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.

I've had a resume in active maintenance since the mid 90s, and it's gone through many iterations. I started with a Word document (I didn't know any better). In the late 90s I moved to parallel Word, text, and HTML versions, all maintained separately, which drifted out of sync horribly. In 2010 I redid it in Google Docs using a template I found whose HTML hinted at a previous life in Word for OS X. That template had all sorts of class and style stuff in it that Google Docs couldn't actually edit/create, so I was back to hand-editing HTML and then using Google Docs to create a PDF version. I still had to keep the text version current separately, but at least I'd decided I didn't want any job that wanted a Word version.

Tonight I tried Hirelite, and I really think they're on to something. They arrange online software developer interview speed-dating-style events where N companies and N software developers each sit in in front of their own webcams and are connected together for live video chats five minutes at a time. It's like chatroulette with more hiring talk and less genitalia.

They pre-screen the developers to make sure they're at least able to solve a simple programming problem and screen the companies by charging them a little money. Each session has a theme, like "backend developers", and a geographic region associated with it. After each five minute interview -- there's a countdown timer at the top -- each party indicates with a click whether or not they'd like to talk further. Mutual matches get one another's contact information immediately afterward.

After watching a video from Defcon 18 and seeing a tweet from Steve Losh I decided to finally set up an automatic SSH tunnel from my home server to my traveling machines. The idea being that if I leave the machine somewhere or it's taken I can get in remotely and wipe it or take photos with the camera. There are plenty of commercial software packages that will do something like this for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and the highly-regarded, open-source prey, but they all either rely on 3rd party service or have a lot more than a simple back-tunnel.

Previously I mentioned I was importing the full corpus of BoingBoing posts into MonogoDB, which went off without a hitch. The import was just to provide a decent dataset for trying out Rogue, the Mongo searching DSL from the folks at Foursquare. Last weekend I was in New York for the Northeast Scala Symposium and the Foursquare Hackathon, so I took the opportunity finish up the query part while I had their developers around to answer questions.

I want to play around with Rogue by the Foursquare folks, but first I needed a decent sized collections of items in a MongoDB. I recalled that BoingBoing had just released all their posts in a single file, so I downloaded that and put together a little Scala to convert from XML to JSON. The built-in XML support in Scala and the excellent lift-json DSL turned the whole thing into no work at all:

I needed to implement the algorithm in Practical Traffic Analysis Extending and Resisting Statistical Disclosure in a hurry, so I turned to my old friend Perl. Later, when time permitted I re-did it in my new favorite language, Scala. Here's a quick look at how a few different pieces of the implementation differed in the two languages -- and really how idiomatic Perl and idiomatic Scala can look pretty similar when one gets past syntax.

I'm thus far thrilled with blohg as a blogging platform. I've got a large post I'm finishing up now with quite a few snippets of source code in two different programming languages. I was hoping to use the excellent SyntaxHighlighter javascript library to prettify those snippets, and was surprised to find that docutils reStructuredText doesn't yet do that (though some other implementations do).

Fortunately, adding new rendering directives to reStructuredText is incredibly easy. I was able to add support for a .. code mode with just this little bit of Python:

Distributed version control systems have revolutionized how software teams work, by making merges no longer scary. Developers can work on a feature in relative isolation, pulling in new changes on their schedule, and providing results back on their (manager's) timeline.

Sometimes, however, a developer working in their own branch can do something really silly, like commit a huge file without realizing it. Only after they push to the central repository does the giant size of the changeset become known. If one catches it quickly, one just removes the changeset and all is will.