Hi,
We're assembling MachetEC2, a free Amazon AWS EC2 instance that comes out of the box with a full suite of data analysis and visualization tools. (Obviously the compute time is on your dime, but the base instance is there for you to grab, for free, and get to hackin')
What tools do you want to have in there? We're going to push this up in the next few days -- look for an announcement on the infochimps blog, and we'll reply here too. If you'd like to help, set up something you find essential and tweet/email us to 'pull' from your instance. (You'll have to use a credit card to get an instance, but it's so cheap it'll only cost a buck or two; and once it's set up we'll pull it onto our account where everyone can get it.) If there's already something like this floating around, please let us know and we'll work with them instead.
We'll initially post up some subset of:
* Ruby, Python, Erlang, R
* MySQL, PostgreSQL
* AllegroGraph, CouchDB
* Hadoop, Hive, Pig
* Cytoscape, Gruff
* Processing, Prefuse/Flare, Modest Maps
* NLTK, SciPy
...
* YOUR SUGGESTION HERE
This will fit in with the things we're helping to add to the AWS Public Data Sets. We want you to be able to use infochimps to find something or pull down the Public Data Set of your choice; to load that dataset next to your MachetEC2 instance clone, and be whailing on data from go.
At some later point we can specialize (MachetEC2-viz, MachetEC2-ML for machine learning folks, MachetEC2-ling for linguistics, etc), so feel free to suggest things of (somewhat) narrow focus, and even more free as I said to set it up and ping us. Free/Open software only, of cours.
