Monthly Archives: September 2008

Configuring EC2

Posted on September 26, 2008 by MXH

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 … Continue reading →

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Lehman, Merrill, and Electricity

Posted on September 19, 2008 by MXH

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 … Continue reading →

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Power Law

Posted on September 12, 2008 by MXH

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.

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Updating PHP on EC2 (for phpMyAdmin)

Posted on September 5, 2008 by MXH

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, … Continue reading →

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