Amazon S3 and it’s many uses

I’ve been using Amazon’s S3 service for quite a while now. It’s a great service and is really affordable. My main use for it is file backups. I have 15 some GB on there, mainly photos and other various files. I use a nice utility called Jungle Disk to access S3. It does daily backups, creates a mapped network drive, and is very transparent. Really a nice utility. It’s not a free thoughl, but it is a one time registration price.

JD is not the reason for this post though. I really wanted to talk about this other post I found on another site. I knew of a few of the uses posted, but didn’t know of them all.

9 Hidden Features of Amazon S3

WAR Notebook

Since a few friends and I are playing Warhammer Online, I thought I would make a notebook to hold some links.

WAR Links

.Net Application on the network

So I write a small little application for work in C#, which is pretty cool, since I’m a mainframe COBOL guy. Pretty much what it does, is it takes a text file generated by the mainframe that contains information regarding clients, each record could one of 3 types of data, case level, adult level, and child level. Each type has a different layout, so that has to be addressed somehow. So it does an OleDB lookup on the file and selects each record-type and dumps them to their own temp file(a table is how OleDB looks at it) and then takes each record-type file and comma-delimits it according to the schema.ini(table layout) that I have predefined for that record-type. It’s really quite slick, it runs thru about 17,000 records, copies them to their temp files, comma-delimits the whole thing, and outputs them to 3 .csv files so you can easily view them in Excel, it takes about 5 seconds. Much much faster then trying to manually import them into excel and having to remember where the columns start and stop.

The problem I ran into was copying the file out to the network so others could access it. Apparently by default, LocalIntranet is not a trusted source for .Net. So after I figured out that’s what the problem actually was, I had to figure out how to solve it. It’s pretty easy actually, you need to use a utility that comes with .Net 2.0 framework…even though I was using 3.5 for this app. Just installed 2.0 if you need it. Anyway, you need to use caspol.exe to setup a trust for your application or application directory, whatever you choose. Here is what I did.

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\caspol.exe -q -m -ag 1.2 -url file://”\\servername/folder 1/folder 2/app.exe” FullTrust

-q=quiet, I had this set in a batch file, can leave it out
-m=machine level trust, trusts for whole pc, any user
-ag=add to group 1.2 which is LocalIntranet
-url=link to a file/url

The path for caspol.exe is the default path .Net gets installed it, if you have it differently, change it to match. Notice the odd mixture of / and \, it does work like above. You can also remove the quotes in the file part if you don’t have spaces in the path, I did, so I had to put the path in quotes.

Rockfield Park

2008.08.30 Rockfield Park

Here are a few pics of the munchkin from out trip to the local park.

I think I can…

2008.08.02 Crawling

Here are some pics of Caleb trying to crawl and a few other funny ones.