I have had an iPhone for a while now and I keep running into instances where I want to have videos outside of youtube in some format that I can watch on the device. These include windows WMV formatted videos from PDC as well as FVL formatted videos on Flex. I finally broke down and found a working solution to convert pretty much any video into a iPhone/iTunes format using mencoder.
I've been using S3 to store semi-transient information like log files from EC2 nodes in the past but recently decided to give Amazon's Elastic Block Store (EBS) a try instead. I quickly realized a downside to using EBS in that there is no mechanism for auto-attach and mounting volumes when an AMI is launched. This is probably something Amazon will fix at some point and allow you to launch a given AMI with an attached EBS volume but until then you need some way of doing it yourself. The following is a simple way of using ruby to make it happen.
I generally don't recomend using SOAP instead of REST but I have been required to use SOAP so much now that I think it is inevitably going to be a requirement for a long time for certain projects. So when I noticed a question on stack overflow about using SOAP on the Google App Engine I thought it might be a nice exercise to see how easy it is to get fringe toolsets to work in the GAE.