Musings of an Anonymous Geek

My apologies to my friends at Planet Sysadmin!! I posted a personal post, did not categorize it as a “systems” post, and it wound up on planet sysadmin anyway. I’m really sorry about that. I *would* try to keep posts like this from being syndicated at *all*, but I also belong to local technology user groups, and those folks actually have some interest in posts like this (as the comments will show). I would guess that the solution is for PlanetSysadmin to subscribe only to the systems category feed, but if there’s something I can do on my end, I’m happy to oblige.

I am shocked (shocked!) to report that, after doing some comparison shopping today, it turns out that the Wegman’s in my area is *cheaper* for *MANY* things than my local Stop & Shop! WTF?!

Today, my wife and I took our Stop & Shop receipt from our shopping trip two days ago over to Wegman’s, because I was starting to get really annoyed at Stop & Shop’s knack for discontinuing stuff I regularly buy, and because I had a theory that shopping at Wegman’s might actually be no more expensive than shopping at Stop & Shop.

In a sense, I was wrong. It isn’t just “no more expensive”, it’s actually quite a bit cheaper for everyday items that we buy all the time! Here are a few examples:

• Baby red potatoes: We buy them in a little plastic container at Stop & Shop - 1.5lb for $3.99. Wegman’s sells them loose for $1.89/lb, so our 1.5 lbs would cost over $1 less at Wegman’s! I don’t honestly recall seeing baby reds loose at Stop & Shop. I’ll look next time I go.
• Kraft Singles at Stop & Shop were $3.69. The same size at Wegman’s was $2.79.
• Milk at both places was the exact same price.
• I buy the Tropicana Orange/Tangerine juice. At Stop & Shop it’s $3.49. At Wegman’s it’s $2.79.
• Welch’s Grape Juice at Stop & Shop was $3.59. Wegman’s had it for $3.19.
• Plums and Peaches were each $.40/lb cheaper at Wegman’s, and were notably better looking as well, not to mention the fact that the selection of produce at Wegman’s kicks Stop & Shop’s ass. Corn looked really expensive to me at 5 for a buck, but we haven’t bought any yet this year. Last year corn at Stop and shop was 10 for a buck.
• Thomas’s English Muffins were $3.99 at Stop & Shop, and $3.19 at Wegman’s.
• Are you seeing a pattern? We’re not talking about saving 10 or 15 cents here. We’re talking about upwards of $.50 for lots of stuff. Shocked I tell you!!

So, of all of the things we checked, I think there was one thing that was more expensive: white turnips. It’s so rare that we buy them that we discounted it, but my wife did mention that they looked much better, and were much bigger than the ones at Stop & Shop.

Also note that we didn’t compare meat prices. We’ve been doing a pretty good job of cutting our meat consumption, really, and we have a lot of local farms that sell meat as well - there are lots and lots of meat options in the area we live in. I am an avid griller and smoker, and I read books like “How to Cook Meat” in my spare time. I’m no meat scientist, but I talk to butchers, and they are typically really happy to see someone under the age of 50 who actually knows what pork shoulder is and how to cook osso bucco. Wegman’s, I can tell you, has superior meat, but the prices for most of it are pretty high. I go there if I’m entertaining company or if I can’t get the cut I want at Stop & Shop. In general, Stop & Shop’s meat section is nothing fantastic compared to anywhere else. They don’t have a very big selection, though they do have some discount prices for some things, like huge packages of chicken thighs and stuff.

While I stay on top of meat, my wife stays on top of produce. She bought lemon basil at a farmer’s market this morning and the lady said “most people don’t even know what this is”. Same with fiddlehead ferns, which we love (if only they were in season longer).

I’ll have to follow up on this in the future. There were some things (like dog food) that I *believe* were significantly cheaper at Wegman’s (like $2 cheaper), but my memory could be faulty. The other nice thing about Wegman’s is that they carry most, if not all, of the things we used to buy at Stop & Shop until they discontinued them.

Having a Google account is sometimes useful in ways you hadn’t planned for. For example, at a few different employers I’ve been at, I’ve had to prepare for reviews by providing a list of accomplishments to my supervisor. One decent tool for generating this list is email, though it can take some time. Another useful tool is the Web History feature of your Google account.

