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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ptomblin_lj | |
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I have a line on a job that involves porting some code that was originally written in R, then in Delphi, and now the researcher wants it re-written in C++, turned into multi-processor/multi-computer friendly (using MPI?), and turned into a plug-in for R. The program as it is now is pretty primitive – he apparently just puts a bunch of parameters into the actual Delphi code then recompiles and runs, and it outputs into a data file. Obviously the first step would be to have a wrapper program that gets the parameters from a data file, and later a wrapper that gets the parameters from however R passes them to plugins.
It’s been a while since I used C++, and the language has changed a lot since then. Name spaces, STL, Boost, auto_ptr, all this stuff is new to me. It’s going to take some frantic reading to get up to speed. Even worse, I have to read the existing code, which means learning a bit of Delphi/Pascal. And I’m going to have to find a decent IDE for C++ – although the consensus on StackOverflow seems to be to go back to the way I’ve always worked until I started using Eclipse last year: gvim, make, gdb, and a web browser open to the man pages.
Even better, the job would mean working from home. The dogs will be happy about that.
Originally posted at Rants and RevelationsTags: geekery, revelation
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elfs | |
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It was too long to cross-post, but some of you might be interested in this. As I mentioned yesterday, I've been using Hudson, a server written in Java that does continual integration testing of applications, to test my Django projects. I recently consulted with a team that wanted to use Hudson on a remote virtual server, but didn't want to go through the rigamorale of setting up basic auth on the command line. Hudson has a pretty good in-house security system these days, but all they wanted was basic auth. I've now written up Setting up Hudson behind Nginx. The basic configuration details ought to work for all unixes. (And can I just say that, when testing Facebook applications, it feels really weird to be running a Java app that runs a Python app, and while the Python app is running, it then runs a Ruby app that runs a Java app in order to test through a PHP-based front-end to reach the aforementioned Python app back-end, all the while exercising and ensuring the Javascript middleware components behave as advertised?) Tags: geek
Current Mood:  geeky
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30toseoul | |
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I'm happily anticipating my Pole return for many of the obvious reasons -- money, travel, seeing friends, the comfort of a familiar place, stars and auroras, extended naptimes -- but here are some not-so-obvious things that I'm really looking forward to. 1) Not having "days of the week". Technically they exist, as Pole and McMurdo operate on New Zealand time because it's the easiest for operations, and most of the station works a six-day week with Sundays off. But the days don't really exist for me because I work every day. 2 meteorologists = 1 day shift and 1 night shift. Science doesn't take the weekend off. (And yes, we used to say the last part in melodramatic voices. Hee.) So -- every day is the same. While that can seriously get on your nerves after about six months, right now I'm looking forward to getting it back. I'm tired of having days. Like, I hate Tuesdays due to a long lab, Wednesdays suck because they're endless, it needs to be Friday dammit! That shit is just annoying. I'm sick of all the mental resentment involved in the process. It will be nice to have one standard repeating day again. And... after a while you can listen to me bitch about being sick of that. I'm hard to please. I am large, I contain multitudes. 2) Having boring food. The food at Pole is actually pretty good, much better than McMurdo fare, but 99% of it isn't fresh. The menu cycle gets tedious after it repeats enough times. You don't get to pick what you eat, it's just served to you. The snack selection is limited. I don't know if some crazed food-supply person did it on purpose, but the cheeseburgers taste like horsemeat and the pizza is for shit. I'm looking forward to all of this so much because it is an awesome way to lose weight. Occasionally I will think about food that I miss, but everything is thousands of miles away, so mostly I don't bother thinking. I dropped fifteen pounds last winter without even trying. Weight loss by the "You Can't Have It Because It Is Simply Not Here" method. Food is around but I don't want to eat it. Brilliant, man. I will be smaller and still contain multitudes. 3) The inability of outside people to reach me. Limited satellite means the phone doesn't work most of the time and we only have so many hours of internet. While it sometimes sucks, mostly it doesn't. I interact with family and friends when I feel like it. Once in a while, I'll even make up satellite problems as an excuse for why I haven't contacted them, because how will they know? Maybe this glee makes me selfish (okay: it does) but really, when I do wind up calling, we have much higher-quality communication because both parties are actually interested in the conversation. It's wonderful to pare it down like that. Only a couple of months before I get to leave the real world again. Tags: antarctica
