Lately I have been messing around with a NCAA Men's basketball power ranking algorithm.  Here are the results currently.

Getting started with Amazon Web Services EC2

First off go to aws.amazon.com and create your account. This part is pretty self explanatory. If you choose a micro instance with no extra services, your first year is free.

You can choose from several public images. I chose an Amazon Linux AMI image which is an Amazon customization based on CentOS. CentOS is in the family of Linux distros that includes Red Hat and Fedora.

After you create your instance, there are a couple of things that you need to do to make it usable. Although it is easy to find how to do these things, I didn't find a unified location that tells you these steps.

1. Open port 22. By default all inbound ports are blocked, so if you plan to ssh into your instance, you will have to do this. Go into the AWS Management Console and find Security Groups. On the Inbound tab, Create a new rule: SSH. For Source, use the default 0.0.0.0/32. This opens port 22 incoming traffic from any address. A couple of notes: You can not log in remotely as root. Use ec2-user or whatever the AWS Management Console tells you under Connect. Also, you cannot use a password to login; you can only log in with the key also found in the Management Console.
2. Open ports 80 if you plan to use Apache, and/or port 8080 if you plan to use a web container.
3. When you ssh in, do
   
   sudo yum install mlocate
   
   if you like to use the locate command.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to BuzzMug. I am your host, Michael Munsey. Here I will cover burning issues about software development and related topics.

First a little about myself. I grew up in Pearsiburg, VA. I joined the army shortly after graduating high school. I spent the biggest part of 1991-1996 in Korea. After that I moved to Fort Lewis, WA. I got out of the army in 1999 and went to work for Unisys. I got married in 2002. I finished my bachelor's degree at University of Washington 2004-2006. I started working at Boeing and started grad school in 2006, and completed my master's in 2009.

Currently I am a Systems and Data Analyst at Boeing. My team's application is called Scheduled Maintenance Integrated Task System (SMITS). Our application is split into two major parts. First there is a Java swing application where Boeing maintenance engineers enter maintenance tasks and their required frequencies. Second, we have a web application that allows airlines to customize their own schedule, which may involve bundling tasks (the same way that a car that has a 30,000 mile service), rather than trying to complete each task as it comes due, which could cause the airplane to be out of service frequently.

About the title...I want to create a buzz, and my most important tool is my coffee mug, which helps me to convert coffee into code.