Though this isn’t necessarily indicative of everything I’ve accomplished in the first half of 2008 per se, it’s definitely indicative of the types of things I’ve generally been into so far this year, and it’s interesting to look back. What does your Web History say?

• Gearman - this is used by some rather large web sites, notably Digg. It reminds me a little of having Torque and Maui, but geared toward more general-purpose applications. In fact, it was never clear to me that PBS/Maui couldn’t actually do this, but I didn’t get far enough into Gearman to really say that authoritatively.
• How SimpleDB Differs from a Relational Database - Links off to some very useful takes on the “cloud” databases, which are truly fascinating creatures, but have a vastly different data management philosophy from the relational model we’re all used to.
• Reblog - I found this in the footer of someone’s blog post. It’s kinda neat, but to be honest, I think you can do similar stuff using the Flock browser.
• Google Finance APIs and Tools - did I ever mention that I had a Series 7 & 63 license two months after my 20th birthday? I love anything that I can think for very long periods of time about, where there’s lots and lots and LOTS of data to play with, where you can make correlations and answer questions nobody even thought to ask. Of course, soon after finding this page I found the actual Google Finance page, which answers an awful lot of potential questions. The stock screener is actually what I was looking to write myself, but with the data freely available, I’m sure it won’t be long before I find something else fun to do with it. I’m not a fan of Google’s “Feeds” model, but I’ve dealt with it before, and will do it again if it means getting at this data.
• Bitpusher - it was recommended to me as an alternative to traditional dedicated server hosting. Worth a look.
• S3 Firefox Organizer - This is a firefox plugin that provides an interface that looks a lot like an FTP GUI or something, but allows you to move files to and from “buckets” in Amazon’s S3 service.
• Boto - A python library for writing programs that interact with the various Amazon Web Services. It’s not particularly well-documented, and it has a few quirks, but it is useful.
• OmniGraffle - A Visio replacement for Apple OS X. I like it a lot better than Visio, actually. It has tons of contributed templates. You shouldn’t have any trouble making the switch. A little pricey, but I plunked down the cash, and have not been disappointed.
• The Python Queue Module according to Doug - Doug Hellmann’s Python Module of the Week (PyMOTW) should be published in dead tree form some day. I happen to have some code that could make better use of queuing if it were a) written in Python, and b) used the Queue module. I was a little put off by the fact that every single tutorial I found on this module assumed you wanted to use threading, which I actually don’t, because I’m not smart enough…. though the last person I told that to said something to the effect of “the fact that you believe that means you’re smart enough”. Heh.
• MySQL GROUP modifiers - turns out this isn’t what I needed for the problem I was trying to solve, but the “WITH ROLLUP” feature was new to me at the time I found it, and it’s kinda cool.
• Wordpress “Subscribe to Comments” plugin - Baron suggested that it would be good to have this, and I had honestly not even thought about it. But looking around, this is the only plugin of its kind that I found, and it’s only tested up to WP 2.3x, and I’m on 2.5x. This is precisely why I hate plugins (as an end user, anyway. Loghetti supports plugins)
• Lifeblogging - I had occasion to go back and flip through some of the volumes of journals I’ve kept since age 12, wondering if it might be time to digitize those in some form. I might digitize them, but they will *not* be public I don’t think. Way too embarrassing.
• ldapmodrdn - for a buddy who hasn’t yet found all of the openldap command line tools. You can’t use ‘ldapmodify’ (to my knowledge) to *rename* an entry.
• Django graphs - I haven’t yet tried this, because I’m still trying to learn Django in what little spare time I have, but it looks like there’s at least some effort towards this out there in the community. I have yet to see a newspaper that doesn’t have graphs *somewhere* (finance, sports, weather…), so I’m surprised Django doesn’t have something like this built-in.
• URL Decode UDF for MySQL - I’ve used this. It works really well.
• Erlang - hey, I’m game for anything. If I weren’t, I’d still be writing all of my code in Perl.
• The difference between %iowait in sar and %util in iostat - I use both tools, and wanted the clarification because I was writing some graphing code in Python (using Timeplot, which rocks, by the way), and stumbled upon the question. Google to the rescue!
• OSCON ‘08 - I’m going. Are you going? I’m also going to the Oregon Brewers Festival on the last day of OSCON, as I did in ‘06. Wonderful!
• Explosion at one of my hosting providers - didn’t affect me, but… wow!
• hypertable - *sigh* someday…when there’s time…
• Small-scale hydro power - Yeah, I’m kind of a DIYer at heart. I do some woodworking, all my own plumbing, painting, flooring, I brew my own beer, I cook, I collect rain in big barrels, power sprinklers using pool runoff to give my lawn a jumpstart in spring… that kind of stuff. One day I noticed water coming out of a downspout fast enough to leap over one of my rain barrels and thought there must be some way to harness that power. Sadly, there really isn’t, so I did some research. It’s non-trivial.
• You bet your garden - I also do my own gardening and related experiments.
• RightScale Demo - WATCH YOUR VOLUME - a screencast showing off RightScale’s features. Impressive considering the work it would take me, a lone admin, to set something like this up. The learning curve involved in effectively/efficiently managing/scaling/monitoring/troubleshooting EC2 is non-trivial.
• Homebrew Kegerator - Maybe if this startup is bought out I can actually afford this thing to put my homebrewed beer in. The 30-year-old spare fridge in the basement is getting a little… gamey.
• The pound proxy daemon - I use this. It works well enough, but I’ve crashed it under load, too. I’ve also had at least one hosting provider misconfigure it on my behalf, and I had to go and tell them how to fix it :-/
• Droid Sans Mono - a fantastic coding font. Installing this font is in my post-install routine for all of my desktops.
• Generator tricks for systems programmers - David Beazley has made available a lot of Python source code and presentation slides from what I imagine was a great talk (if you’re a systems guy, which I am).
• The Wide Finder Saga - I found this just as I was writing Loghetti. There are still some things in Mr. Lundh’s code that I haven’t implemented, but it was a fantastic lesson.
• Using gnu sort for IP addresses - I’ve used sort in a lot of different ways over the years… but not for IP addresses. This is a nice hack for pulling this off with sort, but it doesn’t scale very well when you have millions of them, due to the sort utility’s ‘divide and conquer’ method of sorting.
• Writing an Hadoop/MapReduce Program in Python - this got me over the hump.
• Notes on using EC2/S3 - This got me over some other small humps
• BeautifulSoup - found while searching for the canonical way to screen scrape with Python. I’d done it a million times in Perl, and you can do it with httplib and regex and stuff in Python if you want, but this way is at least a million times nicer.