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elfs | |
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 I am not a waffle. Since everyone's doing it, I decided to go ahead and make oat-and-chocolate-chip cookies in the waffle iron. You can get the recipe at Finecooking.com. Kouryou-chan loves them, of course. They're huge, they're fluffy, and damn if they aren't a good excuse to eat butter, brown sugar, and chocolate chips with just enough egg and flour to bind them all together, a little baking soda riser, and oats for, well, I guess for volume. Maybe I can pretend they're good for me. Tags: baking, cooking, food
Current Mood:  full
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serenecooking | |
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Sadly, my camera battery crapped out just as I attempted to photograph dinner tonight, so you get the text-only version. You can take my word for the beauty, though -- I even diced the carrots, potatoes, and celery into cute little cubes! This recipe did take a fair bit of dicing and chopping, but I did it sitting down at the table, and it wasn't unpleasant. If you prefer, buy a bag of frozen stew veggies; I won't tell. Also, I know that most recipes these days tell you to throw away the fat every chance they get, but the way I see it, if you can use a little of the trimmed fat instead of a little oil, you save money and increase flavor, so hey, toss it if you want and use oil, but me, I like to use it. Even though this recipe starts with dried beans, it doesn't take all day to cook because I use my pressure cooker. If you prefer, just use canned pintos and add them in step 10. Pork and Pinto Bean Stew (regular and pressure-cooker directions) Makes about 3 quarts, or about 6 two-cup servings 1 cup dried pinto beans, soaked overnight or quick-pressure-soaked (or 1 can cooked pintos, drained) 1 lb. pork, trimmed (save the fat) and cubed 1 large or 2 small onions, diced 3 ribs celery, diced 3 carrots, peeled and diced 6 cloves garlic, chopped 2 tomatoes, chopped (don't bother peeling/seeding) 1/2 head cabbage, chopped 2 potatoes, peeled and diced (keep in water until ready to use so they don't go brown) 1 tablespoon no-salt seasoning or poultry seasoning or your favorite spices for stew 1 teaspoon salt (if using canned beans with salt, reduce this amount of salt) black pepper to taste (I use about 1/4 teaspoon) 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika (optional) 1) Disconnect your smoke alarm, temporarily. 2) Mince saved pork fat into tiny pieces and fry in a hot soup pot (I use my pressure cooker) until browned. 3) Add onions, celery, carrots, and garlic and sautee on medium-high heat for five minutes, stirring occasionally, then remove the veggie mixture from the pot and set aside. 4) Rinse the pot briefly, then in the same pot, brown the cubes of pork. 5) Add pinto beans, tomatoes, half of the veggie mixture, and enough water to cover everything by about a half inch. Put the other half of the veggie mixture in the fridge until step 9. 6) Reconnect the smoke alarm. 7) Cook beans, pork, and vegetables on high pressure for 25 minutes, or bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer for 60-90 minutes if using a regular soup pot. 8) If using a pressure-cooker, release the pressure using the quick-release method. If using a regular soup pot, just go to step 9. 9) Add remaining vegetable mixture, cabbage, potatoes, and spices. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer 30 minutes. 10) If using canned beans, add them now and let the soup heat through for a few minutes before serving. Cost breakdownbeans = .45 pork = .98 onions = .22 celery = .15 carrots = .34 garlic = .06 tomatoes = .85 cabbage = .40 potatoes = .07 seasonings = negligible bread and butter = ten cents or so Total = $3.62 (60 cents per serving)Tags: dinner, non-veg, pork, soups, under 1 dollar per serving, under 2 dollars per serving, under 5 dollars per serving
Current Location: 94609
Current Mood: mellow
Current Music: Free Man in Paris, Joni Mitchell
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elfs | |
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Eddie Sullivan at Chickenwing Software has a fascinating post entitled The Facebook Platform is Dead. I agree with many of his comments. I don’t think there’s anything terrible about the “Facebook Certified Application” program; that’s a business decision, not a software policy decision. But Sullivan says one thing that set me off. He wrote:
The big companies can afford to hire someone full-time to test and re-test their apps against every change to the back-end, but the rest of us cannot.
