Mornings

amanda — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:00:12 +0200

I guess we are quite lucky that Finley wakes up some time between 6.30 and 7.00 in the morning. Sometimes he even sleeps in until 7.30. The other parents we know tell us that they get woken up between 5.00 and 6.00am, some even before that! But this morning, Finley was sitting up in bed slapping my arm/head/back trying to get my attention at 5.06am (probably due to the fact that he missed his afternoon nap yesterday and went to bed super early). I tried hiding under the pillow/duvet, but he's too clever for that game. When he started pulling hair and pinching the soft sensitive skin on my ear lobe, I relented and 'woke up', giving him desired attention.

I'm still feeling quite fluey and headachey and I'm starting to wonder whether I have the same bug as Fin since he seemed to get over his cold in a few days and only really had one bad night of crying and feeling miserable. I, on the other hand, seem to have day after day of crying and feeling miserable.

Checking my mail in bed, I was cheered up by a really nice and unexpected mail from Elizabeth Pantley. I had forwarded on a mail from the GPN (Grahamstown Parents Network) onto various mums I know and had included Elizabeth on the list. The email I sent was about reflecting on the amazing job that all moms do everyday: "admiration for the greatness of what you are building when no one sees". In her email she said "As a mom of 3 teens and a second-grader -- Thank you Amanda - I need this today". I had the same feeling then that I used to have when Finley was a small baby and I would constantly find myself awake in the middle of the night, breastfeeding this little person in the dark and quiet. Everyone else around sleeping, except for all the other moms like me in the world, with their newborns in their arms or lying next to them, silently suckling. Its a sense of solidarity, of knowing you aren't alone, no matter who you are - a first-time stay at home mom in Grahamstown, South Africa or a parenting expert, bestselling author and mom of four in Washington, USA.

As many of you may already know, Finley loves showering. But it has only been in the last week or so that he has started to actively seek it out instead of waiting for us to undress him and take him to the bathroom. The boy is determined. So every morning when Brad goes to shower, Finley promptly stops playing with the empty box/wet wipes packet/stuffed animal that has interested him, crawls to the end of the bed, turns around to climb off the bed (our mattress is on the floor so it isn't such a big climb), and with a peculiar fervour makes a beeline to the bathroom where he can hear that the shower has already been turned on. Once there, he shrieks with delight as his well-thought-out plan is being realised and pulls himself up to a standing position on the side of the bath. The next few minutes are spent pleading with dad to lift him up and share the shower with him, when that fails, he resorts to playing a wild game of peekaboo with the shower curtain and indirectly spraying himself and the bathroom floor with water.

Geek Dinner: Happy Habanero

brad — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:59:54 +0200

Last night I attended my third Geek Dinner (aka Happy Habanero), which was held at Mel's Village Kitchen in Rondebosch (somewhere on this map). The food was delicious, although I think their vegetable soup had beef stock in it, because my tummy did the funny growling thing that it does when there is actually meat in something that looks like it is just vegetables.

Jonathan gave a cool talk about Game Theory and Tragedy of the commons, which We (the lift club) discussed at length during our drives to work in century city. It basically boils down that when faced with a situation where you can gain (at the expense of others) there is no logical reason not to take that gain, there is, however, an ethical reason not to (see ubuntu/community/being nice to others). Regulation tends to take away from the benefits of the commons, for optimisating one use/situation. The trick would be to either increase the ethics of the users of the commons (but you still face a loss for defectors), or introduce penalties which drive defection down (e.g. Morning radio that re-iterates the message, or broadcasts plates of people who defect, or somehow associating negative effects to defection, like walking into a coffee shop and the owner says "you pushed in on the N1 this morning, and I am going to reserve my right to serve you, please could you leave the premises").

Jonathan gave a short speech about "Living like a capetonian", which basically boiled down to "get out there and enjoy the place you live, cook good food, and be social, do some things that are not enjoyable, because they will make you enjoy stuff more". I enjoyed it (although being a CT noob, we try to go and visit places people talk about, but we could do more of it, and we mustn't become complacent!).

