Lonely Lion

I’m trying to learn Emacs. It’s difficult. So difficult that I spent time taking a screenshot, uploaded it to flickr, set up my blog for flickr-posting, and posted this.

All to avoid learning Emacs for a little while. Boo!

Victim of Time got a nice little plug in this weeks issue of Time Out Chicago (web version). I’ll post a scan of it soon.

Unfortunately, they misrepresent my role a teeny bit, calling me “the designer.” Pat Mullin is largely responsible for the design, I’m just a programmer and sysadmin.

Note to the Python-heads in the audience, VoT runs on Django.

It looks like the momentum from the bee board got the ball rolling. Tastebud is officially a Digg success. Awesome.

After I wrote that Tastebud article, I thought, “you know, there’s a chance this is digg-worthy. Maybe people don’t know how to roast their own coffee.”

So I put it up on Digg. Frustrated that no one was instantly jumping on how cool my idea was, I went to the bee board and said, “hey, bees, get on this and digg it.” Of course, being lazy improvisers prone to arguing means they have no idea what Digg is, and argue about not having to know what digg is, and argue about me being a fascist for demanding they do anything.

To get my point across, I redirected all bee traffic to http://lonelylion.com/digg.html. That went over…poorly.

The question is, how do I build a piece of media that allows me to go “readers, I demand you go here and do this for me now.” After which, everyone jumps up and does what I tell them to? Clearly I don’t have the crowd manipulation skills I thought I did.

I guess the answer is something like, “build trust.” Boooooring. I want a button to push that’s labeled “several hundred people will do what you ask them to, if you press this button.”

I wrote an article on home coffee roasting for Tastebud last night. I’m a big fan of home roasting, and have been explaining it to a bunch of folks over the past couple of months. I thought it was worth a write up, and might be interesting to you techie folks. http://tastebudchicago.com/blog/roast-your-own-coffee/

I also added a couple of my roast notes. I have a stack of index cards I need to enter into the site, a bunch of wines, cheeses, and coffees. The teeny coffee list is at http://tastebudchicago.com/coffees/.

If you like coffee, and have a DIY sort of ethic, coffee roasting is probably right up your alley. Get up on it.

I ended up moving Victim of Time from Dreamhost to Textdrive last week during the “great Dreamhost outage of ought-six.”

I’m still a fan of Dreamhost, but for Textdrive is better geared for Django and Rails. I have control of a lighttpd server with my own port that Textdrive proxies behind Textdrive controlled Apache server. It’s a very flexible setup that makes me feel like I have root without actually having root. Textdrive is also setup nicely for growth, with “business” shared hosting plans as well as container hosts.

All in all, a very smooth transition. I’m keeping the majority of my sites on Dreamhost as it’s dirt cheap and super easy to use. I may end up migrating more over time, but don’t see a need right now. Dreamhosts’ $9 a month is hard to argue with.

As I’ve documented learning Perl 6 from the Synopses is difficult. I’m not entirely sure why I’ve never come across this before, but there’s much better documentation at perlcabal.org.

Reading through it has got me hopped up on Perl 6 again. Tech Coffee is currently on hiatus, and I have a handful of Victim of Time tasks to take care of. Once VoT is back in shape I plan on putting some time into a visible Perl 6 project. As I’m totally in love with the web, so I figured I’d try and build a simple something or other on top of the ported libwww library or the straight CGI library.

All that said, I’m notorious for writing checks my time can’t cash. We’ll see how it plays out.

We met at Google this month, which a) was really fun and b) blew up our numbers. We had close to 50 people there. It was pretty great. Hopefully they’ll all join the mailing list and keep with the group. Two ChiPy presentations sandwiched a Google presentation.

Brian Ray gave an overview of Python operator overloading, including a history of operator overloading with links to comp.lang.python posts from the mid-90’s.

The Google Guys (excessive hyperlinking is hilarious), Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman, showed us around Google Code. Personal takeaways from their talk: a) start a project b) look up the white papers on BigTable and Data Mining with Map Reduction. One of the more interesting bits about the implementation of the BigTable backend to the Google Code subversion repository. According to them, with BigTable, the repository is just as fast with a million projects as with a hundred.

Along with the tech side of things came an overview of Google’s efforts in supporting the open source community, which (duh) are really impressive. Google gets its share of sort of negative press as of late, but they’re still strong advocates of open software, which I admire. Also, their offices are really cool, and they give away food like crazy.

Then, to round out the night, Jason presented his latest and greatest Selenium work. He’s really gone and done some super neat stuff with automating Selenium tests on multiple platforms. We’ve talked about his work at Tech Coffee a few times. It turns out we’re both working on similar projects with wildly different goals…big distributed applications with central command and control. I think this latest Selenium gadget will end up getting a lot of play in the future.

Thanks for hosting Google, Go ChiPy!

Read the poem.

But who shall tell the legend
of our humble sons of toil?
Who wrought so well to leave behind
these mountain heaps of spoil

I wrote askalibrarian@cpl.org about this whole Hering situation. They got back to me within a few hours. They have a bunch of documentation that says Hering conceived the Ship & Sanitary Canal plan in 1887. In 1889 the Chicago Municipal Sanitary District was formed, with Isham Randolph as their Chief Engineer.

From 1883 until 1886 Hering was working Philadelphia on their sewer system. In 1889 he was in New York doing the same. According to this US Army PDF, Hering was responsible for most the United States early sewers.

I’m going to go to the Harold Washington Library this week to look at some of their archives on the building of the canal. The Chicago Public Library is really impressing me today.