Two days ago I powered down a good server for the first time in years and the last time ever. It doesn't compare to euthanizing a pet, but it still made me more sad than I expected. Below is a remembrance. I've made the server male because once you've gotten so silly as to write a eulogy for a server you might as well go all out.

Ry4an.org II was a good server. In 2001 his Pentium III hardware was already old -- corporate castoff acquired for free. He took a Fedora install without any configuration hassles and always assigned the same ethX numbers to each of his three PCI NICs, without aliases in the modules.conf, which Ry4an.org I could never get right.

I've just emptied out my safe deposit box for the move, and thought I'd re-post this:

If you hear I've died someone who knows their way around gpg should ask Kate for the CD pictured below. It'll be in a safe deposit box that's in my name, and she'll have access after my death. There's a key revocation certificate with reason 'death' on the CD and a printed ASCII-armored version too since the odds of us being able to read CDs in a few decades is approximately nil.

I'll take Mercurial over git any day for all the reasons obvious to anyone who's really used both of them, but geeyah github sure makes contributing to projects easy. At work we had a ten minute MongoDB upgrade downtime turn into two hours, and when we finally figured out what deprecated option was causing the daemon launch to abort, rather than grouse about it on Twitter (okay, I did that too) I was able to submit a one line patch without even cloning down the repository that got merged in.

I just rebuilt the ry4an.org server, and as part of the migration I realized a still had a lot of very old, almost embarrassing content online. I took the broken or not-conceivably interesting stuff off-line and am serving up 410 GONE responses for it.

There exists, however, a broad swath of stuff that's not yet entirely useless, but is more than ten years old and not stuff I would likely post today. For all of these pages I've left the content up, but you first have to click through a modal dialog warning you you're looking at very old stuff I don't necessarily endorse. That pop up looks like this:

The Python logging module has some nice built-in LogHandlers that do network IO, but I couldn't square with having HTTP POSTs and SMTP sends in web response threads. I didn't find an asynchronous logging wrapper, so I wrote a decorator of sorts using the really nifty monkey patching availble in python:

def patchAsyncEmit(handler):
    base_emit = handler.emit
    queue = Queue.Queue()
    def loop():
        while True:
            record = queue.get(True) # blocks
            try :
                base_emit(record)
            except: # not much you can do when your logger is broken
                print sys.exc_info(
    thread = threading.Thread(target=loop)
    thread.daemon = True
    thread.start(
    def asyncEmit(record):
        queue.put(record)
    handler.emit = asyncEmit
    return handler

In a more traditional OO language I'd do that with extension or a dynamic proxy, and in Scala I'd do it as a trait, but this saved me having to write delegates for all the other methods in LogHandler.

We just passed through another graduation season, and for the second year running I was able to get by with the same stack of form letters:

Dear _______________________________,

My ( Congratulations | Condolences | ___________________ ) on your recent (
Graduation | Eagle Rank | Loss | ___________________ ).  It is with ( Great Joy
| a Heavy Heart ) that I received the news.  I'm sure it took a lot of ( Hard
Work | Cigarettes ) to make it happen.

I'm sure you'll have a ( great time | good cry ) at the ( open house | wake )
and ( regret | am glad) that I ( can | cannot ) attend.

As you move on to your next phase in life please remember:

[  ] the importance of hard work
[  ] the risks of smoking
[  ] there are other fish in the sea
[  ] don't have your mom send out your graduation invites -- you're an adult now
[  ] ________________________________________

and the value of personal correspondence.

Sincerely, your (Cousin | Scoutmaster | Parolee | _____________________),

Ry4an Brase

Enclosures (1): ( Check | Card | Gift | Best Wishes )

It's available as a Google Doc.

The University of Minnesota has a Scholar's Walk which celebrates great persons affiliated with the U and the awards they've won. One display labeled "Historical Giants" remains without any names. Since the U can't reasonably be anticipating any new history, I imagine that four years after installation there's still a committee somewhere arguing about which department gets more names. Not content to wait for committee I decided to add a historical giant of my own -- a time traveller.

I just made my third batch of tonic water from Mark Sexauer's Recipe:

• 4 cups water
• 4 cups sugar
• 1/4 cup cinchona bark
• 1/4 cup citric acid
• Zest and juice of 1 lime
• Zest and juice of 1 lemon
• Zest and juice of 1 orange
• 1 teaspoon coriander seeds
• 1 teaspoon dried bitter orange peel
• 10 dashes bitters
• 1 hand crushed juniper berry (I used two)

The flavor is excellent, but the process is terrible. Specifically, filtering the cinchona bark from the mixture after extracting the quinine (actually totaquine) from it is nearly impossible. It's so finely ground it clogs any filter, be it paper or the mesh on a french press coffeemaker, almost immediately. I've tried letting it settle and pouring off the liquid, forcing the liquid through with back pressure, and letting it drip all night -- none work well. A friend using the same recipe build a homemade vacuum extractor, but I've not yet gone that far.

Like half the internet I'm working on duplicating a setup from one Amazon EC2 availability zone to another. I couldn't find a quick way to do that if my stuff wasn't already described in Cloud Formation templates, so I put together a script that queries the security groups using ec2-describe-group and produces a shell script that re-creates them in a different region.

If all your ec2 command line tools and environment variables are set you can mirror us-east-1 to us-west-1 using:

I'm a huge fan of the Khan Academy (and if you haven't yet watched Salman's presentation at TED2011 you should go do that). I'm involved (slightly) in an effort to bring Khan Academy instruction to a local school district and have a standing offer to "coach" participants. Today, though, I found a use for the Khan Academy site probably doesn't endorse: dealing with online panhandlers.

Before today I'd never seen an IRC panhandler, email sure, but never IRC. This morning, though, someone wandered into #mercurial asking for money to renew a domain. Most people ignored the request since it's grossly inappropriate in a software development work space, but I offered the kid the money if he'd do algebra problems on the Khan Academy site.