It's been a tough couple of days. Well, I went to Providence, RI for the weekend, which isn't tough. However, today and Friday, Patrick and I worked on some deeper technology issues and came to some conclusions:
We will use Debian Lenny.
Lenny is just about to be declared stable and Etch is simply too old for what we need.
We will use pretty much the defaults on Lenny although Django will be version 1.0
We will use Amazon Web Services as previously mentioned.
The use of Django leads to another open issue - will we use Django at all? Ruby/Merb is still in the running because HAML and SASS look so exciting.
JQuery.
So, we still have a competition between Ruby and Python.