Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

[UPDATED AFTER MY INITIAL TANTRUM] Updated on 6-29-2014 - I looked over this post which I wrote a couple of years ago and felt like it needed an update now that I can look back on things more calmly.  For quite some time now I've bought all my tunes from Amazon. One of the reasons is that my primary desktop in my  home office is a Linux box and they provided a native downloader for album purchase (so you wouldn't need to download each song one at a time). I buy a lot of collections ("The Best 99 Songs to Clean your Bathtub, etc), and downloading the files one at a time is strictly a non-starter. I've been doing this for some time now...at least 3 or 4 years. Not long ago, they started their "Cloud Music Player" where you stored your purchases on their cloud service, where you could play them or download them. Today I went to download an album I bought a couple of weeks ago and no longer saw "Download this Album" as one of the options. Aft...

I ran a demonstration project using Amazon Web Services (AWS) about a year and a half ago, and we continue to use AWS for one-off projects and sites. It's a useful tool.  That being said, I've learned (usually the hard way) a few non-obvious tricks and techniques that may be of interest to my fellow web geeks. If you've been using AWS for any length of time, you have probably learned all of these already. If not, allow me to offer them for your consideration now. Disclaimer - I've not used all of the services available from AWS, so I'll only mention the ones I've actually used myself. First - a short glossary of terms (this will make the discussion a little easier): AWS - Amazon Web Services. This is the umbrella under which all of the services described below live. EC2 - Elastic Cloud Computing; this is the virtual cloud based servers. Use this for webhosting. Once you kill an instance, everything vanishes in a puff of smoke (unless you take some addition...

Suppose that when it was first built, the Interstate Highway System had companies built the roads (paying the companies large amounts of money to built them to their specifications) and then leased the roads from the companies. Toll roads, right? Remember - the official title for the Interstate Highway System is the  Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways .  The justification for building the Interstate system (replacing the patchwork of numbered US highways that were then in place) was national defense - how to move troops and equipment quickly in times of national emergency. Although this network of "Superhighways" had been under discussion since the 1920's, it took the Cold War to finally get this in place. The government pays large amounts of money to the  Super Toll Road  providers. The government paid for all the research on how best construct the roads, paid the cost of construction, and then pays to use...