Posted on

Crazy fluctuations in Amazon EC2 spot prices

What in god’s name is going on with EC2 Micro instance spot pricing?

I have recently had my instance shut down because the spot price for micro instances in US East zone went up to some ridiculous price like $5/hour! Crazy price, but it only sits there for an little while and then drops back down.

In any event, I have come of spot prices for the time being and have gone to normal pricing which means it costs a bit more but at least I have control of how much I will be paying and not have instances dropping off. An added drama with micro instances is there is no included persistent storage, so when the thing gets shut down all changes made to that image since that last save have been lost (except for the data that I have saved in a persistent storage device I have paid Amazon protection money for and that I mount on the instance).

In any event, may consider moving my instance to Amazons Singapore data center once I figure out how to do that and perhaps go back on spot prices after the move (Singapore seems to be less volatile, presumably given the lesser demand there – just need to worry about supply).

***UPDATE 30 Dec 2011***

Here is a graph showing the wild fluctuations in spot pricing for t1.micro instances. keep in mind the on demand price is currently $0.02/hour. What the!

Here is what I mean about spot prices for EC2 instances,
Posted on

My new bike

Have sold a couple of scooters lately, was looking for a bike that can do most things well and be able to travel long distances (thinking of doing an across the top of Australia ride in 2013). The best bike for the job – the 1994 BMW R1100GS. She a ripper, but pretty big which has taken some time to get used to.

Take a squiz!

Posted on

Cloud music – goo idea but bad for your wallet

I recently copped a large mobile phone bill from my friendly mobile service provider – instead of my normal $49 per month it was over $200! The culprit – 3G data.

Now I get 2.5G of data included each month but I exceeded this by 1.2GB in August and the only thing I can think that I have changed in my usage habits was that I started using Music Beta by Google, Amazon Cloud Player and my own self hosted Subsonic.

My providers billing system only sends you an email saying, in effect “your bill is available to view on our website”.  Given I expected it to be $49 I didn’t check it – stupid me.  In any event, why can’t they just attach a brief summary of your usage and the months charges to the email?  Logging on to your account is just another step in the process and its just not necessary.

So, tip for new players, don’t go with a mobile provider that fails to warn you when you are approaching your data usage allowance (because lets face it, its in their interest not to tell you they can graft you if they don’t) and be warned that using cloud based music players has a detrimental effect on your 3G data allowance – watch out!

Posted on

Bitcoin price drop 9 September 2011

Wow!

I just looked at Bitcoin Charts and its a sea of red. Prices are at around USD5.45 per BTC!

Wondering what the heack caused this recent plunge I take a look at MtGox and notice the following post.

“Dear Mt.Gox Users,

Due to an intermittently active node in the Bitcoin network, Bitcoin withdrawals are currently unavailable. Users will receive an error message of “invalid bitcoin address” when trying to process their withdrawal. Mt.Gox is currently investigating alternate node pathing options. It will be fixed as soon as possible, and updates will be announced when Bitcoin withdrawal is available. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Thank you,

Mt.Gox Support”

I could be wrong (I have not followed the trials and tribulations of Bitcoin recently) but perhaps that “spooked the horses” and everyone is trying to cash out fearing the major exchange has taken a hit or somehow will not be able to transfer out BTC – the above announcement doesn’t read that way to me but I’m an amateur really.  How strange people are.  I am guessing there are a bunch of pre defined sells set up that are triggering, what the bet when people realise things are OK the exchange rate will rise again.

Posted on

Google Authorship and rel=auth

Have been battling with getting my websites and blog set up so that authorship of the blog and website pages points to me Google+ profile which in turn creates some proof of ownership of my website and blog because of the link. A side effect is that when you search Google for something and I happen to have written something about it (or if in fact you are searching for me website via Google) a little picture of my mug will come up next to the search result – which I recon is kind of cool.

I had some problems getting the blog set up. The two major problems I had were:-

  1. Understanding the significance/difference between rel=author tag and rel=me tag.
  2. Making sure the web-link in my profile were available to be viewed by anyone.

So what were the lessons learned I hear you say?

