I feel guilty that I’m even taking this little bit of time to post this. I’m *BUSY*. I’m simultaneously: learning how to deploy a fully-virtualized, production infrastructure on a grid using AppLogic planning and scripting the bits and pieces that need to happen to migrate an infrastructure to a grid architecture. Doing code review for…
Category: Productivity
…So little time
I’m not usually this bad about writing on my blog, but the past few weeks have been a little nuts. But it’s the ‘good’ kind of nuts. I’m working on MySQL, memcached, database replication, optimizing SQL queries (and, in one case, the database schema itself), writing Python (using ctypes, and trying to parse the C-encrusted…
I’ve Been Added
Friday was my last day working as a contractor for the GFDL. I had friends there before I ever worked there, so I’m sad to be leaving them, but I’m happy to be moving on to a really exciting opportunity. I’m now an employee of AddThis.com. I’ll be able to focus on architecture, and how…
Python Magazine Defies Skeptics
I was informed today by the publisher that Python Magazine has been deemed “viable” using all of the important business metrics that they use to evaluate the magazine. This is fantastic news, and speaks volumes about the viability of the magazine in *non* business terms, as well as the model we’ve been employing at MTA…
Getting at your Google Spreadsheets columns
Regular readers know that I’ve been working on a pet project to build a command line interface to Google Spreadsheets. Basically, I find working in a spreadsheet interface to be clunky and uncomfortable. If I need to put in a new row, I’d rather just be prompted at the CLI for the values I want…
I need a Google Apps Mashup
Google Docs is nice. Calendar is really nice. Gmail is ok, too. The notion that you can more or less use any of the tools without going too far is pretty nice, and they’ve opened things up with the API just enough to get some useful plugin capabilities, *and* there’s a Python client available for…
For my next pet project…
Stand back! running install_egg_info Writing /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gdata.py-1.0.9.egg-info brj@dawg:~/working/gdata.py-1.0.9$ python Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, May 2 2007, 16:27:44) [GCC 4.1.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu4)] on linux2 Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information. >>> import gdata >>> print ‘yay!’ yay! >>> No good can come of this! ;-P Seriously, though – I really really strongly dislike spreadsheet interfaces….
Why you should write: common myths debunked
I give a talk that advocates writing. I do this because I owe my career to people who wrote down what they knew and made it available in one form or another; either free on a web site, or in a book that I bought. When I started editing, one of my jobs was to…
A quick overview of common grammatical mistakes
Part of what I do for a living is write. I’ve co-authored a book, written a rather large number of technical articles, and I’ve also done professional editing, tech review, and manuscript review for magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses. Also, my wife is an English teacher. In short, though I make my fair share of…
Quick CVS Cheat Sheet
Actually, I’d love to say that I’ve moved completely to using git instead of CVS, but the truth of the matter is that, for a recent project where I’m just trying to consolidate a whole bunch of admin scripts, organize them under one (managed) roof, and (most importantly) get a bunch of admins on board…