Musings of an Anonymous Geek

Launching a Startup in 3 Hours was a great talk given by Andrew Hyde (of techstars.org) and Gavin Doughtie (of Google). Both of the speakers are heavily involved in the recent trend of doing “Startup Weekends”, and techstars.org is an organization that hosts startup weekends all around the US (and I think internationally as well - Andrew mentioned one in Germany if I heard correctly).

The first half of the talk was about the general concept of a startup weekend, the problems it avoids (”we’ve been working for 9 months and haven’t launched anything”), the problems it brings up (”If you’re not using Java, you’re an idiot, so count me out!!”), and lots of details about how to organize, how to assign roles, and some common tools they use (like Basecamp and whatever your IM of choice is). There was also talk of legal issues, how (basically) to think about forming the company with the people involved, and decisions that need to be made at a business level aside from just the coding.

The second half of the talk wasn’t a talk at all. Instead, people who had ideas stood up, presented their idea in a couple of sentences, and once the ideas were out there, we were told to break into groups and get to work! So people would get up and move over to the person whose idea they liked, and they’d start brainstorming. I decided to head out after about 30 minutes of observing and talking with people about ideas, but when I left, there were probably 6-8 groups of people engrossed in conversations, and the energy level was very high. Overall, it was a really exciting experience!

The evening plans didn’t wait for talks to be done. The IRC channel (#oscon on irc.freenode.net) was alive with talk of prospects for dinner and drinks after the conference. I myself was torn between a group going out for Lebanese and another going to Henry’s, but opted to go with my buddies from home to Henry’s.

It was worth it. If you haven’t been, Henry’s Tavern boasts 100 beers and hard ciders on tap (oddly, the beer list is the only menu *not* online - guess it changes too frequently). There are a ton of local beers that you can’t even get on the east coast just waiting for you to try, but there are also some rare treats, like the Belgian Lambic beers, which you don’t often see on tap. The food is a little pricey, but is really good, and the staff is very friendly. A couple of us were in a rush to get back by 7 for the BoF sessions, and when we asked the waittress how easy it was to catch a cab, she immediately informed us that she would have the hostess call one for us. About 2 minutes later we were in a cab on our way back (we wouldn’t have made it back in time if we had to walk back to catch the light rail).

I was not one of those rushing to a BoF, so I did a little poking around the area near the convention center. It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to stray too far, but I did find a couple of points of interest. First, there’s a bank right across the street from the convention center. I’d be willing to bet that the ATM there is less than the $3 the ATM inside the center charges.

Beyond that is a paintball place. It was closed by the time I found it, and I don’t know if they run every day, or anything else, but interested parties might find it open during the lunch breaks or something if you wanted to check it out. The paintball place is located behind a building that is directly across the street from the conv. center. If you see the bank, it’s on the other side of the side street the bank sits on.

Tonight appears to be low-key from what I can tell. There’s currently no chatter on irc, the hotel bar had a few people chatting, and I might go down to catch the rush of people as they return from dinner and BoF sessions. Stay tuned tomorrow for more!

I think I have pictures of most of the basic parts of the conference at my OSCON Flickr set, and I thoroughly enjoyed day 1 of the conference. Of course, while *day* 1 is over, *night* 1 has yet to even begin. There are lots of BoF sessions, and maybe even more smaller meetups going on, as smaller groups take to discussing things over dinner and a beer or three.

I have to say, that I occasionally pop into irc channels for conferences I’m not even at and follow up on that because I’m involved a bit in conference planning as part of my work with Python Magazine (I’m helping to organize the PyWorks conference in November). This conference seems to have a pretty happy audience, if IRC chatter is any indication (and it usually is). Sure, there are a couple of weak spots in the wireless network, there are some fuzzy projectors, and there was a little confusion regarding breakfast this morning, but the important bits have been well-covered by the OSCON organizers and the “boots on the ground” here on site. Kudos to them all.

This afternoon I hopped to a couple of different talks: one on Memcached and MySQL, and the other on A/B testing. Both contained good content. Of course, I’m a systems guy primarily, so I sort of wanted more of an overview of memcached from the point of view of an admin who is deploying it rather than a developer implementing their code around it. I still got plenty of value out of that talk, and this *is* really more of an open source *developer’s* conference, so the expectations of 99% of the people in the room were met, I’m sure.

A/B testing is just not an exciting topic, and I would imagine that peoples’ bosses made them go to that talk whether they liked it or not. Not to say the talk wasn’t good - the parts I saw (I came in after the break) were good, and I learned from it, and that was the goal. If you’re a QA/QC person, I’m sure the talk was riveting, and there were a lot of good ideas and things I’d never considered flying by in the slides.

Overall, Day 1 is a win. I’ll cover more about this evening’s events in the pre-breakfast hours tomorrow. Stay tuned!

