Monday, October 15, 2007
posi.net going offline
My personal domain, posi.net, will be going offline for the next few days while I move. This means that any mail sent to the domain will bounce (I'm not setting up a backup MX on purpose, since 99.99% of my mail is spam). It also means the Cristin and Kelly's absolutely fabulous wine reviews, my 地球ラジオ archive, and other miscellaneous amusements will be temporarily offline too.
Friday, October 12, 2007
My last BayPiggies
Well, last night was my last BayPiggies meeting for a few years. The speakers were Mikeal Rogers & Adam Christian from the Open Source Applications Foundation, presenting their new automated web U.I. testing framework, Windmill.
It was a pretty neat demo; if I actually did any serious web development, I would consider using it (or the preexisting Selenium tool) for testing. Being that it was a python user's group rather than a product show-and-tell, I would have liked more details about how Windmill worked, especially from the python side, but I am assured it is "really really really really cool". ;) I guess I'll have to find time to read the code myself.
Anyway, afterwards I got to hang out with my buddies JJ and Zach for a while and chat over a burger. I'm afraid mine was not particularly stimulating conversation, but I'm really looking forward to finding out what exactly it is JJ has been coding up over at MultiCosmic. He assures me it will go live in a few days, and that I'll have to wait to learn what it is when everyone else does. :) I just know it involves FaceBook.
I've only been going to BayPiggies for the past couple of months, but I'm going to miss the monthly chance to learn about some new tool or technology utilizing python. More importantly, I'm going to miss the opportunity to hang out and hear the state-of-web-development address from JJ (he admitted he loves Rails, by the way :) ). Hopefully, I'll still see Zach from time to time in Tokyo.
Speaking of which, I have yet to find a web page for a Python user's group in Tokyo; pyJug doesn't appear to actually hold casual group meetings just weekend retreats and workshop-style meetings. That sounds like fun, but not quite the casual get-together I've gotten used to with BAFUG and BayPiggies meetings.
It was a pretty neat demo; if I actually did any serious web development, I would consider using it (or the preexisting Selenium tool) for testing. Being that it was a python user's group rather than a product show-and-tell, I would have liked more details about how Windmill worked, especially from the python side, but I am assured it is "really really really really cool". ;) I guess I'll have to find time to read the code myself.
Anyway, afterwards I got to hang out with my buddies JJ and Zach for a while and chat over a burger. I'm afraid mine was not particularly stimulating conversation, but I'm really looking forward to finding out what exactly it is JJ has been coding up over at MultiCosmic. He assures me it will go live in a few days, and that I'll have to wait to learn what it is when everyone else does. :) I just know it involves FaceBook.
I've only been going to BayPiggies for the past couple of months, but I'm going to miss the monthly chance to learn about some new tool or technology utilizing python. More importantly, I'm going to miss the opportunity to hang out and hear the state-of-web-development address from JJ (he admitted he loves Rails, by the way :) ). Hopefully, I'll still see Zach from time to time in Tokyo.
Speaking of which, I have yet to find a web page for a Python user's group in Tokyo; pyJug doesn't appear to actually hold casual group meetings just weekend retreats and workshop-style meetings. That sounds like fun, but not quite the casual get-together I've gotten used to with BAFUG and BayPiggies meetings.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Python: A better wx.ListCtrl
I'm not going to repeat the entire post here, but I would like to direct your attention to my friend and former coworker Zach's recent blog post regarding implementing a better ListCtrl via wxWidgets' virtual ListCtrl.
For those familiar with wxPython, what Zach has done is combine wx.ListCtrl and wx.lib.mixins.listctrl.ColumnSorterMixin into a single easy-to-use class. Except, rather than implement it as an entirely new class, he implements a function that transmutes a generic ListCtrl into his new & improved ListCtrl. That advantage here, as he points out, is that you don't need to modify any XRC files to gain the new functionality.
The post is on NTT MCL's recently-introduced company blog which, unfortunately, doesn't appear to accept comments (and says "Japan Window" for some strange reason). As such, I'll point out that Zach also occasionally posts to his own personal blog, which is also worth checking out.
For those familiar with wxPython, what Zach has done is combine wx.ListCtrl and wx.lib.mixins.listctrl.ColumnSorterMixin into a single easy-to-use class. Except, rather than implement it as an entirely new class, he implements a function that transmutes a generic ListCtrl into his new & improved ListCtrl. That advantage here, as he points out, is that you don't need to modify any XRC files to gain the new functionality.
The post is on NTT MCL's recently-introduced company blog which, unfortunately, doesn't appear to accept comments (and says "Japan Window" for some strange reason). As such, I'll point out that Zach also occasionally posts to his own personal blog, which is also worth checking out.