Ian gave a short overview of problems with the current GMO process, in that there is no approval process for GMO foods because (for e.g. in SA) they have been granted the status of being the same as non-GMO, so it gives them a innocent until proven guilty stance. It comes down to consumers not buying it if it is an inferior product, or retrospective studies which find poisons etc. in the food, before it would be removed from the shelves. This again presents an interesting connundrum, where do you draw the line of what is/what is not GMO (for e.g. selective breeding is a form of GMO), and what things do you put in place to protect consumers. Until now consumers bought the things they needed, and products were successful based on how good they were. With vested interests, and continuously declining government ethics (across many countries), we can no longer assume if something is on the shelves then it is good for us (or, not perversely bad for us or our environment). I don't think he made his point strong enough that he was not against GMO, that he was against it's current wild west, bribe and plunder approach of the industry, because some people in the back attacked him for condemning GMO (which he never did).

Finally, Timothy Allen did Slideshow Karaoke, from slides made by me, covering "The mating rituals and sexual habits of Tachyglossus aculeatus (of the order Monotremata)". I built my slides from the fantastically hysterical "Their cousin called monotreme". You can download my slides: Echidna.odp in the ISO standard format for presentations. Henk Kleynhans pointed out that Echidna only mate using one head of their four headed penis, I am not sure if this is per mating, or over the course of their life (Do they only mate four times?).

There was wine sponsored by Perdeberg Winery, which was nice (I assume), since people definitely got quite chirpy. A nice evening was had by all, I think.

Dear Standard Bank, Internet banking division

brad — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:50:23 +0200

Hi,

The improvements to internet banking have some bugs, it seems.

I have had the experience twice now during "once off payments" that I get an error of "Internet banking is currently unavailable" when I go through with a transaction. It seems to be related to sending payment confirmations. It is bad behaviour because the transaction goes through, but the user (me) does not get a valid indication the payment has succeeded until a notification (sms, or email) comes through, or manually checks if there is a mention on the account transacted from/to.

I would also like to say that some of the "improvements" are actually a degradation, in terms of usability. The screen is more cluttered with graphics and text, and on my screen (which is running at 1280x800) has information pushed "below the fold". I would suggest that whoever is in charge of usability and new features looks into buying a copy of "Defensive Web Design" (http://www.amazon.com/Defensive-Design-Web-improve-messages/dp/073571410...), and other texts discussing usability on the web. While not absolutely correct, the EyeTRAC studies are a good reference point.

I (as a web developer) find it depressing that a service I am paying for has degraded usability, when the changes were supposedly improvements. It is not a wholely poor experience (there are some improvements, but my general experience is that the interface has become more confusing, not less confusing)

I am posting this email on my blog, and you are welcome to respond publicly (in the form of a comment), or as an email response.

--
Brad Whittington

Geek Dinner: Happy Habanero

brad — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:59:54 +0200

There was wine sponsored by Perdeberg Winery, which was nice (I assume), since people definitely got quite chirpy. A nice evening was had by all, I think.

I blog therefore we am

brad — Sun, 15 May 2005 11:53:51 +0200

RUCUS import: photoblog,geeking,linuxworld

Dom was blogging in the car, about blogging. So i thought i would blog about it, because, well, i can.

Growing up

amanda — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:00:15 +0200

Today something amazing happened that has never happened before. Finley climbed onto our bed, tucked himself in under the covers, read himself a book and then fell asleep All By Himself with the book left open on his chest.

I was busy in the kitchen and was planning on going in to do all that for him, but he beat me to it! I think having had the experience of dealing with a challenging sleeper over the last two years (although the first year was so much more difficult than the second) makes this moment all the more sweeter.

My little boy is growing up and as exciting as these new achievements are, there is still a little pang as I watch him not needing me for various things during the day. As he often reminds me 'I'm a big boy now, mama.'

