Once again, IMUG had its annual holiday season potluck dinner, with a variety of international dishes and a relaxing opportunity to catch up with other members.
We were lucky to have a fascinating lecture and slide show by Paul Max Payton on his algorithmic art. Paul is a principal software engineer with Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center, so really knows pixels. More infomation.
Thanks again to Apple for hosting IMUG.
The Mac Filmmakers user group meeting this month was a joint meeting about digital cinematography with the Digital Cinema Society, resulting in about 100 attendees.
Sony reps did a presentation on the Sony EX3 Pro video camera, list price about $9,900, then there was a pizza break and raffle, followed by a presentation on the Sony F35 CineAlta digital cinematography camera.
Art and Adam demoed the F35, and showed their F35 PG&E conservation public service spot and talked about production. They did multiple takes with different cameras and showed the differences in ability to hold contrast. Quite an eye-opener.
There was a discussion of S-log and Hyper gammas for video camera contrast compression. Cinematographers agreed they can make a big difference in contrasty situations, for example an interior shot of a room with sunshine streaming in.
One audience member lamented that there was no discussion of camera pricing. Since these are industrial cameras, if you have to ask, likely you can’t afford it. Also, a complete setup would involve a combination of many items depending on the shot – body, lenses, curves, storage, sound capture, etc.
Some people mentioned that it makes more sense to rent when possible, as the technology is constantly evolving, and the rental company is more able to maintain the camera firmware and sensor upgrades. Fortunately, the Bay area does have a number of retailers willing to rent gear packages by the day.
Thanks to Apple for hosting the event.
It was all the rage a while ago to spend 10 cents on an Amazon EC2 instance for an hour, blog about it, and deactivate the instance without doing any actual work. Not very useful.
Recently I had the chance to use EC2 for a commercial project for 2 months, so I thought I’d share some real-world experiences.
A friend of mine with a small West Coast data center (1/2 a rack or so, slow 2000-2005 vintage Intel servers) needed to do something big: build out a flexible internal SOAS renderfarm to generate promotional morphing video clips for an entertainment-industry client.
The existing capacity was about 1/morph per second sustained according to benchmarks.
The system requirements were:
The requirement to install custom software leaves you with dedicated servers or Amazon EC2. All the other grid offerings I looked at (Google Grid, Mosso, others) had limitations on what software you could install, basically PHP or python for web use – no root access, can’t install ffmpeg or proprietary binaries.
I like dedicated servers, but their problem is that generally you pay by the month, so it’s hard to quickly reduce capacity and expenses depending on advertising spikes. Sometimes new servers can be provisioned quickly, and other times they’re “sold out.” Not so “elastic.”
Some good American business dedicated server hosts are theplanet and gigeservers.
I was somewhat familiar with EC2 from various conferences, especially the Hadoop Conference last year. The talks by The New York Times (cloud OCR) and AutoCAD (vendor metadata processing) were the most influential on me that I’ve been to.
I did some benchmarking on the 20 cent instance (c1.medium: High-CPU Medium Instance – 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each). 32-bit, 1.7GB RAM, 350GB disk) and liked the performance.
After that I added 2 large 80 cent instances (c1.xlarge: High-CPU Extra Large Instance – 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each). 64-bit, 7GB RAM, 1690GB disk).
I noticed one c1.xlarge was somewhat faster than the other, so you may want to benchmark a few different instances and choose the fastest ones.
The pre-made AMI linux images are all a little different. I had no problems with the 20 cent one, but the 80 cent one was not so smooth – the Perl CPAN module was not installed, and conflicted with the Amazon tools. So I had to yum remove the Amazon tools, then yum install perl-cpan.
I ended up going with two of the monster 80 cent instances to reduce system maintenance and software release targets primarily, keeping the 20 cent instance for test/prod.
Amazon instances appear as regular linux Xen instances, so it’s just linux as usual.
In the end, we ended up using EC2 for 2 months with no problems.
Overall the project was a success, and I was happy with EC2. The invoice was about $1,300/month ($1.80/hour x 24 hours x 30 days) total for the 3 instances, including negligible bandwidth. Here’s an online AWS calculator to play with.
Some suggestions to Amazon would be to make provisioning possible from the web portal instead of just the command-line tools to help newbs get rolling, and do better testing on the images – CPAN.pm is a commonly-used Perl module indeed.
Note that FFmpeg (HEAD) is twice as fast as the older rpms floating around download sites.
