A couple days ago, halfway through a busy night, I lost my phone. Happily, I got it back just half a day later, along with some lessons learned and a great story. I tried all sorts of high tech tricks, but in the end it was pen and paper and a bit of foresight that saved the day.
Read more…
I’ve just published webfinger-unofficial, a stand-in WebFinger server for major sites that don’t implement it themselves. It currently has implementations for Facebook and Twitter, deployed at these endpoints:
It’s just a little side project, and it’s not hugely useful on its own, but it is a step toward implementing OStatus bridge apps for more of the major social networking sites.
Feedback and pull requests are welcome!
I hate forced idle time. I used to carry reading material with me everywhere, in case I had a few extra minutes. I still do that sometimes, but now I listen to podcasts more often. I break out the headphones at any excuse, even as little as walking between buildings at work, or while I’m falling asleep. It’s great. I can easily keep my brain engaged, no matter where I am or what else I’m doing.
I wonder if there’s a catch, though. At the end of a busy day, if I’ve had headphones on throughout my workout and commute and squeezed some quick reading into all the leftover moments, my brain feels a bit…cramped. Uncomfortably full. Like it’s had three square meals, and a bunch of snacks, and a big dessert, but hasn’t had a chance to digest anything. Which, arguably, is exactly what’s happened.
Read more…
My new Mindcandy DVD came in the mail the other day, and it reminded me all over again why I love the demo scene.
Demos aren’t easy to describe. If you’re not familiar with them, think of them as graffiti art for computer geeks. They’re like music videos, with abstract, real time computer graphics…but more. At their best, demos are a striking, uncomfortable, hauntingly beautiful art form unlike any other.
Read more…
I’ve added a new App Engine shell app for the Python 2.7 runtime:
It complements the existing Python 2.5, HRD, and JVM language shell apps as well as other, even better third party projects like App Engine Console.
Enjoy!
I’ve just released Bridgy, a little side project I’ve been working on. Got a blog? Share your blog posts on social networks? Wish comments on those shared posts also showed up on your blog? Bridgy copies them back for you.
Read more…
I’m starting a cleanse today! It’s not a New Years resolution – I don’t tend to do those – but for the next three weeks, I’m cutting out alcohol, caffeine, sugar, wheat (gluten), dairy, and meat. Seafood is ok, and I’ll probably have the occasional piece of dark chocolate or lightly caffeinated tea, but that’s it.
Read more…
Unhosted aims to decouple webapps from their backend storage on a per user level. The status quo is that each webapp stores and manages all of its users’ data. Unhosted wants to turn that on its head and let each user store their own data, across all of their webapps, in a single provider and account of their choosing.
Read more…
I had a great time at Dickens Fair, the Victorian England, Christmas themed renaissance faire that’s been held every year in San Francisco since 1970. It’s massive, and the production values are amazing. So many killer details throughout the whole place, so many great performances!
We saw everything from full-on stage plays to impromptu street scenes like beggars and police, chimney sweeping, and more. It felt like a huge set, complete with real life characters, that you could walk around inside and touch and interact with. Not to mention the authentic food, drinks, and old world craftsmanship like quill pens and pewter goblets and soap made from tallow, all for sale.
I’m definitely going back next year!
I just finished reading Charles Perrow‘s Normal Accidents, the classic book that examines why and how complex systems fail.
When it was published in 1984, the Internet and large distributed software systems were still nascent, so he focused on nuclear power plants, chemical plants, and marine and air traffic control. Even so, the parallels are remarkable: buffers and queues, throttles and safety valves, abuse of common subsystems, unexpected interactions, and incomplete and untrustworthy monitoring. Replace valves with network connections and gases with data, and a 1970s power plant meltdown looks a lot like a 2011 cloud platform outage.
Read more…
