what people actually experience”. Check out Dave’s culture map. I’m a big fan of good diagrams.

My next phone will be the Nokia N95 which comes out this month in the UK. How could I possibly not get it…it’s got video podcatcher.

Online Video Index: I wonder how many of these will last till the end of the year. Great resource.

Business Week: “Facebook—aimed at college students and a pioneer in opening up its APIs—will move its developer program out of beta testing. The company won’t say exactly when it will make its software generally available, but says it will be soon. Rivals such as News Corp.’s MySpace.com, LinkedIn, Friendster, and Google’s orkut are expected to follow suit and open their code to third-party developers this year as well—promising to kick off a spurt of innovation in social networking”.

I’ve just spent an hour writting a great post and just before I was about to post it my XP machine, for no reason at all, just totally hung. The damn thing hasn’t needed a reboot for about a month and when does it decide to act up? Just when I was feeling ok that I stayed back at work late on a Friday to write a post, that’s when.

So in the interest of me getting home quickly some nice Friday links with a little explanation…

Big Love…

Hugh MacLeod has been busy traveling around the UK doing a special Valentine’s day promotion for Stormhoek wine. He’s got a video camera and an editor with him and releasing small shorts as he travels around. I met Hugh a few weeks ago and he’s an awesome guy. If you are only going to read one thing of his read his piece on How to be Creative.

What is the web? Why is it so cool?

It’s weird that when you are so deeply involved in something for a number of years, something you think is great and wonderful, but it’s so big and complex that you don’t really understand entirely why its so cool…you just kind of do.

Then someone makes a video clip like that which takes all the loose ends that have been swishing around in your head all this time and pulls them together, and everything just becomes clear and lucid again.

I love the web and I love moving images.

Another magic video

I got a similar feeling when Toby Harris first showed me this video edit of the first Avit VJ Festival back in 2002. This was when I first started to understand the power of the web. It might take a while to download but its worth waiting for.

Toby (*Spark) is currently involved in some really incredible projects. Watch this space.

The Fake Steve Jobs: “I’m a middleman. That’s it. I’m like the guy who runs the record store down the block from you. If the record labels want to ship their records in cement blocks dipped in smallpox, what do I care? As long as the kids want to buy them”. The more things disintermediate, the more they re-intermediate, it would seem.

Ze Frank on procrastination.

Ali McClymont makes awesome London Snowman.

Yahoo Pipes…

I’ve been trying to play around with Yahoo Pipes. This web application that runs in your browser allows you to pull in RSS feeds from around the web and mash them up together in interesting ways. Techcrunch description here.

The GUI looks very nice. What I found interesting is how it seems to be based around similar node and flow metaphors used in many vfx 2D apps like Shake, Fusion and some 3D apps like Houdini. The aim is to allow non-programmers to be able to harness the power of the web.

Whether this will work or not, only time will tell. The apps mentioned above have certainly allowed many non-progrmmers into the world of vfx but this medium is inherantly visual, and since most people have a pair of eyes, there’s an inate understanding. My instinct is that mashing up RSS feeds full of different sorts of non-visual data is going to be way more cerebral and less immediately fun.

The other problem is that since it’s all web based, the Yahoo servers have to take the workload and so far they seem to be going down all the time. In principle though I like the idea. Lets see what happens.

Jeff Jarvis: “That is the job of media, government, business, and technology: to enable us to make better connections, to set the conditions for our collaboration. But this will frighten them more than it has already.”

It has been really interesting following Jeff at Davos this year. Typically a conference for the elite, for the fist time I felt I was able to see inside it properly. How very interesting to see his observations of the rich and the powerful starting to realise that the internet is changing things in a big way. Even more interesting to hear him say how unprepared they are for their realisation of the shear magnitude of this change. They are in for a shock.

BusinessWeek: “Uploading video to the Internet is so 2006. Now the question is what to do with those clips once they’re in cyberspace.”

I’ve been waiting for an article about this subject for a while now. Digital asset management is the world that I live in and its pretty complicated. The internet disintermediates and it does this faster than people expect. The role of big film and TV companies will change in the comming years and they need to be paying attention to this.

Something pretty bizare has happened to the layout on the blog, sorry about that, I’m looking into it.

Update: Strangely publishing this post seems to have fixed everything.

Very busy but productive day at the office intersperced with learning how to touch type. I spend such a long time writing, I figured that the time I would gain from learning this new skill could be repurposed into doing more interesting things, and that this far outweighed the slighlty scarry notion that the separation between mind and machine would become that little bit more blurry.

TypeOnline is an online application that I’m finding very good. So far I am mainly learning about the ‘home’ keys which are the central line of keys on the keyboard. Did you know that the little indentations on the ‘f’ and the ‘j’ are there on purpose to help you put your hands in teh correct position without looking at the keyboard? Well I didn’t. Anyway touchtyping is hard.

I really was looking to find a copy of The Typing of the Dead, a game where by typing correctly and quickly you save youself from vicious flesh eating zombies. Quite literally you ‘type or die’.

Is anybody going to the Mobile Metamorphosis evening organised by Chinwag? Drop me a mail if you are.

Dion Hinchcliffe: “The emergence and rise of mass social media”. Great diagram.

JD Lasica: “Some folks are calling BarCampUSA 2007 the “Woodstock of this generation.” They’re hoping 5,000 technology and video aficionados will turn out in the wilds of Wisconsin for a four-day event Aug. 23-26″.