AWS main account / sub account login

Well, AWS is a great platform, but this particular problem ate qite a lot of my brain health.

Problem description:

A. Initially, when you try to go to any "inside" page of AWS, you are requested to log in, into an AWS main account (two fields: email / password). Even if you catually want to log into an AWS sub-account (three fields: account# / login / password)

B. If you have at any time logged into an AWS sub account (three fields) - you are unable to find a login page for AWS main account (two fields).

Problem A is solved easily: you just specify your account# in the URL, and viola - you are now prompted to log into a sub-account:
https://??????????.signin.aws.amazon.com/console
, where ?????????? is your main account number.

Problem B is less obvious, I spent quite a lot of time going back and forth between links, and somehow managed to do that in the end. Logging into a sub-account ruins everything though, so at the while i'm just using two different browsers for AWS: one for the main account login, another for the sub-account login.

Hope that helps someone struggling with it - most probably that would be me, after a while, when i forget about this again. ^_^

Clone existing (stopped) Hive cluster

1. Find a stopped cluster you want to be cloned and Clone it
1.1. Provide as many machines as you think should be minimal: it's easy to add machines later, harder to remove them,

2. Install s3cmd (SUSE):
cd /etc/yum.repos.d
sudo wget http://s3tools.org/repo/RHEL_6/s3tools.repo
sudo yum install s3cmd
2.1. create ~/s3cfg file, copy content from any EC2 machine you have S3 set up on
(or check here and do it from scratch)

3. Install aws-cli
sudo yum install aws-cli
3.1. create AWS credentials file
mkdir ~/.aws
cd ~/.aws
nano credentials

[default]
aws_access_key_id=Your Access Key ID
aws_secret_access_key=Your Secret Access Key
region=Optional, the default region to use for this profile

4. "s3cmd get" table creation scripts, run them, then run hive and you're good.

Hive, S3 and AWS credentials

1. Open Hive cluster page in EMR, get SSH connection address

2. Log into main hive cluster machine using Putty

3. Install S3 (http://s3tools.org/repositories):

  3.1. cd /etc/yum.repos.d

  3.2. sudo wget http://s3tools.org/repo/RHEL_6/s3tools.repo

  3.4. sudo yum install s3cmd

4. configure s3cmd: sudo nano .s3cfg, copy from any EC2 machine

5. aws config

, provide AWS credentials

6. s3cmd now works

Sparks in the Biz of mobile games

Quite some time ago, I have signed up for Bizspspark as i found it to be a good platform to start my own gaming industry. Yes, the loud laughing is expected here ))

As time goes by, me and my partner tried to start quite a number of different games, starting with a full-scale RTS for Windows Phone, scaling it down to a Base Wars game, diverting to a learn-the-maths WP game for kids with nice friendly aliens (and some evil bosses, too)

And now i'm trying to scratch enough time to create a simple dungeon crawler. It crawls already, the randomly created maze is there (although it has no entrance or exit), the monsters are there, you can kill them all to win, you can get killed to lose.

There is no loot there, no RPG model (like, you have HP, armor, AC, THAC0 etc, but no primary skill like str/dex/con - you get the idea). No gold, no inventory. No different mazes, no traders or something. All of it is yet to come.

But you have a maze, you have monsters, you have fighting sound (yes, THE fighting sound, lol) - and then you have some nice dungeon-style music. (Actually, it's Druuge theme from Precursors Ur-Quan Masters. I doubt they will let me put it in a final version of the game, yet they may allow that if the game is free - I'll have to talk to them about that once the game is more refined. At least once of them gave his permission to use another theme in a freeware game.)

In short - there is a long path before me... and acquiring Diablo 3 the other day ate up all of my free time. Oh, gamers... ))

People in an extreme situation

I have just watched the mobile-phone video of the recent car crash which resulted in 4 deaths.

The video itself is indisputably shocking.

The comments, however, are neither shocking nor surprising.
For the most part, commentators, sitting in their homes or offices on comfortable chairs, are outraged by the young guys "who filmed the whole damn thing instead of trying to rescue the passengers".

Well, one of them actually tried to help. He broke into the front glass, letting oxygen in, which basically turned the car salon into a flaming hell.
One person reached out, while the others were either unconscious or dead.
I guess nobody can tell now - anyway, they certainly have died quickly afterward.

Well, for all those showing their anger about operator's "stupidity", "monstrosity" and "violence".

Get out of your chair, go outside, happen to be in an unexpected extreme situation - and show us both your courage AND ability to think fast&reasonable.
Or just get out of your chair. And off the internet. It'll be better without you.

Now, for the rest of us who stay - what would you do in this case?

Would you try to help, without knowing exactly what and how to do?
Would you film it all on your mobile?
Would you just stand and stare, astonished?

I suppose 90% of the audience would do the last one. No matter how clever and tough we think we are.

And only time would uncover what was the "right" thing to do.
Yep, the first should be calling 01, 911 or whatever number you have in your city.

And then what?

Break the front glass, saving someone to doom all the others?
Wait for help to come?

There's no obvious answer, even now, when time has passed.

I, myself, choose one guaranteed life saved.
Especially considering two small "issues", which are:
1) The time usually needed for firefighters to come (which is from 30 to 60 minutes at my city)
2) The average condition of fire extinguishers which we all are carrying in our cars (you'd be surprised how ineffective these are)

And if that means that the dead guy's mother will curse me - well, that's tough but that's the price of taking decisions and making actions.

The biggest issue such extreme situations pose is - there is no "guarantee".
I guess that's why they are called "extreme".

So, I suppose I would stand and do nothing, while trying to weight the possibility to save someone vs the possibility to kill everyone with flame.

A sad conclusion.

Life goes spiral

Perhaps it's just me, I don't know - but it seems that life goes expanding circles, i.e. outgoing spiral.

I mean - sometimes I stumble upon a feeling that the situation I'm in right now has already happened to me years ago. On lower level of complexity, with fewer parameters included. I was younger, had not as much experience - neither professional nor personal - heck, I had kids at the time..

But overall, the situation is almost the same.

I wonder how far and high can I get by the time I find myself on the NEXT spiral turn..

Vista

A few days ago I have installed Vista for the first time in my life :)
That can look a bit strange for people from other countries, but here in Kyrgyzstan that's pretty much OK, as we encounter Vista on notebooks mostly - and it is usually pre-installed.

However, this time it was a fully licensed copy ov MS Vista - 5 CDs in a pack with an MS "licensed" sticker.
To tell you the truth, that was the first time in my entire life that I have installed the fully-licensed software ;)

So, what can I tell about Vista installation?
First of all, it was an "upgrade" of Windows XP to Windows Vista.
Second - it took A LOT of time to complete.
Third - the installer got every single bit of information from XP and transferred it all to Vista - from the desktop background to programs installed. THe only program that could not be migrated was Nero 7. Symantec Antivirus was transferred, but Vista refused to work with it - but that's minor.
Well, when I saw the result - it became obvious that such a process CAN take a lot of time, if you ask me :)

So, after a few hours of sittting and yawning - Voila! The computer is up and running with a new Windows, with all the old preferences you'd like to keep.
And I was even able to download all the official updates from Microsoft, without fearing that they will uncover the piracy ;)

As I always said to my clients - you'd better spend some money and buy licensed stuff.
Now I will tell them - guys, pretty please, go out and spend as much money as you can, but get me all the licensed stuff you can! :)

PS The only thing that brought me a little bit of distress was that MS Office 2007 haven't installed the MS Outlook by default. I wonder whether the Outlook is a stand-alone product now, or was it just a misconfiguration?