La la la la la la la
Jul/100
While listening to Basshunter’s – Walk On Water. I wondered how many ‘la’s I could search for.
Here are some charts that graph both the results and my possible boredom levels. X-axis is # of searches. One chart is for quoted searching (i.e. – “la la la la la la la” ) the other chart is unquoted (i.e. – la la la la la la la).
Bit by the climbing bug.
Mar/100
When I was young it was trees that needed scaling. My free solo first-ascent of the maple tree in my back yard was among the earliest of accomplishments. Now it’s cold rock faces that stand between standing on the ground and standing justly slightly above the ground. I wish there had been a climbing gym near my home when I was growing up (I had to settle for being a laser tag pro). If I had a more proper training, I might be in a different league all together. Is it an act of defiance to gravity that leads kids to treetop adventures? Is it the Icarus inside our minds that pull us towards the sun?
The sport of climbing has really blossomed over the years. Going out on climbing trips gives you the chance to the very diverse group of people who all share the same passion. Climbing is very much a social sport. Almost everything you do requires at least one other person there – to keep you from dying or at least cheering you on, keeping you going. But aside from your belayer… meeting other climbers, watching someone top out a classic climb, sharing stories of national parks or hidden boulders you’ve discovered.. it brings people together. On my last trip to Red Rocks, I met all sorts of different climbers. There was the climbing group from Dartmouth who were a mix of skills and attitudes, the couple who had spent nearly two years travelling around Asia and Africa, the family of five climbers from Scotland with the most hilarious little boy, and group of 50 yr old climbers celebrating a birthday in the group.
With all these climbers out there, one might be tempted to feel judged or of inadequate ability. The fact is… there are only a handful of elite climbers out there. They are the ones pushing the limits of the sport as a whole. For the rest of us, climbing is a competition with ourselves… at the end of the day, when you’re atop the wall, it was your muscles and mind that got you there. Everyone else is here to guide you on your personal journey, keeping you safe or offering advice and motivation.
“If climbers used the word ‘beta’ the way most software houses do, we’d all be dead.”
Up. For most people, Up is the place to be. The food chain goes Up, the corporate ladder goes Up… and so do astronauts, skyscrapers, prayers, and red balloons. Climbing is a high, and when you succeed you find Up. Eventually you have to come back down, but the best part is there’s always something new to climb – a new boundary to push. Seeing my progression over the past 6 months has been very exciting.. routes that were ‘impossible’ are now within reach. Each month another grade of problem becomes solved. The sight of more difficult climbs is no longer a daunting obstacle but an alluring challenge waiting to be attempted. I’ve never felt better – physically or mentally. I’m going Up. Are you coming?
The state of deployment, 2010 (part 1)
Jan/102
I’ve always been interested in software deployment. The part of the process that’s not really writing code, and you don’t really want to think about it but it has to get done… over and over. Sometimes it’s a real pain, and over the years I’ve seen and lived across the spectrum of deployment systems. Big hulking behemoths to frail collections of scp scripts.
Amazon definitely wins for the most engineered and weighty solutions. I didn’t spend an awful lot of time using it during my time there, but I will say this… when it works, it works. When it doesn’t, it hurts. Being my first look at a real deployment system, I have a special place for it in my programming heart. It’s got it’s flaws, but at the end of the day I often come back to it as my basis for comparison.
I recently got a Capistrano deploy to work for a small rails install I’ve been toying with. It took a while to tweak configs and settings here and there, but overall I enjoyed the flow and feeling of it all. Although, I may have config’d myself into a corner to taylor my install to the host that I’m using. I feel like there’s some more that I could do, given a better understanding and some doc reading. (In fact, I just did a quick search and deployed to my brain the docs about deploying to different stages.) Overall I was happy how easy it was to get started; an enjoyable experience but I don’t know if I’ll have too much to do with it in the future.
In the java world, I’m really liking the looks of SmartFrog. I haven’t had a real chance to get down and dirty with it yet. The learning curve feels a bit steep (maybe that’s just me), but it seems to be full featured and ‘abundantly engineered’ (aka complicated). There’s some cool points for being able to launch a VM, deploy software to it, run tests, and tear down the VM automatically. There’s also some other neat components: EC2 deploys, hadoop integration, an XMPP server (for intermachine communication as well as telling you your toast deploy is done), The problem is that it comes with having to learn a component description language to get it to do anything useful.
What makes a good deployment system to me? Here are a few thoughts off the top of my head:
- Point and shoot – as agonistic of the target machine as possible. I want to think as little as possible during the deployment process. Whether that’s order of operations, which packages go to what hosts, what side effects the deploy will have, etc. I also want to have the ability to easily and arbitrarily set and change what hosts get what packages. The quick provisioning of a spare development machine to serve as a test, for instance. A nice interface, whether web or command-line goes a long way.
- Idempotent (with easy clean-up). When I click deploy, I want to know that any running processes are nicely cleaned up, files aren’t left scattered about the target host, and then the next time I click deploy the process is just as smooth as the first time. The first time anyone uses the deployment system it’s usually to install “TestPackage123″ somewhere, multiple times, just to see it work. I shouldn’t need to feel nervous by sending out a deploy and wondering if the right magic incantation was or was not used. Rollbacks and removing deployed packages should be as quick and easy as getting them there in the first place. I’ve had development machines collect stale versions of software because it wasn’t immediately intuitive (or sometime possible) to undeploy short of rm -rf.
