https://www.asktherelic.com/posts/Recent content in Posts on asktherelic.comHugo -- gohugo.ioenSun, 29 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2025/06/29/fast-food-fast-data/Sun, 29 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2025/06/29/fast-food-fast-data/Recently, while waiting in the drive-through at McDonalds, I started thinking about how much I was really spending there. Mint used to have this information readily available, and my credit card company’s website probably has a spending chart somewhere, but I also knew that McDonald’s sent pretty detailed email receipts. It had become a common stop for me, and while this could have been just an idle thought, I decided to use the opportunity to try out Claude Code and MCP to find an answer.https://www.asktherelic.com/2024/07/15/connecting-apps-with-the-tailscale-kubernetes-operator-part-2/Mon, 15 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2024/07/15/connecting-apps-with-the-tailscale-kubernetes-operator-part-2/In Part 1, I explored installing the Tailscale (TS) K8S operator and adding an Ingress object to make a K8S Service available to the TS network over HTTP. In this post, I want to cover different Egress and Ingress options and ways to connect apps on the TS network. For more context, while I’ve been experimenting with kind and a virtual Kubernetes (K8S) cluster, I run a personal server running at home with plenty of resources and a virtual server that hosts my public web apps.https://www.asktherelic.com/2024/02/23/exploring-the-tailscale-kubernetes-operator-part1/Fri, 23 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2024/02/23/exploring-the-tailscale-kubernetes-operator-part1/I’m a big fan of Tailscale (TS) and the ease of use it brings to using Wireguard to securely connect servers and apps. They’ve recently been working on a Kubernetes Operator that makes it easy to integrate TS into Kubernetes (K8S). As I’ve personally been moving my internal self-hosted apps and public web apps to K8S, I’ve been curious to integrate the two. Two big features I’m interested in and I’ll cover today:https://www.asktherelic.com/2024/02/05/quarterly-calendar-project/Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2024/02/05/quarterly-calendar-project/Starting out during my Recurse Center retreat, I wanted to visualize and plan my 12 weeks of time. I’ve been working on “daily streaks” for habit building and wanted a visual tracker for my habits. Building a printable quarterly calendar seemed like a good initial project. Several other printable calendars I’ve found recently, that were inspirational: https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/ https://useminimal.com/ https://neatnik.net/calendar/ But I couldn’t find a “quarter” or 12 week view to cover my Recurse timeframe!https://www.asktherelic.com/2024/01/05/joining-recurse-w2-2024/Fri, 05 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2024/01/05/joining-recurse-w2-2024/I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve joined the Recurse Center for the Winter 2 batch, where I’ll be immersed in a 12-week community-focused retreat dedicated to programming and self-improvement. In their words, it’s a “retreat where curious programmers recharge and grow.” I’m fortunate to be in a stable financial position, allowing me to step outside my comfort zone and explore something new. While my career has been built on predictability and meeting expectations, I believe there’s value in venturing outside your comfort zone, especially when it aligns with your true self.https://www.asktherelic.com/2017/01/08/hosting-with-dokku/Sun, 08 Jan 2017 13:03:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2017/01/08/hosting-with-dokku/Having a platform to share my thoughts and work has always been important to me, even when I only have time to use it sparingly. I still like blogging. This blog also has been a great learning opportunity and with its latest upgrade: it’s now running 100% over HTTPS (thanks to Let’s Encypt) and being being deployed by Dokku and Docker. Dokku? Dokku is a free replacement for Heroku, that you can run on your own server.https://www.asktherelic.com/2016/09/18/testing-the-layers-of-your-application-at-pyconuk-2016/Sun, 18 Sep 2016 18:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2016/09/18/testing-the-layers-of-your-application-at-pyconuk-2016/This weekend, I presented at PyConUK 2016, summarizing my recent experiences testing Python webpapps and libraries. I’ve been writing Python for about 8 years now, mostly on a smaller scale, but the last few years at Yelp have been really interesting to see testing done at a larger scale. Testing has become really important to me, as it helps all the other pieces of your software fit together better. It was great to be able to share what I’ve learned and brush up on my presentation skills.https://www.asktherelic.com/2014/04/21/upgrading-my-dotfiles-to-symlinks/Mon, 21 Apr 2014 21:12:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2014/04/21/upgrading-my-dotfiles-to-symlinks/Tinkering with my configuration and dotfiles is a never ending hobby. After finding Github’s guide to dotfile configurations, I evaluated several of the repos and decided to upgrade my own dotfiles. For the longest time, my home directory (/home/askedrelic on most systems) has been a git repo. This has mostly worked but has several problems: everything writes to your home directory; you wind up with many of untracked files, unless you ignore them, which is then a pain to keep updating your .https://www.asktherelic.com/2014/02/08/another-year-another-set-of-backups/Sat, 08 Feb 2014 13:50:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2014/02/08/another-year-another-set-of-backups/You might not be able to call it a New Years Resolution anyone, but it’s not too late to backup everything you did online last year. I usually get around to doing this in December/January over Christmas holiday, but this year I have been slacking. Maybe you have too. It’s not too late, make a backup! Files I have a couple services that I use for my documents, my writing, my photos, and everything else that is a file.https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/12/02/practical-lessons-learned-from-testing/Mon, 02 Dec 2013 21:21:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/12/02/practical-lessons-learned-from-testing/After recently joining a much larger company and taking a look at my team’s product from different perspectives, I’ve found new value from testing. While running a small startup exploring a business market, trying new features was a daily or weekly affair; you have to make tradeoffs with code quality, feature set, or speed of delivery. Code testing, especially in quantity of unit tests, had been something I usually traded for speed of delivery.https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/11/20/streaming-small-http-responses-with-python/Wed, 20 Nov 2013 09:39:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/11/20/streaming-small-http-responses-with-python/For a recent hackathon project, I wanted to setup a client/server configuration, all in Python, so that the server could run shell commands and stream the output back to the client. The client was a Raspberry Pi and the server was my laptop, which already had my real project setup. My first thought was to do this over HTTP, with Requests for the client and Bottle for the server. I started writing some code, checked the Bottle docs for sending a streaming response, and was running with a few lines.https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/11/03/an-exploration-in-selecting-things/Sun, 03 Nov 2013 16:44:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/11/03/an-exploration-in-selecting-things/Sometime last year, I remember finding a code snippet to help switch between Python virtual environments, which I added to my .bashrc. menuvirtualenv() { select env in `lsvirtualenv -b`; do if [ -n "$env" ]; then workon "$env" fi; break; done; } alias v.menu='menuvirtualenv' 12:54:26 pcoles@peters_air:~ > v.menu 1) category-cms 2) collect 3) mrcoles 4) readmd #? 3 (mrcoles)12:54:33 pcoles@peters_air:~/projects/mrcoles > This method for selecting an input stood out to me for being so simple: just a numbered list.https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/08/22/the-birthday-surprise/Thu, 22 Aug 2013 20:41:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/08/22/the-birthday-surprise/It has now been several weeks since my twenty-seventh birthday. A birthday is generally always a reason to celebrate, but this birthday, my startup was acquired by Yelp several days beforehand, which makes this birthday extra special! Startups are hard work. Finding a market, building a product, growing that product, figuring out which corners to cut, or not cut; it’s all hard work, even though some may make it look easy.https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/08/05/a-newer-branch/Mon, 05 Aug 2013 23:08:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/08/05/a-newer-branch/This blog is now being built using Middleman, a well documented and quite flexible Ruby static site generator. I had a pretty good run with Blogofile, the previous engine used to build this blog: over three years. I’m well aware I spend too much time bike-shedding and re-tooling sometimes, but the Ruby community keeps pushing things forward and Middleman has some great features worth upgrading for. The Great Solution Middleman’s smart idea is to break everything about a website into a mix of files, folders, and data.https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/06/16/goruck-light-experiences/Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:32:56 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/06/16/goruck-light-experiences/Several months ago, I had the pleasure of completing a GoRuck Light event. It involved a seven-ish mile hike through the Presidio area of San Francisco, getting a little wet, and finding some new limits for what I know I can accomplish. What is GoRuck? For a little backstory, GoRuck is an American company founded by some ex-special forces folks (the Cadre) that makes pretty durable backpacks and has started doing a series of military style events that physically and mentally challenge you, while training you to work together with a random group of people.https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/04/19/write-the-docs-2013/Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/04/19/write-the-docs-2013/There is definite value to moving where you work and frequently changing your perspective on your work, when you are looking for ideas. I have gotten some of my best ideas recently from conferences, traveling to PyCon in Santa Clara and this past weekend, Write the Docs in Portland. The What Write the Docs is a conference organized to talk about documentation, for those who document, organize, and share information. It originated as a crazy idea over beers, but the founders kept investigating and figured out how they could actually make a