Ok, sometimes you just need a tiny computer to sit there and do something undisturbed where no one is going to turn it off. The problem I have at the moment is I’m traveling so my laptop is on again off again, so it can’t be trusted to have nice things processes. While I could ssh into my work computer, the building I work on is under-construction, so the power is not to be trusted. My home computer can not be gotten to from here… so, there is an app EC2 node for that.

I just launched a happy little EC2 micro instance using the default Ubuntu AMI. I’m about to turn it into a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and then use it to do so very slow data mining of twitter. Amazon has some pretty good documentation to get you started. Once I had my micro instance on Linux, I ssh’d and set up Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

And… you’re done. It’s just that simple.

I also realized I needed git, but hey – that’s just one more line of code

• sudo apt-get install git

Now, I’m off to git my code and things are off and running like speeding turtles.