12 November 2010

AWS (amazon web services) free usage tier and a tutorial

Amazon web services has introduced free usage tier of some of their services: http://aws.amazon.com/free/

You can use EC2 (elastic cloud) web service combined with EBS (elastic bloc storage) to have a virtual server in a cloud. The default Ubuntu’s AMIs (amazon machine images) use 15GB of EBS blocks. With free tier offer you only get first 10GB free. You can pay $0.50 or $0.55 /month depending on the physical location you chose to set up the server and use Ubuntu’s provided AMIs. Or, you can use this guide to make your own AMI of 10GB: http://ubuntu-smoser.blogspot.com/2010/11/using-ubunt-images-on-aws-free-tier.html

Some of the commands above require you to enter which region (if not default) you want the query to run in, e.g.:

ec2-describe-snapshots --region eu-west-1

You can get ubuntu releases from here: http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/

And a very good starting guide to get familiar with AWS: http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-getting-started-with-amazon-ec2

01 August 2010

Git on Dropbox

It is great if working from different computers or just as a backup utility. The best part is the unlimited repositories and collaborators. Just share the folder with the people you want as collaborators and they can easily clone and push. You also can setup to receive notifications on changes made on Dropbox. It is like Github but free.

~/Dropbox/project/directory

git --bare init

~/project/

git remote add dropbox ~/Dropbox/poject/directory/
git push dropbox master

collaborators can access it from Dropbox shared directory

git clone ~/Dropbox/shared/directory/ toThisFolder
git push origin master

Video(by Thom Parkin) that led me to start using these two services together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bxbzFQEMYM

07 July 2010

Low information diet – a success !

Didn’t open any distracting website yet, even though the 10 days test period is over. Not sure why, but in 10 days I’ve got into this habit not to procrastinate. Will extend this “test” to 30 days.

25 June 2010

Low information diet

Yesterday started reading Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek” book. I like the ideas and will start testing them out. From this morning I’m on low/no information diet for 10 days test period. Will report my results.

15 February 2010

Improving touch-typing

I learned touch typing just by trying not to look at keyboard. After a while it was automatic. Did couple tests today and average 45 wpm (words only) with no mistakes. All keyboards I typed (even my laptop) had a numpad, so I never used number row. It reduces typing speed a lot by moving hand to numpad for every number required to type. On keyboards with no numpad it feels very awkward. I decided to improve my touch typing by learning number row and all symbols on qwerty.

This number row lesson4.html is very good in my opinion. Also this lesson5.html is very good for learning touch typing symbols, which includes snippets of computer code and is very good for programming. I’m still quite slow at it, but over the time it will definitely pay off.

Extra tip: pressing Control key with your palm rather than pinky helped me a lot. This is harder on laptop keyboards of course.

« Older Entries