Hello, Divmod

As I've mentioned before, the first time I had face-to-face time with Glyph and Amir was not too long after they'd formed Divmod, at pycon 2004. I'd toyed with Twisted for about two years prior to that, and the stuff they were doing with Quotient was just amazing (better feature sets than gmail). So, when they reached out after I'd blogged about my Zenoss contract coming to an end, I was just thrilled. We had some exciting talks about current development and the future, and given my long-standing love of Twisted and Divmod products (such as Nevow), wild horses couldn't have dragged me away.

I consider the core Twisted developers (and Divmod programmers) to be some of the best in the world. To be working with these guys is a dream come true and I am giddy with anticipation of both what we will be producing and all that I will be learning.

And now, I would like to take a moment to give some love to the python community in general: you guys are awesome.

I know you already know this, but one can never say it enough :-) I had all sorts of people and companies offer really cool positions when they heard I was available. There are some exciting startups that need developers and fantastic non-profits (that pay salaries) that would be great fun to work for (and feel good about). Also, my favorite dev team at my favorite Linux distribution's parent company reached out; they totally rock and I want to thank them for that (you know who you are!).

Two things I learned: VMware uses python and even better, LucasFilm uses Twisted. How totally cool is that? Hopefully we'll be talking to them on the TwistedShow sometime in the near future...

Technorati Tags: divmod, work, twisted

Skater Heaven

So I completely flipped out this morning before breakfast: I looked out the bedroom window after a morning conference call, and there are skaters slaloming down the road behind the house. I've got a 3' Sector9 bamboo longboard and love to get me some slalom action. But I suck. These guys were awesome.

I grabbed Sengey (my girlfriend's Tibetan mastif) and took him out for a walk up the hill. The skaters were amazingly friendly and totally mellow; they jumped at a chance to tell someone about their event. Turns out today is day one of the Seismic Nationals which is being held in my back yard!

I took my phone with me and snapped some shots of the skaters, and they are here in this flickr set. Enjoy!

We've been renting this house month-to-month while waiting to move into the house in Valentine, NE. It's a McMansion and not cozy at all, so this skating event has made the past two months here totally worth while.

Update: a sweet video of the same event last year.

Technorati Tags: skating, colorado

One Number to Rule Them All and in the Phone Book Bind Them

Thanks to Grand Central, I've got a new perma-number. This service completely rocks. I've already got my current temporary house number connected to it, and when I move in a week, I'll be updating it with that number.

Here are the features I love:

• being able to chose you number
• no more hated phone voice mail -- I can check all voice mail on line
• I get an email for every new voicemail
• I can share voice mails with friends with a link

Yeah, I have voice mail issues...

I believe registration is open now, but ping me if you need an invite. Don't for get to use this once you've got your new number.

Ubuntu 7.04 on iMac Core 2 Duo, 2G

Well, I busted me arse this afternoon and evening trying to get Ubuntu set up on my new iMac. It installed without issue (using the "alternate" x386 iso), but has the following critical issues:

1. No wireless
2. No widescreen support
3. No sound
4. Doesn't recognize CD/DVD drive after install and reboot

I'm kind of bummed, since I'd planned on doing dev work on this box (can we even call the iMacs "boxes"?) in native Ubuntu, and now I'll have to use parallels until the driver support is developed. Or until someone sends me a link that I've managed to miss despite incessant googling today...

Once I'm moved into the new place, I'll have a GB switch in the office and will be able to work in Ubuntu over copper. The resolution bugs me more than the lack of sound and DVD, but I can live with those for now. I guess.

But, hey -- it plays WoW and UT2004 in OS X like a champ :-)

Technorati Tags: apple, ubuntu, mac os x, linux

publish-bot with logging capability

Last year sometime, I received several emails from people wanting me to release the supybot IRC plugins I wrote back in 2005 for svn and RSS updates. I'd actually written for several different IRC bots (both twisted-based, and non-twisted bots) but the code was particularly messy for supybot. During one conversation, I said that I'd really done it all wrong, and the last thing I wanted to do was clean up wrong code. If I got a chance, I would do it right:

• create an IRC client for communicating to servers+channels
• create a message server running on local host
• process/parse data from the local server to the IRC client (i.e., appropriate IRC channel)

Such a flexible design would suit every need I have for writing data to an IRC channel.

Turns out radix did just so earlier this year for Canonical, as he relates in this blog post. This is exactly what I needed this weekend while migrating my old IRC bot to a new server. Well, almost all I needed. There were a couple features I wanted to add...

Not having worked with bzr or launchpad much, I asked radix about branching his code, since I heard that Canonical actually provides developers a way of doing that without leaving the launchpad environment of trunk. His instructions were quite simple, and I summarize them here for the benefit of others:

• find the project you want to branch on launchpad
• checkout trunk (if that's what you're branching)
• commit (a local action) with a message about this being a new branch
• make your changes (with any number of commits)
• push all your commits to your branch on launchpad

The steps above assume that you have bzr installed and have uploaded your SSH keys to launchpad.

Here are the bzr commands that I used:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~radix/publish-bot/trunk publish-logger-bot
cd publish-logger-bot
bzr commit --unchanged -m "Created branch of radix's publish-bot."
bzr push sftp://oubiwann@bazaar.launchpad.net/~oubiwann/publish-bot/publish-logger-bot

The changes I committed:

• enabled logging
• added log-rotation
• added an HTTP service for browsing the log files

The code is available here:
https://code.launchpad.net/~oubiwann/publish-bot/publish-logger-bot

Forthcoming features:

• a search form for the log files
• a parser for bot commands, thus enabling human -> bot communications (will probably dust off my old pyparsing code for this)
• arbitrary time log rotation (currently it's by day, ad midnight)

And for dessert:

[18-Aug-2007 17:56:50] [connected at Sat Aug 18 17:56:50 2007]
[18-Aug-2007 17:57:00] [wallflower (logger bot) has joined #supersecretchannel]
[18-Aug-2007 18:00:38] <keturn> what's a wallflower?
[18-Aug-2007 18:20:09] <PenguinOfDoom> It's a flower that grows out of a wall
[18-Aug-2007 18:20:52] <keturn> and has an irc client?
[18-Aug-2007 18:22:49] <keturn> is it related to an oubiwann?
[18-Aug-2007 18:34:00] <exarkun> I reckon it is

Technorati Tags: bzr, canonical, irc, python, software, twisted, web