Dig into EC2’s offers

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jan 132012
 

I’ve moved to Amazon EC2 as mentioned here and mentioned the monthly pay is $17, that was based on EC2 node’s cost is $14 I think, and after dig into EC2’s offers, I found something more useful, see below:

Amazon has this Reserved Instance which is pretty good to Web servers that needs to be running for all the time, I did some calculation and here is the comparison for 1-year term:

Plan One time Hourly Yearly Monthly (alloc.)
On demand 0 0.020 175.20 14.60
light 23 0.012 128.12 10.68
medium 54 0.007 115.32 9.61
heavy 62 0.005 105.80 8.82

Although 3-years term may save more, I don’t want to sign such a long contract as $8.82 per month is good enough to me now.

I will move to the heavy one after my free tier expires.

How to learn iOS and Android development at the same time?

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jan 102012
 

I know this could be a crazy thing, but why not? Especially I have a Mac in hand so that I can do both at the same time.

Since I know almost nothing about either, and I’m not good at client side development at all, so I started with a not-that-complicated open source software, WordPress for iOS/Android. It’s good to see WordPress is almost the same on both platform, this will help me a lot in future work.

The bad thing is, WordPress does not have too many features, such as animation, and so on (sorry all that I know about “fancy” is animation …), so I can only learn basic coding stuffs, but I think it is good enough for now. Anyway it is a API based “flat” App, which has a pretty wide market – think about Amazon AWS manager (I need this), E*Trade App (I’m using this), and GMail client, etc.

Cisco VPN for Mac

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jan 092012
 

I made Cisco VPN works on my MacBook, accidentally …

I was talking to someone while randomly clicked on company’s web VPN site, and while discussing something I blindly clicked here and there and found that Advanced VPN does not work on my Mac, it soon took my attention and in several minutes, I figured it should be privilege issue (at least I guess). After manually download the installation shell script and run it with sudo, everything’s working now.

However, I used to start Cisco VPN on the Windows XP virtual machine running inside VirtualBox, it seems with the VPN moved to Mac itself (which is the host machine for VirtualBox), it became slower, significantly slower than before. I haven’t got time to dig out what was happening, but anyway, it is acceptable.

Evaluating EC2

 Triviality  6 Responses »
Jan 042012
 

I’ve moved all my blog sites (why do I have so many? :-W ) to an Amazon EC2 micro instance running Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit version, everything seems good so far and I will let it running there for a week or two before doing the switch. The most important factor that will or will not make the transition is cost – based on my rough calculation the cost for EC2 will be something around $17 (forget the free tier, I have to pay for it after one year anyway), and Linode is $19.99.

If these blog sites work fine, I will try to put some other stuffs over EC2, and at the same time, try out EC2 work with S3 and SDB.

No, you cannot use my email address

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jan 042012
 

Somebody (stupidly?) registered a Facebook account with my Hotmail E-Mail address and no matter whose fault it is, it became a live account without verifying the E-Mail address, and I started getting all sort of social event notifications.

So I went to Facebook and do a password retrieval through the E-Mail address, I cannot believe that even a unverified E-Mail address can be used as password recovery, so at last I successfully take over the account and shut it down.

I guess someone is crying now but if I didn’t do that I will be the one crying in the corner, I believe this is Facebook’s fault.

All kinds of DVI

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jan 022012
 

I was trying to get a mini display port to DVI converter NOT from Apple as it was ridiculous expensive, so I went to Amazon, and then I spent ~20 minutes to do the research to figure out what is DVI-A, DVI-D, DVI-I, with single link or dual link …

It seems we are using stuffs we actually don’t quite understand, we just blindly follow some sort of instructions to get things connected, I believe this is common to most “normal” consumers, which means all products facing massive consumers should have similar characters – work without knowing too much.

Sure, we are not “normal” consumers … we are abnormal geeks, or nerd, or whatever.

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