I’ve been working with what I used to call “utility computing” tools for about 6-9 months. However, for about the past 2 months, I’ve been seeing the term “cloud computing” all over the place, and there is so much buzz surrounding it that it’s reaching that magical point best described using Alan Greenspan’s words: “Irrational Exuberance”.

When Alan Greenspan used those words to describe the attitudes of investors toward the markets, what he was basically saying was that there were people who didn’t really know what they were doing, putting more money than they ought, into things they knew relatively little about. Further, he was saying that the decisions people were making with regards to where to put their money were a) bad, or at least b) not based on sound reasoning, or the ‘facts on the ground’.

This, I think, is where we are at with “cloud computing”. The blog post that put me over the edge is this one, for the record. I read Sean’s writings often enough, but this one strikes me as being a little off, a little sensationalistic, not based in reality, and a little misleading.

Maybe he just didn’t put enough qualifiers in there. His post might make more sense if he limited its scope and provided more facts, but I guess it’s just an opinion piece so he decided not to go that route, and that’s his prerogative I guess.

By limiting the scope, I mean he should’ve realized that there are millions of web sites currently scaling quite nicely without the use of cloud computing. In addition, some of the new ones that are having issues are also not using cloud computing, and when they hit bumps in the road, they make it through, and the great thing is that they also share their stories, and those stories indicate that a cloud (or, the current cloud offerings) wouldn’t have helped much (there’s lots of other evidence of that too). What would’ve helped is if they had paid more attention to:

• monitoring
• initial infrastructure design
• their own app code and app design

My brain has a set of rules that software project websites get tested against. Each time a project site fails to comply with a rule, I get ever-so-slightly more annoyed, and ever-so-slightly less likely to use the software in question (if there are alternatives, this is even maybe not so “slightly”). 

I thought I’d list these rules because I suspect others are like me: we’re extremely busy, we work too many hours, and are involved with too many projects to spend hours trying to figure out what some piece of code someone mentioned once in IRC actually does. 

But first, know that this site actually complies with just about every single rule there is, so it’s a great template to work from if your site needs brushing up. 

• First and foremost, tell me, right away, what this thing does, the problem it solves, and (at a high level) the approach taken to solve the problem. 
• Tell me the language it’s written in. If it’s open source, and it’s written in a language I hack in, *and* it solves a problem I need solved, maybe I can help out, or be encouraged that if something flakes, I can fix it, or at least speak the developer’s language if I have to describe the issue to the folks upstream. 
• Tell me what OS is required, and preferably what OS/version is tested with. 
• Give me a full list of dependencies with links to go get them, or give me a link to “Dependencies”, or to an install document that lists them. 
• Tell me the current version, and the date it was released. Beta versions and dates are nice too. If there is a timed release schedule, tell me that. 
• Keep the information up-to-date. I shouldn’t have to wonder if your software is going to work under OS X 10.5 or RHEL 5, or if your plugin will work under the latest version of Drupal/Django/Moodle/MySQL/Joomla/Firefox…
• BONUS: a very simple architectural drawing that shows me exactly what components make up the whole. The one for CouchDB is as good as any I’ve ever seen (assuming it’s accurate). 
• BONUS: if screenshots are applicable, use them. They communicate a million times more information using a million times less real estate and bandwidth. They can communicate things you didn’t even know you were communicating. Of course, that could be good or bad, but it keeps you honest, and customers like that :-) 

If there’s one thing that bothers me about using a ready-made solution like wordpress for my blog, it’s plug-ins. I hate software plug-ins. The first question every support engineer for any software product that supports plugins asks in response to a trouble report is “are you using any plugins?” And when you say “yep, I’m using plugins!” the reply from support is to disable them immediately and see if the trouble goes away. That’s a problem.

What’s worse, if the plugins are maintained by a third party (often the case), there’s no telling whether or not they’ll exist when the next version of the base software is released, or whether they’ll be supported in future versions of the software.

Two examples that touch my daily life are Firefox, and Wordpress.

Lately (since around March) I’ve been having lots of trouble with Firefox. I thought upgrading to Firefox 3 would’ve helped, but it really didn’t. Running it on OS X, Firefox hangs frequently enough that I’m actually considering using Safari (I do NOT like Safari). Know what happened right around that time? Ah - I found the firefox plugins for managing EC2 and S3. So today I’ll uninstall those and see if it helps.

With Wordpress, there are two things I’m missing: I need to let readers subscribe to comments via email, and I need better Google AdSense for Search integration with WordPress. Both things are kinda maybe supported in one version or another “but should work under…” - whatever. I don’t really want to spend my time downloading, reading the documentation to do the install, doing the install and configuration, etc., and then finding out that it doesn’t work, or worse, having it look on the surface like it works, but then finding later that it fails in evil-but-silent ways.

These two products are by no means exceptions. Moodle, PHP-Nuke, XOOPS, MediaWiki, Twiki, Postnuke… and for that matter, OpenLDAP, BIND, SSH, MySQL, Sendmail, PAM… all have plugins available written by other folks, and all have bitten me at one point or another. Usually when it comes time to upgrade the base software.

