seemant

Nice StreamBase write-up

It’s always nice to see people say some nice things about the company you work for. Mr. Halyer really wrote up something very nice about StreamBase and its capabilities, etc. Good stuff, indeed.

Meanwhile, I’m hard at work on those articles I promised, though it’ll likely be post Christmas that I’ll be close. Especially since Aimee and I are headed south for more tropical climes for the holiday. Now, it’s a little disappointing on one hand, by the way, that Boston’s weather has been so damned temperate. I’m the absolute last person on the planet to complain about the lack of snow, but really, it would have added to the feeling of “going to the tropics to get out of this harsh winter” if, in fact, the winter actually approached some degree of harshness. Having said that, I’m ok with a snow-less Boston, to be honest.

Stay tuned for some django news.

The Master Cleanse: PostScript

Well, I definitely did not do the cleanse for long enough, this much I know. The statement is true for last time as well. The first indication of this: my tongue was still pasty white when I quit on the 11th day. I actually quit halfway through the day, for several reasons: some social (I need to meet with some people this week over meals), and some not (I have a blood test on Friday, and I want my body to “normalize” — no fake gluten allergy thing). The other reason: the day after I quit, I’ve gotten two or three pimples (one pretty big). It’s as though there are toxins still wanting to get out, and that’s the route they took.

Of course, this could be bullshit, and hormone levels could have just cycled that way co-incidentally. Let’s go with that theory for now, because it’s the saner one. Aimee wants to do the cleanse, so we’ll do it together in March-ish. From here, I’m aiming at a 21-day Cleanse then. She’s looking at 10 days. I’m looking at return to pink tongue. I opted out of the liver flush this time, but I’ll do another one of those upon our return from the Christmas break. Sorry, political correcters, that’s what we’ll be celebrating (yes, I’m not Christian, but I’ve always celebrated Christmas my whole life).

StreamBase: Eclipsed

Well, as promised, StreamBase is starting to get even more developer-friendly. I’m sure some of you have seen the new and improved DevZone (notice the sane URL 🙂 ). Well, now in the add-ons downloads section, we have put up a Java Toolkit for Eclipse.

Now, to be sure, this is not the StreamBase studio, which is a separate download. Instead, this little ditty makes it easy for your java developers to build up custom operators, functions, enqueuers, and adapters for your StreamBase application. The idea here is that the architecture (and SQL, using StreamSQL) people would use StreamBase Studio to design their real-time applications (to react and respond to streams and complex events) on what is basically a high-level. A look through the GUI shows you how easy that can be. The java heavy people who really don’t need StreamBase installed, and probably already have Eclipse (especially recently, btw, I’ve noticed more and more college grads simply raving about eclipse and java), to build you your custom operators and functions and things.

What does this mean anyway? Well, let’s say you’re trying to read in a stream of data coming in some format (let’s say XML) which StreamBase doesn’t natively read. You need to “adapt” that data stream to convert it into tuples that StreamBase will understand. The way to do that is to create an embedded adapter that starts and stop with the StreamBase server, and basically sits in front of the server. Adapters can also, by the way, be used for data output.

So, now, with the Eclipse plugin, it’s trivial for the Java developers to just create a new adapter and fill in the meat (ie, the code that will do their work) into the appropriate spots in the generated code in Eclipse. Easy-peasy pie.

I’m still exploring my way around this, but hopefully sooner rather than later, I will start to put some articles up on my learnings. It’s a really nifty platform to be working off.

Future Proofing

I’d like to talk about future-proofing for a bit. One of the things that’s niggled at me for quite a few years has been the suffixes you find in websites. In the beginning you had either “.htm” or “.html”, and even that was annoying. It’s one thing to have everything be .html. But then (I think FrontPage or its ilk were responsible, but someone please set the record straight here) we got .htm pages as well. Now, it was a 50-50 chance that your memory of a URL was correct. In time, we’ve gotten .jsp (with the hideous jsessionid nonsense), .php, .cgi, and (God help us) .pl pages or .py pages, and probably a whole host more. Is there *any* good reason for this rubbish?

You know, technologies underlying your webpages are going to change. There’s nothing you can do about it, they just will. Slashdot is a good example of using .pl extensions. And again, why? Why use any extensions? What happens when you switch from perl to ruby or python?

The point is that the web is evolving. So, why deliberately lock down your site to embrace one web technology? So your website is up for 5 years with your ugly-assed jsp pages and you’ve gotten up there in your google rankings and what not. Then along comes your new business needs, driving your web infrastructure away from jsp to php. All of a sudden you change your extensions, and now you have to do a whole bunch of redirects. Do you see how this doesn’t scale at all? Is it just me?

Honestly, .html extensions are there needs to be, if anything at all. What I really like are no extensions whatsoever. Django embraces this idea. You get really beautiful URL’s with no extensions and other ugliness. Down the road, when you switch to RoR or Java or whatever, your URLS (gasp!) will not have to change!!

OK, that came off pretty rant-like, but the ultimate point I wanted to make is this: my employers are cool like that. They’re paying attention to the things I say 🙂 I brought up the point of future-proofing url’s, and if you look around on the site (especially the revamped DevZone, you’ll see a lot more future-proofed URLs. There’s still some ways to go before we stop exposing the technology behind our web infrastructure, but it’s a great start.

