Setting up a compute cloud at Amazon

First you have to register an account to use Amazon's many Web Services.
"Sign Up", and enter email, name and address.

When that's done, sign up to the Amazon Elastic MapReduce service. Here you have to enter your credit card number, and address.  Then Amazon calls you and have you enter (or say!) a PIN code that is shown on the screen.

Then they will mail you to let you know that you have enrolled in the services Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Simple Storage Service.

You are also told that you have now an access-key that is used in the Web Services interface to Amazon's services.

Now, lets see the Getting Started Guide.
We need to create a "bucket" to store data and results.  There are both command line tools, and a great firefox plugin Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox)

$ KEY="" SKEY="" # fill in values from Amazon
$ curl timkay.com/aws/aws -o aws; chmod a+x aws
$ echo $KEY >~/.awssecret; chmod go-rwx ~/.awssecret ; echo $SKEY >>~/.awssecret

$ ./aws mkdir sics-lra