To which my reaction is: shut up, and don’t be so damned lazy.
Install Celerity, and get headless testing with WATIR in a rapid-response environment. Install Hudson and get fully automated continual integration. Install Git as your repository, and tell Hudson what your master is, and honor it. Install Cucumber so that when it fails, the failure reports are in clear and unambiguous English. Put this all on that archaic hunk of junk PC in your basement, give it a fresh hard drive and install Debian Linux. Give Hudson a mailserver so it can notify you when an automatic test run fails.
None of this, from building your own PC and installing Linux all the way up to installing Ruby, JRuby, Java, and all of the other tools necessary to support your build environment and make it work, ought to be beyond the ken of the average programmer.
Facebook is just a web application. Treat it as such. Test against it. Get a few Facebook Test Accounts, write a few WATIR scripts to automate their Facebook relationships and friend graphs, write more to log in and go to the application, then test the Hell out of your application.
None of this is hard. If you spend one week teaching yourself how to set Hudson and Git up correctly, you’ll benefit forever from Kent Beck’s famous quote, “transmuting fear into boredom.” Even better, by putting it on Hudson and Git, you get freedom from even the boredom, for the most part. Instead, you get knowledge that your fixes don’t break anything, and the capability of backing out when they do.
What is hard is being in the habit of testing. Of writing testing in terms of expectation. I’m fair at it, but I’m getting better. I aspire to Beck’s mantra: I’m not a great progammer. I’m a good programmer with great habits. Test-driven development (and behavior-driven development) are great ideas (although a lot of TDD zealots go overboard, with the predictable backlash), but integrating them with even better, continuous building and continuous testing, should make all web application development better.
Believe me, Facebook apps are in desperate need of two things: automated testing, and better graphic design. I can at least contribute to one of these.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.comTags: django, programming
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elfs | |
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"I want Americans, I want everybody listening, to go out and buy 5 weapons and 5,000 bullets - for your own protection, for self defense. Because I believe that foreign soldiers will come to our houses, to rape our wives and teenage daughters and kill the men right in front of them - and then the women will bear children of an ethnic stock different from what they are, and that's how you alter the course of any society; you change the ethnic stock. Egypt today is not the same ethnic stock it was during the Moses days." — Major James F. Linzey, Chaplain, US Army, April 10 2005 Oh look, a fire. Gasoline, anyone? Tags: religion
Current Mood:  annoyed
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palsgraf_polka | |
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I realize he has to do the Ft. Hood memorial today because it's his obligation as Commander in Chief, but Obama is considering sending 30,000-40,000 more troops to Afghanistan and we're going to be mired in Iraq for years, so I hope he feels some shame and does some deep thinking about what the Fort Hood shooting means and why this troubled young man turned to radical Islam, and how Obama, as the hope of a new generation, should look at this and see that these two wars are wrong and that we should just cut our losses and go. Now. Obama, you've been very disappointing to me on the issue of the wars. I know you didn't start these two wars (which is why most of my ire is reserved for Bush) but you have the power to make great changes. Let's bring our troops home before we have more suicides and more shootings by men and women who are too disillusioned to want to be sent to a war they don't believe in. In a volunteer army, no less. Tags: politics, sadness
Current Location: 93105
Current Mood:  contemplative
Current Music: Randi Rhodes on Air America Radio
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elfs | |
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Brad DeLong comments on the 9.5% growth reported in the third quarter, along with a 13.6% growth in productivity and a 7.1% drop in labor costs: Back in the 1930s there was a Polish Marxist economist, Michel Kalecki, who argued that recessions were functional for the ruling class and for capitalism because they created excess supply of labor, forced workers to work harder to keep their jobs, and so produced a rise in the rate of relative surplus-value.
