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'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.

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'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.

This blog started out called the unblog back when blog was a new-ish term and I thought it was silly. I'd been on mailing lists like fork and Kragan Sitaker's tol for years and couldn't see a difference between those and blogs. I set up some mailing list archive software to look like a blog and called it a day.

Years later that platform was aging, and wikis were still a new and exciting concept, so I built a blog around a wiki. The ease of online editing was nice, though readers never took to wiki-as-comments like I hoped. It worked well enough for a good many years, but I kept having a hard time finding my own posts in Google. Various SEO-blocking strategies Google employs that I hope never to have to understand were pushing my entries below total crap.