Sat, 06 Jun 2009
MUST HAVE EXTENSIVE PYTHON
"MUST HAVE EXTENSIVE PYTHON"
"MUST HAVE EXTENSIVE DJANGO"
-- A JOB LISTING.
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Recycling the past
2009-JunComments
Comments are welcome. Email me."MUST HAVE EXTENSIVE PYTHON"
"MUST HAVE EXTENSIVE DJANGO"
-- A JOB LISTING.
Fri, 08 May 2009
What is open source (and Free Software) missing? / Moving to Atlanta
Tim and my mother are both neonatologists at the Golisano Children's Hospital inside the University of Rochester. Earlier today, they had this conversation:
In fact, I'm moving to Atlanta because a venture capital firm there funded me, Nelson Pavlosky, and my friend Raphael Krut-Landau to start a company to improve interactions in the open source / free software world. We get enough money to live in Atlanta from May 18 to August 6, and after that, we have to seek more funding.
This has led to a series of ironies. The first is that I am working on a startup. The second is that I left San Francisco to do it.
But I have already moved out of San Franisco, and I have left my job at Creative Commons. (Feel free to get in touch with me (outside my website's comments) about filling my shoes there.) Thanks, Nathan and Mike, for giving me the chance to contribute to CC, an organization and project that I have always had a great passion for.
For a while, I may seem vague about the project I am about to undertake; it's because I still want to nail down some details between the three of us. When Nelson, Raphael, and I arrive in person, we're going to kick into gear.
I've been chatting with a few of you over the past few months about ideas, and I do want to especially thank Karl Fogel and Mako Hill for helping the three of us think through what could be done.
Some questions for readers:
Feel free to email me (asheesh at asheesh.org) if you'd rather not comment publicly. I have a few ideas of my own, and I hope to be tossing them up for everyone to bat at soon!
P.S. Noisebridge, I will miss you!
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Mon, 27 Apr 2009
Comments
What if there were comments on asheesh.org?
Discuss.
[sysop] permanent link
Sat, 25 Apr 2009
Explainer: "Why do some URLs have www in them, and what difference does it make?"
Katy (who I know from the CC internship in 2006) asked me this question recently:
To understand, I have to explain how a browser gets a web page from the Internet. When a browser is asked to load a URL like <a href="http://www.asheesh.org/scribble/enlightened-but-confused.html> http://www.asheesh.org/scribble/enlightened-but-confused.html</a>, it breaks it apart into components.
HTTP, the "scheme", tells the browser what protocol (or network language) to speak when it requests the page from the server.
The domain name is where things get interesting. This alone tells the browser who to ask for the page. The browser looks up www.asheesh.org in the domain name system, an Internet phone book service that converts names to numbers (so-called "IP addresses"). Once it knows the IP address for that name, it connects to it and prepares to speak HTTP.
The browser connects to that IP address, and asks (in the network language of HTTP):
So now, let's think about how http://www.asheesh.org/ and http://google.com/ differ: Their scheme is the same, and their path is the same. But the domain name is different.
The same is true for http://asheesh.org/ and http://www.asheesh.org/. You get the same content because, as luck has it, the administrator for asheesh.org is the same as the administrator for www.asheesh.org, and I decided to make them work the same way.
For some websites, if you add the www component, you do get different contents back: for example, http://cs.rochester.edu/ does not load, whereas http://www.cs.rochester.edu/ does.
So the final answer to Katy's question: You're lucky you ever get the same page for two URLs that are different, even if just by "www".
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Fri, 27 Mar 2009
Pycon09: "Scrape the Web" is over
For my attendees, and anyone else following along at home:
Thanks for coming! I had a great time at the talk, and I already wrote a little bit about how much fun I had. I wanted to be sure to conclude the tutorial with some next steps for you all.
The presentation
Some crucial links:
The demos that didn't work
There were two demos that were less smooth than they ought to have been.
For WordPress Hash Cash, there's the lovely simple code I wrote that uses python-spidermonkey to post comments to a blog with HashCash. One such blog is online at http://pycon09.asheesh.org/hashcash/ ; please try it! (The reason it didn't work was some heavy load on my server during the talk.)
For Selenium RC, you can see the sample code in examples/seleniumrc/. There is a README in that directory that explains clearly how to run that code. (It didn't work for the same reason.)
The future
I'm available for questions, both hands-on at PyCon and by email after the weekend. Just email me!
[preso] permanent link
"Scrape the web" at PyCon: lots of fun!
Thursday morning at 9 am, I gave my scheduled tutorial at PyCon: Scrape the Web: Strategies for programming websites that don't expect it.
