Apple has nothing to fear – amazon mp3 store on android g1 phone is keeping buyers out

I can’t believe how hard they made it to purchase music. Months ago I was bored, browsed the mp3 amazon offerings and wanted to purchase a song on a whim. A message informs me that I will need wifi to complete the purchase. So I abort it and lose interest.

Another month later I have wifi on and really want to purchase a beatles album. Surprise is I find tons of covering artists but not the original albums as mp3? I guess apple / itunes store has an exclusive contract for those. I give up.

Now today I want to really purchase the queen greatest hits album – yes its available, yes I have wifi as I am home. So I select buy, and it asks me my amazon account info. It goes through a list… authenticate ok… charge credit card failed. Please update payment info. Only two choices are retry or cancel. So total stop again. Luckily I am at home and get on the laptop to log into regular amazon.com and review my credit card info. I delete the old expired ones and leave only two that should be current. Nowhere I find where to select one for the mp3 store. Purchasing it only gets stopped out again claiming I have to download and install a download manager first. Well that’s why I am not an itunes customer. I am tired of trying to jump all the hoops. Logout…

They have no future.

Amazon EC2 / cloud computing

Today I got a chance to play with Amazons cloud AWS and was impressed how quickly I could get a machine with my web application online, without having to study a lot of the infrastructure detail first.

All I had to do was go into their AWS management interface, click on create instance, pick one of the 2000 public virtual image templates (picked centos 5.2-git), download the ssh key for it while it was installing, and in less than 2 minutes I was logged into my new virtual machine through ssh without having to enter a password using that key.

I scp’ed my tarball at 450KB/s into the image, extracted it, yum installed httpd and php, and was able to access my webapp.

I had to shut it down to not incur per hour online costs, but it appears to me that I will be back with more 🙂

Here is the breakdown of public images that I saw on their interface:

293 ubuntu
80 debian
69 centos
54 fedora
18 gentoo
13 redhat
3 suse
78 windows
1 opensolaris
and the remaining 1400 where appear to be ‘other linux’

Now it’s time to study how to build and test my own images offline and how to do secure virtual networking between them when they are online…