Aku Aku

Funner than Fiction

I'm up in Portland, for my first real visit (other than two hours at the bus station in 1992) for the Agile Open Northwest un-conference. I'm loving it, and I haven't even left the hotel. The conference is held at an old elementary school that has been converted into a hotel, conference center, brewery, resturant, bar, theater complex called the McMenamins Kennedy School. The hotel rooms are the old classrooms. The conference hall is the old gym, still adorned with basketball goals. Everything has undergone some funky remodeling. Right now I'm typing away (free wifi campus-wide) in a tiny dark bar (Honors Bar) with a woodstove popping two feet away and opera on the sound system, drinking a beer name Ruby Ale.

Hotel guests get free entry to the theater, so I sat in on a movie for a bit just to experience the second coolest movie theater in America. The movie showing was Stranger than Fiction. I only meant to stay for a few minutes, but I got sucked in and had to force myself to leave. I was enjoying it so much that it just made me wish Mie was there to see it with me, so I'll put it on Netflix for later.

I'm also looking forward to another trip to Portland when I can bring her along, since this is where she went to undergraduate school. Hopefully we can stay here at the Kennedy School again!

Coachella 2007

Bands I know I want to see: Björk, Inerpol, J&MC, Arctic Monkeys, Sonic Youth, Peaches, Marleys, We Are Scientists, Arcade Fire, Decemberists, LCD Soundsystem, Blonde Redhead, New Pornographers, Ozomatli, Ghostface Killah, Fountains of Wayne, Cornelius, Justice, Girl Talk, Rage Against the Machine, Manu Chao, Air, Happy Mondays, Willie Nelson, Roots, Infected Mushroom, Lupe Fiasco.

Full line up

peter o'toole

I was catching up on some Daily Show tonight and I saw the start of Peter O'Toole's interview from a week or so ago. I had to stop and delete it just a minute or so in, because I couldn't take it any more. Maybe it's because I just watched parts of Lawerence of Arabia over the weekend, but his current state of feebleness was just too much to bear. I really wish I'd never seen the beginning of that interview. It made me sad.

Mad Hats Ate

That's one heckuva party ...or I'll eat my hat!

Mad Hats Ate

MiniPOV kit

I made a Persistence of Vision kit from Make Magazine (only $17.50). It's pretty cool, but actually hard to see the pattern when just waving my hand. I think perhaps I need to put the whole thing on a string and swing it around my head, but I need to find a safe way to do that. More details and links in the Flick description.

Scripting Textdrive's Webmin

In general, I like Textdrive hosting. The thing that has annoyed me greatly about it is that it forces you to use hideous browser-based "webmin" interface to do a lot of the configuration. For instance, to drop a database and recreate it requires over a dozen mouse clicks and a lot of waiting between clicks because it's always slow loading pages. That's just infuriating for a command line junkie like myself, especially when I have ssh access to the server but PostgreSQL's nice and simple createdb <dbname> command is not permitted by Textdrive.

It's not something I have to do every day, but on the occasion that it comes up it drives me crazy. So today I wrote some Net::HTTP ruby code that logs in and does all the necessary HTTP traffic to convince webmin into doing what should be a one line command anyhow. It wouldn't be hard to take this script and change it to do whatever webmin task you'd like to automate.

I used the Firefox plugin TamperData to grab the proper POSTDATA, and ran it with ruby-1.8.4 on OS X. Strangely, it didn't work on Textdrive's servers, bombing out with an error in the Net::HTTP code. Perhaps because the server is running ruby 1.8.5? I'll look into it later.

textdrive_database_bounce.rb