Its that time of the year again!

Wishing all my family, friends, colleagues and clients a very prosperous Year of the Dragon ahead!

Stay healthy, stay happy and keep truckin’ on!

The Taiwanese elections may be over, but Gothamist LLC’s Shanghaiist.com still manages to pick up a couple of interesting Weibo (China’s Twitter) reaction from Mainland China.

If it’s at all possible to assign scores for democracy, then today’s Taiwan is probably a lot more democratic than many of the more established democracies of the world. These people are like you and I — yellow skinned, brown-eyed, speak Mandarin, and eat Chinese food. Those people that think democracy is not suitable for the Chinese people can now shut up. Those people that say democracy is not possible because the Chinese people are not well-educated enough, or that China is too unique for it, can now shut up. Those people that are still going on about how socialism is superior — please, either go to North Korea for a taste of real socialism, or shut up.
如果民主可以分度数，那么今日台湾要比许多老牌民主国家更民主，这些人和你我一样，黄皮肤，黑眼睛，讲中文，吃中餐，那些认为民主不适合中国人的，可以闭嘴了；那些以素质论、国情论来否定民主的，可以闭嘴了；那些仍在坚持社会主义优越性之说的，要么去朝鲜体验一下真正的社会主义，要么可以闭嘴了。

Some of those ‘tweets’ (seriously, what do you call Weibo updates) seem indicate some sort of dreaming about how a democratic China would look like. This reminds me of the interview I saw over the TV on Channel News Asia, where a local Taiwanese said she was encouraged with the improvements in Cross-straits ties under Ma Ying-Jeou (KMT), and that it is good for Taiwan to get closer to China. She continues, “That way we can show China what democracy is about and hopefully change them.”

I guess she may be onto something.

Oh Colbert!

Rails-god and 37Signals guru, David Heinemeier Hansson, tweeted:

(adjusted for chronological order and aesthetics)

Building apps is the new gold rush. Non-techie friends are constantly asking me how to get in on the action. I would short this market.

It’s like looking at the music billboards and asking anyone who knows how to play a guitar if they can help making one of those hits.

(also, it’s always iPhone apps they want to build. Never hear anyone talk about Android or even web)

True and it also creates giant egos for some non-technical founders. Stay grounded people. Appreciate people and talent for who they are and not just what they can do for you.

This is on-top of the existing 750 micro-instance hours a month for linux instances! Which means you can now run 2 micro-instances of Windows and Linux each under the Free Usage Tier!

From AWS Blog

The AWS Free Usage Tier now allows you to run Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 on an EC2 t1.micro instance for up to 750 hours per month. This benefit is open to new AWS customers and to those who are already participating in the Free Usage Tier, and is available in all AWS Regions with the exception of GovCloud. This is an easy way for Windows users to start learning about and enjoying the benefits of cloud computing with AWS.

The micro instances provide a small amount of consistent processing power and the ability to burst to a higher level of usage from time to time. You can use this instance to learn about Amazon EC2, support a development and test environment, build an AWS application, or host a web site (or all of the above). We’ve fine-tuned the micro instances to make them even better at running Microsoft Windows Server.

As freelancers here in Singapore, we often have to purchase goods/services online which are often not priced in Singapore Dollars.

So how then do we account for it in our yearly tax declaration to IRAS?

According to the folks:

These amounts [price] in Singapore dollars may be shown separately beside their respective amount in foreign currency on your tax invoice. In your GST return, you should report the amounts in Singapore dollars shown in your tax invoice for “value of standard-rated supplies” and “output tax due”.

Examples of the approved exchange rates are exchange rates published by local banks or locally circulated newspaper. This exchange rate must be updated at least once every three months and be used consistently for internal business reporting, accounting and GST purposes. The source must also be used consistently for at least one year from the end of the accounting period in which the method was first used.

So in summary, make sure you choose a source to determine how your currency exchange rate is going to be and keep checking back every 3 months to update your rates. You also should not change your source for at least a year.

If you’re reading this, you’re viewing this blog on a Singapore EC2 instance.

If you’re looking for a quick way to start hosting your PHP5 applications, here’s an EC2 AMI image I’ve created to help make it easier.

It is a x64 Ubuntu Oneiric EBS AMI Image running a LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP) stack which is suitable for those who wants to make use of Amazon’s free-tier micro instances.

Click away

Its currently only available for the AP-Southeast region (Singapore).

Tip: Remember to create a swap partition.

Update: Forgot to list down the necessary authentication information.

- Login with the username ubuntu and your key when you start it.
- MySQL root default password is ubuntu1024. Remember to change it!

Been trying to move my git repositories and apps from my old (and expensive) VPS into Amazon’s EC2 when I asked myself whether it is possible to push use Amazon S3 as a git repository.

Some searching later, I found out the answer. YES!

It is not only possible to push your repositories into your S3 bucket, but its also possible to do so even when your bucket is in a non-US region.

The only real thing that you’d need to install is JGit, a java implementation of the git client.

Here’s a quick and dirty guide from my experience:

1. Download jgit.sh and put it in a path that bash is already reading from.

# when you download your jgit from the link above, its typically in 
# a format like <somerandomnumbers>-jgit.sh
# rename that just to jgit and put it in a path-readable directory
 
# you may need to sudo
 
davidc@davidc-myawesomebox:/usr/local/bin> ls
jgit
 
davidc@davidc-myawesomebox:/usr/local/bin> chmod +x jgit

2. Prepare your AWS security credential keys and create a .jgit file in your ~/.jgit

davidc@davidc-VirtualBox:~> vim .jgit
 
# Add the following
accesskey: aws access key
secretkey: aws secret access key

3. Chmod 600 your .jgit file

davidc@davidc-VirtualBox:~> chmod 600 .jgit

4. Create an S3 bucket in your AWS Console

5. You’re set!

 
# .jgit could be any file you designate as your
davidc@davidc-VirtualBox:/home/me/awesomecode> git remote add s3 amazon-s3://.jgit@<your bucket_name>/<project-name>.git
 
# push away
davidc@davidc-VirtualBox:/home/me/awesomecode>  jgit push s3 master

Extra:
While this is great for hosting personal code where you’re the only developer, this is not that useful for multi-developer environments.

Your S3 bucket is set to ACL: private by default so its only accessible by you. If you’d like to make it accessible to the public (to download), in your ~/.jgit add the following line after your secret key:

acl: public

The public can then clone your repository by

git clone http://<bucketname>.s3.amazonaws.com/<project-name>.git

Caveats: You cannot push to a S3 repository via http. You’d still need to make use of jgit and the amazon-s3 protocol.

Hope this helps!

Note to self:

Create a swap partition after launching a micro-instance.

You’ll need it.