I recently uploaded a static site to Amazon S3. Here is my invoice of the costs:

Let me explain these AWS transfer cost and maybe you can save some money!

I had 20GB of sermons to upload to Amazon. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1. I was trying to use SFTP to upload the talks to Amazon directly from Bluehost. I tried this three times. It got about halfway each time when Amazon terminated the connection.
Estimated 30GB of uploads.

Step 2. I zipped the files and upladed them in one go to Amazon to the S3 bucket. Then I realised I could not unzip them. Rookie error.
Another 20GB uploads.

Step 3. I used Cyberduck to transfer all the files individually using SFTP. This worked! But every single file had the wrong MIME type set. So the files downloaded instead of serving to the browser. This is apparently a well-known bug.
Another 20GB uploads.

Step 4. I used ‘Transmit’ to upload the files into the s23 Bucket – it worked!!
Another 20GB.

So overall I’m estimating 110GB of transfers to get 20GB of files onto Amazon.
If I had used Transmit the first time around it would have probably cost $20 instead of $100. I hope you can learn from my mistakes!

I run a help site for Apple computers at http://macintoshhowto.com. Under ‘Computers’ you’ll find some articles that were a bit too technical or obscure to make it on my main Apple website.

Here’s the story of how I invented the single modifier keypress that has found it’s way into some Apple products.

In 2006 I send a message to Alcor (Nicholas Jitkoff  @alcor ) on the blacktree forum with the idea of a single modifier activation for Quicksilver.

My thinking was this…

You never use a modifier key(such as command or shift) by itself. It is always used with something. When you press a modifier key  OS X  is expecting you to press another key.

I was short of function keys.  I had all my function keys assigned to something. I wanted a simpel way to activate Quicksilver with a single keypress.

So I proposed that Quicksilver be activated by the single press of a modifier key. (The command key).

I suggested that Alcor get Quicksilver  look for how long you held the modify key down, and if you hold the modify key down for under 100 milliseconds,  then Quicksilver treat that as  invoking Quicksilver.   Because, realistically, you never just press a modify key down briefly like that.

Alcor responded fast and within a week this  functionality for ‘ Modifier-only activation’  was introduced into Quicksilver!

I am not aware of anyone else using modifier only activation…

6 years later, in 2012 Apple introduced dictation into OS X  and the had a feature to ‘press function key twice’ to activate dictation.

Take a look at the  keyboard shortcuts for dictation in the current Apple OS X system preferences…

Granted, it’s not single modifier-only  activation, but it’s close.

I don’t know if they borrowed this idea of me (via Quicksilver) or they came up with it themselves but I am happy to claim the credit!

http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/wp-clean-up

Update: This is better: http://pondini.org/TM/B6.html

Here’s how I used it to move all my email messages from one gmail account to another one.

Download it from here:

https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back

Put it in your home folder in a filder called gyb.

From terminal:

cd ~/gyb

python gyb.py --email wayne@dubbo.org --action estimate

tells you what it will do

python gyb.py --email wayne@dubbo.org --action backup

backs it all up, mine took 8GB

python gyb.py --email wayneconnor@dubbo.org --action restore --local-folder GYB-GMail-Backup-wayne@dubbo.org --label-restored "old"

restores it from backup to a different google account  and puts a label on it all called ‘old’

It will say ‘Pass Through’

Click on the drive and change from ‘Pass Thru’ to ‘Unconfigured’

Now click on ‘Rebuild’ and it will rebuild the failed disk from the other disks.

wait for it to finish – 3-6 hours!

It has come to our attention that your site is using an excessive amount of MySQL resources on your Bluehost account.

So some looking into it, the wordpress commentmeta SQL table for http://macintoshhowto.com was 2.7 Gig. Yes 2.7 GB!!!!!

More looking, it’s a bug with Akismet spam filter cleanup.

These two queries fix it.

select count(*) from dbname_commentmeta where meta_key=’akismet_as_submitted’ or meta_key=’akismet_history’ or meta_key=’akismet_rechecking’ or meta_key=’akismet_result’ or meta_key=’akismet_user’ or meta_key=’akismet_user_result’;

delete from dbname_commentmeta where meta_key=’akismet_as_submitted’ or meta_key=’akismet_history’ or  meta_key=’akismet_rechecking’ or meta_key=’akismet_result’ or meta_key=’akismet_user’ or  meta_key=’akismet_user_result’;

Then you need to repair and optimise.