Statistics logging for Django - part 2

brad — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:52:25 +0200

In part 1 I explained how to build middleware and an associated model to capture page accesses, and tie them to a user session. Now that we have all this useful info logged we need to do something with it, like, display it. Unfortunately Django doesn't have a facility for using GROUP BY with mysql, so you have two major choices (there are more but we can ignore them): implement a custom request in a custom Manager (see snippet and snippet, or tagged snippets), or exploit a mysql view and model it in Django. Now for me I prefer the latter because it means my custom sql becomes a mysql customisation and as far as Django is concerned it is dealing with a normal table (but don't tell Django that it is read only), and thus the model code works, so subsequent queries and manipulations can exploit the ORM easily. My subjective and non-scientific experience is that using views is a lot more efficient/quick than using custom queries in the manager (it probably has to do with whatever optimisations exist with views, and the fact that you only fetch items when Django decides you need to fetch a row). So, how the hell do we do it?

First I created a model that describes what information I want to deal with (something which maps neatly on to our other model):

class UserActivity(models.Model):
        session = models.OneToOneField(Session,
                                        db_index=True, 
                                        null=True,blank=True,
                                        primary_key=True)
        user = models.ForeignKey(User,null=True,blank=True)
        date = models.DateTimeField(
                       help_text="Date Request started processing",
                       auto_now_add=True,
                       db_index=True)
        processing_time = models.IntegerField(
                       help_text="Total time spent on this user")
        requests = models.IntegerField(
                       help_text="Total Requests in this session")
        stats = UserActivityManager()
        def __str__(self):
                return '%s: %s %s - %s - %s' % (self.user,self.session,self.date,self.processing_time,self.requests)
        class Admin:
                list_display= ('user','session','date','processing_time','requests')

The nice thing about this set up is when we aggregate our activity logs we can pull out random stuff like total processing time for requests for a user/session, along with number of requests/user/session (and thus average request time)

But that is just our model, we still need the magic. To implement the magic nicely I put some custom initial SQL into the sql directory of my application (in my case the housing application for this is called accounts, so I make a file called accounts/sql/useractivity.sql), you can read more about initial data here, Django fixtures).My SQL looks like this:

DROP TABLE accounts_useractivity;
CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW accounts_useractivity AS 
SELECT i.session_id,
       i.user_id,
       MAX(i.date) as date,
       sum(i.request_time) AS processing_time, 
       count(*) AS requests 
FROM accounts_activitylog i 
GROUP BY 1 
ORDER BY NULL;

So first I tell mysql to drop the table that django just created (accounts_useractivity), and create a view in it's place. The view is very simple, in that it just GROUP BY the session_id. The real hair puller for me was figuring out that I needed to use the MAX(i.date) (see more about aggregate functions) to get the most recent access to float to the top when it normalises the data (otherwise the GROUP BY normally ORDER BY the session_id, which helps no one), the ORDER BY NULL is an optimisation to tell GROUP BY not to ORDER BY. I am hoping that because date is an INDEX (from our logging model) it shouldn't cost too much to do a MAX. (I would like someone with Much MYSQL-fu to point out any further optimisations to this, or even alternative approaches to the whole thing).

So now we have an aggregating VIEW which Django maps using it's ORM, so that to figure out sessions which have been active in the last x minutes (where x is a datetime.timedelta object) we simply do a:

UserActivity.objects.get_query_set().filter(date__gte=datetime.now()-x)

I wrote a custom manager for getting recent sessions etc., but that is an exercise for the reader. What I did include in my model is something which returns a stepped "request_weight" i.e. session requests / largest session request x steps, which in my case defaults to 6. This means I can style my users like one would a "tag cloud", so very active sessions will grow bigger than less active sessions. I needed to implement a helper function in the custom manager to return the session with the most requests.

The final tip is to use a context processor to make the information available to all your templates, although you could do it with middleware (maybe middleware is the proper way to do it?).

Why Telkom is teh Ghei

brad — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 19:52:02 +0200

RUCUS import:

So Guy and Russell were doing some rough calculation, and it looks a lot like it is cheaper to browse the internet via GPRS than fixed-line-modem. some final thoughts from them:

As a rough estimate, assume the line is idle 50% of the time (not unreasonable if we're browsing the web). Simplisitically this means we'll double our cost per megabyte â€” meaning we get to R 4.426 in standard time and R 2.930 in callmore time.

