Stevie Ray Vaughan, not as good as you thought:

(APOLOGIES: I’ve decided against making the video public, so the video below will not work unless I share the video with you; just tell me your youtube account and I’ll share it with you.)

This was my first edit using the new iMovie. It’s a very rough cut

The good:

• It was great to see new Djangoistas, and it made me think there might even be enough interest for a Django user group in Beijing. There’s already a Python User Group in Beijing.

• I personally found it fun to get down-and-dirty with the core Django framework. It’s good to work with a system that has such a complete set of tests and documentation. It has a feeling of quality about it.

• I had never run Django’s test suite, nor had I looked at the their ticket system in detail. I think most people had a similar background. After the sprint I feel the barrier to contribute has been lowered, and I’m sure I’m not alone in contemplating doing some more contribution when I have spare time.

• We did knock out a few tickets.

The bad:

• Our timing was off. At GMT+8 we’re more than 12 hours ahead of Lawrence, KS, where the core developers had gathered. The next time we’ll make sure we start no earlier than the core developers. This time, however, we were massively off time-wise, and this had a couple of implications:

  • We were just getting ready to pick tickets when the Django site’s servers were shut down for routine maintenance, so for 2-3 hours we were struggling to keep active.

  • It wasn’t that clear what the actual status was for many tickets, and what was required to resolve them. With none of the core developers awake there weren’t anyone to ask either, so we were a bit stuck in many cases.

• Our office is in a Hutong (side ally), hard to find on a good day, so we usually ensure people have a phone number they can call for directions. This “detail” somehow slipped my mind until the last minute, so one person wasted a couple of hours looking for the office before giving up.

Overall it was good; we made new friends and had fun with Django and Python, and I’m already looking forward to the next sprint.

If you want to come, please post a comment to this blog and put your name on the Django sprint wiki page under the Beijing section, so that we can gauge how many are coming and keep informed if there are any updates.

(See also Exoweb planet for more information on Exoweb and our office.)

Want to hear and see his stuff?

His unique background makes for some unique songs, very geeky songs, like code monkey and lately Still Alive, the end theme song for the popular game Portal, which the villain artificial intelligence GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) sings. It’s one of the coolest and funniest songs I’ve ever heard. Here’s a really cool and cute remake:

And here’s the original “Portal” end theme, in which GLaDOS writes the lyrics in a terminal, accompanied by ASCII art. Very cool, very funny, and very geeky The portal trailer is also worth a look.

Also funny and catchy is Flickr, which has the problem of being completely non-sensical if you don’t also see the music video at the same time:

Other favorities are Digg the Code, Mandelbrot Set, A Laptop Like You, and Skullcrusher Mountain.

What are your favorite geek songs?

I came across this solution that does exactly that. After the super-simple set-up I’m able to do:

All that’s required is to tweak your .ssh/config. Mine looks like this on my laptop:

With wifi came the promise of being online (almost) anywhere, but due to incompetent or misdirected implementation and management, it’s pretty much a patchwork of extremely unreliable networks. My experience is that there’s a 30-40% chance of actually being able to get online at an access point.

In the case of wireless access points (AP) owned and operated by cafes/restaurants, they are:

• often connected through a patchwork of bad power, telephone, and network cables, usually piled on top of each other next to the cash register to ensure a reboot every cash register kachink
• using a cheap and buggy access point that freezes up every 30 minutes
• unencrypted/open, and long since discovered and overloaded by P2P freeloaders
• configured to the same channel as the other 10 access points around, causing “mysterious” packet loss of 50%+
• configured with the same SSID (e.g., linksys) as the other 10 access points around, making actual selection a stroke of luck
• practically unmanaged. It’s always better to just go over and try to fix it yourself if something’s wrong; if you ask the staff they’re usually completely clueless, and will try to call someone almost as clueless, before finally you’ve spent a good hour helping them just get the thing working.

In the case of commercial access points, while they’re more professionally installed and run, the access and management systems kill the experience. Here are typical problems:

• Filtering of everything but port 80 (web) - goodbye IMAP, IRC, etc. I can’t do any work when all I can do is browse (yeah, I know I could set up a tunnel over port 80, and I may have to start doing that sigh).
• You have to first go through a “home made” web application to register and sign in, which you often can’t due to bugs on the web application preventing you from registering;
  • failure to localize phone numbers or addresses
  • missing web pages
  • 500 server errors
  • failure to send SMS or email registration messages
• Worst of all, there doesn’t seem to be anyone monitoring or receiving these server errors; if there were, I wouldn’t be hitting them nearly as often.
• If you’ve managed to sign in, you can expect to be suddenly locked out if you close your laptop and open it again since your old session hasn’t expired, and they have “smart” sessions.

I have yet to find a good web application like this. In my opinion they should be banned altogether. The internet is not the same as the web, so just requiring you to go through such a manual and unreliable system to get online is insane.

If I have to guess, I would have to guess that these systems are designed, implemented, bought, and managed by incompetent people as well, people that:

• Don’t understand or value simplicity and reliability, always erring on making things too complicated and thus unreliable
• Think the web is the Internet, so they don’t see anything wrong in “breaking” the Internet by disabling everything but the web
• Think you can just build-and-forget, relying on (expensive) customer bug reports (that often have an unhappy ending) instead of proactively managing and fixing problems

What works?

I have been using wifi extensively in a few places around the world (Beijing, Hong Kong, Budapest, Singapore, San Francisco), and the only wifi access points I’ve seen that work are those that are free and run by clueful coffee shop or restaurant owners that know to:

• invest in robust cabling, and put the AP out of harms way
• invest in proper training of staff, and howto material
• invest in proper installation that
  • sets the access point SSI to something unique, the name of the venue is perfect as well as good advertisement
  • configures the access point to use a channel that doesn’t conflict with other nearby access points
  • changes the admin password to non-default one (most amateur access points do not)
  • adds encryption (WPA is the only secure thing these days)
• change the WPA password every day (using a hex key), and has it written down on a piece of paper they can hand out to guests
• advertise wifi availability and instructions for getting online prominently

In addition, for laptop users, it’s also always good to have power sockets around.