Mechanical keyboard

I recently purchased a new mechanical keyboard.  My usual functions are gaming (maybe 15% of my time on a computer) and programming.  While I’m certainly not a hard core gamer, I do enjoy the competition and want the correct gear in order to ensure that I can compete at an average (or above) level.  But since my […]

My Big Red Button

For Christmas, I got a USB Big Red Button.  I honestly have not even looked at what it is supposed to do as it comes from the manufacturer (mostly because they only officially support Windows and I only run Linux). I am, however, inspired by the simplicity and tactile interface of the Big Red Button.  I’ve read […]

We’re in the thick of it

On the Dreamhost cloud team, we’ve been busy.  First off, we really make a big effort to participate in the open source communities.  This requires time and energy on our part, but I think that giving back to the communities we rely on to do our business is good publicity and makes the products we rely […]

If programming languages were vehicles

This article is personally funny to me on a deeper level, as I actually think minivans make a lot of sense and was trying to convince the wife that we should get one instead of an SUV. Also, comparing javascript to a lifted golf cart is so spot on (with node.js making headway, these days).  I would love to […]

Project Update: Pimometer

Found some time to work on pimometer this weekend.  Made some decent progress.  Our original goal included leveraging a custom built django API, but upon further examining of our needs, we decided the MongoDB API was really all we needed.     We now have a working WebUI (though it is a bit minimal at the moment), […]

Python vs Ruby

TL;DR: I like python (mostly because I’m fairly proficient with it) but have a lot of respect for ruby.  However, the two languages are actually really similar at lower levels. This might be a less typical “vs” article.  Really, I don’t enjoy language wars.  I believe that each language is a tool that solves particular problems well. […]

Puppet git hooks

Since I have noticed an uptick in interest in my puppet-git-hooks, I thought I should dedicate some time to explaining myself (also, this is the first time anyone has ever written a book about anything that I’ve done). The Goal The highest level goal for these git hooks is to provide a programmatic mechanism for validating puppet […]

Latest Project: pimometer

The Birth of pimometer I don’t have too much to report on this yet, but I’ve been working on a Raspberry Pi project to monitor the status of a long BBQ or smoke out.  It’s under the current working title of pimometer.  Various design points are still being talked through, but I think we have the […]

Why I Hate: Java – Library Management

There are many things I hate (or dislike, or currently have a bone to pick, etc.).  I thought that Java would be a good first target for a post. Maybe my lack of any formal training is hindering me here, but I find trying to leverage public libraries (take google-guava for example) in Java the […]