I’m not saying anything new here. People have had this problem with lots of different software products for a long time. My question is “why is this still a problem?” I’m not asking this because I have some magical obvious solution or answer, I’m asking because I feel like there’s probably more to it than I’m grasping. I’m not a masterful developer, or even a masterful software project manager, so I’m calling on all of you who are (or are closer than I am) to help me understand the problem. Some day, I might find myself in a position to take the wrong or right path where plug-ins are concerned, and I’d like to be more informed than I am so I can avoid putting users in the position I find myself in when I use other peoples’ software. Has Joel blogged this yet? If so, I can’t find it. Links please?

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!

I ran across an issue that my google-foo has had some trouble handling. Maybe what I did is the only way to do it, in which case maybe this will help someone in need… but I rather like to think that someone here will have a much nicer solution.

I use Subversion at most of the clients I work for, for most of the projects I work on. It’s even used in the production/editorial process at both Python Magazine and php|architect Magazine. For my own work, I’m still using it personally mainly because I haven’t had the time to really get a good grip on Git yet.

Though I’ve been using svn almost since it was created, I can’t find a clean way to revert to an earlier revision of a file, and then make that version of the file the new “current” version of the file. At first I thought I could just make a trivial change to the file and commit, but you can’t commit if the file is out of date with the repository (that’s why you’re supposed to run ’svn up’ before committing - duh). I also didn’t see an option to any of the svn commands that looked like it would work, but maybe I missed something (do tell!).

What I wound up doing was moving the local copy of the file sideways, svn up’ing the file back down, moving the good copy back over (overwriting the one I just svn up’d), and committing. Nasty. It looks like this:

$ mv myfile.php myfile.php.bak
$ svn up myfile.php
$ mv myfile.php.bak myfile.php
$ svn commit myfile.php -m "All cleaned up"

It works, but it just seems like something that should be built into svn somehow. Those with sufficient clue are hereby solicited to share it

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.

I picked up the Apress book about Ruby for Systems Administrators, because I plan on learning enough about Ruby to make it a viable tool that I can use if I have to use it at some point. I still plan on doing that, but in reviewing the first couple of chapters, I don’t think I’m going to like Ruby very much, and I think I’ll have to be dragged kicking and screaming to use it. Maybe as I gain some practical experience with it this feeling will subside.

I should say that I did all of my sysadmin programming in shell and perl for many years. I still use them somewhat regularly, if only to maintain existing code or to write code for clients who require Perl, or to work on systems that don’t have Python installed (yes, these exist. Basically, unless you’re using Linux, Python is not “just there”). If I have a choice or some say in the matter, I’ll tend toward Python if I’m writing new code. I’m pretty sure that all of the non-web code that I’m writing for AddThis, for example, is Python (web code is in PHP, and I do database development using straight-up SQL, because we’re using MySQL - if I were using PostgreSQL, there’s a chance I might use Python for that as well).

When I started using Python, I also looked at Ruby. It was one of those periods of time where I was pretty much out looking for a language to add to my repertoire. I had experience with Java, C/C++, PHP, Perl… enough languages that at this point I knew exactly what I wanted in a language: I wanted a language that I could use no matter what I was doing. Of course, I do mostly systems coding, but I wanted a language that would be enjoyable enough to use, and agile enough, and capable enough, and available on enough platforms, and <long list here> that I could use it for web and perhaps even GUI scripting as well (I tend to avoid scripting GUIs in any language because I just think going straight to the web skips an oft unnecessary step in the evolutionary cycle).

Turns out, Python won because it happened to be in heavy use on a couple of projects I was loosely involved in at my job at the time. However, I’ll state that I volunteered to be involved in them so I could get a better grasp of Python, and I’m glad I did. My feeling at that time was that Ruby looked too much like Perl to me, and I was really making an effort to move away from Perl, because after 10 years of coding in a language, you should not still feel like a complete neophyte every time you have to use it.

After more reading about Ruby, I’ve discovered that, due to the fact that Ruby supports things that don’t exist in Perl, yet tries to adhere to a Perl-ish notion that symbols are good visual indicators of various things (though the same symbols mean completely different things between the two), it actually looks even more cryptic to me than Perl does.

This is completely a “doesn’t fit my brain” thing. I’m sure Ruby is a fine language, and if I made regular enough use of it, I’d probably get used to parsing all of the symbols (though the same could be said for Perl and even shell as well). Python has some weirdness to it as well, which also took some getting used to. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a project to use Ruby on right now, and nothing forcing me to use it, and no existing projects that would be easy for me to involve myself in. I guess I’ll just have to find some sysadmin task that needs doing and see how Ruby works out. My primary language, though, is likely to remain Python, as I find it about 60 million times easier to read than Perl, and 100 million times easier to read than Ruby. I learn a lot by reading code, so I guess the ability to parse it readily is of primary importance to me in picking up a new language.