For thirty years, ever since I got into this business, I have been mocking Michel Kalecki. I have been pointing out that recessions see a much sharper fall in profits than in wages. I have been saying that the pace of work slows in recessions--that employers are more concerned with keeping valuable employees in their value chains than using a temporary high level of unemployment to squeeze greater work effort out of their workers.
I don't think that I can mock Michel Kalecki any more, ever again. I feel like I'm living in Michel Kalecki's universe nowadays. I note with amusement that DeLong, who also hosted Shrillblog, where those driven into unholy madness by the malevolence, mendacity, incompetence and disconnection from reality that has characterized the right wing of American politics for the past nine years can ululate in psychotic shrillness at the cold, uncaring stars, has chosen to rename his blog, "Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles." Tags: unemployed
Current Mood: shrill
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serenecooking | |
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Potatoes are such amazing food. Cheap as all get out, for one, but also a nutritional powerhouse. It runs counter to the way people think of them, but they're not all carbs. A large potato has 63 grams of carbs, yes, but it also has 7 grams of protein (and no fat). Which is to say that it's a perfectly good basis for a meal, without worrying about adding some protein-rich food on top of it. Buttermilk-garlic Mashed Potatoes with Mushroom GravyMakes 4 servings, plus usually a fair bit of leftover gravy, yum For the potatoes, I boiled six large ones and mashed them with their skins on, adding a few ounces of buttermilk (somewhere around a half cup -- use as much or as little as will give you the texture you like, and substitute any liquid you choose if you don't have buttermilk) and a few cloves of minced garlic that I'd sauteed lightly in a couple tablespoons of butter, along with some salt and pepper. And that's about it. All my vegan gravies these days are some variation on the basic method for the Post-punk Chickpea Gravy in Isa's Vegan with a Vengeance. I've done a lovely miso-ginger thing, lots of different mushroom gravies, the original chickpea thing, and several more. It's really versatile. This week, I used mushrooms that I found on sale for $1.29 a pound, but when mushrooms aren't cheap, use chickpeas or white beans or a big mess of fried onions or...  Mushroom Gravy1/4 cup flour 1 teaspoon oil 1 small onion, quartered and sliced thinly 2-3 cloves garlic, minced 1 lb. mushrooms, cleaned and sliced 3 tbsp. soy sauce pinch of rosemary salt and pepper to taste 1/4 cup nutritional yeast, optional Whisk the flour into 2 cups of water and set aside. Heat a heavy frying pan (preferably cast iron) on medium high heat. Add oil and onions and stir for a minute or so, then add garlic and mushrooms. Cook on medium-high until all is cooked down and the liquid has mostly evaporated (about 15 minutes). Add soy sauce, rosemary, salt/pepper, and whisked flour/water mixture. Stir constantly until gravy thickens. Turn off the heat and add the yeast if desired (it's good both ways). Keep warm on low heat until serving. If it gets too thick while waiting, add a little water and stir well before serving.  Cost breakdownpotatoes (about 2 lbs. at 9.9 cents a pound) = .20 buttermilk = .16 garlic = .06 butter = .06 flour = .03 oil = negligible onion = .11 mushrooms = 1.19 soy sauce = (I have no idea what I paid for the soy sauce. Let's say five cents) nutritional yeast = .28 broccoli = 1.29 Total = $3.43 (86 cents per serving)Tags: dinner, lacto, potatoes, under 1 dollar per serving, under 2 dollars per serving, under 5 dollars per serving, vegetarian
Current Location: 94609
Current Mood: waking up
Current Music: "Least Complicated" earworm
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oshawapilot | |
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Originally published at Information Echo. Please leave any comments there. I’m an avid user of Time Machine to keep all of my media (most importantly, digital pictures dating back 15 years, and scanned images dating back nearly 20 years) backed up and safe, but a few months ago I started to consider the possible issues of having a backup sitting right next to the source.
In a situation of hardware failure on our iMac, the Time Machine backup is indispensable - simply fix the hard drive, and restore.
