Ohhh, I was thinking that your problems were from using Clojure.

In this case, I'd definitely go with Amazon. Like gm mentioned, you get a free year of micro instance. You also get quite a few other things for free, like 2000 msgs/day with Amazon SES (Simple email service), which is a very reliable way of handling email for web apps.

The pricing plans for AWS are probably what happens when you put a bunch of engineers in charge of marketing. But, if you do spend a little time working through it and nailing down what all the definitions mean, it eventually starts making sense.

I think what you'll find is that it makes much more economic sense to use AWS once you get more familiar with it.

I like the Amazon Linux AMI. Installing Postgresql + PgAdmin:

Just checked them out, they look pretty good.

I'm leaning towards handling transcoding myself. An m1.large EC2 instance with 7.5GB of RAM and 4 ec2 compute units runs about $112/month when you purchase a reserved instance, so it won't be a whole lot more expensive.

After I get it setup and get the wrinkles ironed out I'll update you on how it works.

sd,

what do you need such a beast of a machine for?

For encoding video.

In my specific case, it's for users to upload and share surveillance video clips. The nature of my app requires separate versions of the app to be deployed for each company. My plan is for it to be a central server that handles all video encoding for everyone.

In some particular cases, it's important that video be available pretty quickly after being uploaded. The extra horsepower is to make that happen.

I should also note, the expense is being passed on directly to the clients. It's important to them to have quick availability, and so they're willing to paying extra to make that happen. And it really isn't that much extra since it's being shared by everyone.

Looks scary... I have to put that at the same area as the Scheme -> Haskell interpreter project: not now.

hold your breath everyone, dumb question coming up: how many hours would it take to learn and become proficient with python for someone with no prior comp sci experience? resources for study will include whatever is available on the internet. 200-300 hours?

depends on what proficient means

My background:

Now retired, former Silicon Valley H/W tech [the little black pieces of plastic-IC's- connected to the flat slabs of fiberglass-PCB's] for 15 years. Learned C, Assembler, GW-Basic, how to burn the f*** outta my hands soldering, etc. .

found this place:
http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0

Currently cruising thru the basic JavaScript course, somewhat as a refresher. Tried 2 learn Python from books @ the local library once while my puter was down for 6 weeks, I might try again. Would highly recommend Codecademy for noobs, semi-noobs, even old senile dweebs like me.

Cool man, welcome.

I had to google Gw-basic to figure out what it was, which eventually lead me to this site:

http://www.moorecad.com/classicbasic/index.html

Absolutely f'ing awesome. It's been so long since I heard the term "Qbasic", I had nearly forgotten what it was.

Do you know where I can get a Basic interpreter, or something, to try out all those games?

Edit: Not all of the links on that site are broken, apparently. I think I found one to download.

Obviously depends on what you mean by proficient but I'd say for learning and getting a decent understanding of the core language and major libraries that estimate is on the high side.
You should be able to do some pretty cool stuff after 50-100h tbh

Then it'll take some time to learn whatever technology you're interested in i.e. learning Django for web development would take extra time etc.

https://www.coursera.org/ recently started an intro to Python course from Rice University. They teach it by developing games which tends to be fun and they also have developed a browser based "IDE" which they use throughout the course which means you don't have to install anything and can basically work on your stuff from anywhere.

That tool (CodeSculptor based on CodeMirror) is actually pretty neat. Your stuff is saved to the cloud and can be accessed via a URL (obviously you can save local copies, too).

'Proficient' is a pretty vague term. 'Proficient' in the sense of doing your own personal web project with a bunch of non boiler-plate content - I'd say closer to 500 hours. 'Proficient' in the sense of doing a consulting type web project for a business - I'd say closer to 1000 hours. 'Proficient' in the sense that you could get a job at a software development shop - Thousands of hours.

As a comparison, it's suggested that to become an expert at something you require something around 10,000 hours of practise.

I'm well past 300 hrs of Python. I'm not proficient.

Edit to add: Don't get stuck in learning language X because you'll never be proficient.

I'm sorry for doing this, but if any of you have a Steam account could you take a look at this and vote for us? Steam Greenlight now accepts software which is awesome/interesting!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfile.../?id=103246571

We're currently #1 on greenlight and are doing everything we can to stay there!

Man do I hate websites that play music when I open them.

Yeah that does suck lol, there are basically no exceptions to that rule

jj, this all sounds reasonable, but you seem to have way too much respect for "development shops" :P

Hah. Touche.

anyone here use ubuntu 12.04 as their main OS?

i just installed it on a VM to do some dev stuff i can't do on windows, and it seems really nice. thinking about switching.... thoughts?

I use ubuntu as my primary OS (tho I am on a version that is a year or so old) and I much prefer it to windows... but then I do a lot of software development.

But, even for someone who doesnt do much technical work, I would still recommend ubuntu as a great choice. It has come a very long way in the past few years, especially in ease of use/setup and is a real contender to windows.

just got it on one of my work computers. seems nice but I'm not fussy enough to have a strong opinion, I don't think there was anything broken about the releases that used Gnome.

yeah really seems like it. even vs the version i played around with a year or so ago, this one seems way slicker.

Ye... its actually driving a lot of 'linux' users away from it because its become too much like windows and is loosing some of its linux feel, but for someone looking to switch from Windows, its a really good option.

When I had Windows XP on my laptop 5 years ago, I never though I could live without at least one computer running windows. I have not had a windows machine for 5 years now, and its probably over a year since I have even used one. Not once have I not been able to accomplish a task because I was running Linux or OSX

I preferred Mint to straight up Ubuntu, but I'm barely a tourist so it was never used for much more than to get it running...

The codeacademy python courses are pretty good. Did the first 7 sections last week. Good way to get a basic understanding of syntax
Basically only done loops, assignment, operators, functions, etc.

It does seem like a fairly intuitive and readable language