At R 2 a megabyte for the most expensive bundle, GPRS looks attractive doesn't it :-)

A way over[due|rated] italy

brad — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 15:58:28 +0200

RUCUS import:

So, it has now been like a week since i returned from italy, so my conquests are no longer fresh in my mind. Either way, i will take some time to elaborate on my experiences.

It all started on the suggestion by Rob to visit him in antibes, and look into getting boat work, for a few Euros. So, gathering a few too many things into a bag, I hopped onto a train and headed off to Antibes.

Arriving late in the afternoon, after suffering minor delays on the route down, due to train problems, I met up with Rob. He took me to his apartment, and introduced me to the people he was living with for that week, and introduced me to another Rob, who had also just arrived, and was going to the same backpackers to stay. So eventually, with not much fanfare, we ended up trudging up the hill quite late in the night, with only a bare minimum of directions to enable us to find shelter. With some creative walking we finally truimphed our way to the backpackers and crashed.

After camping on a lawn for three weeks, a real bed is actually so uncomfortable that you cannot get to sleep properly, so I tossed and turned the whole night. Waking up relatively late, I popped down and met up with Rob, and we cruised down to the harbour to take a look around. The net result is that I can affirm that there are a lot of people who think of boats as toys. Towering above anything organic the motorboats dominated the foreign pier. So, bearing this in mind, and considering the nature of the people who seem to scrabble around at the anus of "rich" culture, It is not surprising that with very little prompting, I departed from Antibes the next morning. To be honest I did meet some interesting down to earth people, but the karma cloud hanging like an anvil over the shithole, and I wasnt prepared to remain in the zaif fog any longer.

Boarding a train with the my intention to get into italy, I chose Ventimiglia, since, I had to, in order to board onward travelling italian trains.

Arriving in a foreign country, where people had a funny twang in their voice, saw a new set of challenges. My first concern involved finding somewhere to sleep, and then something to eat. Eventually tracking down the tourist board, I was informed that the nearest hostel was another 2 hours on the train, I conceeded to wallow a little longer on the edge of italy, and eat my first italian pizza, following which I would head off to Finale Ligure, the only town in a 200km radius with a hostel.

So, clutching a photocopy with information about the hostel, I headed out to Finale ligure, hoping the 3cm square poorly copied picture of the venue of the castle would be sufficient. It was a struggle, but in the end I realised the castle in fact adorned the top of the nearest hill, and so trekked up the steep slope in search of bedding. The climb was worth it, and I met up with a French canadian, a swiss german, an american, and a group of young(too young) german girls.

So, turning the time to hiking the area, swimming in the sea, sampling the cuisine, and getting to know the foreigners, I settled down for a few days. Adventure followed, and culminated in seeing two of the guys kicked out of the hostel in the middle of the night by an insane power crazed italian. Besides that, the beach was magnificent, and the area quite beautiful, and some brief information scouting pointed that I had inadvertendly discovered a climbing hotspot, with well over 2000 sports routes in the area. So, future excursions will see me scaling some of the face, hopefully.

After that I headed down to Pisa, saw the tower, the leaning one, and then turned back and headed out on what can only be described as 24 hours of solid travel. I will admit i turned tail, and split, but it was after meeting a travel crazed australian that forced me to question my travel descisions. His last two years had been spent ticking off sights, as was evidenced in his rattling off of significant place after significant place, and his constant jittering, and speed walking. I think it really just made me wonder why I was travelling, and to be honest, I did not know, I did not have a passion to see crap that people built hundred of years ago, and the foreign culture was not too foreign. Unfortunately tainted by the global village, I felt like I had already been to italy. So I decided I would rather be doing something for a good reason, like climbing, or working, or something like that. Because I dont want to be a headless tourist, ambling around the countryside, helping an industry which seems to annoy people more than it empowers them. So, rant over. Italy cute.

My plans from here include meeting up with Lanyard and Heather in Spain in a few weeks, and in the mean time, going climbing with Ben and Kath, who arrives in Too loose tomorrow. Also, Ben and me missioned to too loose yesterday to go and do some climbing in the gym, as we have become flabby and soft.

