human made

A Virtual Laptop

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:26:16 -0500

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.

Introducing MassText for Group Text Messaging at PyCon by Jon Sackett - Twilio Cloud Communications - Discover Our Web Services API for Making & Receiving Phone Calls & Text Messages, Cloud Telephony

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:05:35 -0500

Introducing MassText for Group Text Messaging at PyCon by Jon Sackett - Twilio Cloud Communications - Discover Our Web Services API for Making & Receiving Phone Calls & Text Messages, Cloud Telephony:

I have been blogged about at twilio.

Which is actually pretty cool.

A cool little video showcasing Tokyo.

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:09:10 -0500

A cool little video showcasing Tokyo.

Dressing Like an Adult

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:35:00 -0500

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...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:27:31 -0500

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.

MassTexter Follow Up

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:34:55 -0500

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.

Python + Django vs. C# + ASP.NET: Productivity Showdown

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:36:45 -0500

Python + Django vs. C# + ASP.NET: Productivity Showdown:

Kurt goes into some detail about the stats behind our company’s switch from the .NET stack to a Django stack for our web development.

I love finding out I was a guinea pig for all of this.

Introducing MassText

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:50:56 -0500

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:
- pulls the other users in the list
- creates a Twilio XML response containing the original sms message for each user.
- 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.

"Theater doesn’t make for authentic public discourse."

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:06:40 -0500

“Theater doesn’t make for authentic public discourse.”

- Jon Stewart, in this interview in the Hartford Advocate.

There is an odd comment going around since the iPad demo happened. I’m not sure where it...

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:42:53 -0500

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.

Writing Like A Programmer

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:07:45 -0500

I fancy myself a writer. Not, mind you, a good one. Just a passable one.

I am, however, definitively a programmer. This means that I like things like version control, scriptable or programmable tools, and open, easily interchangeable formats.

Currently, when I write things I write them in RTF or in ASCII with Markdown. I really like Markdown. I used to like RTF, until I realized that it has no really standard implementation. So I have resolved to move my writing away from RTF and into Markdown only.

So, ideally, here’s my writing setup:

Any writing project is a git repository.
All source files for the project are written in Markdown
When a project is finished, an HTML version is produced using the python implementation of Markdown
Additionally, when a project is finished, a PDF version is created with wkhtml2pdf
Optionally, if I want to get designery, output files include some nice CSS, injected in either through a hack or some sort of nice templating tool (Jinja, anyone?).

It seems like a nice idea. Of course, the problem with it is that I have a bunch of stuff not produced in this fashion, and I need to convert it (mostly because I’m slightly OCD about having all my stuff in a similar state, but that is neither here nor there). Aaron Swartz has a nice tool called html2text, which works reasonably well as part of an RTF to HTML to Markdown conversion flow. The only problem now is that the Markdown produced doesn’t return to an entirely accurate final format.

I’ll continue on here about my experiments in this vein. In the meantime, other writers reading this: what is your setup, ideal or otherwise?

Lessig has a good response to the recent Supreme Court ruling on...

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:21:34 -0500

Lessig has a good response to the recent Supreme Court ruling on corporate political advertising.

Today's Thought

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:22:10 -0500

Those of us who refrained from referring to the administration you put into power Nazis would appreciate it if you, in turn, could avoid invoking 1984 at every action of the administration we put into power.

Thank you.

Work has the oddest conversations...

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:41:50 -0500

(11:39:38 AM) mk: no, randy
(11:39:44 AM) mk: zombies dont crave pizza
(11:39:54 AM) mk: and if they did [their] internal organs no longer work

Meticulous or Obsessed?

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:11:00 -0500

DZ commented on my previous post regarding an unfortunate use of an MLK quote.

There’s been a relatively unfortunate trend recently of idolizing the ridiculously obsessed. Obsessives, in some circles, equate automatically to quality and workmanship.

The problem here, I think, is that obsession becomes an easy stand in for meticulousness. It’s an understandable mistake to make, honestly. An artist or craftsman who is meticulous in the details of of their art or craft is generally obsessed; the focus of that obsession is however about something deeper than the number of icons on one’s desktop.

I don’t mean that a person’s obsessions are necessarily trivial—when John Gruber and Merlin Mann asked people to “pursue their obsessions in a serious way” I agreed with them along with most of the people in the world blogging. But to me, pursuing an obsession in a meaningful way means having some perspective.

Be meticulous in your pursuits—save obsession for the things that matter.

There’s a great little blog called Minimal Mac that has a wealth of nifty little tricks for...

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:53:42 -0500

There’s a great little blog called Minimal Mac that has a wealth of nifty little tricks for computing happiness.

I’m not mentioning it because of one of these tricks. I’m mentioning it because just now it posted the following quote:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

That’s Martin Luther King, Jr.

Really? I mean, really?

I don’t know. Maybe MM was just sharing this b/c it’s a nice quote, but given the frequent posts it has regarding “what we believe in” and “not what we believe in” I’m left feeling as though it’s meant to be applied to their views on simple computing interfaces.

Thus: Really? Equating a matter of civil rights to decluttered desktops?

"A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By..."

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:30:00 -0500

“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”

- From Marco, who got it from mudd up,peterwknox, who got it from The Economist.

This finally explains to me why the Brown novels are so bloody popular, without relying on a “people are idiots” excuse.

"if you switched to the AM dial it was nothing but ghostly mystery talk … and sometimes, the..."

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:59:34 -0500

“if you switched to the AM dial it was nothing but ghostly mystery talk … and sometimes, the sound of someone crying or laughing in the dark but you could never tune in clearly enough to hear which.”

- Ariana Osborne

The Things He Carried

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:33:03 -0500

The Things He Carried:

I suppose I’ve seen too many movies, but, really? Social networks? Behavior detection? The TSA budget is almost $7 billion. That money would be better spent on the penetration of al-Qaeda social networks.

A great piece on the TSA and airport security by Jeffrey Goldberg, at the Atlantic.

Mag+

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:47:00 -0500

Mag+:

The smart folks over at Berg London have thrown together a prototype of a new magazine reading experience. I’m a little ambivalent on the whole e-reader thing, but it’s worth taking a look at. So do so.

Back? Okay.

There’s a lot to like here, and a lot to dislike.

I appreciate their thoughts re: scrolling, but I feel like it’s misguided. When reading a large amount of content, I prefer something with paging. I agree that the weird faux-page pull-corner paging thing they reference is awful, but I like the side to side page they show for switching between articles, and would prefer it as a means of progressing through an article. Perhaps some sort of pull down table of contents in place of the side to side could be used for switching articles.

I really like their use of multitouch to allow controls to be called up from the sides of the screen, but I’m so-so on the “heat up the contents,” both as an idea and as a gesture. A protracted touch would be sufficient to call up the menu they show.