May 2007 Archives
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May 15, 2007
Birthday Cake Video
Below you'll find a video showing the birthday cake that Laurie made for herself for her birthday party. She had some help from one of her friends during the final decorating. The cake inside is a carrot cake, but I'd call it more of a spiced carrot cake as its quite flavorful. The critters are made out of fondant while the frosting is orange butter cream and the cake was encased in marzipan. About 2/3rds of the bottom section fed about 20 people at the party. We still have leftovers.
May 4, 2007
Amazon Web Services Pricing Change
Amazon has recently released that their prices for their web services are going to be changing on June 1. Is it cheaper?
For Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), it definitely is. The AMI instance rates have stayed the same at 10 cents per hour, rounded up. However, bandwidth fees have dropped and are now on a tiered basis. The bandwidth costs are the same across all of the services and bandwidth between EC2 and S3 (Simple Storage Service) is still free.
For Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service), the costs have remained basically the same, with the exception of the bandwidth changes. This should also cause, if anything, a reduction in fees for SQS users, although not by much.
However, for Amazon S3, the cost structure has changed. No longer is there just storage and bandwidth costs. There are now separate fees for PUT and LIST requests and another separate fee for GET requests. The storage pricing has also remained the same at 10 cents per month per gigabyte. However, now, each 1,000 PUT or LIST requests will cost an additional penny and every 10,000 GET requests will cost a penny. That doesn't sound like much, but for very high volume but very small data, the costs could go up. They also specifically do not say that this is free for EC2 users. The impact of that is that trying to use S3 as a database of sorts for small bits of data could get much more expensive.
Amazon says this about the price changes to S3:
To quantify the impact of these pricing changes, we looked at what the effect would have been on customers' March 2007 bills. Assuming this change was in effect, 75% of customers would have seen their bill decrease, while an additional 11% would have seen an increase of less than 10%. Only 14% of customers would have experienced an increase of greater than 10%.
So that does mean one in every four users of S3 will see a rate increase. Now, that could also include users that are at the very low end. Maybe some folks spend 25 cents a month and might now spend 30 cents a month because of rounding for transactions fees. That's more than 10 percent, but it's all still pennies.
The bandwidth fees are were most of the costs have changed. Upload and download bandwidth is now charged at a different rate. Upload has been reduced to 10 cents per gigabyte, half of the original 20 cents per gigabyte per month. This makes using S3 to back up data much cheaper. It also reduces the cost of uploading new AMIs for EC2. Download bandwidth is now tiered. For bandwidth used up to 10 terabytes per month, the cost is now 18 cents per gigabyte, down 10%. The next 40 terabytes of data transferred will cost 16 cents per gigabyte, down 20%. After that, bandwidth after the first 50 terabytes in a month is charged at a mere 13 cents per gigabyte per month. That's a hefty 35% reduction.
So, a while back I looked at the cost of Amazon EC2 against a dedicated host. In that writing, I had no examples of bandwidth in the double-digit terabyte range. I was looking at it more from a personal point of view. There, we saw that an AMI that used 40 gigabytes of storage and 100 gigabytes per month of transfer would cost about $99 per month. Now, this cost would be reduced to $97 because the bandwidth would drop from $20 a month to $18 a month. The initial upload for the 40 gigabytes would drop from $8 to only $4, as well.
Now, if you're a large user or have a very popular podcast and deal in the terabyte cost range, things may get much better. If you were using a dedicated host at $119 like I am and had to pay 50 cents per gigabyte for transfers after the first 1500 gigabytes in a month, you'd spend about $35,119 a month for the hosting to use 71,500 gigabytes a month in bandwidth. At a sustained rate of 222 Mbps, though, a standard 100 Mbps server won't be able to keep up. Spread across 12 servers to have each at 20% of the Ethernet speeds, spread evenly 24 hours a day, you'd add another $1,400 to the cost each month and server complexity.
If, however, you hosted via Amazon EC2 with the files directly available off of S3, you'd likely only need a single EC2 to serve up the feeds. To be safe, though, you'll use two of them at a cost of $146 per month. Your first 10 TB of bandwidth will cost $1843. Your next 40 TB will add $6553 per month. The last 21.5 TB will cost an additional $2,862. So far, were up to a total cost of $11,404 per month, or nearly $25k cheaper, so far. Now, don't forget about the S3 GET fees. Every 10k downloads costs an additional penny. Assuming your average data file size was 20 megabytes (a podcast, remember?), using 71.5 TB would be about 3,750,000 GET requests. That adds all of $3.74 a month. Were you worried? If you hosted your feed on S3, too, it might have 100 times as many requests as RSS readers check it every hour or less. That could bring the costs up to hundreds of dollars. But, as you can see, it would be cheaper to host that on the EC2 directly.
