I hadn’t used KDE in at least 5 or 6 years, so I decided I’d give it a try again. Wow, I didn’t think it was possible to get uglier but apparently it was. I’m currently installing regular Ubuntu 9.10, I haven’t used Ubuntu desktop since like 8.10. I have been using Ubuntu Server for a while now on 540House though.
I’m installing Ubuntu on that spare windows box I have because I want to mess around with Gentoo as well. This could be the end of me… we’ll see.
I made a tutorial video that shows you how to integrate Amazon Simple Storage Service (s3) with A Small Orange web hosting for a grand total of less than $50 a year. The software I used for Amazon S3 access in this video is CyberDuck for Mac OS X, however a cross-platform tool that is just as good is S3Fox for Mozilla Firefox.
Please feel free to ask any questions. If anything is unclear, I’d be glad to help. If you guys would like any more tutorial videos concerning this setup, just let me know.
Video requires Safari 4 to play in browser.
Direct link to video for download
Also available is a YouTube version of the video:
I’m surprised I haven’t posted about this before, but I am working on a project called Formula Hybrid where we design and construct a hybrid gas-electric formula-style race car. It’s a really fun project, and I’m the Aero lead on the car. We may be behind in the project, but it’s still exciting to see everything coming together.
I’m working on Aero surfaces such as body design, undertray, and intakes. Hopefully next year we’ll have a full set of wings for this baby.
I have some audio tracks I recorded when we installed the new muffler, as shown in the CAD file above.
I’ll post some more pictures as the car comes together. I’m hoping to get Kyle to record some HD videos of us when we reach rolling chassis.
After getting S3 setup, I am very happy with it. Pay as you go service couldn’t get better than this. It has some interesting “features” though, which are kind of weird. I wanted to setup a static html index at the base of my S3 storage, but it doesn’t let you do that. If you type in http://s3.cheesejaguar.com, then you get an access denied page. However, if you type in http://s3.cheesejaguar.com/index.html then you go to the static page I wanted. Small fun things like that, but I guess it’s aimed to prevent you from hosting dynamic HTML/PHP/CGI pages on S3, instead of using their Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). If I had more money, I’d definitely be playing around with EC2, but as it is it’s currently $70 a month for pay as you go.
Well, sort of. At least all static multimedia such as images, audio and video will now be hosted in the cloud. It’s pretty awesome, and it’s pretty cheap. I’m using Amazon’s S3, and using their bill calculator it should only be about 30-50 cents a month to host. Pretty nifty and high tech, yes?
That image is hosted in the cloud. Click for the 17 megapixel version. I chose this image, because cloud computing gives me access to “infinite” data storage, kind of like the near-infinite expanse of space. Of course I don’t have an infinite wallet, but still for what I’m doing it’s never going to cost more than a dollar a month.
So there really is no reason for the server to be on the machine its on right now. The server is a P4 3.0GHz with 1GB PC3200 400MHz RAM in a 7 year old Dell configuration. The thing must suck a lot of power. To save some money in the long run, I’m thinking about switching it to an Atom machine. Here is the possible configuration:
Would be about $150, and according to the PSU calculator, would drop my power consumption from 229 watts to 54 watts. A 175 watt saving will save me about $150 in electricity, if assuming $0.10 per kWh. Then again we split the electricity bill 5 ways, so I’d really only save $30 a year, but I think of it as an investment. I just hope the savings in electricity won’t also mean I lose computing power.
I’m gonna post on reddit to see if they have any advice.
Check out this HTML 5 video demo. Awesome, huh?
It seems flash has become the ginger kid on the playground, and both YouTube and Vimeo have rolled out their own HTML 5 player. I thought I’d give it a try. It’s really simple.
For those of you who know HTML, you know that an image is embedded using
<img src=”filepath”>
For HTML 5 video, it works the same way.
<video src=”filepath”>
Since I just upgraded the upload speed of our home server, let’s see how HTML 5 looks using some fairly basic settings.
Pretty nifty eh? If it didn’t work, it’s likely that you don’t have Chrome 3 or Firefox 3.6