Last weekend we bought two Rodd lamps at Ikea for the guest room, and it struck me how amused I'd be if each one switched the other. Six hours and a few new parts later, and it came out pretty well:

The remote action is especially jarring because the switches are right next to the bulbs they would normally control:

I really lucked out with those lamps. The switches aren't integral to the bulb sockets as is often the case, and they're not even soldered. I was able to fit two extra wires through the lamp's main tube without going to a wire gauge that felt scarily thin -- LED bulbs helped there.

As a hack, when I need an append-only datastore with no authentication or validation, I use Amazon S3. S3 is usually a read-only service from the unauthenticated web client's point of view, but if you enable access logging to a bucket you get full-query-parameter URLs recorded in a text file for GETs that can come from a form's action or via XHR.

There aren't a lot of internet-safe append-only datastores out there. All my favorite noSQL solutions divide permissions into read and/or write, where write includes delete. SQL databases let you grant an account insert without update or delete, but still none suggest letting them listen on a port that's open to the world.

At DramaFever I got folks to buy into to burn down charts as the daily display for our weekly sprints with the rotating release person being responsible for updating a Google spreadsheet with each day's end-of-day open and closed issue counts.

It works fine, and it's only a small time burden, but if one forgets there's no good way to get the previous day's counts. Naturally I looked to automation, and GitHub has an excellent API. My usual take on something like this would be to have cron trigger a script that:

GitHub doesn't let you use the same deploy key for multiple repositories within a single organziation, so you have to either (a) manage multiple keys, (b) create a non-human user (boo!), or (c) use their not-yet-ready for primetime HTTP OAUTH deploy access, which can't create read-only permissions.

In the past to managee the multiple keys I've either (a) used ssh-agent or (b) specified which private key to use for each request using -i on the command line, but neither of those are convenient with Jenkins.

I'm often on unencrypted wireless networks, and I don't always trust everyone on the encrypted ones, so I routinely run a SOCKS proxy to tunnel my web traffic through an encrypted SSH tunnel. This works great, but I have to start the SSH tunnel before I start browsing -- that's okay IRC before reader -- but when I sleep the laptop the SSH tunnel dies and requires a restart before I can browse again. In the past I've used autossh to automate that reconnect, but it still requires more attention than it deserves.

This is going to be one big jargon laden blob if you're not trying to do exactly what I was trying to do this week, but hopefully it turns up in a search for the next person.

I'm setting up a new development environment using Vagrant and I'm using Chef Solo to provision the Ubuntu (12.4 Precise Penguin) guest. I wanted MySQL server running and wanted to use the database cookbook from Opscode to pre-create a database.

When I start up the shower it's the wrong temperature and adjusting it to the right temperature takes longer in this apartment than it has in any home in which I've previously lived. I wanted to blame the problem on the low flow shower head, but I'm having a hard time doing it. My thinking was that the time delay from when I adjust the shower to when I actually feel the change is unusually high due to the shower head's reduced flow rate.

My primary home machine is a Linux deskop, and my primary work machine is an OSX laptop. I do most of my work on the Linux box, ssh-ed into the OS X machine -- I recognize that's the reverse of usual setups, but I love the awesome window manager and the copy-on-select X Window selection scheme.

My frustration is in having separate copy and paste buffers across the two systems. If I select something in a work email, I often want to paste it into the Linux machine. Similarly if I copy an error from a Linux console I need to paste it into a work email.

NFC tags are tiny wireless storage devices, with very thin antennas, attached to poker chip sized stickers. They're sort of like RFID tags, but they only have a 1 inch range, come in various capacities, and can be easily rewritten. If the next iPhone adds a NFC reader I think they'll be huge. As it is they're already pretty fun and only a buck each even when bought in small quantities.

Back in 2008 I wote an extension for Mercurial to render activity charts like this one:

Yesterday I finally got around to updating it for modern Mercurial builds, including 2.1. It's posted on bitbucket and has a page on the Mercurial wiki. It uses pygooglechart as a wrapper around the excellent Google image chart API.

I really like the google image charts becuse the entire image is encapsulated as a URL, which means they work great with command line tools. A script can output a URL, my terminal can make it a link, and I can bring it up in a browser window w/o ever really using a GUI tool at all.