Give Your Eyes a Treat

brad — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:59:23 +0200

I subscribe to the IEBlog because it is always good for a laugh, or good to see exactly how much they are copying from the rest of the community. Recently Bill Hill, the Program Manager for Internet Explorer posted a little blurb about using their nice Consolas font for use in CMD.exe (Microsoft's built in emulator of the 1980's command prompt, for the linux readers out there). Now, I dig the Microsoft fonts, they are very pretty, and very unfortunately licensed (sidebar: who decides to improve web, terminal, and printing with a series of fonts, and then puts licenses that impede their adoption?). I Have them installed on my Linux system, and while the may not have the full features of ClearType under linux, they still look damn good. So, Mr. Hill posted this how-to use it as your default console font, so I thought I would do the same. I am going to repeat his instructions so it benefits any windows users. I am not going to cover installing the fonts on either platform because it is pretty easy.
Windows

    reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" /v 00 /d Consolas

    logoff

     Note: In Windows Vista, you need to run the reg command from an elevated command prompt.
When you log back in, Consolas will be an option in the “Command Prompt” Properties. (n.b., Bryn tells me it actually shows up before you relog, but it won’t work.)

Linux/Gnome/Ubuntu
You can do the equivalent in Ubuntu using gconf-editor from the command prompt, but you don't need to elevate privileges, and you need to browse to apps -> gnome-terminal -> profiles -> Default, and change the "font" key. You could also do it system wide and browse to desktop -> gnome -> interface, and edit the monospace_font_name key to "Consolas 10". I find this a little complex, so I tried to see if there was a less obscure way. Turns out there is:
Open a terminal:

Right click the terminal, choose "Edit Current Profile...", and left click:

Uncheck "Use the system fixed width font", and click on the named font (not sure of the default, I already had it set to Consolas 10):

Choose Consolas (or any installed font), and I prefer 10 points, because it ends up being about the same size on screen:

Alternate method
Alternately, you could do it system wide (well, gnome/free desktop wide), by navigating to the top menu in the Gnome environment, choosing System -> Appearance, click on the Font tab, and change the Fixed width font with the font chooser. If you prefer using the keyboard you can just hit Alt-F1, right, right, down, right, down, down, down, Enter, right, right, Alt-F, then type 'Consolas' (or type until it reaches the desired font, I find this is about 'Con'), Tab, Tab, enter "10" or select with the down/up keys, and hit Enter, and Esc.

[sarcasm]Boy, I wish the Linux desktop wasn't as complex and niche as the Windows desktop. I find everyday tweaks require such effort.[/sarcasm]

Finley discovers inflatable pools at Lily's party

brad — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:41:10 +0200

Over the weekend we went to Lily Mae Bowker's Birthday party, on the family farm in Thornkloof (about 40 minutes outside of Grahamstown). It started out as a very nice day, blue sky, etc. At the party, among other things, was an inflatable, and brightly coloured, pool. Finley spent 60% of the party in the hand deep water, splashing, laughing, and attacking anyone trying to take photos of him. By the end of it he was freezing cold, but cried every time we took him out, or he caught a glimpse of the pool.

For reference, this is what Lily Mae looks like (photo taken at Morrigan's party last weekend):

And this is what the road looked like on the way back from the farm:

Geek Dinner: Happy Habanero

brad — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:59:54 +0200

There was wine sponsored by Perdeberg Winery, which was nice (I assume), since people definitely got quite chirpy. A nice evening was had by all, I think.

Even when you are winning (Drupal vs. Mambo, Germalism, Django, Schools, more bean)

brad — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 15:45:25 +0200

You haven't heard from me in a while because I have been pretty darn busy. So, what have I been busy with? lots...and to be a dork, I will lump the unrelated together in this monumental post:

