Remind Me: Damage done in San Francisco in six days

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Jeff Forman

I am lucky enough to have a sister living out in San Francisco, and to be able to work out of our offices there. Below is a hit list of the places I ate at and visited in the span of six days. My stomach has finally recovered.

Wineries (Sonoma County):

  • Preston Vineyards: https://www.prestonvineyards.com/com
  • Unti Vineyards: http://www.untivineyards.com/
  • Bella Vineyards and Wine Caves: http://www.bellawinery.com/
  • Truett Hurst Vineyards: http://www.truetthurst.com/
  • Dry Creek General Store: http://drycreekgeneralstore1881.com/

Both of us are lucky enough to have been through Napa several times, so we decided to venture into Sonoma County. The last item in that list is an unsuspecting general store off of Dry Creek Road in Heldsburg which has an incredible sandwich list. This area turns Napa on its head, with a much more family-run low-key atmosphere. There is none of the pretense of visiting a large production winery such as Mondavi or the herds of people who visit Duckhorn.

To Eat:

  • Izakaya Sozai: http://www.izakayasozai.com/
  • Burma Superstar: http://www.burmasuperstar.com/
  • Bar Bambino: http://barbambino.com/
  • Yank Sing: http://www.yanksing.com/
  • La Folie: http://www.lafolie.com/
  • Hog Island Oysters (Marshall, CA): http://www.hogislandoysters.com/
  • Mission Chinese: http://www.missionchinesefood.com/
  • Foreign Cinema: http://www.foreigncinema.com/

I cannot recommend every one of these places enough. Izakaya Sozai serves killer ramen. Yank Sing serves dim sum on weekend mornings that melt in your mouth. Shuck your own oysters at Hog Island (we learned in about 30 seconds) at the farm while sitting on benches along Tomales Bay. Mission Chinese blasts gangster rap while you gorge yourself on craveable Chinese food.

Go, eat, recover later.

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The Internet is slow. Is the Internet down?

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Jeff Forman

We have all heard the same questions at one point in our careers, “Is the Internet down?” or “Getting to X site is slow.” You scramble to a browser to see if Google, ESPN or the NY Times websites are up. Then you fire up traceroute. In some cases, the pages might load slowly, in other cases not at all. These two situations are often downstream fallout of two connectivity issues: latency and packet loss. Latency is the time it takes for a packet to get from source to destination. The speed of light says the latency for one packet to get across the USA from New York to San Francisco is normally between 70-90ms [1]. Packet loss occurs when packets do not make it from their source to destination, being lost along the way. Many factors can contribute to packet loss, including overloaded routers and switches, service interruptions, and human error.

When diagnosing network issues between source and destination, it is helpful to have data to backup your suspicions of slow and inconsistent network performance. Insert Smokeping.

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A home network overengineered: dhcpd, tsig keys, ddns

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Jeff Forman

I started to write this post, explaining how I upgraded my home network setup with a dhcpd server, multiple dns servers communicating securely via tsig keys along with dynamic dns, but the post became unwieldy and would have been thousands of words. Instead, I’ll post some links and gotcha’s and hints on how to make it work a lot easier.

Links scoured and re-read in the process:

Hints:

Manage the key files distributed to each of your DNS servers with some sort of config management system (I use Puppet). That way if you ever need to change a key or add a new one, it makes things a heck of a lot easier.

Don’t stick the TSIG key files inside your named.conf. This posses a security risk because anyone who can read your named.conf, now has access to your TSIG keys and can potentially update your zones. Instead, put them in their own files inside your bind etc directory, mark their perms as 640 (bind:bind, or the like) and use an include statement to get them into your named.conf

Following on that last point, use dns’s allow-update statement inside zone definitions on the master. You can either lock things down via IP (less secure) or via Key (more secure) so that only authorized processes or people can update your zones.

Gotcha’s:

If you have FreeBSD clients, don’t forget the ‘hostname’ parameter in /etc/rc.conf. Otherwise you’ll request a lease from the dhcp server, but never tell your hostname, and therefore won’t get a record added to the ddns zone.

Notes:

Yes, this is a completely over-engineered solution on how to run a home network. It came to be because I play around with lots of VM’s at home, and to pique my curiosity bug, wanted to try to get things working end to end. Being able to ssh into the various Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD VMs by name made it a lot easier.

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Remind Me: Initial Data in a Django class-based Form

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Jeff Forman

I love Django‘s class-based way of handling forms. You name the class, articulate each field (data point of your form), and attach it to a view. Voila. But what happens when you want some initial data in the form?

Initial to the rescue!