Sample EC2 Commands
$ ec2-add-keypair gsg-keypair -K /root/.ec2/pk-xxx.pem -C /root/.ec2/cert-xxx.pem
$ ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon
$ ec2-run-instances ami-2bb65342 -k gsg-keypair -t c1.medium
$ ec2-describe-instances
$ ssh -2 -i id_rsa_gsg_keypair ec2-67-202-32-93.compute-1.amazonaws.com
$ ec2-allocate-address
ADDRESS 75.101.148.165
$ ec2-describe-addresses
ADDRESS 75.101.148.165
$ ec2-associate-address -i i-aa46e5c3 75.101.148.165
$ ec2-authorize default -p 80 -K /root/.ec2/pk-xxx.pem -C /root/.ec2/cert-xxx.pem
GROUP default
PERMISSION default ALLOWS tcp 80 80 FROM CIDR 0.0.0.0/0
$ ssh -2 -i key aws01
__| __|_ ) Rev: 2
_| ( /
___|\___|___|
Welcome to an EC2 Public Image
: - )
Getting Started
__ c __ /etc/ec2/release-notes.txt
[root@domU-12-31-38-00-46-01 ~]# uname -a
Linux domU-12-31-38-00-46-01 2.6.16-xenU #1 SMP Mon May 28 03:41:49 SAST 2007 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
[root@domU-12-31-38-00-46-01 ~]# date
Sun Sep 28 21:17:28 EDT 2008
[root@domU-12-31-38-00-46-01 ~]# cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo
[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
^D
[root@domU-12-31-38-00-46-01 ~]# exit
$ ec2-terminate-instances i-aa46e5c3
Rent or Own: Amazon EC2 vs. Colocation Comparison for Hadoop Clusters
George Reese: On Why I Don’t Like Auto-Scaling in the Cloud
More Adventures in Amazon EC2 (and EBS)
AWS Management Console
Tom gave a rather technical talk on wireless mesh networking.
At roughly 30 minutes it was the shortest SVLUG talk I’ve been to.
Thanks to Symantec for hosting the event.
I spent a 5-day Thanksgiving weekend in Honolulu flying and enjoying Hawaiian Regional Cuisine (HRC).
Hawaiian Airlines arrived at Honolulu Airport at noon Thursday, so I headed straight to the GA area on Lagoon Drive, ate a Hawaiian-style plate lunch at Hawaiian BBQ, and got a practice flight in right away at George’s Aviation.
Note: theBus’ Lagoon Drive route was cancelled 2 months ago, so you’ll need a rental car or catch a cab on the east side of Lagoon Dr. just south of Nimitz.
I initially flew a 5 year-old Cessna 172SP. This was not a great choice for me to practise for a flight review as the panel instruments (HSI, GPS, etc.) and handling were quite different than my usual 172N choice.
The 172 SP has a fuel-injected 0360 engine with a lot more power, and the airframe is a lot cleaner than a 30-year old N model, so handling in the landing flare is different. (Apparently George bought if from a Fedex captain who kept it as a toy.)
Then I went to my “discount-rate hotel” – the 4-star Waikiki Resort Hotel at Koa and Kauilani Streets – for $89/nite. That’s about half price, so occupancy rates must be really low. (When I was paying for my flight online, a partner popup promoted this deal. I guess I was targeted very effectively.) 
After another practise flight the next day, I started my FAA Flight Review.
Every 24 months, a flight review by a CFI is required. It used to be called a Biennial Flight Review (BFR), but I understand it may become an annual requirement, hence the recent renaming to just “Flight Review.”
CFI Bob gave me a 1 hour flight review oral quiz. Mostly it involved demonstrating detailed knowledge of airspace on a sectional chart, and explaining the various FARs about pilot and aircraft currency.
After that we did a one-hour flight out of Honolulu Class B airspace to the Wheeler south practise area for private pilot maneuvers, followed by some landings at Kaleiloa Class D airport, and return for landing at HNL.
It was a challenging flight. The winds changed from quite calm for Hawaii using Tradewind procedures to Kona wind procedures mid-flight, resulting in runway changes at both airports. Also, Honolulu Approach frequency was busy for almost 5 minutes, so I had to circle outside the Class B before landing.
It appears the standard North Arrival at 1500′ has been changed to the North2 Arrival at 2000′, effective in the new Airport and Facility Guide (AFD).
I ate the buffet at Sheraton Princess Kaiulani one nite, and another nite had the Pear salad and Linguini Seafood at Sergio’s Italian (yelp reviews) in the location formerly occupied by Sam Choy’s near the Honolulu Zoo.
The city block-sized Compusa near downtown was closed due to bankruptcy, and most of the retail stores on the first level of Ala Moana were new to me since the last trip.
The hotel TV had some interesting items. The Subway $5 ad had one hilarious version with 3 hula dancers doing a hula to the ad song. There was a well-researched hour-long documentary on the history of the UFC, including interviews with the original creators and current owners and president. Plus lots of local news coverage of the Hawaiian airline industry court battles over the bankrupt Aloha airlines trademark.
The shuttle bus back to the airport was only $9, and left plenty of time to eat at the Lahaina Chicken location. The roast chicken and beef combo platter was really good.
Next time I’ll take the free airport wiki shuttle out to the mainland gate. It’s too humid to run around outside with luggage. (Any gate higher than 26 is a long walk with luggage.)
Hawaiian Airlines has the most primitive in-flight entertainment systems, but it’s only a 4.5 hour flight, so I didn’t bother to rent a headset for $5 or a digimedia player for $15. Instead I watched my seatmate cheat on beginner’s crossword puzzles, which was quite amusing.
Waikiki 180° Panorama. Canon S400.
Hi, I'm James Briggs, an Internet software developer and MySQL DBA in Silicon Valley.
I've been programming for 20 years for companies like Netscape, eBay, Cisco, Yahoo!, Apple and startups.
In my spare time I do Open Source programming and enjoy flying airplanes, karate and studying Asian languages.
This blog talks about events, places and things in my life.
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