Drupal and MamboJoomla?
I have been doing some free-lance work here and there. Lots of CMS setting up, notably, lots of Drupal. After using Mambo for a long time, and dealing with hacks here and there to get it to behave in a sane manner wears one down. I cannot vouch for if Joomla has improved the sif codebase that Mambo runs on, but I know Drupal is the closest you can come to a good multi-purpose CMS that Doesnt make your head burn when problem solving. I don't want to say that the many hours that went into making Mambo were wasted. It is very clear that Mambo started as something, grew into something else, got released as open source, and became something else, split into two competing products (Mambo/Joomla), etc. Drupal, on the other hand, is community plumbing. It started out as community plumbing, grew into better community plumbing, and has a very interactive community, built using...Drupal. If you want a clear illustration of where Mambo/Joomla fails download yourself a mambo module, and a drupal module. Open the two codebases (in parallel, or series), and notice how the joomla/module has No style, no API it is adhering to, behaving generally like a wild west php script. Notice how drupal module has an API it adheres to, notice how it can augment many different areas in the engine. Drupal starts as an engine, you plug modules into it, and it becomes a CMS, or a Blog, or a community advocacy site. Mambo/Joomla is a piece of bad ex-commercial monolithic code which heard about plugins during one of it's augmentations.

What I do know is that Drupal is incredibly easy to work with, well documented, stable, and current. It cuts my web development time in half. In fact the work I normally have to do lands in building a theme (using any one of the templating engines available), installing and configuring a few specific modules, and smiling a lot. I think there is probably enough business in just building themes for drupal. For web development...Inkscape++, Drupal++.
Germalisms
I have been lecturing some Germalisms (or Journalists) in XHTML and CSS (plus some mentions of Web 2.0.1b rc3 stuffs). I have been using our local Moodle installation to build up the course and so on. Obviously I did my homework, and being an advocate of standards where possible, I looked into using s5: A Simple, Standards-Based, Slide Show System within moodle. Good news is it is possible. What does all that jibber jabber mean? well, using an s5 plugin for moodle means I can create lecture slides on moodle, and they will run in any web browser. I don't need a proprietry product, I don't even need a fancy web browser, I can actually build the slides using my cellphone (if the urge gripped me) from anywhere in the world. Sure it doesnt have fancy effects (it can be easily augmented to have some fancy effects), but it allows me to build good looking slides quickly and easily, without ever leaving my browser. that is k-rad. Up yours proprietry-vendor-of-your-choice.

The kids are cool, but we have only had two lectures so far, what with me being in Dwesa last week, and them being in jhb this week. It is going well though. We have pet names and everything. Well, not so much, but we could. Some may take offense at me calling them Germalisms, but it is a pet name some of us have for Journalists, I am a victim of circumstances.
Djangalising
Another highlight in my life has been wrapping my keys around some Django. Django is a web application framework written in the (imho) best-language-around python. I am currently writing a custom app for the Freedom League. Mambo has been seriously deficient at this task, and I felt that building a custom app was the way to go. Django makes a lot of life easy. It does take ten minutes to do the basic core code, but it obviously takes longer to develop an application, with bells and whistles. I have been bad in not posting any code snippets etc. but I haven't had the inclination to spend the time on such things. The project is going to be open sourced as soon as possible, but i want to get it up and running, have a people use the site, improve it, get some peeps to review it, and then release it. Either way, python, and Django, have improved my outlook on webdevelopment even more. The exciting things about Django include easy scaling up, high response times (i.e. higher than any web framework in php, j2ee, etc.), easy interactions with multiple database backends, abstracted modelling code, plenty of freebies (like the admin module, comments, multiple markdown syntaxes, powerful templating). There are arguments for different web frameworks, and they are nice, but Django is a comfort zone that I like. I tried Ruby on Rails, knowing no ruby, and got pretty far, but very frustrated. I tried Django, knowing no python, and got most places I wanted to get. Django++
Schools
A significant portion of my time has been dedicated to the e-Yethu schools project. Besides the technical side of things (helping schools get things done), the project is having increasing interactions with the Department of Education in the Eastern Cape. We are starting to produce documents which are of use to the department. They have to cater for lots of schools getting computer labs by 2013, like all of them. We can, and are, presenting them with research and knowledge which has grown from our actual experience working with the schools in grahamstown. We can discuss multiple lab setups with expertise (Thin clients, Fat clients, Dual boot thick and thin clients, Windows networks managed by Open source software, school relevant open source software on linux and windows), as well as connectivity issues (Modem, DSL, Wireless (wifi and wimax), GPRS/EDGE/HDPSISASAAS). It is nice that we are producing something worthwhile, building our own experience and knowledge. Without the work that came before us we would be nowhere, and now we are trying to ensure that the work we and others are doing can be used to the benefit of lots of school kids.
Bean and Amanda are the underlying current of my life. We have a reasonably strong indication that Bean is a girl, although I think people are seeing chickens before the eggs crack. Becoming a parent brings a whole wealth of experiences and worries, but it seems like together we are getting somewhere. I cannot wait till bean is born and I take the time off to spend with Mandy and bean. The prospect of a long holiday at the end of the year, spent getting to know my spawn and all of it's crying-spitting-shitting-ness is going to be rad. It seems like everyone else is more worried about what-is-going-to-happen than me, or worrying for me. The nice thing is that there is nothing to worry about, because it will work out fine in the end. I think people will only believe me when I am old enough to embarrass bean. I am already old enough to. I will know my work is paid off when my child tells me "you are such a dork". Because, I am ;)

