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Moving Forward in Oregon
Entry posted on October 01, 2010.A bit of history around Urban Airship and thoughts on doing business in Oregon, leading up to why I think that John Kitzhaber should be our governor.
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DjangoCon NoSQL Panel
Entry posted on September 16, 2010.Some brief thoughts around the panel that I was on at this year's DjangoCon. The topic was on NoSQL and Django.
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Posterous and URLs
Entry posted on June 29, 2010.Concerns on the long-term consequences around an issue with Posterous not supporting custom URLs of any kind.
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ZNC's partyline
Link posted on March 16, 2010.URL: http://en.znc.in/wiki/Partyline
I asked around looking around for what people used for an SSL-and-password-protected private IRC network. Idan very kindly mentioned that the IRC bouncer ZNC, which we were using anyway, supports a partyline. A partyline is a private room that's on the bouncer, independent of other networks. Since our ZNC is already behind SSL and password protected, the ability to do a private room on that bouncer fits our needs perfectly.
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Setting up Hudson on Ubuntu 9.10 with Apache, Django, VirtualEnv, etc.
Entry posted on February 27, 2010.It took me a while to properly set up Hudson the way we wanted, and I figured that I should document the process in case anybody else wanted to take a crack at it.
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pubsubsuperfeedr
Entry posted on January 28, 2010.Introducing our library which allows you to easily register/unregister feeds with Superfeedr.
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MongoDB is awesome. (Edit: not so fast)
Link posted on January 08, 2010."...as writes occur old data will start migrating to other shards."
Thanks Adam for pointing this out.
We recently started using MongoDB at work and, I have to say, it's been an absolute dream so far.
Update: This keeps coming back to haunt me, often in humorous situations. Want to know why? Read Adam's dissection of our recent history.
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PIL, libjpeg, Snow Leopard, and missing _jpeg_resync_to_restart
Entry posted on November 21, 2009.I just spent a lot of time trying to get this working and I figured I should blog about this.
The Snow Leopard, libjpeg and PIL combination has a lot of issues. There are tons of blog posts out there about this, and they definitely helped get me a long way.
This blog post and http://proteus-tech.com/blog/cwt/install-pil-in-snow-leopard/ both are great for installing PIL and libjpeg, and if those work, great. You're done.
If, however, you keep getting issues after this when you attempt to import _imaging, try compiling libjpeg as i386.
When going to compile libjpeg:
CC="gcc -arch i386" ./configure --enable-shared --enable-static
And then do the rest normally, and you should be good to go.
Good luck.
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More favorite tools: Gowalla
Link posted on November 19, 2009.URL: http://gowalla.com/
So, full disclosure, I found out about Gowalla because they signed up to use Urban Airship. In other words, Gowalla uses Urban Airship, and I'm a cofounder at UA.
HOWEVER
That does not dilute Gowalla's awesomeness.
Gowalla is kind of like FourSquare - you check in at locations and your friends are notified that you have done so. I view these apps as an easy way to invite my friends to my location. And, yes, there is the game aspect of it. With FourSquare, you're competing on points and attempting to get mayorships. With Gowalla, you get items - beautifully done images, really - that you can swap with items at the spot you're at or others.
FourSquare has several advantages over Gowalla, such as a larger user base, restrictions to city limits (though I do enjoy seeing British friends checking in, it's not exactly useful information) and an API. However, it seems that Gowalla is working hard on these things, so I'm looking forward to them as well. Gowalla also requires that you be within a certain distance around the spot you're checking in at, which is nice.
Much like a luxury car vs. an economy car, or a Mac vs. a PC, it's the little features that are so well done that appeal to me about Gowalla. They have a great design and the app is rock solid. I'm definitely a fan.
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New version of Gabble
Link posted on November 18, 2009.URL: http://erikhinterbichler.com/software/gabble/
I figured I should probably be talking a bit more about the tools that I/we use and love.
We use Yammer at work and it's fantastic. It fills a perfect niche for sharing information across our four-person team. I've also found that Gabble is the best client for it and, as of the latest update, it solves all but one of my minor beefs with it.
It now has image viewing inline (before attachments would often get lost), it will resize the text area without bumping the text below the screen if Gabble is at the bottom of the screen (this is a complicated description, but trust me, it was annoying), and a bug fix that never really affected me.
The only thing that Gabble could fix that's bothering me right now is that it often reposts an entire day's worth of Yammer entries (I refuse to call them "yams") to Growl, cluttering that up for a bit. I think this happens when it unexpectedly quits or updates.
At any rate, Yammer + Gabble is a very nice tool.
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Eric Holscher releases Kong
Link posted on November 18, 2009.URL: http://ericholscher.com/blog/2009/nov/17/announcing-kong-server-description-and-deployment-/
Kong is a way to run automated Twill tests against a suite of existing services. Simon describes it as a monitoring tool, which I don't think is quite accurate - I'd still use monit for that. This is a step above that, doing basic integration testing on production sites to make sure that everything appears happy. I definitely see a use for this, especially when managing a large number of sites that share a code base.
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FullCalendar - jQuery plugin to provide a calendar interface
Link posted on November 18, 2009.URL: http://arshaw.com/fullcalendar/
Thanks to Jacob for finding this one.
"FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar ... It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month and is easily configured to use your own feed format (an extension is provided for Google Calendar). It is visually customizable and exposes hooks for user-triggered events (like clicking or dragging an event)."
This is just fantastic. I don't have a particular need for it at the moment, but it's very comforting to know that it's there when I do.
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tender-multipass, Python utilities for easily integrating Tender's MultiPass authentication
Entry posted on October 19, 2009.Introducing tender-multipass, a Python library for easily sending along multipass single-sign-on requests for Tender.
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Fixing jinja2 and pycrypto (and probably others) on Snow Leopard
Entry posted on September 07, 2009.A quick fix to get some Python libraries compiling properly on Snow Leopard.
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Introducing JSONP-USGS
Entry posted on August 26, 2009.A brief description of a quick little Google App Engine app that I wrote to provide elevation data from the USGS as a jsonp-enabled API.
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Just a tip
Entry posted on May 18, 2009.Don't even bother trying to watch videos and other Flash content in Firefox on OS X - Safari just works so much better.
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