One of the most ample things I’ve had this summer has been time: time to read,
time to code, and time to tinker (or waste) on improving how I code. While I am
occasionally guilt of
being too ‘meta,’ spending too much much time worrying about how I do work
rather than doing work, I feel that having the idea to improve in your head is
far better than stagnating. Some improvements are easy to invest in and quick to
see returns of saved time, others are not. Improving how you work and trying new
things is an investment than I feel is worth making.
Over the weekend, Barcamp Rochester 4 took place here on campus at RIT. I have been helping to plan this event over the last few months and was pleased that it went off with any major problems! Around 60-80 people showed up of the course of an entire Saturday and there was a lock picking village that was open most of the day. I arranged most of the food and it seemed like my estimates were in order, I don’t think anyone left hungry!
I switched servers recently, moving from a SliceHost VPS back to a spare machine
to try and save some money monthly. One of the final pieces of rebuilding the
server was to add a server status page. I tried at first with some php exec
calls and command one-liners, but that was pretty limited functionally and
required me to handle all the formatting. Then I found
Munin, a script-based monitoring tool that
uses RRDTool to create static graphs that you can view through your web server.
Before I left this languish any more, here are my thoughts on Shmoocon 2009: it was a great time!
The First Day
I was last in DC about 6 years ago for my 8th grade graduation, so it was fun to view the city again from a different perspective. Some friends from RIT drove down Thursday night and we crashed at another friend's house around 2AM. We were up and moving by 10 the next morning, taking the Metro in to the city center. We checked out the White House and saw some of the major sites that I guess you're supposed to see when you visit. Checked into Shmoocon around 1pm and then ran into Matthew Lesko, the question mark guy down below, who was just hanging out at the hotel that Shmoocon was being run at! Very friendly guy. There was only 1 track of talks on Friday, about 5 hours total. The only interesting talk of this bunch was given by some students from West Point, about identifying Large Binary Objects based off a map of their indentity. Very cool stuff. My friends and I crashed pretty early, we were all quite tired from the day.
Saturday
Saturday was a long day. We were awake and heading into the 'con by 9am. I caught the Fail 2.0 talk by Nathan Hamiel and Shawn Moyer about hacking Myspace and other social networks, which I had caught previously at Defcon, and it was good to see that they had updated their slides based off the last 6 months and what had changed. Social networks stilll suck, but they are learning their lessons slowly. There was a packed talk by Jay Beele about man in the middle talks, where he released an HTTP-based man in the middle tool called Middler. Speaking of that, I should go check it out now... Actually, for most of Saturday, there was a TF2 tournament going on that I got sucked into... A bit of a waste of time, but it was great fun.
At the end of the day, I attended a great talk by Sandy Clark about “hacking” your way into academia. I really wish I had gone to this talk 5 years ago before I attended college. It really reflected alot of what I have been noticing in the world lately, with the flow of information becoming less centralized. A degree was a badge of accomplishment and skill about 20 years ago, guaranteeing you a job at a major corporation. Now, degrees have become watered down and information is easy to obtain. Companies perform rigerous interviews that test your skills because they will (sometimes) hire people without degrees. With a dedication to learn and accomplish, and an Internet connection, you can suceed. This talk was a great example of what thees conventions are about, with many people interjecting their thoughts and experiences during the talk. People kept sharing their stories for 20 minutes after the talk, I was very impressed.
Still trying to get my trip in China written up, but a busy school schedule and
great snowboarding this winter has taken precedence over the writting! To top
that off, I’m 5 minutes from leaving for Shmoocon, a hacking and security conference
in Washington, DC! If anyone who reads this is going, send me and email! I plan
on taking pictures and providing a summary of the event when I get back, so have
fun this weekend!
I love the Terminal that comes standard with OSX and now thanks to 10.5, the
Finder has improved a bunch as well. Between the two of them, I can get to the
right directory and get what I want done pretty quick. Here are a bunch of tips
to help integrate and work better with them.
Finder
For just navigating around, I use List mode (Apple + 2) exclusively. My hands
sit on the Apple key and the cursor keys. You can move the current selection
up and down with the cursor keys. If you want to go up a directory,
Apple + cursor Up. If you have selected a file to open or folder you want to descend
into, Apple + cursor Down. If you want to view the contents of the directory,
with the directory still selected, hit cursor Right to open up a tree of the
directory. Hit cursor Left to close the tree. If you see another directory you
want to explore in the tree of files and folders you just opened, go down to
it and cursor Right to open another tree. Once you are multiple trees deep,
tap cursor Left to go up to the top of the immediate tree. Tap cursor left
again to close it. You can keep double tapping cursor Left to get the top tree
you first opened.
My friend Drew updated his Perl iTunes library module in this
post, adding an example script for providing a bunch of stats. I used his
module previously, practicing my Perl skills and getting some basic
stats for my facebook profile, but his example sets a good baseline for
comparison. Here are my iTunes stats, check out his post to grab yours!
Number of tracks: 14811
Total size: 130492.45 MB Average size: 8.81 MB
Total time: 61d 0h 49m 31s Average time: 5m56s
Ratio of songs/artists: 6.07506152584085
Most popular artists, by number of tracks:
257 Yoko Kanno
207 Aphex Twin
190 Nine Inch Nails
154 Pink Floyd
153 Massive Attack
Most popular artists, by playcount:
672 Dieselboy
462 Ferry Corsten
373 Nikonn
343 Yoko Kanno
335 Deep Forest
Most popular genres, by number of tracks:
1940 Electronic
1894 Rock
1066 Trance
953 Soundtrack
739 Indie Rock
Most popular genres, by playcount:
4488 Electronic
2800 Drum & Bass
2683 Trance
1937 Rock
1573 Ambient
After getting back to school and settling in, I put some serious thought into my
current desk setup. Considering I’m planning on sitting at this desk for the
next ~14 months (which is actually quite a long time for me stay in one place),
I wanted to ensure that it was ergonomically sound. My main guide was a pair of
Coding Horror
articles, a programmer blog from Jeff Atwood. They had
been on my mind for awhile, but I didn’t have the time or money until now to do
something about them until now!
I was updating my Facebook profile tonight and wanted to fill in the “Favorite
Music” section with some real data from iTunes, considering I listen to 99% of
my music through iTunes, my iPod, or iPhone, which means all of my stats get
tracked through iTunes. Creating a Smart Playlist in iTunes of my most played
music would be adequate, but I don’t know of a way to that data out of iTunes
without copying and pasting, a boring and time waste experience, so I turned to
Perl.
It was a great day Saturday at Wordcamp, meeting so many interesting people,
fostering some new ideas, and learn quite a lot. I’ve used wordpress now as my
default blogging software for a few years, but I’ve never had the opportunity to
get in touch with the community first hand, to see whose really behind the
software. As my first Wordcamp, I had high expectations, and I wasn’t let down!