However, in a situation of double-hardware failure (unlikely, but possible), corruption (again, unlikely, but possible), or (hopefully never) catastrophic loss of our household contents, a local-based backup is going to prove rather useless. I needed an off-site backup solution to complement the local backups. Risking nearly two decades of memories simply calls for more than a lackadaisical approach to backing up.
My current webhost provides me with an unbelievable amount of disk space and the logical solution was to simply backup to this otherwise underutilized space, but simply compressing everything up into a huge archive and FTP’ing the files to the server seemed like a pain in the ass, and since it wasn’t easily automated, it was prone to being forgotten and as the months pass by could still result in file loss.
Enter “Twin”, by App4Mac. It seemed perfect, and in testing the feature-limited free version, it also seemed to actually work. It was straightforward to setup, was highly automated, and was able to utilize my wasted server space as an off-site backup destination. It was exactly what I wanted.
I was a little put off by the nearly $80 price tag, but I tweeted the developer and was sent back a “20% off” discount code which took a bit of the sting away from the purchase, so I took the dive.
The problem is that although it seemed to handle the small amount of files in the demo version, once I was registered and I set Twin loose with my 60 gig iPhoto library, things started going horribly wrong. The first failure was a result of me pausing the backup (using the server applications pause feature) since I needed the bandwidth for something else, except when I went to continue the backup the server crashed. 30 Gigs of upload wasted.
The second failure happened after about 40 gigs of the backup had completed. Starting from scratch.
The third failure happened after about 50 gigs of the backup had completed. Once again, starting from scratch.
You see, aside from the fact that the program doesn’t seem to be able to reliably handle large backups (as is evident from the crashes), it also can’t recover gracefully from said crashes - if a backup is not completed to 100% (a process that can take a very long time with a slow DSL upstream connection handling 60 gigs of upstream content), the program simply orphans everything that was backed up to the point of the failure and wants to start all over again when you restart.
Ridiculous you might say, but after discussing the problem with the developer, confirmed. Apparently no interim index of check files are written during the backup, and if it fails to complete for any reason whatsoever, you loose everything. Checking my server I can confirm that my last backup attempt successfully transferred just over 50 gigs (spanning the period of numerous days worth of saturated upstream transfer) and the files are there, but there is absolutely no way to re-associate those files to Twin and make it continue where it left off. Even if I attempted to manually handle the files that it did manage to backup it would prove infuriating since Twin aggravates files into batches, ZIP’s them, splits then as required, and (I understand) renames the source files to fit it’s own backup schema.
There is a feature to “recover an orphaned backup”, however again, it only works if the backup in question was 100% completed (at least once) to begin with, and then the Server app somehow lost it’s configuration of such.
So, after wasting over 120 gigs of bandwidth, I’ve given up. The developer did last respond saying a future version will address this issue, but when I inquired as to the anticipated release date of the new version, I received no response. I’m considering asking for a refund and looking for an alternative backup solution that does what I need, but I can’t seem to find anything else that handles things quite the same way Twin does - this is of course why I bought it to begin with.
The only good part of the story is that I have an ISP that offers me a generous 250gb/Month allowance so these failures aren’t going to cost me an arm and a leg in overage charges, but I still can’t help but feel a bit ripped off. Tags: frustration, mac
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mzrowan | |
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I seem to be ill. It came on quite suddenly at the end of the work day -- headache, violent coughing fits, sore throat, stuffed-up sinuses, nausea (although that may be from the irritated throat), a feeling in my lungs reminiscent of childhood exercise-induced asthma attacks, general malaise. No fever, though, according to redheadedmuse's tricorder Exergen ComfortScanner Infrared Thermometer. (Gosh, remember when you used to have to put a thermometer into a body cavity to find out your temperature? I bet kids these days would never believe you if you told them that...) Yes, I know, with that symptom list, this could be the big one. redheadedmuse has graciously offered to keep an eye on me. I really hope it isn't. I mean, besides the usual reasons for hoping one isn't possibly gravely ill, I really can't afford to lose a week from work. Tags: life
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Previous 
morose
bored
damp from my shower