As I work with Amazon EC2, I find that I need to configure machine images for specific tasks. In general, I’ve preferred to perform this configuration by running brief install scripts on the standard Amazon-owned images, rather than using more complex, pre-configured images. For me, the core issues are those of transparency and trust.
Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch have been much in the news lately. In light of Lehman’s bankruptcy and Merrill’s sale to Bank of America, I thought it would be interesting to look at their participation in the electricity market. Merrill Lynch appears to have been a major player in that market, while Lehman, despite growing aggressively over the last two years, was not.
The power law distribution (and the associated long tail) is a much-discussed statistical phenomenon. I’ve been looking at wholesale electricity transactions, and it appears the the wholesale power business is also well described by the Pareto principle.
I recently installed phpMyAdmin on one of my EC2 machine images. In the course of doing so, I found it necessary to upgrade the PHP interpreter. I did not think that the best way to perform this upgrade was obvious, and so I decided to document my experience.
