I’ve been using an interesting Android task app for a couple of months now called Simpletask (Source) [not pictured above] and I feel like I’ve used it long enough now to be able to give it a fair review over some of the other stuff I have tried for task management.

I’m still using a lot of other task management apps for things like software development and project planning, but Simpletask and the ecosystem it’s based on have some unique characteristics and advantages that can also potentially fit really well into your workflow.

This small tabletop chest was inspired from a design copied from the class project of Camille Larrey’s Intermediate Woodworking Class at ACC. It was made based off of a diagram of general parts required and the overall dimensions of 18x10x10’'.

In features 24 dovetails for the upper drawers and an additional 12 for the panels. In the rendering the cabinet panels are using the “Wood Cherry Original” material from sketch up while the drawer fronts “birds eye maple” and side panels, “cherry finished” from an article on wood grain textures1 however when it came down to purchasing lumber I only went with two species.

I’ve been neglecting my homepage for a while, and as a dynamic site written in Django, it is harder to manage and I just don’t want to spend the same amount of effort anymore to run a page I don’t frequently update.

To remedy this, I decided to throw everything into static files and build the static files when I do deploys of new content instead of dynamically rendering the pages on each request.

With the new release of Docker 0.11 it has finally become easy to run Asterisk inside of Docker. Instead of port forwarding your RDP and SIP ports, you can now pass –net=host to Docker and avoid all those NAT SIP header rewriting issues. My start_asterisk configuration is below and beneath that is a second command I use for accessing the Asterisk Shell.

$ docker run -d -v /opt/asterisk/voicemail:/var/spool/asterisk/voicemail -v \


  /opt/asterisk/monitor:/var/spool/asterisk/monitor -v /opt/asterisk/etc:/etc/asterisk -v \


  /opt/asterisk/run:/var/run/asterisk --net=host asterisk asterisk -v


$ docker run -i -v /opt/asterisk/run:/var/run/asterisk -t asterisk asterisk -rvvv

Before running the above commands, you need to build the docker image which is done by running ….

960 grid system is a fixed width html layout framework. There is a bad ass generator at http://960ls.atomidata.com/ that used to be linked from the main page, and I have no idea why it is not there any more. Rank it up google!

So, Django Con Europe just ended a couple of days ago and all the party people have been blowing up the Planet Django feed that I subscribe to and I wanted to make a list of the talks I want to watch when they hit the 3 dubs.

• From static to real-time: one app’s journey into the modern age - Interested because, when people at a Django conference have a talk about about node.js stealing some of Django’s thunder, and you don’t know much about node.js, it’s basically the most relevant way to learn about it.
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Python Packaging - I can’t claim to worry about how I package my Django applications, but I am almost sure that I can find some ways of making life easier on myself.
• Django and PyPy: Performant is a word
• 3 CMSes in 45 minutes
• One size fits all: responsive web design with Django, Compass, and the Less Framework - Interesting to me because I wrote different stylesheets for different devices once and never did it again because it was complicated.
• Continuous integration and continuous deployment
• unjoinify: a module to tame the SQL beast - Keep my hands off of even more sql?! Sure!
• Celery - An asynchronous task queue (not only) for Django
• Reusable Apps using “Eight Spaces” - One of the big themes of Django con Portland 2010 was problems with apps not being purely pluggable and almost always taking some additional customization to get them working in your stack.
• Core developers panel - Last year it seemed that most of the questions were related to different talks and kind of served as a medium for an official response, plus, I am interested in seeing what kind of input some of the new core devs have to give.
• The Impact of Django
• An iPhone-Python love affair: Building APIs for mobile
• The Best and Worst of Django Core
• Django on Rails: Getting Resourceful
• Deploying, At An Unusual Scale
• Taming runtime dynamic models in Django
• Scalability panel
• Whither Django?

And of course, if your Django tastes are different then mine, there is a full list up at http://djangocon.eu/schedule/

I’ve been messing around with Erlang after picking up Erlang and OTP in Action(affiliate code) and hopefully I will be writing massively scalable applications soon because Erlang makes it so easy. Even though I’m not quite there, here is what I got so far:

-module(all_work).  
-export([convert_temp/1]).  
convert_temp({T,c}) ->  
{T * 9/5 + 32,f};  
convert_temp({T,f}) ->  
{(T - 32)* 5/9,c}.  

A simple program to convert C to F.

24> c(all_work).  
{ok,all_work}  
25> all_work:convert_temp({73,f}).  
{22.77777777777778,c}  
26> all_work:convert_temp(all_work:convert_temp({73,f})).  

What is Next? Who knows.

572 days were accounted for in the output of uptimed but I had this same Linode allocated to me since oct 20th 2008, thats about 30 months that it has been up and run a variety of distros starting with Gentoo, then CentOS 5, Debian, and now I am switching to a new linode running Ubuntu server LTE 10.04.

`
root@steni / $uprecords

Uptime | System Boot up

----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------  
1 236 days, 23:10:44 | Linux 2.6.18.8-x86_64-li Tue Oct 27 18:48:32 2009  
2 220 days, 09:51:07 | Linux 2.6.18.8-x86_64-li Mon Jun 21 19:00:39 2010  
3 109 days, 15:10:44 | Linux 2.6.18.8-x86_64-li Fri Jul 10 00:29:42 2009  
-> 4 11 days, 05:28:18 | Linux 2.6.18.8-x86_64-li Fri Jan 28 09:14:53 2011  
----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------  
1up in 98 days, 09:42:27 | at Wed May 18 01:28:29 2011  
no1 in 225 days, 17:42:27 | at Thu Sep 22 09:28:29 2011`

The justification for deploying to another server instead of keeping this one came from the fact that I wanted to switch to a 32bit OS and also wanted to run Nginx as a front end proxy for the sites I was hosting to get better performance from its caching module.

