Here's how I ran my PhD simulations on EC2:
- The AMI downloads a manifest file at startup.
    - The manifest has one record per line, two fields per record: the s3 URL of a .tar.gz to download, and the path to download it
- The AMI then runs a shell script (/etc/run.sh) that's been put there by a manifest entry

Shell scripts upload new files to s3 (e.g., /etc/run.sh) and have ec2 run new VMs. When the VMs are loaded, they're running everything I need, ready to go.
Other shell scripts stopped/started experiments on these VMs.
Other shell scripts shut down the VMs when I'm done.
The scripts did little more than scan the appropriate machine list from the ec2 tools and ssh into them with a specific command.

At the end, I had some of the experiment-specific scripts quickly have git clone/pull in files I was changing quickly per experiment.

All of it worked really well for me. Nothing fancier than the ec2 command-line tools, bash, ssh, & git necessary.

It's 2012, why does this search engine stuff come up all the time, when it's *so* easy to fix? If they want to publish the names, but not have them come up when people are searching for individual people, shove the list in robots.txt. Not complicated. A moron can figure out robots.txt

This is a known-cyphertext attack using the tile filesizes as identifiers. Build a database of map tiles' sizes and coordinates (x,y,z) from gmaps, then compare against the SSL response stream.

It doesn't say if it's only effective for satellite view.

As another hacked reader, yeah I'm unhappy about this too. Considering that I was donating to wikileaks before, this is just painful.

Stratfor's just come out with their email, 8pm, not great, but here we are. They've done the standard 1yr prepaid monitoring service for identity theft.

I looked around to verify that my CC was actually breached (who knows, maybe it was a card I've already canceled?), but all the primary copies of the CC list seem inaccessible. It'd be lovely if they were taken down before I become collateral damage in all this, but it hasn't exactly been a lucky week.

Canceling the card, and watching the account like a hawk. It's all we can do, and hopefully it's enough.

Pick up one of the pure-google phones. My Nexus S doesn't have it on there.

The backend for quite a few compilers, and a few shader compilers...

On your resume, it'll read like this:

I finished school, and interviewed. While every reasonable CS student on the planet, especially in 2011, can get an actual programming gig, I couldn't. So I took a glorified Geek-Squad gig instead*.

* It doesn't matter what the actual job was. It's in IT and not programming, it'll be read the same as geek squad.

The results of Discovery will be *awesome*.

*EXACTLY*

Blu-Ray, as a disc format is doing well within its relative market. It's just that the disc market is collapsing.

Really, who's buying many discs these days? Who's /renting/ them?

If you don't want google to store anything about you, just opt out: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/view

If you don't trust them to do what they say, or anyone else for that matter, use privoxy: http://www.privoxy.org/

Well it does have a screen, hinge, keyboard, and trackpad.

Naughty Google! Very Naughty!

.. Fox isn't going to outrank the AP article they're syndicating. For U.s. political news (where they do their most reporting), they're on news.google.com -- right now, they're on 6 different news items.

As for yanking videos off of youtube, it's the customer base flagging it. You can argue that google shouldn't yank unpopular videos, but people marking it as offensive (or hate speech) is hard to ignore.

Hello, I couldn't find another way to contact you, so here we are.

I'm finishing up a PhD in scalability & performance analysis, and have done a lot of work in instrumentation. A userland instrumentation tool is part of my final research. Instrumentation is in a terrible, terrible state -- save a few points of light -- and I'm happy to see someone else in this area!!

So, as you're starting out, some tips:

1) If you haven't already done so, investigate dtrace. While available on Mac OS & FreeBSD, it's worth picking up a virtual machine image of opensolaris & playing with it there.

2) Pick up a copy of: R. Jain, "The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: Techniques for Experimental Design, Measurement, Simulation, and Modeling," Wiley- Interscience, New York, NY, April 1991, ISBN:0471503361. It's my new Bible.

Good luck, and hit me up if you'd like to chat. For my email address, I'm [my first name].[my last name]@gmail.com

Cheers,
-ls

Yeah, you get much better performance going through a northbridge & PCI-e than talking to a gpu on the same chip...

Check out mappero: http://www.mardy.it/mappero

The UI's a little strange, but it treats me reasonably well!