Tell me your thoughts on this — I’m especially interested in you .jsp and .php people. How do you possibly justify that nonsense?

The Master Cleanse: Day 10

Well, the last day came and went. My tongue (writing this on the morning of Day 11) remained white throughout Day 10, signalling at least a Day 11 on the fast in my immediate future. I don’t really feel hungry any more. I mean some stuff sounds good and I want to eat it, but not physically — there’s no craving. It’s a mental, “I’d like to eat cheesecake or chocolate mousse or both sometime soon” thing. I did the flush in the evening, and that went well.

We went to the grocery store to restock on lemons and maple syrup. And of course, the one we went to didn’t have any organic lemons. So we had to go to another one in Arlington where they usually stock organic lemons. And of course, they were out, too. So, I’m stuck with “regular” lemons for the duration of this fast. Aimee went out for Indian food to the Dhaba yesterday. She didn’t want to bring any food back, but at this point, I’m way over it. The smell of food doesn’t do anything for me. We passed by a Bertucci’s in a mall yesterday. It actually–get this–smelled bad to me.

Gross: I’m still “eliminating” like a freaking madman. This, without ingesting anything other than lemonade, salt water, senna laxative tea. So, perhaps it really is toxins. I mean, 10 days without solid food and I still have eliminations? That’s crazy.

Long Live the LA Box

That’s right folks. The box is dead. The motherboard fan won’t work, the media disk is clicking (that was 120GB SATA with all my multimedia on it). And it won’t boot. Even the livecd hangs when trying to mount the livecd filesystem. So, I guess it’s time to try and find somewhere I can take the other disks to mount and get data off. Oh well…

The Master Cleanse: Day 9

So here’s the thing. I’m bothered and puzzled. I’m puzzled by the fact that even though I haven’t had anything to eat, and I haven’t been flushing consistently (see the two days I missed), I still have to go to the bathroom every morning. I don’t what the reason is — perhaps, I’ve been steeping my senna tea for longer periods this time around (10-15 minutes). Either way, I wake up every morning with cramps/pains — not fun, let me tell you. I didn’t flush again this morning because we woke up late and had to run to the malls to wrap up Xmas shopping.

I’m bothered by the fact that my tongue is even whiter. My last day of this cleanse is day 10 (the day I’m writing this entry), and my tongue is showing no signs of being pink. I fear this means at least another day or two of fasting. I can hack it, but it’s definitely interesting.

Speaking of interesting — I’d gained 4 inches in my waist in LA and Boston. I’m now back to a 33″ or 32″ waist! That’s pretty exciting. All that running and cleansing seems to be paying off!

LA Boxes Update

So, the Genesi PPC box arrived in almost perfect condition. It was sitting packed in a box this whole time, so there was barely even any dirt in it or around it. It booted right up, and I got the data off it. It’s a very quiet box. Since it has 2 ethernet ports on it, it’ll become my new dns/dhcp server etc.

As for my athlon box, the CPU fan came loose and fell right off. So did the memory stick. So we had to go to a computer store to get a tube of Arctic Silver (last one!). Once I reformat the PPC and start the hardened gentoo install on it, I’ll start repairing the athlon XP. I hope it at least boots.. If all goes well, I’ll upgrade to kernel 2.6 on it (I had been holding off because the attempt I’d tried failed — due to evms1->evms2 issues), and use it as a media server and print server.

The Master Cleanse: Day 8

Well, I had to flush in the evening on Day 8 again, instead of the morning, because of an early morning appointment. So, something strange. I was going to blog today that my tongue remained pink throughout the fast. Alas, that is not the case. On Day 8, my tongue has turned white. This can’t be goodness, because that means this fast goes beyond Day 10. It takes like 3 or 4 days to get it pink again. I’m not craving anything specifically, but I am looking forward to getting off the fast so I can sushi and Indian food and pie and chocolate cake and ice-cream. In different sittings, not all at once, obviously.

Oh yeah, the city we live in has some weird strange parking rules. They don’t bother posting them, you know, on the street, or anything. No, you learn the rules by getting tickets. Apparently, in winter time, regardless of the weather (we haven’t had any snow to speak of), you have to park on one side of the street or the other. So last night, a whole bunch of cars, including Aimee’s, got $10 tickets for parking on the wrong side of the street. We’re going to fight it obviously, because you can’t just ticket people for some hidden rule/law, this isn’t Soviet Russia, sheesh.

The Stealth Website CMS

So, I’ve been writing a CMS thingy to manage the website for my wife. That has taken a bit of a turn on the backburner, but it’s returning to the front next week. In the meantime, I wrote up django apps for part of the websites where I work. It took quite some learning. Along the way, I learned about decorators and manipulators and validators and templatetags and context processors. Pretty much everything was learned out of James’ blog, and the rest was divided evenly between Django’s own fantastic docs and the fine folks in #django.

I don’t know how the rails community or other communities are. But I’ll tell you the learning has been fun and challenging and easy. The challenge came in to play in the material itself. It was easy because people are so forthcoming with information to help you.

So, I wrote the CMS for work, but I’m not counting on it getting adopted, to be honest. However, a lot of the models and ideas that got created and generated in that project will make their way into the church website. I’ll start to talk more about that one as I make real progress on it next week. I’m looking for a place to host it so that I can share my progress.