Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Okay - I'll admit it: it doesn't take much to buy me off. I've bitched about buying and downloading mp3's to Linux machines and Amazon's non-support for a while - in fact those posts are some of the most visited on my site. But still I stick with Amazon. It's like some trailer park relationship. But now I'm willing to kiss and make up because now Amazon Prime memberships get FREE MUSIC STREAMING! (I'm doing the happy dance). I signed up for Prime around Christmas because (I told myself) I needed a package in a hurry. While normally I might have just popped for the extra shipping, the fact that Prime accounts get free 2 day shipping AND video streaming was enough to get me to fork over the cost of a Prime membership. You can do a free one month trial, so why not?  I don't watch a lot of stuff, but I watch some, and it's a nice deal. I even bought myself a Roku device (from Amazon!) for Father's Day this year to make it easier. But fr...

These days, The Cloud is all the rage in the computer world. Cloud storage is probably as far as most folks want (or need) to go - think Box.com, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive/Docs...the list goes on. You can collect quite a bit of free off-site storage if you're of a mind to.  These are all examples of  SaaS - Software as a Service . PaaS - Platform as a Service - gives you a specific pre-configured platform to build applications or services. Finally there is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which is virtualized hardware: CPUs, hard drives, networking, firewalls and the like. A little background:  at my day job at Sisyphean Corp, I manage hosting for a couple dozen big websites (I lose count sometimes).When I first took this on, we were on physical hardware. Trouble with this is once you make your decisions about the hardware, you're sort of stuck with it for a while. If you've predicted your needs poorly, or they change, well... I migrated one o...

Okay, not long after my rant about Amazon dropping support for Linux in their MP3 market place, I cooled down and did a second look. I'd rather fix my problem than bitch - here's what I figured out. In case you missed it, here's what prompted my outrage: to download albums from Amazon, you download an AMZ file, which is essentially an encoded list of URLs to the MP3s in the album. After supporting this functionality for Linux for a number of years, they suddenly dropped it. If you are a Linux user, they now inform you that you will need to download your MP3s from their Cloud Player, one file at a time . Click, download, click, download (repeat ad nauseum). If you purchase much music, this is a completely unacceptable solution. First rule of computer troubleshooting: no matter how outlandish or obscure the problem, somebody has experienced it before you. I did what any self-respecting geek did: I Googled. Breaking this down, there are actually 2 problems to solve. O...

[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...

If you know British actor Hugh Laurie primarily from his hit TV show House, you may be unaware of his previous role on the BBC production of "Jeeves and Wooster," based on the stories of P. G. Wodehouse (both the TV series and the books they were based on are hilarious). Laurie was a comic genius in these, but he also displayed his musical talents, performing (in character as Bertie Wooster) novelty songs of the era. I was always left wanting just a little more. I want no more! The multi-talented Mr Laurie has released a CD entitled Let Them Talk inspired by his love of New Orleans blues. It is great stuff!!! I downloaded it from the Amazon MP3 store (my favorite source of downloaded music these days) and am marveling at the goodness of it all. He sings, plays guitar and piano, and is joined by a number of outstanding guests, such as Dr. John and Tom Jones. Hit his website for more info and some downloads. Here's a sampling to give you a taste (I own a mahogany...

Here, in one easy-to-read place, is the timeline for Thursday's Amazon Web Services FAIL in their Northern Virginia data center. In case you are interested my phone started ringing at 3:15 AM, CST, about 20 minutes after the error (still not disclosed) that started this whole sorry mess.

By now, if you keep up with all things geekish, you may have heard about Amazon's big outage yesterday . No - this wasn't their online store: this was their other business --  selling their excess capacity as "cloud computing" services. So-called "cloud computing" (also known as utility computing) is all the rage today, and like a lot of things, it's not an entirely new thing. It works by setting up virtual machines in Amazon's massive datacenter. Usually everything works just dandy. But not yesterday . I got a call from one of my internal customers in the UK at 3:00 AM (my employer, the Sisyphean Corp is a global operation) who, in a panicky voice, informed me his Amazon-hosted site was gone. I spent the next 15 hours working to recover it. Amazon has not yet offered a detailed explanation of exactly what happened. My sources, however, have found the reason for all the trouble: