TileMill
I've played briefly with TileMill before, but after learning more about the advances that Development Seed is putting into their MapBox stack (such as Node.js integration with Mapnik, utfgrid and more) I realized it was time to sit down and play with it for real.
My main interest right now is in getting a feel for the CSS-like syntax used in Carto , but as long as I needed to set up a full instance of TileMill to play with I figured I might as well make it into an Amazon EC2 AMI, so anyone can easily boot up an instance and get started.
Setup was extremely simple (thanks to Dane telling me how to cut and paste their very straightforward install instructions; not that he noticed I was installing everything to /tmp). After some much needed sleep and attempt #2 here on the plane, you can now go to the Amazon AWS console and load up ami-56ae563f, or search for tilemill, and you're done. Just wait for the instance to start up, and TileMill should be running on port 80