What your class might look like:

class PersonForm(forms.Form):
    first_name = forms.CharField(max_length=100)
    last_name = forms.CharField(max_length=100)
    gender = forms.CharField(max_length=1)
    hair_color = forms.CharField(max_length=256)

If you now wanted to initialize your form for males with blonde hair, include this snippet in your view:

form = PersonForm(initial = { 'gender' : "M", 'hair_color' : "blonde" } )

Then pass that form as part of your render return:

return render_to_response('add_person.htm', { 'form' : form })

This post is brought to you by #neverwantingtosearchtheinternetforthisagain, and StackOverflow for inspiration.

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Boston Barcamp 6, Day Two

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Jeff Forman

Finally got this post out after having a bit of a busy week.
 

Location based networking, anurag wakhlu (coloci inc)
http://goo.gl/mxAtd
* location based apps: where are you now? or where will you be?
* where are you now: foursquare, gowalla, loopt, etc
* where will you be: coloci, fyesa, tripit, plancast
* interest based networking: the reason to talk to someone who is near you. tie an interest: sending someone a coupon when they are near starbucks. if they arent near starbucks, what good is a coupon?
* proactive coupons: dont wait for a check-in. if someone is 2 blocks from starbucks, send them a notification for coupon. ex// minority report. walk by a billboard, recognizes you, tailors ad specifically to you.
52% of US consumers willing to share location for retail perks.
* foursquare background checkin? automatically check you in when you are in a close enough vicinity to a location
* Do privacy concerns have a potential impact on services becoming more popular? ex// European privacy laws about broadcasting who you are, where you are, etc.
* Have to trust your device that when you disallow authority to know your location, it actually does not broadcast where you are.
* Trade off of convenience versus privacy. Debit card is a lot more convenient than cash, people are more than likely to give up privacy.
* If you really want to not be tracked, you really need to disconnect yourself from the computer. Go cash only. Re-education might help. “You might already be sharing this info somewhere else, so what difference is it now that you do it via your phone?”
* Tracking someone’s history via CSS visited tag. Firefox supposedly has fixed this issue where websites cannot do this anymore.
* Using EZpass, who is responsible for giving a ticket if you did 60 miles in faster than 60 minutes? Using your location to know your broke the law.
At the start, Anurag gave a wonderfully succint history of location based networking, highighting the current giants like Foursquare and Facebook Places. We talked about how the potential is there to enable your phone to alert you about consumer deals in your vicinity, having more of a ‘push’ aspect to networking, or your phone could alert you to friends being near as well. Eventually though, the attendants turned the talk into a big privacy discussion. Not necessarily as flame-worthy as it could have been, but still talking about how much of our information we want to broadcast and allow to advertisers. Broadcasting location and private information. Could the situation eventually get to the point like Minority Report where your phone is overtly/covertly broadcasting who you are to potential advertisers or other potentially nefarious people.

Economics of open source
* reputation is a kind of currency. ancillary benefits of ‘being known.’ ex// popular github repo, can get you a book deal, flown to conferences, etc.
* are we cheapening what we do by giving it away? software produces so much cash for people. not everything is oss. still need people to customize it and apply.
* discussion: can donations kill a project? the comptroller decides who gets money, and those who donate time but dont get paid feel slighted, and the project can take a nose dive.
Content of presentation was a bit bland/dry, but the discussion was involved. War story: giving training away for free when a company charges for it. you are hurting the ecosystem by giving it away rather than someone paying for it. This was fairly interesting, delving past the common topic of software being ‘free as in beer.’

Interviewing well as a coder round table
* feel okay sitting there for a couple minutes thinking. Dont feel stressed to start writing code right away.
* some questions to ask you to regurgitate syntax. what happens if you get confused between languages.
* design issues “show us where you would add X feature.” stylistics versus code syntax.
* code portfolios: employers look at your github profile. see the code you’ve written. if your code is ‘too good’, employer wants you to find bugs in their code.
* how to practice your whiteboarding skills? codekata: short programming problems.
* asking questions that there is no solution to. can you be an asshole interviewing?
* be prepared for personal questions because employers will google you and find your personal interests
* spin negative questions as positive: what do you see improving in your work environment?
* questions back to employee: what do you hope to improve for our company?
* if you list a skill in your skills list, be ready to whiteboard the code.

Can the internet make you healthier? jason jacobs, runkeeper founder
* convergence of health/athletic data and IT
* virtual coaching: ahead/behind pace, in-app reminders to go faster or slower on their iOS app.
The more data you have over what you’re doing physically, can help you react. How am I doing against my peers? This was interesting, since Jason sees his company’s first product ‘Run Keeper’ as the jumping off point to more athletic-body sensing applications. The point was raised about what point does the app which suggests a certain pace while running, dance the line of being medical advice. I think it is a good point, that the app needs more information about your health before suggesting a certain distance or pace for exercise. I’ll be curious myself as I use the app more, how I am improving athletically.

Overall, I found the signal-to-noise ratio of the unconference to be very high. For my first Barcamp, I would suggest it to all technically-inclined folks who just want to let their interests and imaginations plot the course of which talks they attend. I know I will be a repeat attendee.

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