Well, that’s a decent enough summary I guess. As you can see, I’ve been doing a good bit of Python scripting. Most of my code these days is written in Python instead of Perl, in part because I was given the choice, and in part because Python fits my brain and makes me want to write more code, to push myself more. I’ve also been dealing with things involving “cloud” computing and “scalability” — like Hadoop, and EC2/S3. I haven’t done as much testing of the Google utility computing services, but I’ve used their various APIs for some things.

So what’s in your history?

Steve Jobs is one of the best presenters you could ever hope to see. He’s great at tapping into that part of your brain that makes you just want whatever it is he’s holding. But this time, it was a little different.

You see, I already have an iPhone. I bought one in February. I didn’t buy the very first model that came out because it was lacking some stuff that was really important to me - most notably, it only had Apple apps, which was severely limiting, and IMAP support was limited to Yahoo! accounts, which was absurd. With those two obstacles out of the way, I found it useful enough to spend my employer’s money on, but not my own. In the end, it was a business decision, and I still think an iPhone is a better deal than a Blackberry hands down. Especially the new 3G, which has addressed some “enterprise” concerns. Thing is, I don’t care about any of that.

I want some really really really simple things that I haven’t heard anything about, and I want one thing that is perhaps slightly harder but essential.

The slightly-harder-but-essential thing is voice commands. I can hardly believe that were on the third generation of a phone without having voice commands. You can get a $30 Nokia made in 2002 that has voice commands for crying out loud. Without voice commands, it’s unclear to me how this phone is useful in a hands-free environment at all. Have I missed a feature somewhere? Is there something I can plug my iPhone into while I’m driving that will parse the voice commands and do the right thing with the iPhone? I know that if you have an Acura TL the car itself parses the voice commands, but I don’t know if there’s some generic thing that *doesn’t* cost $40k that’ll do the same basic job? Anyone?

