January 02, 2011
Last Vacation Day
Good morning! We're just back from Mass and breakfast on this Feast of the Epiphany.
Folding laundry while watching Bells of Saint Mary's via Netflix streaming.
Hard to believe I'd never seen "Bells". Bing Crosby as Father O'Malley, Ingrid Bergman as Sister Mary Benedict, and surprise -- Henry Travers (the "Clarence" of It's a Wonderful Life) as Horace P. Bogardus. It was difficult at first for me to see Henry Travers as a selfish, greedy old man. I just kept seeing an angel trying to get his wings. Being that the movie is just a bit over 2 hours long, you can imagine the boys' eagerness for it to be over so that Daniel could clear some new levels of SuperMario Galaxy 2.
Decided to donate to Wikipedia. As often as I've linked to it and my kids have used it over the past several years, I wanted to thank them and show some support for doing this all ad-free.
The twins weren't in the mood, but Timothy and I went candlepin bowling. Afterwards we brought home some hot drinks for him, Michelle, and me. Now I'm going to research one of the other things I wanted to do over break: password managers. So many programs and services to choose from: eWallet, KeePass, LastPass, and RoboForm. I'm leaning towards KeePass at the moment, but want to look into the tradeoffs. Meanwhile the boys are watching another episode of "Penguins of Madagascar" and Michelle is watching "Easy A".
Although I appreciated the open source goodness of KeePass, I was left with the dilemma of where to store the encrypted data. I was more interested in keeping my passwords encrypted in The Cloud™ and having sync'ing between various computers and my mobile phone, so I went with the popular LastPass with a Premium ($12/year) subscription. It includes native apps for most popular smart phones (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and webOS) and nice integration with Safari, Chrome (my browser of choice), and Firefox.
Just migrated my passwords to LastPass and reset my Chrome Browser to its "just installed" state.
Since it was our last evening before life returns to “Normal” (ie. work, school, etc.), Michelle and I took the boys for a semi-fancy dinner at The Pasta Loft.
Refreshed my memory on using Amazon's EC2 - the ability to launch a virtual computer "in the cloud" - with their new "Micro" instances, meant for tiny jobs that don't need a lot of CPU or memory horsepower. Usually I've used EC2 from the command line. This time I used it from their newer graphical 'AWS Management Console' interface, which is handy if you just need to launch one or two compute instances interactively and manage them. While I'm just tinkering with this, IT professionals use this to launch large numbers of compute instances for major web sites. "Micro" instances are handy for experimentation because they only cost two cents an hour. Computing for pennies... literally.
After getting the boys down to bed with their prayers, I did a last bit of tinkering with SABnzbd but for the challenge I installed it and configured it on a temporary instance in the Amazon EC2 cloud. I had this desire to see how much faster downloads would be for a small compute node in their high performance server farm vs what I see using a similar program on my MacBook over residential broadband. At home I get about 800-900KBytes per second over cable modem+WiFi. My Micro instance in the EC2 cloud was getting ~3.2 MEGAbytes per second, ~4x my speed.