Chicken Thighs, SEO, Structured Data... and More

Let's run a simple experiment. Imagine that you have some chicken thighs in your refrigerator. You are not much of a cook, but you are willing to try. So, you do what most of us do looking for answers to all kinds of questions - search the Web. Don't worry - the experiment doesn't involve actual cooking :-)

Apache and Skype: Yet Another Reason to Keep Things (Virtually) Separate

I rarely use my always-on Windows desktop for anything other than office type of stuff, an occasional blog post, and communication. Still, when I am too lazy to boot up another machine (physical or virtual) for a quick test or something like that, I may run some web applications on it.

I guess, today was one of those "lazy" days. So, I started MySQL. No problem. Then, I tried to start Apache 2.2. It showed me the usual
The Apache2.2 service is starting.....
and then, all of a sudden, gave me this error message:
The Apache 2.2 service could not be started.
A service specific error occurred: 1.
More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 3547.

Getting Your Feet Wet with AWS - Part 2: Connect to Amazon EC2 Instance via SSH

In Part 1 of this tutorial, we created an Amazon EC2 instance using a pre-built minimalist AMI. In other words, we created a remote virtual machine from a "disk image" with just enough of Linux operating system (plus some applications) for it to boot up and run, and for us - to be able to remotely administer it over a secure connection.

Getting Your Feet Wet with AWS - Part 1: Create Amazon EC2 Instance

Although this tutorial was written with an absolute beginner in mind, some general computer knowledge is required in order to complete it.


On a very basic level, AWS (Amazon Web Services) is fairly easy to use. However, if you are totally new to virtualization, at first, it may be somewhat confusing primarily because the documentation, although quite extensive, is, for the most part, not written for the "uninitiated".

Luckily, Amazon offers one year of AWS for free. The free offer includes: one micro instance of Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) and one micro instance of Amazon RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service). As the word "micro" implies, these are not computing powerhouses, but they are enough for anyone, even without advanced computer knowledge, to "poke around" and figure out the basics of how they work and how to manage them.

T-Mobile's MobileLife Contacts App Disabled, Finally!

Among other things that are beyond the scope of this post, T-mobile is known for slapping mostly useless, extremely annoying, often intrusive, and always poorly implemented applications onto mobile phones. MobileLife Contacts is, quite possibly, one of the worst I have seen so far in that it is all of the above plus very hard to get rid of. I could go on ranting, but, I guess, you just want to know how to uninstall the "pest".