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.

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.

I heard someone in IRC saying that the mercurial test suite was bogging down theirlaptop, so I set up a quick push-test service for the mercurial crew. If you're in crew and you do a push to ssh://hgtester@ry4an.org:2222/ these steps will be taken:

1. a local clone of the crew repo is updated from intevention.de
2. a new, disposable local clone is created from that crew clone
3. your csets are pushed to that new clone
4. the working directory is updated to 'tip'
5. a build is done
6. the test suite is run
7. the build and results show up in your stdout
8. the new clone (and your pushed csets) are deleted

It's on a reasonably fast, unloaded box so the test suite runs in about 3 mins 30 seconds. Thanks to ThomasAH for providing the crew pubkeys. If you're not in crew and want to use the service please contact me and convince me you're not going to write a test that does a "rm -rf ~", because that would completely work.

I park in the #mercurial IRC channel a lot to answer the easy questions, and on that comes up often is, "How can I create a remote repository over HTTP?". The answer is: "You can't.".

Mercurial allows you to create a repository remotely using ssh with a command line like this:

hg clone localrepo ssh://host//abs/path

but there's no way to do that over HTTP using either hg serve or hgweb behind Apache.

I'm a huge fan of Grand Central's call screening features. It's irksome, however, that they make it hard to dial outward -- sending your GC number instead of your cell number as the caller id. To do so you need to first add the target number to your address book, and often I'm calling someone I don't intend to call again often.

I started scripting up a way around that when I saw someone named Stewart already had.

My company, Swarmcast, announced one of our first public releases today. Previously we've been primary selling to content providers, but now we're putting out a user facing free release. If you download our Autobahn Accelerator for iTunes you'll find your purchases from the iTunes music store come down three to ten times faster than they did before. We'll be adding support for lots of other sites (you tube, etc.) in upcoming weeks.