Parallels 4.0 is fast
Just when I was losing to the idea of configuring my macbook for dual boot (or even getting a new machine) to be able to use Windows XP with more ease.
I am using Parallels to be able to do testing of the apps I’m writing on IE (one site I’m working on has more than 1/3rd of users still IE6…) and to be able to recompile and package an old J2EE application using a proprietary framework and builder that works only on Windows :-(
Until upgrading to Parallels 4.0 (which I did yesterday), generating the EAR for said application was taking more than 25 minutes, now it’s just down to less than 5 minutes! The big improvement seem to be in the (shared) filesystem access but also everything else seems snappier and the VM feels lighter on the system.
Overall a highly recommended upgrade to anyone using the product.
Controlling an EC2 instance with python
One of the selling points of EC2 is that it enables elastic provisioning of computing infrastructure; this allows following novel usage patterns where a server is used only for the time required to do some work.
The key to reach this flexibility is the API that gives developers the ability to startup a server, configure it, use it and shut it down. There are libraries for many programming languages but I like the way the boto python library makes it really simple do these things (and a lot more).
Here I’ll show how to use boto to start a server instance then how to send a file to the instance and execute a command on the remote server, and finally I’ll show how to terminate the instance.
Den Rest lesen…
Just installed the SyntaxHighlighter (plus) plugin
Just a test of the SyntaxHighlighter plugin
from datetime import datetime
echo $PATH