Asterix Readings

brad — Mon, 09 May 2005 13:41:38 +0200

RUCUS import: studies,masters

I have spent the morning reading some asterisk documentation, and I installed asterisk on my lab machine, and when I go in to campus later today for Jock's seminar about Thawte certs, I will go on and plug Aether.anywhere back into the rhodes network, and install asterisk, copy across the iLanga configuration files, and update ubuntu (which is positively a pleasure to do ;).

On the reading list is:

ONLamp.com: Asterisk
Asterisk Docs
Andy Powell's Getting Started with Asterisk
Digium's Draft Handbook
Papers by J.Penton and J.Hitchcock, I will reproduce them on my MSc page RSN

Buddha bubbles

amanda — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:21:54 +0200

"We should not complain about impermanence, because without impermanence, nothing is possible" - Thich Nhat Hanh

Picture taken by Finley

It was Saturday morning and we had just finished eating our fruit salad when Finley's eye caught the bottle of bubbles on the shelf. He's become really good at blowing bubbles and holding the bottle by himself, dip and blow.

Dip. Dip. Blow.

He has also developed this high-pitched three-note melody that goes something like "aaahuhaah" when the bubble he is blowing pops before it leaves the bubble wand. The cuteness of that sound never gets old.

This is the shape of that sound.

This Saturday though, he was becoming increasingly troubled by those bubbles that did make it off the wand to float gracefully in the air, sunlight shimmering off their soapy skins, only to pop and sadly disappear as if they were never there.

I started talking to him about Buddha's ideas on impermanence and how we can appreciate the beauty of the bubbles without getting too attached to them. I think he stopped listening after I said Buddha and seemingly my deep life lesson fell on deaf ears. Instead, he went over to the bookshelf and pointed up at our own Buddha who has regrettably become somewhat of a bookend (only temporary I promise). "Booda Booda!" he cried in excitement. I went over to fetch it for him and he proceeded to happily blow bubbles with Buddha, and then happily pop the bubbles with Buddha as well. For the rest of the day, Finley and Buddha played together, ate together and drank together. I love being reminded, when trying to 'teach' Finley something, or impart some wisdom, that really, he is the one who is constantly teaching me.

My new sweet set up in the lab

brad — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 22:30:07 +0200

RUCUS import: photoblog,geeking

Photologue: Mobile108.jpg

brad — Sun, 15 May 2005 11:18:21 +0200

RUCUS import: photoblog,geeking,linuxworld

Tux moved while we were driving...

Sleep: Elizabeth Pantley is my hero

amanda — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 20:55:53 +0200

A couple months ago Finley was waking every 2 hours at night. After doing lots of research about babies and sleep it was clear that the two schools of thought were 'cry it out' or 'learn to live with it'. Since I wasn't willing to do the first method and tired days and a grumpy mum meant I wasn't willing to learn to live with it either, I researched further until I came across this book by Elizabeth Pantley - The No-Cry Sleep Solution.

