At work I'm looking at PerformancePoint, and being a newbie with this product I of course do all the newbie errors. That's why I was so happy when finding Nick Barclay's blogpost where he explains all about the way-to-common connection errors. Big thank you to Nick. 
Not quite happy with any of the programs I found to identify iTunes duplicates, I spent an hour making my own (beats tracking down duplicates. ) I thought I'd share it with you. It's my first attempt at using OS X' ScriptingBridge and written in Python. I have no clue if it runs out of the box, I suppose you should have Developer Tools installed. It's not the fastest beast either, and Python and iTunes both use 50% CPU. But it gets the job done. If you wonder why I give so many parameters to the track class I should say that I plan on reusing it to do some more iTunes housekeeping. The script will mark all the duplicates with one star. Then I can round them up and delete ...
I'm a big fan of Amazon EC2 and S3. To be able to use the amount of computing power you need and the amount of storage you need and only pay for what you use is a good way of computing in my view. However, EC2 wasn't built to run clustered databases like MySQL on, and I've had problems finding any service that will let me pay for the capacity I need (cpu time and disk space) and give me a guaranteed query time. Amazon's SimpleDB seems to be a good step in that direction, and I'm really looking forward to toying with it and hopefully use it for many interesting projects.