- State of the Union. There’s some level of reporting that is useful. Knowing what versions of what packages are on what machines at a glance is helpful. Questions that get asked like “Is staging up to date??” ”Which server is running X?” ”Who deployed Y to Z?” can and should be answered by a machine. Save human beings for the hard questions like.. ”Who’s bright idea was it to put the master db, search server, website, and batch processing system on the same machine?”
Certainly not an exhaustive list, or a very revolutionary one at that. Common sense really, but sometimes that is left at the door when it comes to deployments. My questions for you, the reader, are: What nice features have you seen in software deployment? What feature has been missing from your life? What other deployment systems are out there and deserve credit for being good or notoriously bad?
Someday I’ll get around to writing a followup part 2 to this deployment rant (with a little more meat on the bones perhaps), and maybe even before 2010 is over and done with. And with that, I end this post. Remember to be excellent to each other and party on dudes.
Edit: I can’t believe I forgot the coolest deployment story I’ve read: Continuous Deployment! Look for more about it in part 2!
those were the days.
Dec/090
Those were the days, when the Internet was innocent and pure. Geocities, Angelfire, and under construction men keeping a watchful eye. Kids these days, with their lulz and omgs…. we invented OMG and BRB. I remember a time before smileys, when emoticons were ASCII. Don’t get me wrong, there was a generation before mine who invented their own world. BBSes and gopher and what have you. We all have our good old days. Our own technological timecapsules, when things were innocent and pure.
What internet teen these days can tell you the sweet sound of the modem as it dials into AOL. That gamer who remembers iddqd, back when 3D was rad, or the turbo button was a sweet feature? The days before blogs and social networks. The days when gaudy and stylish websites were the same thing. Before javascript, before css… when surfing the web was new and netscape was bitchin’.
We stumble forward, some of us with vague yet disconnected views of what came before us. When we look out today at what our society is and believes, there are some areas of great promise and inspiration. Science and technology. And some areas of great concern – equality, civil rights, education, greed, and the other great divides in our lives…. but compare ourselves now with ourselves in the past. I mean seriously, we altered the very fabric our our law to ban alcohol for 14 years. Are you kidding me?? We fought a war with ourselves. We did all of those things we read about. They actually happened. Sometimes it’s difficult to relate to those days. And I wonder how I ever lived without broadband and tv on demand….
Those were the days.
All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves. – Amelia E. Barr, 1831-1919, All the Days of My Life, 1913
we are modern day wizards
Nov/092
Last night something amazing happened. The internet influenced real life, albeit in a (nearly) trivial way. We were sitting around enjoying some wine and watching streaming television. For whatever reason we started talking about tater tots, those golden delicious potato nuggets… As we sat there, looking at each other, our brains churned at how it would be remotely possible to get a bag of tater tots in front of us. At 10:50pm my friend posted the following to twitter:
if anyone brings me cooked delicious wonderful tatertots at [XXXX] st I will give you wine and hugs. and $10.
And with that, the tubes were in motion. Our collective expectation was having a good laugh and 0% chance of tater tots. Minutes later, an eternity for internet magic, a call arrived. “… you doing what? … …. awesome!” Another friend saw the late night plea for tots, was already on his way to the store, and decided to drop by with them.
Truly, we are modern day wizards. From nothing but the ether, we have conjured a physical manifestation to appear before us. What great power we possess, what other seemingly magical spells can we cast? As I am a man of science, and not of wizardry and witchcraft, I feel it is necessary to repeat this experiment and collect evidence of it’s occurrence in the rest of the world.
In this day and age we augment our reality with digital information. From maps to local search to mobile location based services to same-day delivery, we have at our fingertips a connection to a vast and powerful beast. I never feel lost in a strange city, I never feel out of shouting distance from my friends, I never feel like it’s impossible to do anything anymore… How has the internet chanced the physical world for you?
Erdos-Bacon…
Jul/090
…it’s what’s for breakfast.
So, I dug up an old image:
Modeling and Analysis Of Worm Defense Using Stochastic Activity Networks
David Nicol, Steve Hanna, William Sanders and Frank Stratton, University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign
That publication gave me a finite Erdos number of 5…. which ties me with Natalie Portman and puts me 1 ahead of Carl Sagan. My next goal is to get my Bacon number <= 3… (ideally == 1). If there’s anyone out there who can help, I would appreciate it!!!
A shot heard round the world
Jun/090
Photographs can change the world in the way words never will. 20 years ago today, this photo of an Unknown Rebel was taken. A picture is worth more than just 1000 words, it comes with its own translation into every language on earth…
Part of me wants to be that man, making a difference in the world by your actions… but a large part of me wants to feel what the camera man felt as he captured history through his lens, as he no less changed the world by the click of a shutter. Photographs are meant to be shared, they are conversations as much as they are art. A conversation frozen in time, unlocked by your eyes.
First Post!
Jun/090
Reinstalled the website today from ~35,000 ft above the country….
It makes for an interesting new beginning, but i’m not sure that it’s a sustainable bloging location. I’m in the process of copying over old content and starting to create new stuff.