Python Piggies

After going to the Internet Telephony Expo at the Convention Center, I found that if you turn North right form Pico and left before the 110, there is a great little street for parking, so I got to the floor in time to toss my bingo card in for the Prius, but alas Wayne from Hermosa Beach won it, I took his card as he is starting some kind of a VoIP business, who knows, I could need his help for a company sometime.  I thought I had a good talk with someone from CyLogitics. seems they could have a billing and PBX solution worth looking into, both hosted and sold.

So Python Piggies didn't allow cameras, too bad, that was a great meeting, nice food and great company. Pythoscope seem like something we can use. The second presentation was "How we use Python in Toontown", from Joe Shochet - lead game designer and programmer on Disney's Toontown Online. Very entertaining and well done, but probably more of a Python is great and we use it testimonial, where we some some impressive properties: Panda3d a tool they use looks cool, nice story of Disney open sourcing it and everyone looking at them in disbelief. Some games they made: ToonTown and Pirates of the Carribean. Would have been nice to get pictures of the meeting, but hey Disney gets to ask for none, I guess.

bash

I don't do bash very often, and got to say that this very simple, httpd restart, where you actually stop and start, would take me a bit to write, however, I guess I will try to get Dallas to help.

service httpd stop&&service httpd start
Might acutally work, tempting. I seem to be at a point where I am learning and trying to avoid it, so I can get things done. Then there is Python, might be a better option for me right now, as it is a far more useful language or Ruby, so much to do, so little time.

Drupal, learned lots and yet, don't have time to implement any of it.

DrupalCampLA08

So I finally made it to yet another camp, this one is totally focused on Drupal and isn't an unconference, as much as the past events I have been going have been, in fact other then the free location, the City of LA, 9th district donated the rooms at the Convention center, and other then the fact that it seems there will be no food, too bad, it does seem to be a good event to learn Drupal and it is rather well organized and the speaker track was avaiilable before starting out. Sitting next to another blogger from NorthWind, guess the power brings us together, need to keep the Mac battery charged, in track 3, where the room is smaller, but the speakers are better.  I did walk out of the Building a static, corporate site from the ground up - Steven Chan (Resonance Visuals) talk as other then installing Drupal, the filling out the forms seems to be obvious.  The best question at the beginning was about MAMP, to get your Mac running LAMP fast and effortless.  However to cool things in the room, I as able to project the LISA08 after the opening talk, sweet, and the get Steven to put LiLAX.net as the example in his Drupal intro.  Sweet.  But installing Drupal is pretty easy, and I figure that a quick google would yeld a way to do it, or I can simply ask Stephen. So I went to the expo room, although they called it chill, guess they don't have that much to show, and it is nice to have a room to chill out, food would be nice, didn't eat breakfest today, thinking I could get out earlier, but hey whatever, neighbor had me wait 30 min, but I got to use the carpool lane so it is all good, even washed a car while waiting, and if you saw it, it hardly looks clean, baked on grime, didn't come off, I have to soak the car next time before applying the water, to soften backed on dirt.  Since I now drive 2 cars on alternate days, I have gotten a bit behind. But again, who cares about my personal stuff, uilding APIs for Modules- Adam Kalsey of WorkHabit sounded much more interesting, but being the advanced track, must be over my head, and since I am blogging, I guess I spent my time getting the power.

Check out the schedule at DrupalCamp08. I am now listening to Dreamweaver & Drupal - XTND.US (Chris Charlton) who is a pretty good organizer for this event and does an amazing job at LADrupal as well, but I must be on the wrong track, as I don't use DreamWeaver anymore, it is a free download, but then you have to pay after 30 days.  I used to use it and it was great, but I am more on Linux lately and perhaps I can now revisit it and setup this XTND.US and play with it, because after hearing someone talk about it, you have to think it is useful, even if you are only half paying attention as you blog. I got to say that after talking to a prominent security guy, I decided to hang out in the front of the Camp to get more of the hall talk, since I don't really do Drupal, and we are a Django shop anyhow.

darkness

So I wake up at 6am, it is now dark at that time, fall is here, it feels cold in the morning and at night. I woke up this morning as if I had a 6th sense and right as I sat at the computer get a phone call from the other side of the world, support for our night shift, a very apologetic voice on the other side asks me about some of our recent changes, and I knew the answer, wow, high availability, I just happened to be up, cool. I remember years ago getting that 4am call from somebody clueless as to what area code they were calling me in, geez. This is why Skype is cool, it lets you know if I am really on the computer or forwarded, that is definitely a good feature. But I will have to test if strangers get to use the forward feature, or if you have to be authorized, haven't got a forwarded SPAM call yet, but who knows.

work is boring, meetings are cool, but tomorrow back to work

Went to the EC2/S3 event at UCLA, was pretty good and the neworking had great catering. Hadoop was the most mentioned piece of software in conjunction with the use of distributed instances, so will have to learn about that. I then went to a Terracotta talk, again about scalling to bigger clouds.

Quiet weekend

Crashed, turned on the TV and watched some movies.  I didn't even go to a sfvlug hacking session where they might tell me how someone broke into our server.  I don't know how to get more done right now, but I sure have lots of demands on me these days. I took a look at how close I am to collecting on the ads, bu still at $48.50, I truely have to think i am blogging for myself, there isn't money in this, but on the bright side I get a free place to do it, and that is a good thing. I had written a bit more, but I guess this doesn't autosave in Safari or the suspend of the laptop somehow got in the way.

The missing part was about positive things statements make you happy. I was watching this program about achieving happiness and they cited a study where people wrote 3 things they were thankful for in a journal every day. Interesting idea. Lets see, I got a good job, wife and kid :)

Moving sucks

I have been busy trying to restore services like internet, phones and just finding things in boxes after moving, not very productive, just busy work. Now I have to figure out how to connect to an AdTran with a RS-232 serial port so that we can use our T3, the only cool thing to come of the move.

Yesterday coming back from lunch there was a Channel 9 helicopter hovering over El Segundo, seems an American Airlines 737 blew a tire on takeoff and had to return to the airport.

Also playing with a MacBook Pro, love the lit keyboard, sleek elegance, nice laptop, hear it is the best performer for Vista too.