unethical blogger

Let's all pretend I have a Geeko-related pun for "SCALE." Anyhoo, SCALE, otherwise known as the Southern California Linux Expo, is coming up in February (25th - 27th) and yours truly will be present and accounted for.

Yes, those are bus tickets you see there. I will be heading down from Oakland to Los Angeles by bus instead of flying for ideological reasons, so I'll try to be in a good mood when I arrive!

At this year's SCALE, the openSUSE project is making a big splash. Contributors and ambassadors will be showing up from all over the globe to show off openSUSE, talk nerdy, socialize and eat tasty snacks supplied by Cruise Director, GNOME Accessibility contributor and openSUSE Board Member Bryen Yunashko, who just got his annual haircut in preparation for the momentous occasion! ;)

Over the past month or so I've fallen in love with an incredibly simple command line tool: GNU/Parallel. Parallel has more or less replaced my use of xargs when piping data around on the many machines that I use. Unlike xargs however, Parallel lets me make use of the many cores that I have access to, either on my laptop or the many quad and octocore machines we have lying around the Apture office.

Using Parallel is incredibly easy, in fact the docs enumerate just about every possible incantation of Parallel you might want to use, but starting simple you can just pipe stuff to it:

cat listofthings.txt | parallel --max-procs=8 --group 'echo "Thing: {}"'

The command above will run at most eight concurrent processes and group the output of each of the processes when the entire thing completes, simple and in this case not too much different than running with xargs

With some simple Python scripting, Parallel becomes infinitely more useful:

python generatelist.py | parallel --max-procs=8 --group 'wget "{}" -O - | python processpage.py'

There's not really a whole lot say about GNU/Parallel other than you should use it. I find myself increasingly impatient when a single process takes longer than a couple minutes to complete, so I've been using GNU/Parallel in more and more different ways across almost all the machines that I work on to make things faster and faster. So much so that I've started to pine for a quad-core notebook instead of this weak dual core Thinkpad of mine :)

GNU/Parallel Demo

Over the past year or two I've become quite fond of tiled window managers, the jump to Awesome (which I've since dropped) to XMonad was a logical one. My gratuitous use of GNU/screen and Vim's tabs and split window support, already provided a de-facto tiled window manager within each one of my many terminals. The tiled window manager on top of all those terminals has served to improve my heavily-terminal biased workflow.

One computer has never been enough for me, at the office my work spans three screens and two computers, I've not yet discovered a Thinkpad that can drive three screens alone; at home I typically span three screens and two laptops (let's conveniently ignore the question of why I feel I need so much screen real estate). Tying these setups together I use synergy to provide my "software KVM" switch. As long as I've used synergy, I've had to switch from one screen to the other with a mouse, which is one of the few reasons I still keep one on the desk.

Until I discovered a way around that, thanks to Jean Richard (a.k.a geemoo) who posted this little configuration change to synergy.conf:

section: options
     keystroke(control+alt+l) = switchInDirection(right)
     keystroke(control+alt+h) = switchInDirection(left)
end

With this minor configuration change, combined with XMonad, Vimium (Vim-bindings for Chromium) and my usual bunch of terminal-based applications, I can go nearly mouse-less for almost everything I need to do during the day.

Lately I've fallen in love with a couple of fairly simple but powerful technologies: haproxy and WSGI (web server gateway interface). While the latter is more of a specification (PEP 333) the concepts it puts forth have made my life significantly easier. In combination, the two of them make for a powerful combination for serving web applications of all kinds and colors.

HAProxy is a robust, reliable piece of load balancing software that's very easy to get started with, For the uninitiated, load balancing is a common means of distributing the load of a number of inbound requests across a pool of processes, machines, clusters and so on. Whenever you hit any web site of non-trivial size, your HTTP requests are invariably transparently proxied through a load balancer to a pool of web machines.

I started looking into haproxy when I began to move Urlenco.de away from my franken-setup of Lighttpd/FastCGI/Mono/ASP.NET to a pure Python stack. After poking around some articles about haproxy I discovered it can be used for virtual hosts as well as simple load balancing. Using a haproxy's ACLs feature (see Section 7 in the configuration.txt), you can redirect requests to one backend or another.

After running a Linux laptop for a number of years and having mostly negative travel experiences from messing something up along the way, this holiday season I think I've finally figured out how to optimally travel with a Linux notebook. The following tips are some of the lessons I've had to learn the hard way through trial and error over the course of countless flights spanning a few years.

Purchase a small laptop or netbook

Far and away the best thing I've done for my travel experience thus far has been the purchase of my new Thinkpad X200 (12.1"). My previous laptops include a MacBook Pro (15"), a Thinkpad T43 (14") and a Thinkpad T64 (14"). Invariably I have the same problems with all larger laptops, their size is unwieldy in economy class and their power consumption usually allows me very little time to get anything done while up in the air. Being 6'4" and consistently cheap, I'm always in coach, quite often on redeye flights where the passenger in front of me invariably leans their seat back drastically reducing my ability to open a larger laptop and see the screen. With a 12" laptop or a netbook (I've traveled with an Eee PC in the past as well) I'm able to open the screen enough to see it clearly and actually type comfortbaly on it. Additionally, the smaller screen and size of the laptop means less power consumption, allowing me to use it for extended periods of time.

A coworker of mine, @teepark and I recently fell in love with tiling window managers, Awesome in particular. The project has been interesting to follow, to say the least. When I first installed Awesome, from the openSUSE package directory, I had version 2, it was fairly basic, relatively easy to configure and enough to hook me on the idea of a tiling window manager. After conferring with @teepark, I discovered that he had version 3 which was much better, had some new fancy features, and an incremented version number, therefore I required it.

In general, I'm a fairly competent open-source contributor and user. Autoconf and Automake, while I despise them, aren't mean and scary to me and I'm able to work with them to fit my needs. I run Linux on two laptops, and a few workstations, not to mention the myriad of servers I'm either directly or peripherally responsible for. I grok open sources. Thusly, I was not put off by the idea of grabbing the latest "stable" tarball of Awesome to build and install it. That began my slow and painful journey to get this software built, and installed.

• Oh, it needs Lua, I'll install that from the repositories.
• Hm, what's this xcb I need, and isn't in the repositories. I guess I'll have to build that myself, oh but wait, there's different subsets of xcb?