Route53 is an excellent service, and the latest price reduction makes it even more attractive - but using the API directly as an end user is a little cumbersome, especially for cloud servers.

A while ago I thought "wouldn't it be great if when launching a cloud server some magic would happen and the server would get assigned a human/friendly name of my choice? I'm tired of remembering IP addresses, and logging into my DNS management console to setup records."

Following that thought we added Domain management and a free dynamic DNS service to the TurnKey Linux Hub.

If anyone is interested:

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/hub-domains (announcement)

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/hubdns (documentation)

https://github.com/turnkeylinux/hubdns (source code)

A little late to the conversation, but none the less...

You could use the TurnKey Hub for easy deployment of a pre-configured Django appliance to Amazon EC2. If you prefer the command line you can use the Hub's API or CLI, for example:

$ hub-launch django [-options]

If you've enabled TKLBAM (encrypted backups of changes to files, databases, package management state, even users and groups), you can launch a new cloud server which will be automatically restored upon boot:

$ hub-launch $BACKUP_ID

Take that a step further and say you're developing your Django app in a local VM. When you're ready to deploy to the cloud you just trigger a backup, then launch it in the cloud.

I keep a list of books I've read and highly recommend here [1]. Almost all of them include the first chapter free (via kindle for web).

[1] http://www.alonswartz.org/books/

Article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_refund

Been using them for years on Linux, can't live without them. I use three 1) email + timelog 2) journal + coding 3) reference + browser. With the help of the virtual desktops and keybindings, any app or desktop I need access to is a key combo away.

Interesting sort-of-related article: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/08/the-large-display-p...

You're right. The Studio 16 XPS comes with a backlit keyboard (optional).

Good point on the battery life. Reports running Linux I've seen are 2.5 hours (which is really poor), as well as 6-7 hours (possibly due to power consumption tweaks). The aesthetics are nice to have, not the deciding factor.

I totally agree that basing solely off geographic location is not adequate, so let me clarify the implementation details.

In production, we use GeoIP to determine the country/state of the server in question, and then perform a lookup in the generated indexes to determine the preferred region. I say preferred (and not closest) because the indexes are static, and are not calculated on the fly. This was a design decision to allow us to tweak the indexes with the help of community feedback.

The location based calculation described was used to generate the baseline indexes to provide a relatively good starting point. One of the reasons for writing this blog post and publishing the indexes, was to take us to the next phase of tweaking the indexes, hence the closing paragraph:

"we need your help to tweak the indexes - as you have better knowledge and experience on your connection latency and speed. Please let us know if you think we should associate your country/state to a different Amazon region."

The countries and US indexes consist of 249 and 62 entries, respectively. We don't have the resources to perform latency testing in each and every location, for that we need the communities help.

List of titles and authors: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/8641676/100-Must-Read-Books-The-...