The other stuff consists mainly of small application features:

• The ability to bookmark or otherwise somehow save “Directions” in the Maps application. This way, if I’m driving, following the directions in Maps, and need to search for a gas station or coffee shop, I don’t then have to go back and punch in the information again to get my directions back.
• Why the heck doesn’t mail let you read in landscape mode?!?!?!
• I’d *REALLY* like to be able to send and receive photos in text messages. I don’t use it often, but when you need it, you need it.
• The ‘.com’ shortcut should pretty much *always* be visible on the keyboard.
• Make email alerts a per-account setting instead of only alerting for the default or for all accounts or whatever it is the iphone does now. Let me treat email accounts like phone contacts and assign different alert settings for each account just like I set different ring tones for different contacts.
• Let me bookmark phone numbers so I can just hit a button on my home screen to dial them (in the absence of voice commands).
• Make the bluetooth support do some neat trick that’ll make it be actually worth turning on.
• I do a lot of system administration, and I’d love a usable, locally-installed ssh client that I don’t have to perform surgery to install. I don’t want to hack my phone, really. I also refuse to use a web interface to access an ssh client. If you’re doing that, stop right now, and go change every password you have.

On the development front, it would actually be really nice if they supported maybe *one* parsed scripting language for iPhone development. Even if they did like AppEngine and provided a somewhat stripped version of Python it would be something I could use. But that’s a rant for another day.

I’m going to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) again this year. I went in 2006 as well, and had a blast, in addition to learning quite a bit, and meeting tons of people whom I’ve been acquainted with online for a long time. That was 2 years ago. Since then I’ve been acquainted with lots *more* people online, and I’m hoping I’ll meet at least some of them this year.

If you’re not going to OSCON, you’re not only missing out on a great technical conference that will leave you physically tired from all of the activity and at the same time unable to sleep from the ideas sparked by the day’s events, you’re also missing the Oregon Brewers Festival, which takes place just as OSCON is wrapping up.

I have a medium-sized home brewery that a buddy and I built from scratch. Over the years we’ve brewed and tasted all kinds of beer. But you can’t get all beers everywhere, so traveling is a good opportunity to taste wild and exotic beers, or just local beers you can’t get at home. It’s odd, but while you can get easy access to beers from Germany, Belgium, Poland, England, Scotland, and Ireland, you would be hard pressed to find a good number of great beers from the West Coast of the US on the East Coast of the US. And the West Coast has a lot happening, beer-wise.

Beer festivals are also where some brewers pull out all the stops. In ‘06 I went with a buddy and actually had not one, but TWO different watermelon beers - a variety I had not even heard of until I showed up at the counter. One was pretty good, the other tasted like Watermelon Bubblicious, but the experience was fantastic. Every have rock candy made from hops? Pretty good I tell you!

Anyway, I was thinking of getting a larger group together to attend this years Brew Fest, so if any geeks out there have an interest in beer, let me know. And if you DON’T have an interest in beer, you should DEFINITELY let me know. I’ve converted numerous friends and family who say they don’t like beer to becoming more familiar with styles they actually will go out and buy, unprovoked, voluntarily! Saying you don’t like beer is like saying you don’t like food. There’s just too many kinds of beer to say you don’t like beer. Maybe you don’t like hops, in which case you might like hefeweizen, but have probably never heard of it. Maybe you don’t like really fizzy beer, in which case you might like various Belgian ales, a Barleywine, a porter, or any beer with a less fizzy, more creamy, or less prevalent head on it.

Anyway, I’m going, and it’s fun. If you have an interest, do join in, whether you go with a group I put together or not!

This is *not* a ripoff of xkcd (though I read that regularly, and so should you) - this is seriously the best graphic I can come up with, and it does the job. Yesterday I looked at doing all kinds of stuff to my iPhone. I wanted to see if I could get Python and a full-fledged Django installation on my iPhone and create the first web 2.0 application created completely from the bathroom. Just kidding, but I wanted to do some pretty evil stuff. Turns out that, as of now, there isn’t a clean simple way to get a lot of stuff to work without hacking the iPhone in some way, or resorting to things that are completely ridiculous. I’m sorry, but there has to be an easier way to get SSH and a terminal on there. It’s just not that critical right now, and this thing was damned expensive.