conference happen.https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/03/25/pycon-2013-wrapup/Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:40:20 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/03/25/pycon-2013-wrapup/This year was my second PyCon and I wanted to share some thoughts from the experience. Although it is quite a large event running well over a week, I attended for just a few days and took away a good amount of information. The two big themes I noticed, maybe just from the selection of talks I attended, were Python 3 and IPython. Python 3 Python 3 was originally slated to have something around a five-year rollout, which would put us in 2013.https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/03/07/storing-command-line-passwords-in-keychain/Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:38:21 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/03/07/storing-command-line-passwords-in-keychain/Over the last year, I’ve made the effort to get most of my passwords into 1Password. It’s pretty nice to only have to remember one password, along with easily with increasing your overall online security. Whenever another bank or website gets their password list stolen, I’m not concerned because my password for that site was “0RLrA4GQeGlRZR” or some other gibberish that was unique to that specific site. Anyways, I still use a bevy of command line tools that mostly keep their passwords in .https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/01/27/exploring-github-readmes/Sun, 27 Jan 2013 17:32:04 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2013/01/27/exploring-github-readmes/Over the last few years, I’ve integrated and used many different open source projects, looking at a wide range of code quality, documentation, and project organization. Code is just one part of a project, first impressions matter, and especially when deciding to add a dependency to your project, you want to judge a project on many different metrics. READMEs are a big first impression. They can summarize your project, show quick getting started documentation, licensing information, and are a good metric about the overall state of your project.https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/11/14/catching-up-with-homebrew/Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:44:36 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/11/14/catching-up-with-homebrew/Homebrew is pretty sweet. I’ve been very pleased with easily keeping my OSX system up to date since it was released; no more Fink/MacPorts, it’s automatable, it just works (well, as long as you keep installing the latest XCode or OSX Command Line Tools). You are using Homebrew to install and update all your programs, right? If not, checkout the homepage now. However, when just following the Homebrew repo on GitHub, I think keeping up to date with what is “new” with Homebrew has always been hard.https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/10/17/year-one-at-a-startup/Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:35:01 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/10/17/year-one-at-a-startup/September was recently my first year at SeatMe, along with my first full year living in San Francisco. It’s been a great year as a programmer, doing some awesome things at a startup that I love, and for life in general, moving closer to many friends in the area. As part of this milestone, I wanted to reflect on what has been accomplished and things I’ve learned along the way.https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/09/10/book-reviews---the-tipping-point-and-made-to-stick/Mon, 10 Sep 2012 22:12:25 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/09/10/book-reviews---the-tipping-point-and-made-to-stick/Two for one special today. My reading backlog of late has been oriented on some well known books covering ideas; how they spread, how they are shared, and how you can get your ideas to stay in someone’s head. I am always interested in improving how I can communicate with world around me and these books offer some great viewpoints on that subject. The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell ISBN: 0316346624https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/05/23/book-review-the-design-of-everyday-things/Wed, 23 May 2012 22:50:25 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/05/23/book-review-the-design-of-everyday-things/The Design Of Everyday Things Donald A. Norman ISBN: 0465067107 What’s The Point? An interesting look at the design of doors, computers, and things that we interact with daily. The book breaks down the major components of design and how they work. I learned about affordance, which the quality of something to do a task; a door handle affords being opened. The book was an interesting mix of psychology and science, which I’ve studied before with cognitive science.https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/05/17/django-deployment-experiences-with-seatme-com/Thu, 17 May 2012 23:11:23 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/05/17/django-deployment-experiences-with-seatme-com/Wednesday night I gave a presentation on how I deploy SeatMe.com @ the Life360 offices in SF. It was pretty fun and had a good turnout! Here’s that presentation: One other idea someone had mentioned afterward for running a local PyPI was to run a Squid proxy in front of PyPI and set a 1 year cache on everything. The more I think about, it’s pretty ingenious and simple, versus running a full Python