Amazon EC2

Steps for setting up a free ec2 micro account:

• Sign up for a free ec2 account
• You will need to create a new AWS account if you already have one
• Log into the AWS Management Console
• Create a micro Linux account - choose an EBS backed AMI (Official Ubuntu AMI's are uploaded by user 099720109477)
• Make sure security group has SSH access
• Download pem file (can store in same directory or ~/.ssh/identity - ~/.ssh/id_dsa for newer ssh versions)
• chmod 400 [KEY].pem
• From folder of pem file connect with: ssh -i [KEY].pem ec2-user@[ID].compute-1.amazonaws.com (user name may be root or ubuntu, depending on instance)
• Send files with: scp -i [KEY].pem file [USER]@[ID].compute-1.amazonaws.com:
• Mount filesystem: sshfs [USER]@[ID].compute-1.amazonaws.com: ~/mnt -o IdentityFile=[KEY].pem
• Unmount: fusermount -u ~/mnt

Format harddrive

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/

Look for required harddrive

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 -L "Buffalo"

Grep-fu

How to display list of files with given extension with given text:
grep -lr --include="*.py" "firefox_" *

Installing Crunchbang

• Download Crunchbang development torrent
• Format USB as FAT32
• Download recent version of unetbootin
• Create Debian Unstable HDMedia environment on USB
• Copy Crunchbang ISO to USB at root
• Boot from USB to install

Post install:

• Add account to sudoers with visudo
• Add http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ and http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ to /etc/apt/sources.list
• Add "setxkbmap us &" to ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh to set US keyboard
• install ttf-* packages for foreign fonts (Chinese: arphic-uming, Korean: unfonts-extra)
• Install vim, codecs, etc
• Customize .vimrc, .bashrc

iso install

1. Find path to USB with: ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/*usb*
2. Format USB to FAT32: sudo umount /dev/sdx && sudo mkfs.vfat -I -n "custom name" /dev/sdX
3. Replug USB
4. Write ISO to usb with: sudo dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M;sync (or use UNetbootin)
5. Make USB first in BIOS boot order (hit F2 or Del at startup)

OCR for Linux

I tried a few solutions to extract text out of a clear image containing alan0@hotmail.com:
Install with: sudo apt-get install gocr tesseract ocrad

$ gocr -i email.png
aIan0hdmaiI.com

$ convert email.png email.tif # requires tif
$ tesseract email.tif out
$ cat out.txt
Ina rrykeeg a

$ convert email.png email.ppm # requires p[bgp]m
$ ocrad email.ppm
alano_no_mall.


Upscaling the image slightly improved the results but still none were correct.
Disappointing ...

web2py on webfaction

In Panel create a custom script and then paste this URL: http://wiki.webfaction.com/wiki/Web2py-LatestSource

Tor on Ubuntu

I found Tor works with privoxy but not the recommended polipo on Ubuntu 9.10. To run tor first add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org [distribution] main

For me the [distribution] is Karmic.


Now install Tor and the proxy server with:

1. sudo aptitude install tor privoxy
2. sudo vim /etc/tor/torrc and modify MaxCircuitDirtiness
3. sudo vim /etc/privoxy/config
4. comment out: “logfile logfile”
5. find: listen-address 127.0.0.1:8118
6. add (on next line): forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 . (including the period)
7. sudo /etc/init.d/tor restart && sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy restart

Now set 127.0.0.1:8118 as proxy (eg in firefox) to access the Tor network.

GAE domains

How to register a domain with godaddy and enable free hosting on Google:

• Purchase domain from godaddy
• This will use the default godaddy nameservers (ns35.domaincontrol.com, ns36.domaincontrol.com, etc)
• Set up Google Apps for domain
• Complete signup form and request cname value to verify domain
• Login to godaddy domain manager (advanced)
• Add www forwarding to get naked domain to work (use masking)
• Delete all the default cname values, which point to various services
• Add google.com cname value and use default TTL
• Add cname ghs.google.com with alias www
• Add www sub domain through GAE dashboard
• To enable email use this service
• Had to wait 10 minutes before service was active

SSH timeouts

Add this to ~/.ssh/config to avoid ssh timeouts (create file if does not exist):

Host *
    ServerAliveInterval 240

Call url with CRON

Call URL periodically with CRON, discard HTML, and send all output (including errors) to file:

$ crontab -e
0 * * * * wget URL -O /dev/null 2>> ~/cron.log

Memcached on webfaction

Choose memcached from custom install scripts and set extra info to maximum number of MB (eg 2)

This executes:

memcached start -d -l 127.0.0.1 -m 5 -P $PWD/memcached.pid -p XXXXX

Then can access with gluon.contrib.memcache

Take note of port used

Komodo

Run current file with Python: %(python) "%F"