random($foo) is the occassionally still updated blog of Leonard Lin. My pics are on Flickr, code is on Github. @lhl on Twitter. More »
I was digging out some old code and realized that it might be useful for some, so threw it on github. Nothing special, just a lightweight python port of some of the old Flickr statsd that I wrote… almost two years ago. (time flies!)
If you’re looking to run something fancier in production, it looks like Etsy has some great stuff going on (see also).
Anyway, if you just want a quick graph and/or don’t want to setup Graphite, the code I’ve put up should get you generating an RRD pretty quickly.
It’s getting close to SXSW time. I spent some time today starting to fill out my SCHED in earnest (and to make my @SXSWPartyList reservations.
Probably my best discovery so far is SPIN’s 35 Must-Hear Acts at SXSW. Found a bunch of bands great bands that I’ve missed while being way too busy:
The last time I spent much time on personal data storage was over 2 years ago. Since then, all my NASes and most of my disks have actually been themselves in storage.
While I’ve been nomadic, I’ve mostly been haphazardly filling up 2TB 3.5″ external disks and various 2.5″ portable disks. Lots of these are dupes however, so now that I’m a bit more settled, I’ll be trying to bring these in line.
To that end, I’m building a new storage filer, and potentially will build a second as a backup if it works well. I’ve decided to take the ZFS plunge so I’ll probably be running FreeNAS which has ZFS support and is USB stick friendly. Here’s what I picked up last night:
I’ll post an update once everything’s up and running, including final kill-a-watt numbers.
Like most geeks, over the years I’ve gone through a lot of a lot of task management tools (most successfully, OmniOutliner and TVO), only to go back to using text files (which unfortunately, tended to accumulate on multiple computers at multiple locations, I still have a few megs of files tucked all over the place). Lately I’ve been using a lot of Evernote, and as one of the few things that synced flawlessly (although Dropbox has really changed the game there), I used that for about a year or so as my main task “manager”, and used FogBugz for development-related stuff.
After the latest round being really unhappy w/ my setup, I took another look around what kind of online/shared options were available and stumbled onto Checkvist early last year. Although there are others that do more (Toodledo, and of course, Remember the Milk), Checkvist was the one that stuck the best, mostly because of its simplicity and speed. Also, probably the biggest factor (and a big contributing factor to the speed aspect) is that it can be almost entirely keyboard driven. It’s a moded editor with tons of chained shortcut keys. You can see the appeal to a longtime vim user. It also has decent multi-user sharing baked in from the start, which is nice for small teams (although there are a few things missing that have been stumbling blocks for adoption by my co-workers).
That being said, despite a few things that originally seemed like dealbreakers (lack of mobile app, for one), over the past few months, Checkvist has managed to take over as my primarily task manager. I attribute it primarily to the parts that it gets right: keyboard driven UI, search, list switching, expansion among them, that are just unmatched in anything else I’ve tried.
Here, BTW is my ongoing Checkvist Evaluation/Improvement List:
Checkvist’s closest peers are probably Todoist, which has a few nice touches, but seems to be inferior to Checkvist in just about every way, and Workflowy, which is conceptually very interesting (dynamic scoping/zooming, keyboard everything, and while slicker, is too limited to be really useful for me (even less metadata, no sharing). Also, I suspect that the lack of modalness actually makes the keyboard nav a lot more complex than it otherwise would need to be…
NOTE: I’m keeping a more up-to-date (and prettier version) of this list on Bagcheck.
One thing I’ve noticed having done a couple of reinstalls lately is that I’m using a lot less apps on my computer. I figure now (that I’m procrastinating) is as good a time as any other to write things down in case anyone finds it useful:
Alfred – I finally switched off of Quicksilver a few months ago. Now, there’s still some development going on, and it mostly works, but it felt like the right time to move to something a bit more vital. After trying Quick Search Box, I settled on Alfred mostly because I wanted a quick way to access individual preference panes. My launcher needs have always been pretty basic, I just wanted something that works and doesn’t crash much.
OK, not the shortest list, but compared to the number of apps I had installed before…
Charlie Stross posted an interesting essay today, Reasons To Be Cheerful recapping some of the great things that have happened in the world over the past decade, primarily in the developing world. A great read, and honestly inspiring/heartwarming for the disheartened humanists. It’s easy to get overly cynical about it all. This is a good antidote.
That being said, I don’t think Charlie goes quite far enough. The essay starts framed by the thesis that in the world, things haven’t much improved, and the besides a few specific counterpoints about disease and the general march of technology, it feels like he gives up on really repudiating that thesis… for the developed world. And it’s easy to see why. In terms of general socio-economic trends, it’s hard to be all that positive. Things are downright unsettling heading towards dystopian. However, there’s at least one aspect, the very medium where we are commenting on that is worth, uh, commenting on.
