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…
Category: Technology
“For the Community”
Sometimes people claim they’re doing things for the good of the community, but I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean they intend to involve the community in the effort :-/ A group of open source/free software users in New Jersey (where I currently reside) learned that the hard way when the maintainer of a web site…
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….
The Technology Behind Python Magazine
Hi all, I mentioned to a buddy (who is also an editor) that we used subversion in our editorial process. He didn’t know what that was, and said that they used either this big nasty home grown system, or email attachments, to coordinate the editorial process. He was incredibly curious about how we used subversion…
With Great Funding Comes Great Responsibility
For the past ~6 weeks, I’ve been talking to people, getting buy-in, educating users and administrators, and generating copious amounts of project proposal and six sigma documentation presentig VMware Infrastructure as an infrastructure building and management tool. There’s a whole manifesto behind this, but I’ll try to boil it down. Basically, this client has three…
Python Magazine Status Update
First, and most important, Python Magazine’s premiere issue has been unleashed! I love this business. Doing all of the negotiations, the communications with authors, coordinating with layout and contract people, web administrators, tech editors, and the like, can get pretty chaotic. It’s sort of like managing…. a tornado. And, like a tornado, one second you’re…
Sometimes it’s just about attitude
Today I spent the day completely breaking down and replacing the entire above-ground portion of my in-ground pool’s plumbing. I had some problems crop up with my multi-port valve, and I had to take a few things apart to troubleshoot and remove the pump as the source of a pressure problem (namely, there wasn’t any)….
Two ssh-isms I forgot today
1. To remove an offending known_hosts key without opening the file or using sed or whatever, you can just run ssh-keygen -R <hostname>, which will remove any and all keys for the given hostname (see man ssh-keygen for other options like this). 2. To copy files from a local directory with spaces in its name…
UNIX mtime vs. ctime
Sometimes I get questions from people about stuff that I’ve long since taken for granted. One is “what’s the difference between mtime and ctime?” The answer is simple, but I wanted to post it here in case it can help anyone. In UNIX: mtime is “modification time”, and it is the time at which the…
New Job!
I started a new job about 6 weeks ago. I’m now doing infrastructure architecture at http://gfdl.noaa.gov GFDL stands for Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab. It’s a NOAA site that supports atmospheric and climatology research. So in other words, the work I do supports research into things ranging from global warming to what the atmosphere on Mars…