Abhi Yerra

Adobe finally realizes that open standards are important and has released Flash that uses H.264. This probably came as a result of people not using the On2 VP6 encoding which is quite proprietary and quite expensive to license especially for command line encoding.  Take this along with the fact that most of the major sites aren’t using Flash 8 (On2 VP6) based encoding, I think it was a good decision for Adobe.

Why is H.264 important? Well HD-DVD and Blu-Ray both  use it as their video encoding, Apple is totally in love with it and most of all it is mostly an open standard with many commandline tools supporting it. So will we see H.264 on YouTube? Maybe not for another year or so, but still that is hope. If YouTube decides to force people to update their Flash so people can watch the higher quality videos I think people will update.

As video on the web is set to take off we need a general video standard and I think with Flash now supporting H.264, we will now be able to move to HD on the web.

What I find I dislike most about the society we live in is that there always has to be someone to blame for something going wrong. Why is that? Why is it that there needs to be someone at fault for mistakes or accidents? Errors happen and you can’t always blame someone for it.  Reading this article in the New York Times about the Virginia Tech shootings I was aghast at the state panel blaming the school.

It wasn’t the school’s fault that the guy went out and killed, it was a bunch of things that caused it to happen. Poor laws, the school’s  “university officials misunderstood federal privacy laws,” and many other little factors. You can’t always have someone to blame for one thing or another. Things aren’t always black and white and I wish we as a society would go beyond that. There many colors out there never put it into the two that aren’t even considered colors.

Today I created an Elastic Computing Cloud image on Ubuntu Feisty and wanted to share some of the oddities, weirdness  and coolness that I have experienced along this path of being a guy who created an AMI and made it actually run on EC2.

Amazon has been great lately coming out with such nifty technologies that help startups and the little guy such as Simple Storage Service, Elastic Computing Cloud and Simple Queue Service. The recently released Amazon Flexible Payments Service also seems like a great competitor to Paypal, but I wish it had a non-cobranded version. However, these other services are not the story, but EC2 is.

EC2 is a virtualization technology based on Xen provided by Amazon where you pay per instance hour. That is you pay per the hour that the instance is running. It is great for sites that need to add servers on the fly as load is added. Although it is not cheap as it runs about $70 dollars a month it does provide decent specs for the hardware.

What  I realized is that EC2 is more like running a system using a LiveCD then an actual system install. What does this mean? It means that storage is temporary and as soon as the instance is shut down all data is lost. However, if you reboot the instance the files seem to stay alive.

Also most importantly the root filesystem gets very little space. That means you have to work with /dev/sda2 which is usually mounted to /mnt. You are provided with 150gb of space on sda2. I ran into this snafu when I was trying to configure MySQL. Since MySQL uses /var/lib/mysql (on Ubuntu) to store the logfiles I kept on getting “Storage out of space” errors. To solve this I wrote a startup script that moves the mysql files to /mnt.

Uploading a new image was relatively simple, however, I got annoyed that I had to type out the Private Key and Public Key on the command line. Bundling the image itself was relatively straightforward as it was just converting a loopback device.

Creating a Ubuntu image was relatively straightforward especially with these directions and debootstrap taking care of the hard part. Remember to install libc6-xen if you are creating a Linux image. I wish Amazon would be less rpm specific and provide debs for the bundling apps. However, alien was great and got me through the process of installing the files.

Overall, I must say if you are really into creating your own images/distribution that you want to use to run various specific services then EC2 is amazingly efficient at it. Though I wish they would provide state if you want to run a bunch of images to do processing such as video transcoding, Hadoop clusters or mass indexing then Amazon is a gift from the web gods.

Plus I recommend everyone create an image and upload it. I learned quite a bit in the process.

I am all for convenience that is why I hate anything governmental, they are so prone to inconvenience customers and  weighed down by bureaucracy. I digress, today I got my EZ Rider card which should make taking BART much more convenient.

I am prone to always arriving at the BART station right when the BART train is at the platform. This causes me to run my ass off to catch the train, fumbling my wallet out, opening it and taking my ticket out. Quickly passing it through the gate I realize I wasted a few precious seconds and I continue running my ass off upstairs to realize that the doors are closed and the train is already continuing its journey.

Another scenerio is when I realize that the train is near to the platform when I arrive at the station. As I run to the entrance I realize that my ticket does not have enough money, I run to add money to my ticket realizing I don’t have cash or the credit card transaction is taking a while all while the train is above me on the platform loading passengers. By the time I get my ticket and get to the platform the train has long since left.

When I went to London the one thing I totally loved was the Oyster Card. The Oyster Card basically allows anyone taking the system to pay on the buses or the Tube using the same card allowing you to top off after you have spent a certain amount on rides during a day.

What I wonder is why did it take so long for this technology to come to take hold? I mean this solves the sort of inconvienience that cause people to not take public transport!

People do not like exterting a lot of effort. That is driving to say San Francisco and paying a ton on parking has a lower opportunity cost than taking BART, paying for the ticket, then walking or taking a bus, paying the ticket, to the place that they need to be. If the whole ticket process is simplified then that’s one whole aspect taken care of.

I understand that there are costs associated with this kind of system and BART probably makes a ton of money by tickets that are lost, but for people that take the BART everyday to get to work it’d be a great system. If they expanded it so buses also take the card for example then it would make getting around a lot easier. It will also reduce the congestion that is caused by traffic.

So what is this rant about? Well basically I want the EZ Rider card to do more! I was it expanded to buses as well as just the BART. I want to go anywhere in the Bay Area and assume that the EZ Rider card will work on any of the public transportation and most of all I want to avoid the burden of buying yet another ticket.