plainlystated

In a chat interface, text is the natural medium.

Like most devs, I keep a mental backlog of useful-to-me project ideas.

I’ve been using QubesOS (a xen/fedora distribution focused heavily on security by isolation) for a couple weeks now, and I’ve been really enjoying it.

The next virtualization strategy I’m testing out is KVM.

Having spent a week playing with various features of XenServer (with a focus on automation), I’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do.

One of the great features of a hypervisor management suite like XenServer is the ability to migrate a running VM from one physical host to another without affecting running services on that VM.

Using Xen pools, you open the door to a lot of cool features, including high availability of VMs, migration of running VNs, and automatic placement of machines.

Creating VMs from scratch in XenServer is a bit of a hassle, but that’s OK because it’s not a frequent task.

When creating a new virtual machine in XenServer, the typical path is to clone a pre-built template of the type of linux/Windows you want to install, and add a network repository from which it can grab its packages.

I’m starting to dive into choosing from a variety of server virtualization options for work in order to determine which solution to roll into our environments.

At my job, we have quite a few servers, all on dedicated hardware.

I bought an antique telegraph sounder a while back, and I’ve been working on a project that will click out emails from my Etsy store when I get an order.

When setting up a new Raspberry Pi, it’s helpful to have console access, which could mean hooking up a screen and keyboard to the pi.

At TempoDB, we maintain multiple environments (production, staging, etc), and each environment is in a datacenter (Dallas, Seattle, etc).

I picked up a new Mac Mini this Friday to play around with Xen at home.

I put up a handful of small servers with SSH honeypots running, and have been watching who tries to break in.

(Cross-posted to blog.tempo-db.com) In addition to our REST API and language-specific client libraries, we now offer the ability to bulk import data by uploading CSVs.

I opened my Etsy store in January (about 9 months ago), and have learned a lot about effectively marketing my store.

I have two similar data collection projects, both of which collect time-series data and serve it up with graphs and such.

A while back I built my own thermostat using an Arduino, nodejs, and Google Calendar.

The site I’m working on now, deploys as static files.

My Etsy store has been doing well, but I’d like to overcome the friction of requiring an Etsy account.

It’s hard to say what sort of sales rate is reasonable or average for a new Etsy store.

I opened my Etsy store two weeks ago today, and I’ve learned a ton in the time.

I’ve been experimenting with laser cutting lately, and starting to get some results I like.

Here’s a quick post to show off my first project using the LED canvas I have been working on (nicknamed Square Wave).

Arduino is awesome, but using their IDE is uncomfortable for people that would prefer vim or emacs.

As prep for future projects, I’ve built a simple 2D array of individually addressable LEDs.

I picked up a telegraph sounder on ebay this week.

LED strips are growing in popularity and ease of use.

Ruby’s standard library includes the Singleton module, which lets you easily implement the singleton pattern.

At Braintree, the developers get every other Friday to work on non-work-related projects of their choosing.

Before releasing my coffeescript RRD library, I needed to write some tests around it (RDT: Release-Driven Testing).

I’ve completed the first pass of what seems to be a popular electronics self-education project: a home thermostat.

For Hot or Not, I wanted to leverage as much existing code (open-source libraries) as possible, so I could focus on the more interesting application logic.

Last week I had a post make it to the Hacker News front page, and my site immediately went down.

Recently, I’ve worked on two projects (Power Hungry, Hot or Not) which (among other things) collect write-once data over time, and graph the results.

My latest project, Hot Or Not, is live!

I finished my first significant electronics project in a while: Power Hungry.

I recently picked up a graphic LCD display and a clear touchscreen panel for a project I’m starting.

For Inspectinator (a sinatra microapp), I needed a database-less authentication solution that was as lightweight as possible, but with a reasonable amount of security and maintainability.

For Inspectinator, I needed a lightweight token generator to allow people to share their results.

I’ve been wanting to experiment with sinatra for a while, so I popped something off my things-to-do-someday list and put together Inspectinator.

This weekend I was in Nashville, TN for Ruby Hoedown 2009.

As part of my Erlang self-education, I’m doing a selection of sample problems (from the “Programming Erlang” book) in both Erlang and my language of choice: Ruby.

I’ve been playing around with Erlang lately, and it’s been quite a departure from the language I’m most comfortable with (and use everyday): Ruby.

I came across this issue the other day at work, and I’m not really sure how I feel about it.

Continuing towards my goal of developing an application in ruby for my Android (see part 1), I’ve been getting into Rhodes, which is an open-source project that aims to allow you to build native apps for a variety of mobile platforms, all from a lightweig…

Of course, now that I have a new G1, I want to start writing apps for it.

To start off my reinvigorated vim education, I looked into why I get a helpful info bar when I have :split windows, but not when I am looking at a single file.