  1. The rel = author tag basically tells Google search engine that the page with this tag in it is a very important page and (in the case of a wordpress blog) to look at the page with that tag to then look for the html tag rel = me.  In turn, the rel=me tag points the search engine to my Google profile which as a result “connects” my blog to my Google+ profile. I guess a parallel are some of the sites that allow you to “claim” website as your, e.g. claimID.com or the Verisign VIP service (via OpenID)
  2. One of the steps in the process is to make sure that your Google+ profile has a website link that points to your website (or blog) that you linking to your Google+ profile from, ie, the website that you have just added the rel=author or rel=me tags (or both) on.  Just make sure that the links on your Google+ page are available to be viewed by everyone, not just those in your circles (like I did).  If you restrict visibility to only those in your circle you will not obtain the full benefit of Google Authorship.

There are a few sites to look at about all this.  The main ones I used for my WordPress blogs were:-

  1. Google site about it all – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1408986
  2. and most importantly, in relation to WordPress blog – http://www.ryantmalone.com/seo/google-authorship-markup-verification-tutorial-for-bloggers/

These two sites should get you on yor merry way.

Enjoy your head next to search results with your site in it!

Posted on

Google TV – Meh….keep Mythtv

I bought a Logitech Revue with Google TV the other day from Amazon at a knock down price of USD99.99.

I really wanted to like Google TV but in the end, when I received the package I didn’t even get it out of the box, instead I sold it on eBay unopened. It’s a shame I had real hope of being able to make the box fit into my life somehow but even I could not justify it.

Why, I hear you ask, bare in mind I am in Australia:-

  1. Have to pay for a VPN subscription to circumvent geo-blocking on US content providers like Netflix and given there is no option except DHCP networking on the box had to hack a work around for DNS providers for the unblock-us.com service.
  2. Have to pay for content providers like Netflix, Amazon instant videos or some other services like that.
  3. Doesn’t record TV.
  4. Can’t access network shared media unless you are prepared to set up a DLNA server.
  5. Netflix doesn’t have the most recent TV episodes in any event, looks like they are 1 season behind or something.
  6. Can’t access Hulu to watch the most recent TV episodes as they have blocked GTV’s browser.
  7. No integration with any cable TV boxes here in Australia (that I am aware of).
  8. Can’t get content through GTV that you can’t get “elsewhere”.

So basically, its the lack of anything new and of content providers that make it easyier to watch stuff that is going against GTV.  For anyone that already uses some thing like Mythtv (like I do) I can’t see any reason to get a Google TV.

I’m not sure how the much talked about Honeycomb upgrade will change things, perhaps it does which would be great and perhaps I sold it to soon but I can’t justify this box over Mythtv.

Posted on

Retail prices here in Australia.

I just read on news.com.au Gerry Harvey bleating about how the retail segment this year is going to find it tough because consumers in Australia are too tight to spend.

Here is a perfect example of why I and I guess others are choosing to spend at other electronic retailers.

Suppliers of electronic goods (goods which are largely a commodity now) are replaceable by any other retailer assuming they sell exactly the same product, you will normally go for the cheaper option, at the end of the day it boils down to time, are you willing to trade time waiting for a product for $$ saved.

At Dick Smith today I see they are selling the new Amazon Kindle 3g for AUD219 delivered. A quick check at Amazon finds I can get the thing delivered from the USA by 5 September (by priority international courier) for AUD194, that’s a saving of AUD25.

Now I’m not about to race out and buy a Kindle but its a basic example of how easy it is to save $$$ online in Australia.

Posted on

EC2 Ubuntu 10.04 Apt-get upgrade

The other day, like a good admin, I attempted to keep my Ubuntu 10.10 EC2 instance up to date and performed and apt-get upgrade, it failed horribly as alluded to in one of my earlier posts and resulted in my getting to sleep at 1 in the morning.

The offending package was java-6-sun and it is a known bug for 10.10 (see this link).

In any event I followed the fix, shut down the instance )(after creating a backup AMI just in case), started it again as a small instance and performed the upgrade without a hitch.  The only thing I am now concerned about is the fact that it would appear there are reports that the instance remains unstable!!  This is not something I need so will look at a dist upgrade shortly but I concerned at what other issues this may introduce.