For those of you who attended, thank you! You made it loads of fun. The tutorial was supposedly full at 30 people, but in fact we had at least five more; at the halfway break, staff added another table to the room so that those of you standing in the back could sit down!
Because I was so behind on so many things from travel, I stayed up all night before the talk. This is actually fun for me, as we saw at Debconf last year. So I arrived at the talk energized and with my examples fleshed-out (for the most part).
There were a few ways I knew things were going well.
Early on in the talk, Nathan Yergler arrived and saw that we were scraping information from the CC lunch mainstay Mehfil Indian, nicknamed "Curry in a hurry." This caused a ricochet of smiles between me at the front and Nathan at the back; I hope that helped the mood for others, too!
Throughout the talk, the audience looked happy, and they felt comfortable enough to stop me and ask questions. Knowing that the audience feels comfortable participating is crucial for me. Participation and questioning are part of learning; they are also the best way for me to know how to tailor what topics I cover to the people in the room.
After the talk, some attendees handed in evaluation forms. One man asked me what he should do with his. "I've been putting them in this box face-down," I explained.
He suggested, "This one you ought to see face-up!"
About five people came up after the talk and asked me specific questions. One was a young lady who attended my preview talk at Baypiggies in January, which was great to see.
The same number came up to me at the end and thanked me for a good talk, which was very rewarding. One asked how often I give talks at conferences. I mentioned my OSCON talk with Nathan, and wondered to myself what other conference sessions I had led. He urged me, "You really ought to make speaking part of your career. You're a great speaker."
I followed a couple of attendees to lunch; one pointed out the room had been Twittering madly during the talk. A search of Twitter shows a lot of positive comments. (He also pointed out that someone else is "paulproteus" on Twitter.)
Basically, everybody loves me. Yay!
By the end of lunch, I was fading from the lack of sleep. I took a six-hour nap, and I woke up after all the official PyCon proceedings were over. I read an email from Greg Lindstrom, organizer of the Tutorials series of talks at PyCon. His email began:
I giggled about this as I walked to dinner with Nathan.
What a great start to PyCon!
[preso] permanent link
FSF Award for Projects of Social Benefit
Last weekend, I attended the Free Software Foundation's LibrePlanet 2009 conference.
The first day was a full day of talks from Free Software luminaries including Jeremy Allison of Samba and Evan Podromou of identi.ca. During the talks, the conference IRC chat room was brimming with conversation; between talks, so were the hallways.
The day concluded in an award ceremony. We joked around on IRC:
Richard Stallman happily presented the Award for the Advancement of Free Software to Wietse Venema for writing the Postfix mail server. Then he continued to announce the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, awarded...
"...to Creative Commons."
Mike Linksvayer kept sitting at his laptop.
"Shouldn't we go get that?" I asked him.
"Yeah," he answered, not moving from his computer.
"Should I come with you?" I asked.
"Yes," he said crisply.
And up we went.
Richard handed Mike the award, and I stood next to Mike as Richard explained to the audience that he wished Creative Commons would talk more about freedom. As Mike accepted the award from the lectern, I did my best to not grin like an absolute idiot. I managed to look somewhat serious in the photo as Mike cropped it; maybe that's the effect of the shadows.
Asheesh Laroia and Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons accept the 2008 Free Software Foundation Award for Project of Social Benefit from Richard Stallman. Detail of photo by Matt Hins / CC BY-SA. (Cropped image and this caption by Mike.)
I was immensely pleased. Creative Commons and Free Software, as organizations and as movements, are about lifting unneeded or immoral burdens copyright law levies on people who want to remix, improve, and share. These movements tie together as Free Culture, and they have been a huge part of my life. Moreover, Free Software was the first empowerment movement I could concretely understand.
"Happy hacking!" said Stallman to us as we walked off stage.
[free-culture] permanent link
Thu, 12 Mar 2009
Today at ETech: Baobab Health Partnership
(I mostly live-blogged this; excuse the messiness.)
Mike McKay gave a fantastic presentation about his work at Baobab Health Partnership. To quote his blurb:
Baobab Health Partnership took i-openers, added a PIC to create a touch-screen, and hacked on Power over Ethernet, and configured them to be used as data entry and analysis workstations for HIV clinics in Malawi.
The i-opener was an "Internet appliance" sold as a simple web terminal: given a monthly subscription for the i-opener service, you could have an inexpensive, trouble-free web browsing experience. As it happened, the community swiftly repurposed the devices. According to one i-opener hacker, "What follows is discussion and photographs of a most righteous hack, turning the nearly-free Netpliance i-opener web appliance into a full featured pseudolaptop / electronic photo album." Slashdot saw a lot of excitement around these in 2000 and 2001, but they lacked Ethernet or wifi, so they fell out of favor.