Sold my car
We sold my car today. It was a 1996 Ford Escort.I realize this isn't particularly interesting to anyone else, but since it was the first car I ever bought on my own -- heck, I even moved it with me from Virginia -- it is kind of significant to me.
Anyway, I bought it for $9800 back in 1995 and it is still running well at 154,000 miles. I sold it today for $700 (thanks to craigslist!). That means, excepting gas and maintenance costs, the depreciation was $9100 over 12 years or approximately $760/year. Given that the car got 32 miles to the gallon new and has lately been averaging around 29, it even got good gas mileage (by today's low standards, anyways).
In fact, if I assume an average of 30 MPG over the life of the car, and an average of $2.00/gallon, that comes to about $10,300 in fuel costs. You may think $2.00 a gallon seems low, but a good number of those miles were driven in Virginia, where the price of gas fluctuated between $0.85 and $1.35 before we moved to California. The price of gas has certainly been higher here in California, but I've been riding CalTrain and/or walking to work since long before the recent surge in gas prices, so I think $2.00 a gallon may be pretty close to our average per-gallon price.
Ignoring maintenance costs, which weren't extraordinary, that is $19,500 to own and fuel my Ford Escort for just over 12 years. I'd say it was all around a good purchase. I certainly won't badmouth Ford cars anymore. A hybrid will cost you more than that just to own, not to mention fuel costs.
It certainly didn't turn any heads, but then again, I never once worried about anyone stealing it, dinging it, or hitting it. In fact, I would say that having a dumpy car has its own value -- in peace of mind.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
The price of spam
Like anyone, I get lots of spam. Having kept the same e-mail address since 1995 and having that e-mail address posted all over the web may contribute to absolutely inordinate amount of spam I receive. I get over 1000 pieces of spam mail a day.
To make matters worse, I run my own mail server on a Soekris 4801 at home. I use postfix running on FreeBSD 6.2 with SpamAssassin to identify spam. My spam situation is desperate, so anything that looks remotely like spam gets immediately sent to the bit bucket. Still, over 50 spam mail a day make it to my Inbox.
My Soekris box is my mail server, file server, firewall, and PPPoE tunnel end-point (for my DSL connection). I also run a low-traffic web site off the box. That said, between pppd, the postfix and spamd processes, receiving and processing spam consumes almost 100% of the CPU all day, every day. My load average rarely dips below 1.0 and, at the heaviest times, the inbound mail queue grows to a few hundred messages.
Now, this isn't the fastest machine in the world. But when I started my first ISP back in 1995, we ran dozens of web sites (admittedly, mostly static content) off a single 100Mhz Pentium server with 128MB of RAM. Our entire 27000+ newgroup Usenet feed was hosted on another 100MHz Pentium server, also with 128MB of RAM. But in 2007, I'm here to tell you that it takes a 266Mhz Pentium-class machine (with the same 128MB of RAM) running 24/7 just to deliver mail for two e-mail accounts.
So I can tell you personally that the price of spam in 2007 is roughly one Soekris 4801 plus disk space. It may not seem like much in comparison to today's top-of-the-line computers, but it is enough to make me sick just thinking about.
To make matters worse, I run my own mail server on a Soekris 4801 at home. I use postfix running on FreeBSD 6.2 with SpamAssassin to identify spam. My spam situation is desperate, so anything that looks remotely like spam gets immediately sent to the bit bucket. Still, over 50 spam mail a day make it to my Inbox.
My Soekris box is my mail server, file server, firewall, and PPPoE tunnel end-point (for my DSL connection). I also run a low-traffic web site off the box. That said, between pppd, the postfix and spamd processes, receiving and processing spam consumes almost 100% of the CPU all day, every day. My load average rarely dips below 1.0 and, at the heaviest times, the inbound mail queue grows to a few hundred messages.
Now, this isn't the fastest machine in the world. But when I started my first ISP back in 1995, we ran dozens of web sites (admittedly, mostly static content) off a single 100Mhz Pentium server with 128MB of RAM. Our entire 27000+ newgroup Usenet feed was hosted on another 100MHz Pentium server, also with 128MB of RAM. But in 2007, I'm here to tell you that it takes a 266Mhz Pentium-class machine (with the same 128MB of RAM) running 24/7 just to deliver mail for two e-mail accounts.
So I can tell you personally that the price of spam in 2007 is roughly one Soekris 4801 plus disk space. It may not seem like much in comparison to today's top-of-the-line computers, but it is enough to make me sick just thinking about.
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