Posts tagged: FUN

Greetings from Boston – specifically, BarCampBoston. My first “unconference”. Nerds galore.

The format is (mostly) half-hour talks from attendees on whatever subjects interest them – as long as other attendees have also expressed interest. It’s all tracked on a big board in the lobby. So far I’ve been in discussions involving localization, designing for technophobes, cloud computing, physics simulation in games, and Lisp. The level of interactivity is high – as is the collective expertise brought by the participants.

This post is not about any of my usual software or hardware topics, but it still is nerdy.

The flashlight.

Parliament’s classic song on the subject tells us that “everybody’s got a little light under the sun.” It’s good to have a little light, especially when the sun isn’t around. But some little lights are better than others.

The best thing that has happened to flashlights in recent years, especially little ones, is the rise of the LED. Compared to their predecessors, LED lamps are smaller, more efficient, more durable, and much longer burning.

At the Western Mass. Developers Group meeting this week I showed a few people some of the unixy fun you can have with a (jailbroken) iPod touch and the Cydia package manager. Cydia is a port of Debian’s APT system to the iPhone platform – i.e. it’s a real package manager. It made it a snap to install Python, Mobile Terminal, Mobile Text Edit, Subversion, etc.

This is the toolset that has allowed me to even do some work on the book as I mentioned in my last post.

This is a function that takes an integer and returns its ordinal representation, e.g. “1st” for 1 and so on.

It’s not the most readable thing, but once I saw the pieces falling into place I couldn’t help myself. Repetition of the “th” literal is the only thing that bugs me. Oh well.

ord_text = lambda n: "%d%s" % (n, "th" if 10 < n % 100 < 14 else {1:"st", 2:"nd", 3:"rd"}.get(n % 10, "th"))

Comes with a one-line test suite!

This has been going around – give people a peek at what commands you run most often. I ran this on my server, where I spend most of my shell time:

> history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  103   hg
   81   cd
   67   ll
   29   ./manage.py
   23   ab
   21   re-ap
   17   hgup
   14   svn
   13   cat
   12   ls

Notes:

• Mercurial has pushed my use of Subversion way down.
• I can’t remember what I was benchmarking with ab, but I’m sure it’s faster now!
• re-ap is my alias for restarting Apache (re-po restarts Postfix, re-my restarts MySQL, etc.).
• hgup is a simple shell script that updates the live instance of my site by fetching from the Mercurial repository in the staging instance. It would make a neat Django custom management command, but not one tied to a particular app.