I decided to wait it out and see what comes our way over the summer.

Here’s the email I received on Saturday from The Planet, where I have some dedicated servers hosted:

Dear Valued Customers:
This evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.
We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.
This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.
We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.
There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.
I am sorry that this accident has occurred and apologize for the impact.

That’s pretty rough. Lucky for me, nothing I do is solely dependent on any of those machines. However, I think it’s probably pretty common for startups to rely heavily on what amount to single points of failure due to a lack of funds or manpower/in-house skills to set things up in a way that looks something like “best practices” from an architecture standpoint.

Building a startup on dedicated hosting is one thing. Running a production web site at a single site, perhaps with a single machine hosting each service (or even a few or *all* of the services) is something dangerously different. However, building a failover solution that spans outages at the hosting-provider level can also be quite difficult and perhaps expensive. You have to really come up with hard numbers that will help you gauge your downtime tolerance against your abilities and budget. While a restrictive budget might mean less automation and more humans involved in failover, it can be done.

What kinds of cross-provider failover solutions have saved your bacon in the past? I’m always looking for new techniques in this problem domain, so share your ideas and links!

I went to a very good panel discussion yesterday hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. There has been a conference going on there that covers a lot of the overlap between technology, law, and journalism, and the panel discussion yesterday, Data Mining, Visualization, and Interactivity was even more enlightening than I had anticipated.

The panel members included Matt Hurst, of Microsoft Live Labs, Kevin Anderson, blog editor for The Guardian, and David Blei, a professor at the Computer Science Dept., Princeton University. This made for a very lively discussion, covering a wide range of perspectives about social media, “what is news?”, how technology is changing how people interact with information (including news), how the news game is changing as a result (which was far more fascinating than it sounds), and how this unfathomably enormous stream of bits, enabled by lots of open APIs, feeds, and other data streams can be managed, mined, reduced, and presented in some value-added way (part of the value being the sheer reduction in noise).

Cool Tools for Finding News

Some of the tools presented by the panelists were new to me, and aside from being great tools for bloggers and other content publishers, there are some excellent examples of how to make effective use of the data you have access to through APIs like the Digg API.

BlogPulse

This was presented by Matt Hurst. It’s is pretty neat - it’s a tool that essentially charts blog buzz of a given phrase over time, and it even lets you compare multiple phrases, which is really interesting as well. Check it out here.

I’d like to know more about how it derives the metrics, but in doing a couple of quick comparisons using the tool, it seems to line up to some degree with simple comparisons of the number of search results for different phrases on sites like technorati and bloglines. Interestingly, even though there appears to be lots more data available at Technorati, in my very limited experimenting, the percent difference between search results for any two phrases appears to be similar, indicating that bloglines may be a representative sampling of technorati data. More experimentation, of course, would be needed to lend any credibility whatsoever to that claim. It’s probably irrelevant, because you can’t ask either service for any kind of historical data regarding search results

Twistori

This has the potential to be really interesting. Right now, it lets you pick from several different terms, like “love”, “wish”, “think” and “feel”, and after clicking one of those, it’ll start producing a constantly updating stream of twitters that contain those words. If this experiment is successful, I would imagine they’d eventually enable the same service for arbitrary keywords, which would be really powerful, and quite a lot of fun!

Tweetwheel

Oh how boring my life according to twitter is. I’m still in the schizophrenic stage of settling on a live ‘update your friends on what you’re doing whether they care or not’ services. Facebook, myspace, twitter, jaiku… there are too many. I’m trying out the imified route now to consolidate all the cruft. According to tweetwheel, there are more places to update my status at any given moment than there are people who give a damn what my status is.

Anyway, tweetwheel shows how you’re connected to people through twitter. If you have lots of followers and follow lots of people, the wheel is really exciting to look at, as displayed by Kevin Anderson, who has a much more “robust” wheel than me — it’s actually interesting to look at. At some point I’d like to see this idea expanded to cover the other services like Facebook and even LinkedIn.

