Here are some simple commands to get you started with using Amazon EC2:

ec2dim
Displays your account’s AMIs that are on Amazon

ec2run ami-XXXXXXXX
This launches your Amazon EC2 instance. Use your own or one of Amazon’s AMI IDs

ec2din
Describes your running instances with AMI and instance IDs

ec2dvol
Lists your account’s volumes and their status

ec2attvol vol-XXXXXXXX -i i-XXXXXXXX -d xvdf
Attaches an Elastic Block Storage device to your running instance

ec2detvol i-XXXXXXXX
Detaches the storage volume from an instance (use -f to force)

ec2stop i-XXXXXXXX
Stops a running instance so that you can perform maintenance on it

ec2minatt i-XXXXXXXX
Modifies an instance attribute such as the instance type

ec2start i-XXXXXXXX
Resumes your stopped instance

ec2kill i-XXXXXXXX
Terminates your running instance

I just thought I’d share my wife’s latest creation. There’s still a tenuous link to technology

Yoshi takes the lead in this delicious climax.

Happy Birthday John!

How many of your customers 'drive away' without you realising?

I was out shopping the other day and I did something that I’ve done many times when I’ve driven into Asda: I drove around to the parent and child parking spaces. Then I drove out of the car park and went to Sainsbury’s instead.

So what just happened?

A simple thing, really. I wanted a parent and small child space, and there were none. None at all. This happens quite often, and is a clincher for me when I’m finding a supermarket to go shopping at. I’m not going to rant on why the bays are a good idea as they are for many reasons. But I’m going to point out something that happens frequently at Asda and Tesco here, and why I think there’s a trick being missed. (more…)

This chap doesn't know it yet - but you're calling him to fix his problems

One of the constant struggles in business is trying to engage new customers, and catch them when they need you. Businesses are constantly trying to come up with clever ideas to remain in the potential customer’s mind at all moments so that when you suddenly think “I need a quote for car insurance” that brand is right at the front of your mind.

So, I’ve had a thought. Why can’t we turn this around and have customers advertise to us? (more…)

A little problem came up with some user submitted content on a platform I’m working with.

A form allows users to submit content with tinyMCE. If the content is pasted from MS Word, the source is then littered with HTML conditional comments that can have a detrimental effect on the the page that returns it.

After discovering what was going on, I thought that the best time to capture the offending content is when the text is submitted. Using a regular expression, I can capture the HTML conditionals as well as remove any unnecessary comments:

<code>
function clear_html_comments($html)
{
    return preg_replace('/&lt;!--(.|\s)*?--&gt;/', '', $html);
}
</code>

That’s it. Just pass in the content from tinyMCE and it should prevent any content being returned that is in HTML comments.

I’ve been working with a client to migrate their email systems to Google Apps Premier, as most folks’ emails are being kept on their personal computers and there is a good chance of losing a chunk of work amongst other things.

The task for me was to personally help with uploading all of the disparate systems up to Google Mail, Calendar and Docs. We’ll also be moving some wiki content onto Sites over time but the main issue right now is that we need to get those emails up!

The Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook tool is pretty good at getting everything working with Outlook directly, as well as uploading your existing emails.

Set up is straight-forward, but sometimes an error crops up that is commented in the forums and in the known issues page.

I found that the “Sync Errors” folder that is created doesn’t actually get synchronised. The easy fix is to either upload the folder with the Email Uploader tool, or simply create a label with the same name in Google Apps Mail. Once done, sync should continue to work.