I saw a article on Dvorak Keyboards today and i had to give them a try.
(btw, this article is also being typed on a querty keyboard, it wasn’t that easy to pick up after all.)

I knew about Dvoark for some time but I have never bothered to try it before, but I was sold when I read that when using Dvorak, 70% of the keystrokes were on the home row as opposed to 32% with qwerty. Also, to improve the speed that people type, the vowels are on one side of the keyboard so that you can alternated from right and left hands when you type words with alternating vowels and constants.

Getting your SyncML phone working with Ubuntu just got a lot harder in their newest release, but fortunately it is still possible with a bit of work. In the latest release, they moved from libsoup 2.2 to 2.4 and didn’t leave the old version in the repositories, so to get it working, you need to download the .deb packages for karmic and install them side by side.

• http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/libsoup2.2-8
• http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/libsyncml0
• http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/opensync-plugin-syncml

When installing libsyncml0, i had to install libwbxml2-0 which can be gotten from aptitude. Also there are a couple of other programs you should also get.

I have had to update my resume lately and a while ago I wrote it using LaTeX which is a typesetting program. Typesetting programs are different then word processors as they allow you to focus more on the content rather then laying everything out on the page. A few cases where LaTeX trounces Microsoft word is when you are writing anything that uses a predefined layout that must be adhered to such as a paper written in MLA format or a book. While it excels in some areas it fails miserably in others, for most use cases anyway. So you are going to have your work cut out for you if you are trying to make posters, fliers, banners, and any other type of thing where you really want to focus on layout while writing.

Yesterday I was fooling around with python and trying to serve
some XML to a Cisco 7960 I have. I spent a lot of time getting
my web server set up to serve a dynamic XML page which I could pop
my phone book information into and when I finally got it done it
wouldn’t work. Searching online I found out that the latest
firmwares from Cisco, 9.*, has a couple of bugs in it dealing with
XML. Unfortunately I don’t remember where I found this information
but I can give out the sparks notes on what I saw.

When you first turn on your computer the BIOS kicks in and searches for instructions on your master boot record or MBR. From there it is able to locate the boot loader which in turn figures out which kernel to run and then loads it into memory and that is the point you start actually running your flavor of UNIX. At this stage your computer is just running a kernel and has no interactivity or running services.

I have been playing around with http://wolframalpha.com lately and it has a lot of power behind it. I mostly use it for doing math stuff when I don’t have a calculator in front of me and it can even do some stuff I cant do on my ti-89 like Laplace transforms. When it returns a result it often time gives a comparison of other things that have the same unit. As an example, I asked it about 15 gigs and it immediately figured out what I was talking about and told me how big that was in relation to a blueray disk,60%, as well as how long it would download at different speeds. All this information got me thinking about what kind of questions it can answer and what it cant. The questions it cant answer fall into 3 main categories and while I could never list all the things it can answer I can easily list what kind of questions I want it to answer.

My filesyserver at home is a opensolaris box using raidz under zfs and right now it is having some problems. Recently I had to replace a drive that did not fail but it was making some clicking noises. After repplacing it the first resilver left me with an error about a snapshot that i didn’t need being damaged. okay i can live with that, so i just need to delete the snapshot and bring the pools redundancy back up. well, it reslivered everything, but it didn’t seem like the pool was running completely. i cleared the error and it started to resilver again. same thing happened again but now i am getting a warning for something else <0x5c>:<0x64d62> and now the resilver is going past 100% and copying more then the amount of data i have. some posts online suggest disabling snapshots because they are keeping it from completing. didnt work so i reboot the computer and when it comes back online it starts resilvering automatically. again it goes to 100% and keeps working but this time it takes two files with it, the one before and <0x2b3>:<0x64d62>. looking to another post i see to upgrade opensolaris and try again, i do that, but now i am starting to get worried about playing fast and loose with my data. i still hvent fixed the problem but i want to have some assurance i am not going to make it worse.

Just sent to PROD a copy of my personal site. PROD is a 20$ vps currently hosting two websites and it is running open source software which is important. thanks to jamescarnley[http://jamescarnley.com] for doing some beta testing.

My department has several linux computers and auditing the logs is very tiresome if they are all localized to each computer. While the vanilla syslog offers remote logging features it uses udp and thus many things can affect the chance of log messages reaching their destination. the message dropping problem is not as widespread in syslog-ng since it uses tcp to transmit log packets.

Compiling syslog-ng is required as the only syslog-ng binaries are licensed and require a contract to purchase. under rhel/centos the eventlog compilation goes as planed, but things start going wrong when auto configuring syslog-ng itself. it will complain. _configure: error: Cannot find eventlog version >= 0.2: is pkg-config in path? _this is a easy problem that can be fixed with running configure in the following way:

linux server: leif

solaris client: sisu

export the shares on leif to sisu and then exportfs -r

add an entry in /etc/hosts.allow on leif

on sisu modify the file /etc/auto_master and add the line

/- auto_direct

in /etc/auto_direct add lines like

/home -rw leif:/home

reboot and celebrate

if that is working its now time to set up nis to get remote logins

first set up the domainname in /etc/defaultdomain and use the domainname tool to set it

when the sun tech installed the hard drive array he made one big 4TB partition. when i finally made my mind up about which size quota to give each user i realized that i needed to have a separate partition for the quotas. i used lvm to resize the partition and created an additional partition for the mail server to use. in /etc/fstab there needed to be an option to enable usrquota. after any changes are made to fstab the partitions need to be remounted. once this is done the quota files need to be generated. use the command “time /sbin/quotacheck -vguma” after the quota files have been set up, the quotas need to be set for all users