Digg Labs

You have to go to the Digg Labs site and see what people are doing with the Digg API. There are too many awesome utlities to cover them all here. It almost makes me wish I did fancy Flash UI stuff instead of back end data mining and infrastructure administration.

At a higher level…

Most of the discussion about social media seems to be about measuring buzz created by bloggers (at least where news/content publishing is concerned). However, although things have shifted dramatically in a ‘consumers are producers’ direction, causing people to start rethinking the definition of news, this shift is caused as much by consumers who are still *only* consuming as anyone else, and I didn’t see much in the way of tools that measure the interest of those people in any meaningful way. Perhaps the consensus is that the bloggers are a representative sampling of the wider internet readership? I don’t know. I would disagree with that if it were the case.

I work for AddThis.com, which seeks to provide publishers of news and all kinds of other content with statistics that help them figure out not just what pages people happen to be landing on, but which ones they have elected to take a greater interest in, either by emailing it to a friend, adding it to their favorites, or posting it to digg, delicious, or some other service. Maybe some day there will be an AddThis API that’ll let you easily do even more interesting things with social media.

So I updated one of my laptops to Ubuntu 8.04 pretty much as soon as it was available. I’ve been using my MacBook Pro laptop for everything for probably over a year now, because I grew tired of the hobby that *is* running Linux on a laptop and getting everything to work. I’ll note that I *do* run Linux on every server I maintain that I can think of

The first test for this laptop was wireless. I bought this laptop (Lenovo T61) specifically because it got rave reviews for its Linux compatibility. I was careful to order the laptop with the proper video and wireless chipsets that had the best support. However, 2 things annoyed me so much that I went back to the MacBook for everything:

1. Wireless hung, and hung often, and in a way that it was unrecoverable.
2. Lenovo put the Escape key in the worst place they could possibly put it, especially for a Vim user. Changing the key mapping caused issues with other apps, and configuring the key mapping inside .vimrc doesn’t help on the 30 other servers I use it on (ssh’d in from this laptop) :-/

Really, it was the wireless that did it. I work 100% remotely on everything I do. So, 8.04 seems to have fixed the wireless issues. The next thing I wanted to do was check out all of the Python IDE/editors I couldn’t use on the Mac (or, not easily). So I used Synaptic Package Manager to install all of the ones I could find. I’m sorry to say that I personally had Problems with most of them:

• DrPython launched fine, but using the file browser to open a file resulted in…. a no-op. I’m sorry, but an editor needs to be able to open a file.
• PyPE failed to launch altogether! It looks like it’s going to open, it spins for 5-10 seconds, and then just disappears. No window is ever shown, but a tab does appear in the bar on the bottom of the screen.
• Pida allows you to choose an external editor, so I chose Vim, and that kinda worked, but I really just want the key bindings, not the whole editor, and there’s no option to use some default built-in editor that has code folding and autocompletion and stuff. It appeared to me to be so close to gvim that I decided to skip it. I tried to stick around and give it a chance by reading the docs, but alas, the only thing under “Help” is “About”. Seems there are still a number of open source developers more concerned with getting credit than getting users.
• Stani’s Python Editor looked pretty nice, but I couldn’t find any easy way to change the syntax coloring, and while there is a manual, you have to donate to get your hands on it. This is nonsense. If you want to sell some kind of advanced documentation, fine, but you can’t expect me to donate to a project that I don’t even know if I want to use yet! “Please pay me so that you can see if this product fits your needs”…. it just doesn’t work that way. What you’ve done is given me a product that is complex enough that you pretty much need a manual just to get started, and then deprived me of that. Why not just give me the manual and a 30 day trial, after which I have to donate? I’d have no problem doing that if I planned on keeping it around. In fact, that’s how plenty of Mac applications work. I’ll pay for software that does what I need, but this game that’s being played is just offensive.
• Eclipse with PyDev, I can use this, but I don’t like it a whole lot. The good news is that there’s an SVN plugin (subclipse), and a plugin for vi keybindings if I want to pay for it (it’s only $20 - not bad if you use it a lot). The interface is a little clunky to me, and there’s no easy “change your syntax color scheme to this” type functionality. If you want a dark background and light colored text, you actually have to go to one place to change the background color, the color of the line numbering area, etc., and then go to another place to change the colors associated with the different elements of your particular language. That’s annoying for two reasons: first, it’ll take forever to get things the way I want, and second, if I installed this on another machine, I couldn’t just move over some kind of theme file and have my settings ready to go (as far as I know).

