Ben Harper

This dude is just awesome. I've been listening to him casually since college (one of my suite-mates was a big fan). Through my casual enjoyment, my housemate has become a pretty big fan, so I got her the three-disc edition of Both Sides of the Gun. Of course, I've been listening to it as well :-)



As a result, I've been hearing a much more diverse selection of his music than I've ever had at my fingertips. And I've been listening more closely...



This guy is just amazing. He's got sounds and styles that range from Cat Stevens and Mick Jagger to Stevie Wonder and Stevie Ray Vaughn. He's got punk, jazz, honkey-tonk as well as his signature quiet laments. And he pulls it off in a manner fantastical. Not once does it appear as if this is a musician who can't make up his mind; quite the contrary. Everything he does on three-disc album is 100% Ben Harper, 100% committed to the music.



Go get it now. Before you get hit by a bus.

Technorati Tags: entertainment, music

The Twisted Show

We're doing a little experiment on the Twisted Labs site, and I thought I would invite folks to check it out:

  http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TheTwistedShow

It's also linked off of the front page under "New Feature", so it's hard to miss :-) We're aiming for podcasts down the line, but right now (while I'm learning how to actually *conduct* an interview) we're providing (edited) transcripts.

I'm actually kind of excited about this: it's such a great opportunity to chat one-on-one with folks who are using Twisted as part of their success -- which is ultimately what software is supposed to help us do.

Our first interview was with Renkoo, providers of a social networking software for fluidly and intuitively plan events with friends. It's a perfect match for planning get-togethers when the "when" and "where" haven't yet been decided.

We've got a list of projects in mind for interviews and/or podcasts, but I'd love to hear from folks on who *you'd* like us to interview. And the kinds of questions to which you'd be interested in hearing answers.

Technorati Tags: community, twisted

How to Skin a Trac

As some folks know, I worked with Huw Wilkins on the new redesign of the Twisted site. Huw did the design, CSS etc., and I hacked around on trac to make his vision work within that framework. He made my life very easy, though, as he produced the entire design to fit perfectly within trac.

The new Twisted site has been a success -- we're getting many more visitors and they are staying longer than ever. I believe that the design and the improving info architecture are the most significant contributors to this. And after seeing these changes and the assumed enjoyment that folks are deriving from them, all I could think was "This was so easy to do, there's no excuse not to have a good-looking trac instance."

Having been inspired by Huw's great design for Twisted, I did the same thing for The Zenoss internal trac instances. I had a great time doing this, having explored a lot with the Twisted site redesign. What's more, with the use of the trac dev branch (forth-coming version 0.11) the Genshi templates really simplify the process. With the process I had established with the Twisted work and the Zenoss work, I was have the courage to update my own massive number of trac projects: 3 domains with each one being a trac "multi-sites" setup.

People don't realize how quickly you can take a generic trac and have something quite unique. Here's all you need to do:

• install Genshi and 0.11 Trac from subversion
• design your look and feel and then prepare your images
• edit the trac.css file
• update the site.html and layout.html Genshi template files

Now, things do get a little complicated when you have trac multisites running. You have to write code that will render the sites index the way you want. Then you need to consider how to manage the templates across all the sites.

As an example, I've put the trac customizations in subversion here.

Technorati Tags: design, software, web

Blogging with ecto

Mark Hinkle has been exploring Flock (Mac OS X) for use with the forth-coming Zenoss blogs, and that reminded me of a brief conversation with radix about a year ago where we were discussing blog editors. Thus re-motivated, I did a little research and evaluation of blog editing/posting software. The one that seems to be the most complete and featureful (to me) is ecto. Getting it set up with the new blogger seems a little awkward (the default "access point" doesn't work), but there's another version in the works where the kinks will be worked out (or be moot).

Here's what I had to do to get it (version 2.4.1 Universal + blogger beta support) to work with the new blogger API:

• Hit the "Add Account" button on the Accounts window
• Give my blog URL, as requested
• Set the System as "Blogger"
• Set the API as "Atom"
• Set the Access Point as http://www.blogger.com/feeds/default/blogs
• Be sure that all the RSS feeds are "full" (blog settings in Blogger admin UI)

ecto was then able to get a list of my blogs for various account names as well as recent entries for each one.