So, not only is AWS cheaper, but it's also much more flexible. You could increase the bandwidth by 10x without having to add your own servers because the S3 system will just handle it (presumably). That's very convenient.
May 2, 2007
An Attempt at Time Lapse Video
So, on our trip the weekend before last (you know, the one with the broken car window and the poorly behaving gadgets), I also took many pictures with the Sony Vaio UX280P out the window on the way.
I've turned this in to a simple time lapse video that's about a minute long. Instead of trying to figure out how to do a little embedded Flash player for my own Flash video, I decided to just let Windows Movie Maker write out in WMV format. Then, I uploaded it to cruxy. Why cruxy and why not YouTube (or Google Video)? Well, I might try those, as well. Cruxy seemed like it might be easier to switch to a local version at some point, though. They also provide tools for transcoding video files to and from most of the major, unprotected formats.
So, anyway, here it is (hopefully):
May 1, 2007
Sprint's Music Downloads
Unlike last time I had a Sprint Ambassador handset, this time I'm much more interested in the music aspects of it. That probably has something to do with the fact that the phone supports A2DP and I have relatively comfortable headphones that also happen to support A2DP. This allows me to listen to the music in some sort of high quality way and through the headphone I listed to just about everything else with.
Unfortunately, the entire experience has been with some frustration. The basic experience of downloading songs via the Music Store on the handset and playing them on the handset has been just fine. In fact, it's very fast, works really well, and the songs sound great even though they are relatively small and a whole lot can fit on the included 64MB card. The music recommendations work pretty well and the "Others Bought" and "More by this Artist" features help find more songs you might not know or might want.
The Sprint music store also allows for PC downloads of anything you've purchased on your computer. It also allows for backing up of your handset music to your computer. You can't play it there, but if you delete music on your handset, you can't download it again. The handset music is in a protected AAC+ format, which is the reason why it can be so small yet still have very good audio fidelity. On the desktop side, standard protected WMA files are used. It's on the PC side where all of my problems started.
I tried logging in to the Sprint site to download my music (www.sprint.com/digitallounge). First, I couldn't get the password retrieval to work. Finally, after quite some time of trying, I got a single SMS with the password. I then couldn't log in. The site kept saying there was some technical error on the back end. Finally, I tried Internet Explorer rather than Firefox and got logged in. After downloading one song, I was prompted to login again. This time, I couldn't. Neither the password that it sent to me nor the one that I had set worked. I tried requesting a new one, but this didn't work.
A couple of days later, I tried again. I finally got back in with a new password and using IE only. I then downloaded a bunch more music. I then launched WMP11 to play it on my machine (the Sony UX280P with Vista, of course). This didn't, and still doesn't, work. The files are listed as having copy protection, but in the licensing tab there is no information about it. It's very odd.
So, I thought maybe I was missing something. After some searching around on the Sprint site, I gave up with trying to find any downloads for Vista. The CD even listed XP as required. Well, the CD also had a URL on it that I didn't recognize. I went to it and there they had a Vista version of the music manager. So, I downloaded and installed it. That took two reboots. One for the installation and one to fix whatever went wrong when I ran it for the first time.
The music manager requires the USB cable to be used with the UpStage. It also shows my UpStage as having 0 bytes used of 0 bytes total. I couldn't figure out how to sync any music to the phone at all. I would start, but never give status or anything. When I finally tried to close the application, it said there was a sync pending. Well, if there was, it was going at a bit a minute. Maybe.
The Sprint Music Manager is even more of a joke than just not working. The content tab is just a browser window that brings you to the normal login location. It doesn't even short cut you to the download site. So, naturally, it didn't anything new to work that was broken. Although, when trying to play the music through it, there was no detection of errors. The status would say playing, but naturally nothing was playing and the play time wouldn't change.
Now, to be fair, I haven't had time to call the Ambassador support line to see if they can tell me what I'm doing wrong. However, I don't think it's supposed to be this hard! Well, I'll post more information later if things start working...