In the end, it looks like my three favorite editors are still Komodo Editor, JEdit, and Vim. What’s your favorite Python editor for Linux?

I seem to have found a pattern in my own internal workings. In the fall, I work furiously and get a lot done. Around the time of the winter holidays, I almost always do major personal web site changes and upgrades according to a mental list I’ve compiled over the previous year.

In the spring, I shake off the winter (I’m not a fan of winter), I brew my first batch of beer for the season (which symbolizes the end of winter, because I brew outdoors), and my brain starts to be flooded with new ideas. They range from the simplistic (maybe we should consider replacing windows in the house this year), to the slightly odd (why isn’t there a bluetooth setup that pairs two devices and alerts you if they get out of range, so if my daughter strays too far…), to the really useful (I should really take on that woodworking project to build that bookcase we desperately need), to the GEEKY!

This year I seem to be having a lot of geeky ideas. The difference is that, this year, I finally feel empowered enough to go after some of them. One idea that has come up is building an online brewer’s workshop. I would just build a GUI to do this for myself, but then I’d have to deal with which widget set to use, which platforms to support, and whatever else. Also, the final step in the evolution of a lot of GUIs is webification anyway. So I *think* this might be a job for Python, and I *think* I might try to do this using Django, which is fully supported by my web host (finally - see yesterday’s post)!

Brewing is one of those things that you can make as complex as you care to get. I started brewing with a buddy using a Coleman picnic cooler, a few buckets, and some odds and ends from the kitchen. Now I have a full three keg system, with pumps, plate chillers (small plate heat exchangers), fancy false bottoms, cool valves and tubing, and it involves relatively little manual labor. And that complexity can infect recipe development as well. Hops add bitterness by leeching alpha acids into the wort (the liquid that is not yet beer). Hop utilization calculations can be non-trivial and depend on many other factors in your system. Other characteristics depend heavily on the percent of available sugars you’re able to extract from the grains, your ability to keep a mash at a given temperature for a fixed period of time. This is easier to predict if you know, for example, the thermal mass of the vessels involved, and how much heat will be lost when you combine water and grain and stir. There are also proteins at work in the mash which can gum things up enough to make draining the liquid off a chore, so knowing what water/grain ratio to use is also important. And how quickly can you bring wort from boiling down to a temperature more friendly to yeast at the end of the cycle?

That’s a small fraction of the considerations you *could* make when brewing. I didn’t even touch on pH and water characteristics, or yeast attenuation! Needless to say, brewing with any consistency would be a great challenge and take a good bit more preparation without some tool to help you figure out how much water you’ll need, how many ounces of hops for how long, and how much grain you need to mash (and for how long), etc. There are lots of tools to help brewers out with this kind of stuff (ProMash is a popular one). The problem I have is that these tools are mostly commercial, proprietary, platform-specific ventures. I’d like to put one on the web that is at least “good enough”, and free for anyone to use. I’m open source that way (I’m happy to release the source as well).

Another tool I’d love to see is one that would let me manage my consulting business online. If BestPractical’s RT had a good PayPal plugin that would let you charge per ticket or charge for a bundle of so many tickets or something, that’d be a good start, but I’ve mucked with the code for RT (it’s written mostly in Perl), and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. This wouldn’t be a complete solution either, because most of my work is *not* simple support tickets, it’s large projects. For those I’d like people to be able to pay invoices online. There’s lots more I’d like to add on top of that, but that’s the general gist of it, and in the past I’ve been unable to find a really good solution, where “really good” is a completely nebulous term barely defined in my own head.

In addition to those ideas, I registered a couple of domains over the past year, and I hope to do some cool things with them as well if I ever get some time away from work and consulting. Oh yeah - I’ll also continue working on loghetti! Keep any eye out for updates. Maybe some people reading this have similar interests and would like to collaborate. Ciao for now!