Finley has been waking up almost every hour for the last week and then is often up at 4am and doesn't go back to sleep until 5.30am! After reading through all the articles and advice on her website and trying out the gentle, loving ways she suggests getting babies to sleep for longer periods, I can confirm that it really really does work! So we went ahead and ordered the book.

Why I really like her suggestions:

she caters for everyone: whether you bottlefeed or breastfeed your baby to sleep, use a dummy, co-sleep or if your baby sleeps in his/her own cot, there is a solution for you
you get to choose which techniques you think will work for you and your family and put together your own customized plan and not one that is prescribed by some 'sleep expert' who knows nothing about you or your baby
introducing a new way of falling asleep and/or staying asleep is a gentle gradual process that goes according to you and your baby's pace and not a quick fix promising to have your baby sleeping through the night (according to the medical definition of the phrase: sleeping a stretch of five or more hours without waking) in 7 days
she comes from a place of raising children with love, compassion, respect and consistency.

So I will keep you posted on how things go, but with the little work we've done in the last couple days it already feels like we're covering ground. For those of you who find yourself in a similar position to me and can't bear to let your baby cry it out, finally there is an alternative and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I am truly excited at the possibility of having a few hours of uninterrupted sleep in the near future!

Ruby on Rails

brad — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:18:26 +0200

RUCUS import: geek

I have started to learn ruby on rails. It is a webapplication framework, and everyone is going nuts for it. Other options include python, php (with much fu, and lots of coding), or .net/mono.

Either way...some good resources (more for me than for you buddy):

My only concern is that while they have much power, php is one of the only languages that lends it self (in my opinion) to being relatively inline and unobtrusive, and very much efficient in it's operations. But then i dig php a lot.

Word on the street is that it is relatively simple to add AJAX functionality to webapplications built with Rails, as in..."Do you want AJAX in this thing, guy?" kind of simple. And it seems like it is simple to get up and going on the rails. I am interested in how easily one can build interfaces to the "web application" i.e. interacting outside the sphere of strictly only a web application. Granted, all the stuffs will be stored in a Mysql database, so it is really limited only by how well you can build something that is compatible with the Ruby paridigm

After some more reading and thinking, Ruby is nice. and Rails is nice too. I am really loving the feel of it. And there are some really good opinions about Ruby and scalability etc. etc. It is a web-application framework. you can do AJAX, you can do SOAP/XML-RPC, and you have the backend of Ruby, which is a very nice OOP language. It grew out of design patterns, and is smallTalk-ish. So...some articles from people:

Could Rails have been built without Ruby? discusses some fine points about Ruby
Why Rails? is a coldfusion turned RoR
What is all the fuss about ruby? some comment from joel. The discussion is more interesting then the tonsil's opinion.
Scaling with Ruby is boring is a response to some of the arb crit of ruby.

In my readings it is very clear that there are lots of pointy heads who cite things like the fact that RoR may not scale well etc. but it is pointed out that it scales as well, if not better than the hardest mofo J2EE engines. And...what pisses me off is how the tonsils go on about how "this probably doesnt scale cos of xyz, sure you have case studies of 10-50 users, but what about 1000+ concurrent users?" Well...lets look...ummm...maybe 43things repreasents a significant concurrent user base. I mean, 43things attracts Livejournal and cat-blogger types. and there is millions of those. 43things has even been slashdotted. If that does not repreasent scalability on the internet, i dont know what does. And for the pointy heads...what is with saying "what about 1000+ concurrent users"? exactly when do you _regularly_ have that kind of situation?.

Mornings

Geek Dinner: Happy Habanero

Dear Standard Bank, Internet banking division

Geek Dinner: Happy Habanero

I blog therefore we am

Growing up

Statistics logging for Django - part 2

Why Telkom is teh Ghei

A way over[due|rated] italy

Give Your Eyes a Treat

Finley discovers inflatable pools at Lily's party

Geek Dinner: Happy Habanero

Even when you are winning (Drupal vs. Mambo, Germalism, Django, Schools, more bean)

Further reading on a cute child

Asterix Readings

Buddha bubbles

My new sweet set up in the lab

Photologue: Mobile108.jpg

Sleep: Elizabeth Pantley is my hero

Ruby on Rails