One problem I have run into, however, is the multiple accounts thing. I have to quit ecto and restart it in order to post to blogger under a different user name. It seems to be caching login info and not using the user name and password that the particular account is configured with.

Despite that minor inconvenience, I will probably purchase the full version of this software and begin using it extensively. The single driving motivation for this is the multiple account management feature: seeing all the accounts and blogs I have within one application acts as a reminder; I will be more likely to post to my other blogs now :-)

Technorati Tags: macosx, blogging, software

Back at Zenoss HQ

For part of this week, I've been flown back to Annapolis, MD for a few days, ostensibly for the holiday party, but in addition, to coordinate in-person with Mark Hinkle and Rusty Wilson on the infrastructure and code needed for the next 6 month community push. In an effort to jump-start a whole set of community tools that Zenoss wants to provide, I've finished up some pretty sweet (yes, unit tests are sweet and so it automated web application/form processing/monitoring) additions to Zenoss Core and I am now switching gears to integrate community communications and work on the Super Secret Zenoss.net project (lots of Zope3 + Five + Plone hacking). Pretty fun stuff.

It's been really cool being back with the Zenoss core team this week -- lots of changes have happened since August: additional (and pretty sweet) office space, lots more people, lots of awesome code being produced by Erik Dahl, Eric Newton and Chris Blunck that I haven't had a chance to see until now. There a bunch more stuff that I can't let out of the bag yet, but is most excitimentful. Well, it is if you're into monitoring and systems/network management... and the software that helps you do that :-)

Technorati Tags: business, software, zope 3

Google Projects adds Wiki Support

Well, Google has supplied the last little piece of functionality that will allow me to move all of my projects onto their infrastructure.

The best part about it is the integration they've done with svn. I've rigged up rsync scripts in the past when working on SourceForge projects that allowed me to maintain the content in svn. With Google projects, I now get that for free, without any extra overhead or maintenance.

To test this new feature, I began migrating content from the old pymon project page to the hosted project page on google. The wiki syntax is the one many of us have been using for years -- first with MoinMoin and then with trac. Everything worked flawlessly.

The only minor bone I have to pick is the view on the wiki page -- it lists the pages instead of taking one directly to the main page. The listing is good, but I'd prefer an actual page as the default. I've added a link on the main project page to the WikiStart page, though, and that helps a bit. Another nice-to-have would be an automatic "return to parent: ParentPage" link generated at the top
of all new child pages.

All in all, I'm quite excited by the new feature and am looking forward to no longer having to host my own trac/svn anymore!

Technorati Tags: documentation, management, software

Twisted Web Site Gets a Facelift

I'd like to take this opportunity to invite folks to the new super lucky special auspicious yum-yum Twisted web site. And to offer massive grattitude to Huw Wilkins for donating the design and his time to this much-needed effort. As most people know, the Twisted site has been the ghetto boy for a while now, we're all quite delighted to have made it out of The Projects.

We've still got a large number of tasks on our collective plate to polish everything up, and there will doubtless be new issues that need addressing. However, we will all be much happier looking at the site during the on-going work :-)

Technorati Tags: community, twisted, web

Mac OS X --> Solaris via Serial

My google foo was pretty low tonight, and I had a hell of a time connecting to a Netra 240. After lots of searching, trial, and error, I'm now in like Flynn. Here's what I ended up using:

• Sun Netra 240
• Mac OS X 10.4, PowerBook G4
• Keyspan USB/Serial adapter (P/N: USA-19HS)
• Keyspan drivers
• Sun-provided RJ-45 serial cable (I think the part number is 530-2093-01)
• minicom (installed via Fink)

Instructions for getting connected with minicom:

• Start minicom from the command line
• Hit "ctl-a" an then "z"
• Hit "o" to adjust the configuration
• Down-arrow to the "Serial port setup" menu and select
• Make sure that you're pointed at the right serial device and that your speed/parity setting is "9600 8N1"
• Hit "enter" to save and go back to the menu
• Select "Modem and dialing" and change the "Init string" to "~^M~"
• Hit "enter" and select "Save setup as dfl", exit, and restart minicom

Here are the gotchas I ran into:

• be sure to reboot OS X after installing the adapter drivers
• be sure to use the right cable (I was using a Cisco RJ-45 serial cable, and it seems to be pinned differently)
• be sure to use minicom (I tried with ZTerm, but I just don't grok GUI apps)

Once all these were in place, it was a piece of cake. With a BREAK (no keyboard for the Netra, so no "Stop-A") during boot-up, I'm ready to wipe this puppy and install Solaris 10.

Damn, Sun makes solid hardware. It's been years since I've played with their stuff. Even if Python apps don't run so well on Solaris, it's still going to be good to use these machines again.

Update: Added step-by-step instructions for connecting with minicom.

Nevow for Rapid-Deployments

I think I remember Guido making the comment that Twisted and/or Nevow scared him. I also think that (ignoring the causal effects of his statement) many people feel the same way, and if those people saw this blog post, they'd say I was deluded.

I've been using Nevow (on and off) since fzZzy first presented it at PyCon2004. I've been blogging about it since a year after that.

My first "web framework" was shell-script-generated HTML in the mid-90s. Then I found PHP. Zope. Perl (Interchange and Mason). Plone. Then a whole string of custom solutions.

I tried Django when it first came out, and hated it. I tried it again recently, and was most pleased with the progress they've made. I'm using it on a project with some non-programmer folk who wanted to convert their application from PHP to Python (I couldn't sell them on twisted). After digging around in the Django code base, I can safely say I will probably enjoy myself while working on the project.

I've also been a fan of the z3 CA for a couple years, and disagree with much of Ian Bicking's recent assessment of it (and agree very strongly with Martijn's comments). I continue to do work with z3 and enjoy almost all of it (being able to pick and choose helps greatly).

But when it comes down to it, when I need to roll something out fast, and I can choose the framework without concern for such things as technical support, community popularity, buzz, or political considerations, I choose Nevow. Case in point, the project I mentioned in this post. 30 minutes to casually convert a project from z3 to Nevow.

Though important, development speed is not the only consideration to make. Everyone talks about how fast you can roll a project out in web framework X, etc. But there's something that has a much higher priority for me: how insane will it let me be? Can I do anything I want? Once it's built, can I plug "stuff" in and out? Can I make unexpected changes easily and quickly, without compromising the integrity of the architecture? And even more: can I build my own system(s) with it?

And that's where Nevow cinches it for me. I am the most comfortable with it's design, templating, internals, and programmer freedom. I feel I have a little more freedom and flexibility with it than I do with z3. Nevow provides me with the tools and comfort level to build my own systems easily, quickly, and extensibly.

As an example, take this work in progress.

I've built a couple game-world oriented sites in the past. The first one used PHP and the second two used Plone. In both cases, it was very difficult to easily manage what I wanted to manage. I learned a lot of lessons about how information management works for me. When I started working on Myðgarður, I put these lessons into effect. Nevow let me do that.

I have a highly customized brain that needs things done in a certain way in order to be maximally productive. I think lots of brains are like that ;-) I want a framework that reflects my brain's needs, not only to deliver a result quickly, but to deliver it in a way the fits me best... and can adapt to the future best.

As a side note, Nevow is going through an overhaul (more) right now that will not only improve its general efficiency, but will actually fit my brain even better. When the context-less Nevow is released, I plan on producing at least one screencast on how to go form 0 to 60 with it in less than 20 minutes.

So stay tuned...

Technorati Tags: internet, nevow, programming, python, twisted, web

A New Experience

As I told Bill Karpovich today, I don't think I've ever had this happen before: add a feature to software and then have someone on a major news site blog about it.

To be fair, the Zenoss objects-to-XML (and vice versa) code was written quite a while ago by Erik Dahl. What I finished this week was providing a means of exporting Zenoss templates (RRD and Nagios) and then importing them from the file system or a URL (as well as some initial UI plumbing).

The code may sound mundane, but when you have a highly active, intense, and enthusiastic user base, writing code that makes their lives easier is a profoundly satisfying activity. Because, inevitably, you get emails and IRC comments like "you guys are awesome!" and "we love you!"

The next level of deployment will likely include a dedicated mail list for users to share the systems management/monitoring templates (and download them directly into Zenoss). This will be a transitional feature while we continue working on the portal where users will have the ability to upload, edit, and publish (share) their templates, and then download these templates through the Zenoss management UI.

I'm having a great time with these guys -- an awesome team with an incredible product and an amazing community :-)

Now playing:

Muse - Darkshines

Technorati Tags: media, monitoring, programming, software, work