I wanted to give you that background so I can explain that the Baobab Health terminal is the coolest thing I have ever heard of anyone doing with an i-opener. This puts my kitchen recipe terminal plan to shame. Check out patient registration video that shows the terminals in use.
The software stack is all open source: They have an Ubuntu server running MySQL and Ruby on Rails, and the user interface is just an AJAX web application running in full-screen mode. It was developed by Malawaian developers who, says McKay, "were trained in VB. Now they hang out on IRC and flame people on mailing lists. They're part of the Internet."
As they bought a few from eBay for about thirty dollars, they noticed that one person in Nebraska seemed to keep listing them. It turned out that he had been stockpiling the until he figured out something great to do with them. In the end, the Nebraskan gave them two thousand i-openers. (The twentieth century rises again.)
As far as impact, McKay pointed out decision support makes a huge difference in healthcare, as Provonost found at Hopkins years ago with checklists. He also talked about how they data validation dramatically changed the clinics' ability to record useful data; most of the previous paper records were found to be useless as they began to import them into the computerized system. Through comparisons to other people of similar age and gender, they can encourage correct weight measurement data entry. Danny O'Brien pointed out that this does not degrade well in the case of equipment or network failure. I believe Danny was hinting at the question of what happens when the entire system fails (backups? data loss?); McKay understood it to refer to what happens during temporary failures. He explained that with their generators, they've had very good reliability. When the computers fail, many clinics take paper records instead, though some simply lock the doors and stop seeing patients. That clinics choose the latter approach has provided strong motivation for their programmers to fix reliability issues!
McKay went on an aside to talk about having his appendix removed when he was in the States. "All of a sudden, I was exposed to the American health care system, and I was shocked at how broken it is. There's no computers anywhere! The only computers around are at billing."
To get to electronic medical records in the US, he says, "Maybe we just need a disruptive piece of technology."
As for how to spread the program to other countries or circumstances, McKay explained, "One of our problems is the next generation of hardware. I'm not going to send this hacked i-opener to a country where there aren't technicians who know what to do with them."
The program was started by Gerry Douglas in 2000. Douglas is now based in Pittsburgh, though he spends four to five months of the year in Malawi. Also, the data collected by the project inform policy discussions at a quarterly HIV Forum in Malawi. A man from the NIH suggested that they work on sharing that data and doing more research.
The presentation was fantastic; the work is brilliant; and the man is friendly and thoughtful.
[event] permanent link
Wed, 11 Mar 2009
Photo galleries
I prefer to host my own Internet services. Here is a quick summary of what I have found in the past two hours of my life:
It's 2009. Am I just going to use Flickr and call it a day?
I selected these by looking through web photo gallery programs on freshmeat.net. I'd like a dynamic one so I can accept comments.
It does seem there are some decent galleries for WordPress, in particular NextGEN Gallery.
What do others in the autonomous world do? Am I supposed to write my own?
(Waiting for Gallery3 is probably a good path forward, failing that.)
[debian] permanent link
Sat, 07 Mar 2009
That LJ post about Watchmen - Yeah, it sucked
My friend Lisa pointed me to Andrei's review of Watchmen.
The review begins with surprises. In the edited version that is online now, we learn watching the movie caused "the destruction of all of [Andrei's] hopes and dreams." That's a sizable investment for a movie based on a comic book. Furthermore, he writes on his LiveJournal post that he felt "punished with awkward sex and slow-mo violence." One would think that a LJer would be pleased with both of those!
Andrei asks, "Is producing copious amounts of blood the only way to generate a dark mood?" This must be a rhetorical question; any LJer worth his salt knows that changing the theme and typing in all lowercase can do that, too. (In fairness, Lisa points out that this is difficult to achieve in a movie.)
Lisa mentions that a previous version of the post called people who like the movie "sheep." It's good that Andrei does not call them goats, else he raise the ire of Frank the Goat, LiveJournal's beloved mascot. Presumably Frank's global fanbase would have risen up in anger, too. (Frank the Goat has previously written about his ambivalence about not being a sheep.)
There are many things in this review I would not have said. Despite the temptation, I would especially not have shared this utterance with my new friend Quinn, the first person I know to have seen the movie: "Comedian bad, but torn and damaged individual."
The story of Andrei's post is a case study in dramatic irony. He writes of the voice acting, "We got the same crap Bale did in Batman where he thinks making your voice gravelly gives it more gravitas. No, it doesn't." It seems that Andrei thinks calling your friends sheep gives your voice more gravitas. As his friends teach him in the comment section: No, it doesn't.
At least Andrei's user picture (unmodified from original) does elicit the appropriate sense of gravitas.
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