Greatly simplified view of what EC2 instances are in your account. Faster than running ec2-describe-instances on my laptop (which sucks at running Java).

ec2-quick-describe-instances.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
import boto

# Connect to EC2. Picks up environment variables
conn = boto.connect_ec2()

# Get a list of my instances
reservations = conn.get_all_instances()
for reservation in reservations:
    for instance in reservation.instances:
        # Print only the stuff I care about
        print "%s (%s, %s) %s" % (instance.id, instance.state, instance.instance_type, instance.public_dns_name)