I have a spare laptop from the days when I was pursuing linux as my full time operating system. It’s a nice one—a daru2 from system76.
I’ve been using it at work so that I would have access to a linux machine while using the windows workstation that I had. Recently though the department has switched over to linux for everyone (aside from a few holdouts) so I don’t need a separate linux computer.
This leaves me with a computer to experiment with.
I was thinking I would set it up as a multi-os system using virtualization. I would set up something very lightweight to run guest OSes. I thought it would be really cool to use esxi. However, I have found that esxi is only really meant for use with servers. You can’t get a visual interface to your os on the computer running esxi—you can only dial in from another system.
So, I’m back to needing an actual OS to run a the guests. I want something ludicrously lightweight, so I guess I need a linux of some sort. And as long as I’m at it, I may as well have a GUI to manage the VMs with.
Right now, I’m thinking a stripped down version of Arch running wmii, but I’m not sold on any one thing yet.
As I’ve grown up, I’ve taken stock and noticed my wardrobe of baggy jeans and hoodies doesn’t really fit for a late-twenties, soon-to-be-married, recently-tried-to-buy-a-house guy. That, plus the input of Put This On has led me to start thinking about what a complete but relatively minimal “adult” wardrobe (that I would want to own) might need.
Here’s my take so far:
- Two well cut dark wash jeans
- One dark color non-jean pair of casual pants (chino’s, I guess)
- One pair of proper “dressy” pants
- One good suit
- Six or seven nice, but casual button down shirts
- Two dress shirts
- A handful of nice ties
- Good black shoes
- Good brown shoes
- Two good blazers/jackets
I have no idea if this is actually complete, and I’m sure the list bored you to tears. I’m just brainstorming here.
What are your thoughts?
I’ve switched over to using Things for my task management, and I love it. I used to use a moleskine with a pretty jacked up taskflow that worked for me in the rare cases that I remembered to use it. The problem with that system was that in order to almost always have my notebook, I kept it in my messenger bag…and never took it out. So I never used it.
So I now I have this moleskine I’d rather not just throw away, but I need to find a use for it. The kind of use that is still useful even after I rip out a bunch of pages that no longer have any value (I’m not big on the logging of stuff I’ve done forever and ever).
So, does anyone have any suggestions beyond just adding it to my stack of available notebooks? Something purpose oriented, preferably.
So, it’s the end of the week, and I thought I would write some follow up information on the masstexter.
I got the masstexter up and working Thursday night; we used it for all of PyCon.
With ten people using it we had a really high response rate—people generally got the message sent to them within seconds of someone sending a message out. I left the code sending the message to everyone in the list—including the sender—so as to maintain some sort of confirmation that the message was sent. But at $0.03 a text, I removed that feature. With the feature, pretty heavy usage of the texter ran a cost in three days of about $60. That’s about 180 uses with ten users. Without the confirmation message, that would go up to about 200 uses.
The application turned out to very useful—we had planned on using a chatroom on our company VPN for communication, but given some pretty prevalent wifi issues we ended up falling back on the masstexter more than I had planned.
Towards the end of the con, I threw in another modification, though we never had too much need for it; if someone not in the masstext database sends a message, it doesn’t pass that message on. I realized that if someone got ahold of the twilio number, they could easily spam all of us without any penalties, driving up the cost of the application and irritating everyone. That change was pushed up to github.
I’m looking into some other features as well; chief among these is some sort of grouping feature, and usage of an asterix server to cut down on the costs of sending messages out.
I’m also considering what license to push this out under; something better than the informal “it’s on github, feel free to play.” If anyone has recommendations, let me know—otherwise I’ll probably default to the BSD License or similar.
This past weekend, I was at PyCon. My entire department went, which led to some communication difficulties. While we all had each other’s mobile numbers, text messages and phone calls were requiring a phone tree system, which was both lossy—not everyone got the messages—and really inefficient.
Not to mention irritating.
Programming to the Rescue
Fortunately, Twilio recently released an SMS service, which makes programming SMS powered web apps really simple. With a little django power, I was able to put together a simple webapp that can accept an SMS and send it on to a number of other people.
MassText
Unoriginally, I’ve entitled the project MassText. It’s a surprisingly simple application—only one model, only one view (plus a little love from contrib.admin and contrib.auth). The model stores a phone number and who owns said number; the view handles the send and receive via Twilio.
The basic process works like this:
- An SMS is sent to a Twilio number.
- Twilio sends a POST to the masstext view.
- The masstext view:
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- pulls the other users in the list
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- creates a Twilio XML response containing the original sms message for each user.
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- Sends the response to Twilio
- Twilio sends the defined SMS messages to all users.
Like I said, simple.
I Wanna Play Too!
I’ve put the code up on github. I’ll be adding official licensing and working on better features in time. Feel free to take a look and set it up yourself.
There is an odd comment going around since the iPad demo happened. I’m not sure where it started, but it goes something like this:
If I want a piece of toast, I shouldn’t have to know how to build a toaster.
This is a load of crap, as a computing analogy. If you want to write an email, no one expects you to build a computer, or write an email client. They expect you to be able to figure out your email client. A simple computer, while good, is not going to be some panacea for the computing illiterate. I’ve met plenty of people who still can’t set up their email account in the iPhone, never mind it usually requires filling out all of three fields.
Sorry. Consider that a filtered version of my irritation with iPad articles in recent history. Moving on now.