Yes, the interwebbytubes, as Stross puts it, is quite a different place than it was at the beginning of the millennium. We are looking at a 2X adoption growth in developed nations (from plurality to supermajority, if not ubiquity). Worldwide, 2 billion people are now online. Beyond the quantitative changes, the qualitative changes are even more intriguing. In 2000 there was no Web 2.0. Blogging was in its infancy. Most of the things we take for granted online today were not invented yet. Among them: Wikipedia (2001), Facebook (2004), Google Maps (2005), Twitter (2006). I list these in particular because I don’t think there’s a day that goes by where I don’t use these particular services, but I’m sure that others have their own lists. Lest you think that this was a singular period of growth, I’ll throw in that the iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010) have kicked us into another era of hyper-growth that will be just as (if not more) life-changing.
We’re just starting to see what happens when the Internet starts engaging with us in a location/context aware fashion. We’re also starting to see what happens when Internet-style/scale dynamics are applied outside traditional consumer Internet contexts (e.g. Obama Campaign, 2008). In a historical scale, we’re still at the very beginning stages of figuring out what it means to live in a digital, massively inter-networked world, and similarly just starting to get a handle how that will change society (attention, communications and collaboration in particular).
All that’s a really long way of saying… well, there’s a pretty dang bright spot in the developed world too. One that has the potential of being turned into the shovel we need to dig ourselves out. So, here’s looking to the future. Happy New Year.
Just a few tracks, new and old, for the cold and dark.
Owen Pallett released the Export Demo EP for download on Soundcloud last week. (awesome!)
Oh, and thanks to FUELTV’s Green Label Experience for getting a whole bunch of songs stuck in my head.
I have work deadlines, so I haven’t been able to been able to write a well constructed post about this, however, a few things:
password = 'your_password' hash = 'your_hash' salt = hash[0:2] import crypt crypt.crypt(password, salt)
If you’re not sure though, audit your passwords anyway when you have a spare hour or two. You’ll feel better, trust me.
Today was an average afternoon – taking way too long to accomplish a seemingly trivial task, but looking up and learning a bunch of new things along the way. It seems there should be a better/easier (almost automatic, transparent) way to track the sources (links/pages), process (things tried) and results (code fragments)….
The basic goal in this case was to automate some execution of some javascript on a page. Because execution of the script caused a page load, it wasn’t a matter of writing the calls into the console. The faster and easier way would have been to write a Greasemonkey or Chrome Extension script (because there were timing issues, the script would have to write a time-based state file on actions), however, I figured I would try to see what kind of options were available with a control-script oriented model, as having that handy would be more generally useful in the future (more and more, straight mechanize is less useful as more JS proliferates).
Before getting started, I had to strip out just the lines that I wanted. I always forget how to do it, but that was a simple vim command lookup.
I looked at Selenium and Selenium RC, which probably would have worked fine (but that I didn’t use because I didn’t want to install extensions and the RC docs weren’t directly linked, but would have probably saved me time in the end).
Instead I decided to try out Watir (cross-platform, cross-browser, and my Ruby is rusty so this was a good excuse). I started out with SafariWatir, however, after a bit of poking, came up with a dead end on executing JavaScript. There’s a scripter object, but even after getting access to it via monkey-patching (did I mention my Ruby-fu sucks?), I was still getting errors and there wasn’t much help In general.
Instead of slogging through a potentially losing battle, I decided to jump ship to FireWatir. FireWatir uses JSSh, which communicates directly via JavaScript to Firefox, so it seemed like it might be a surer thing. My Firefox profiles were corrupted from my last system transfer, so there was a bit of messing with the profile folder until I gave up and started a new, but after that it seemed like I was home free.
Except, that when running js_eval, it turns out the scope that JSSh puts you in, isn’t in the document DOM, but rather the browser’s XUL DOM. For whatever reason, I couldn’t find a reference for even with the direct object type refereces (i.e. getWindows and getBrowser return ChromeWindow objects, which just don’t seem to have docs. Introspection via domDump() or inspect() just returned a huge amount of stuff to go through). Luckily, while searching, one of the results that turned up was a StackOverflow question on firewatir + jQuery which answered the question – ChromeWindow.content gets you into the HTMLDocument DOM. I’m a bit mystified why this isn’t in the firewatir or JSSh docs, as this seems to be one of the most common things that people would want to do, but well, that is the life of the developer…
One of the little pleasant surprises as I settle into a routine in LA has been rediscovering how great KCRW is. My drive usually has me catching some of Morning Becomes Eclectic on the way in, and Chocolate City or Raul Campos in the evening. Garth in particular has a knack for playing some killer cuts (that Shazam invariably does nothing for and where I have to manually remember the time and look up later).
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. So, in the spirit of holiday procrastination, here’s a little mini-mix of stuff I’ve been enjoying recently: