Myles Braithwaite

One of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) employees gives a really cool screencast about building better web applicaitons with scripting languages.

You might learn a whole new programming language to put off making something useful with the one you already know.
zefrank

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company’s machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

• Wired – See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

Ordinarily Wikipedia allows anyone to edit its articles, and the encyclopedia has become a target for vandals, revisionists and spin doctors. In an effort to keep Wikipedia more honest, U.S. graduate student Virgil Griffiths created WikiScanner, a site that can trace the IP addresses of computers that have made edits to Wikipedia entries in the last five years.

• CBC – New ‘WikiScanner’ exposes underhanded editors

ick Broadhead, a Toronto-based Internet consultant, says in some cases finding the originating point of a Wikipedia edit is the cyber-equivalent of discovering a “prostitute’s black book.”

“It can be detrimental to the subject of an article that has information that casts you in a negative light or brings up events that you would rather forget about; hence, the desire to modify the entries so that particular events are recast or deleted altogether. You can’t do this with Encyclopedia Britannica, but you can do this with Wikipedia,” Mr. Broadhead said. “But to be seen deleting factual information – to me that borders on being scandalous. This would be a public relations nightmare … to rewrite history in this manner.”

• The Globe and Mail – Is Wikipedia becoming a hub for propaganda?

Just today I registered the domain mylesbraithwaite*.ca* so as of today I am officially a Canadian Blogger.

P.S. CIRA is a bitch.

Terminally Incoherent - What does your favorite text editor say about you?

Of course my two favorite text editors are Vim and TextMate. Vim for when I am working on the Server and TextMate for everyday use.

Vim or Vi

You are a minimalist at heart, but you value raw power of a sophisticated, and yet simple editor. You hate to waste key strokes. You laugh derisively at the fools fighting with their silly Notepad like editors. You either use a traditional unix keyboard or you switched around Ctrl and Caps Lock so that they are in their popper places. Chances are that you might be (or have been) a sysadmin. You think that Emacs is not a text editor, but a fucking operating system with a built in kitchen sink, and a circus tent. You might as well use an IDE.

TextMate

You tried many different text editors. You could never get a hang of vi and Emacs. You think it’s a bit crazy to spend time and effort learning how to use them. You were dissatisfied with every single editor on the market. They were either to difficult to use, to simplistic, or too bloated. Then you found TextMate and it felt like an extension of your body. It did for text editing what OSX did for operating systems. You love this editor so much, that you actually don’t mind it’s not free. For you it’s worth every penny. You don’t mind being the only guy in your town who actually paid for a text editir. You are a smug Mac user, and proud of it. You have recurring fantasies in which you strangle Justin Long with you Mighty Mouse cord.

Today Ajaxian.com 2006 Survey Results came out and I saw a suppresing amount of Python users. Which made me think what is the most used Ajax/JavaScript Toolkit that Pythoners use?

Not much difference against the whole with Prototype still winning but it is interesting that Dojo is the second most used. I use jQuery the most so I am a little disappointed that it is some what last.

And when did Django and TurboGears become a Ajax Framework?

Globe and Mail – Say goodbye to e-mail – wikis are bringing the workplace together

A Toronto software company uses them to plan birthday parties and next product launch.

Intel uses them to post news from the company juggling club and collaborate on top-secret computer code

A Vancouver company thinks its wiki can stem junk e-mail and global warming

Is there anything these things can’t do?

Last night I went to FaceBookCamp Toronto it was pretty large about three hundred people were there.

It gave me about three ideas for working on my own application. One thing I was a little angry about is that lack of caching on Facebook side. If they were to add that, then most applications would be ten times faster. Also thanks to Colin Douma for giving me a ride.

I have official moved from WordPress to Django.

There is still some minor things I have to complete like the Photos, Links, and Wiki but I have setup the redirects form my old blog site. I will be watching the 404 error to see if there are any problems. Hopefully this will be a smooth transition. Anyway I still need to do allot of work I want a global templatetags so it will be easier to link from all the applications. Another thing I would like to do is have a presentation section where they can be exported to PDF, S5, and the like. I am going to use Jacob Kaplan-Moss presentation section for inspiration.

I have already written three new entries here:

• Lighttpd vs. Apache with Static Content
• A Gentlemen’s Duel
• An OLPC is now at the linuxcaffe

I have been researching what web browser would be better to server static content Lighttpd or Apache HTTPD.

I used the same JavaScript and HTML combo MochiKit‘s hypnotic Colour Wheel. Both were tested with one hundred requests and one concurrency and one hundred requests and one hundred concurrencies. Lighttpd and Apache were both hosted on the same server but I tested both twenty minutes apart.

Apache did better with only one concurrency scoring 5.78 requests per second betting Lighttpd scoring 5.79 requests per seconds. But when one hundred concurrencies Apache only scored 34.50 requests per second and compared with Lighttpd 38.96 requests per second.

So with that information Lighttpd can handle more users per second than Apache.

Mike Fletcher on External Relation Board for the OLPC Project has leant the linuxcaffe his old XO so developers will have a test unit.

Sean Hurley has released his clothing line at Dynamic Clothing.

Sean Hurley has released his clothing line at Dynamic Clothing design fully in Open Source applications (that I turned him on to). Ubuntu, The GIMP, and Inkscape has been his tools of trade. Sean has personally told me that using Open Source tools has inspired his designs. He currently has only two T-Shirts but he is in development for a zip up sweaters, hats, and belts. He also can design T-Shirts and the like for your company.

This weekend I was really sick because for some reason our Air Conditioning wasn’t working and it got down to 15 degrees Celsius in the house. So I decided to play around with Django, I will hopefully talk more about this on Monday a little to tired right now.

I am now using redMine.

Anyone following my wiki will know that I am currently looking for a Project Management and Bug Tracking Application for replace my current Trac setup. While it looks like I found one, redMine. Now on to a CRM tool.

I would like to say Happy Sys Admin day to all the Sys Admins out there.

Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery
Subject: ADMINSPOTTING
Message-ID: <5cl3le$q24@infoserv.aber.ac.uk>
From: gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary Barnes)
Date: 28 Jan 1997 14:49:18 -0000
Organization: Ripoffs R Us
X-No-Archive: Yes
Choose no life. Choose sysadminning. Choose no career.        *****
Choose no family. Choose a fucking big computer, choose hard  *   *
disks the size of washing machines, old cars, CD ROM writers  * A *
and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine  * D *
and mental insurance. Choose fixed interest car loans. Choose * M *
a rented shoebox. Choose no friends. Choose black jeans and   * I *
matching combat boots. Choose a swivel chair for your office  * N *
in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose NNTP and wondering why  * S *
the fuck you’re logged on on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting * P *
in that chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web    * O *
sites, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose     * T *
rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some  * T *
miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to    * I *
the selfish, fucked up lusers Gates spawned to replace the    * N *
computer-literate.                                            * G *
Choose your future.                                           *   *
Choose sysadmining1.                                        *****


	
Gaz
[1] It might fuck you up a little less than heroin2.
[2] ObFootnote.
– 
 /./\   gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary “Wolf” Barnes)
( – - ) “Do not ask any lady to take wine, until you  
 \ ” /   see she has finished her fish or soup.”
  ~~~                – Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society

I have 10 Invites to Pownce if anyone wants them just leave a comment or email me at me[at]mylesbraithwaite[dot]com.

iftop is definitely a great tool for any System Administrator.

iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts. Handy for answering the question “why is our ADSL link so slow?”.

Evaluating Web Development Frameworks: Rails and Django

We Feel Fine is an interesting site that searches blogs looking for the word “feel” and copies everything from that word to the end of the sentence. It is a awesome idea that allow you to look though different peoples emotions throughout this Web 2.0 thing. So if you have a chance take a look at what other people are thinking.

I have been using Drupal for a few clients this month and even for a few my websites and I am liking some of it but there are a few things that are just driving me nuts.

1. Drupal has this great online resource with tones of tutorials and howtos but there site down for most of the day.
2. The other problem is when using Drupal (and even WordPress) I tend to be a module whore which makes Drupal slower (I do not consider this a Drupal problem but a Myles problem).
3. Drupal’s default theme is to good which makes me question making my own.
4. There is no real Social aspect to Drupal’s main site along the lines of rating modules.

Thats really it. But I can say that using Drupal for a simple web site is really simple.

I have converted most of my Wiki to Yaki today now just this blog and I am done.

If you don’t already know I am going to be presenting PyGTK at the next PyGTA meeting today! I will try and have slide up afterwards and even some more demos that I wont be showing at the meeting (because of the screw up at the last).

Bright Green has relased and interesting paper comparing Rails and Django.

This logic suggests that men will brag about how much their proprietary software cost when attempting to impress a potential mate. Similarly, women will contribute to open source.

This logic suggests that men will brag about how much their proprietary software cost when attempting to impress a potential mate. Similarly, women will contribute to open source. Glossing over what this says about the romantic lives of open source contributors, the article suggests to me that to overcome the shortage of women in open source men just need to romance them. Obviously you can’t do this randomly, the gents will need to be thoughtful. Candle-lit WINE and Cheese dates. Ditch the Godiva, give her a box of Arduino microcontrollers for Valentine’s Day. Surprise her with a commit bit. You can do this, men.

Oreilly Radar – Support Open Source: Seduce A Woman Today

A few days ago I wrote a post called Webmail and Web Statistics, while I have a little update I have now seen four referring sites leaving the domains at the folder of /wp-admin/.

I have been checking out Yaki a really cool Wiki/Blog engine maybe by The Tao of Mac guy Rui Carmo. It is really awesome and I am thinking about using it for one of my web sites. One of my favorite things is that it is complete flat files.

On both my personal blog and company web site, I have noticed some interesting referring sites, all ending with zimbra/mail and some with the sub-domain webmail. Personally I think this is awesome, I can know track to see how many people are visiting my site though an email message.

bayimg is a free uncensored image host from The Pirate Bay.

Q: Why dont you Pirate Bay guys ever finish a project before starting a new one? A: We do whatever we want, whenever we want. If it doesnt suit you, you can start your own empire.

Right now half of the traffic coming to my site is from Great River, USA possibly in New York or Mississippi.

“Desgin first, then code”

1) “Design first, then code”

Okay, things are going political now, but even though you will find many many people who disagree, I still feel that this is the single most valuable lesson that I have learned. Designing first and then coding simply doesn’t work. The problem is that this is so counter intuitive that you more or less have to find it out for yourself.
I think every programmer has experienced a project with no planning turning into a mess. Changing such code can only be done with hacks and patches to everyones great frustration. It is at that time that you realize that the only decent way to code is by designing things right from the start. Only now the frustration is even greater when you realize that your beautiful design isn’t prepared for exactly this new feature that you are to implement now. What to do then?
You should think before you code. Go ahead, but think for hours, not days. Don’t kid yourself into believing you can sketch an entire design document with UML diagrams and everything without making mistakes. At least, don’t think you can do so any faster than you could have simply written the code.
Now, if you’re not familiar with agile methodologies such as eXtreme Programming, the whole concept of evolving design sounds like the very problem programmers are trying to solve with all their clever ways of abstracting things out. And indeed, evolving design only works well if you follow a number of practices. Short iterations, automated testing and frequent refactoring being the most important.
I suggest you read Martin Fowler’s excellent article Is Design Dead? which explains it all a lot better that I am capable of.

Top Ten of Programming Advice NOT to follow by Kristian Dupont Knudsen. | Top Ten of Programming Advice NOT to follow

Recently I decided to start backup my Email Server which currently is running the Open Source Edition of Zimbra. I decided to use zimbraColdBackup a perl script that sync the whole /opt/zimbra/ folder to a backup folder remotely or locally on the computer. I thought this would be the best idea until it ran last night and sent me a email saying that Zimbra was down for 672 seconds (or 11 minutes and 12 seconds) to me this isn’t executable. So I am currently working on a was to use rsnapshot and some backup script instead.

These are the wrong questions. The right question is: Why doesn’t Jobs just say what he means, instead of spinning vaguely technical explanations that don’t really make technical sense?

The simple truth is that Apple is committing to nothing because that allows them to keep all of their options open. They’re promising nothing because they don’t have to promise anything – the iPhone needs neither additional publicity nor higher expectations.

A really cool tutorial on how to create a Linux Application using QDeveloper and C++.

The linuxcaffe is now at summer hours.

I really hate when I received an email that tells me that the sender has requested to be notified when I (the receipt) open the Email.

This is a rather controversial topic, since it touches privacy issues. So the best is to ask the recipient that she sends you an acknowledge :-).

Sendmail’s Documentation on How to get notified when an e-mail has been read/delivered?

Blitzaffe has released a PHP class for a Jabber Client. I have done some work with Jabber Clients in Ruby and Python but this has so many more cool points.

Every once and a while a client will come and tell me some new way in driving traffic to there site like making Micro Sites using products like SiteSell and the lot. I will usual reply that I don’t feel right doing something of that nature and if they have any pride in there business and/or product they should fell the same. Now I am not saying that all SEO procedures are bad (such as changing meta tags per page or posting you web address on a public site) but some of them are no different than Viagra, Porn, or the hundred other spam sites that are polluting the internet.

lookupd -flushcache

Recently at a clients I had to work with a property software developed in ASP. It was developed by a vendor and another consultant company. Now the vendor’s software (of course) was compiled into DLL files (for those of you who work in python think eggs in java think wars) so IIS could server nicely (now this is a property software so this is quite normal). Now most of that would normally be okay but except for a bug in the software in the database layer. Now this (as told to me by the other consultants firm) was just a matter of a sequence file not in the database. No lets say if this was a open source project I would have CC myself to the bug ticket to receive up to the minute status on said bug. After a month of waiting I might even go as far as to download the version, simulate the environment and begin seeing what the problem is and if I find anything would create a patch and attach it to my ticket. Of course because this is property software all I can do is sit back and hear allot of bullshit.

Okay this isn’t true but I like to see these pictures. This ones of my work where a Debian Apache2 Proxy works as a DMZ to a Windows 2003 IIS Server. Guess which one has more uptime.

An interesting topic on #debian

I have been forced to upgrade to testing today because the OLPC interface, sugar, will just not run on etch.

You should to.

I have setup a mirror of my websites on a lighttpd server thanks to Jamon. They are:

• www2.mylesbraithwaite.com
• blog2.mylesbraithwaite.com
• wiki2.mylesbraithwaite.com

I am going to setup a redirect when one has too many users on.

Update: We ended up scraping the second HTTP server.

Today I was working on my MacBook Pro and a window popup saying that I didn’t have any disk space left. I started feaking out.

Squidward:/usr/local/apache2/logs myles$ sudo du -cks –block-size=1M *
1       access_log
1       dev-mylesbraithwaite.log
21797   error_log
21798   total

I will be attending IT360 with TLUG.

I will be presenting IronPython at the next PyGTA meeting.

Newsgroups: comp.lang.python.announce
From: “Mike C. Fletcher” 
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:15:27
Subject: Python in a strange land: IronPython and ASP.NET at the next PyGTA


	
IronPython is a native implementation of Python on the Microsoft .NET platform.  The implementation is from Microsoft and the language is well supported by the Visual Studio development environment which has always been one of the Microsoft platform’s strengths.  Though Python is often associated with the Free and Open Source communities, consultants and developers frequently need to solve real-world problems using Python on the .NET platform.  IronPython makes using Python in these situations a natural choice for the Python programmer. 

	
Our speaker for the evening is Myles Braithwaite, a local consultant and developer.  He is going to give us an idea of how developing a web application using ASP.NET looks when using IronPython instead of C#, as well as his impressions of the platform. 

	
As usual, we will hold the presentation at Linux Caffe, gathering for introductions at 6:30 PM, with the formal presentation beginning at 7:00 PM.  We normally head out around 8:30 PM for beer, coffee and/or ice cream.  You can find directions and maps to Linux Caffe on the wiki: 

	
http://web.engcorp.com/pygta/wiki/NextMeeting

Update

I have the Presentation and Demo files at my wiki: /Presentations/2007/PyGTA-IronPython

myles@sandy:~$ cat /etc/debian_version<br/>4.0

Today I was board and decided to to rob the facebook gift shop with a simple bash script.

#!/bin/bash
for i in `seq 100 300`;
do
        echo $i
        wget http://static.ak.facebook.com/images/gifts/$i.png
done

Update: I made it work with png2ico:

#!/bin/bash
for i in `seq 100 300`;
do
        echo $i
        wget http://static.ak.facebook.com/images/gifts/$i.png
        ./png2ico $i.ico $i.png
done

We will be having a Feisty Release Party at linuxcaffe on 19th April, 2007. I am hoping to give out both Feisty and Etch CD’s.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

I install IronPython’s module for ASP.NET on one of my Windows Boxes to see how it would work. Here are some simple sinpplets of the differentces bettween Python, C#, and Visual Basic.

I have moved this page to my wiki.

I just read today that RedHat/JBoss has trademarked “Hibernate” (USPTO #3135582 look it up here).

Cross Platform applications have always been important to me. That is why I started to develop in Java and later moved to Python. Two good pieces of news came out today. One VisualBasic .Net support for Mono.net and two PostgreSQL support in windows.

Command line personal information tools like Remind, abook, and Todo.txt.

David J Patrick of the linuxcaffe recently told me of his plain to start a web site dedicated to command line PIM applications such as Remind, abook, and Todo.txt. I am going to try today and convert over to all these applications and even in some cases use them as a backup to evolution. | Command Line PIM (Personal Information Managers)

Stallman also warned that proprietary software is a security threat because without being able to examine the code, users can’t know what it’s doing or what “backdoor” holes developers might have left open for future entry. “A private program is never trustworthy,” he said.

Cuba embraces open-source software | Proprietary software is a security threat!

Specifically, the people behind officelabs want to adopt the “release early, release often” approach that has worked well for open-source projects such as Linux and Firefox. Instead of having a fixed release date and product launch, the idea is to get early versions of new products into the hands of the public through web-based distribution. One aspect of open source that Microsoft isn’t planning to adopt is the actual open source part, as it remains incompatible with the company’s business model. However, the code for officelabs products will be available to anyone within Microsoft itself.

ars technica: Microsoft takes a page from the open-source playbook

It is about time!

Just watched an interview with Ballmer (Microsoft’s CEO) about his reaction on the iPhone. He says (and I am paraphrasing) that the iPhone for its price ($599 with plan) is not directed toward the business user because it doesn’t have a built-in keyboard. Being a Mac Fan this got me a little pissed of at first, then a few seconds later I realized that this is true. Apple has (again) forgotten about the business user.

Operation Cold Comfort went off with great success today. We should have the video up soon.

Update 1: I have uploaded some Photos to Picasa. | Operation Cold Comfort went off with Great Succes

It would be only fair if Tux was at an Ice House.

we’d like to hang out around the lineup next to the Ice House, demonstrating Ubuntu on laptops and handing out literature. David Patrick of the linuxcaffe is also the owner of a 10-foot inflatable Tux which we’d also like to employ for this event.

I should be there with some Ubuntu 6.06 CD’s.

A YouTube video about the question “What if programmers built plnaes?”