app.https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/05/13/journal-0-3-released/Sun, 13 May 2012 13:29:36 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/05/13/journal-0-3-released/After some recent emails from new users of Journal, I’ve released version 0.3. (Journal is a CLI tool to help with keeping a work/personal journal). If you have Journal installed with pip, you can $ pip install -U journal What’s New This version has been a long time coming, pulling in some patches from my friend Drew and changing how arguments passing to Journal are handled. Here is the official list:https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/03/06/pycon-2012-planning/Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:52:27 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/03/06/pycon-2012-planning/I’m really looking forward to attending my first PyCon this weekend. After moving to SF, it’s great to have so many cool conferences right in my backyard! It’s sold out this year, which might be a first? The talks look great, but I’m just as hopeful to meet a bunch of cool people and trade ideas on projects and Python. After writing Python for around 5-6 years now, I’m finally beginning to understand most things and hopeful to begin contributing to large projects or things that might help improve the language.https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/01/15/interesting-trends-in-vim/Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:31:28 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/01/15/interesting-trends-in-vim/Something I’ve noticed lately with vim plugins are that miniscripts and smaller vim tweaks, any sort of vim functionality, are being packaged and shared as a proper vim plugins via git, not just big IDE style plugins. This may not be an entirely new idea, but I think it’s becoming more of the norm to use pathogen and git submodules to share everything vim related, rather than copying and pasting actual code, I think the idea of managing everything via git, github, and git submodules is pretty neat.https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/01/02/backup-everything-you-did-last-year/Mon, 02 Jan 2012 08:58:59 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2012/01/02/backup-everything-you-did-last-year/A habit I’ve developed over the last few years is to backup all of my online artifacts and identities once the year ends. Maybe I’m just a bit paranoid, but in this day and age with more and more things being stored in the cloud, control and access to your data is being shifted to faceless servers and scripts that can disconnect you quite easily with little recourse. Whether it’s a TOS violation, a change in a company’s policy, or just something else screwy, it’s not something to worry about daily, but it’s better to be prepared.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/12/31/2012-python-meme/Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:43:50 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/12/31/2012-python-meme/I wanted to do some kind of reflection this year, so may as well hop on the bandwagon. What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2011? Fabric. For a good six months of this year, I was managing everything server-wise at my last job through Fabric and learned a good deal about it, hacking in some features and giving a presentation on it at the local Pittsburgh users group.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/12/30/book-review-design-for-hackers/Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:54:02 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/12/30/book-review-design-for-hackers/Design For Hackers David Kadavy ISBN: 1119998956 What’s The Point? Design, layout, fonts, and color theory for websites and web applications. Kadavy covers all the main points of design, how design affects how we use things, and through understanding your design decisions, how you can make better decisions. How Was It? A useful and interesting read! The hacker in me likes well organized and straightforward things. Each of the main elements of design were given a chapter and covered thoroughly: what they are, how they work and why they exist in a historical context.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/11/08/version-1-0-of-comcast-bandwidth/Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:01:01 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/11/08/version-1-0-of-comcast-bandwidth/After receiving some patches on GitHub this weekend and renewing my interest in this project, I’ve decided to tag a 1.0 version of my Comcast Bandwidth Usage script! After being stable for atleast a year and combined with these new feature, it’s probably worth finally tagging a stable version. What’s new in 1.0? Android Notifications of your usage via Notify My Android The ability to easily run the script on Heroku instead of your own server Now using standard config.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/11/05/unix-style-cron-on-heroku-s-cedar-stack/Sat, 05 Nov 2011 15:40:02 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/11/05/unix-style-cron-on-heroku-s-cedar-stack/I’ve been playing with Heroku for a project and wanted to use the default cron addon to run a Python script and only email if that script printed anything to stdout; regular Unix style. This repo is my attempt that. Overall, I definitely accomplished what I set out to do! I’ve been very impressed with Heroku’s Cedar stack and how flexible it is. It’s awesome being able to script the creation of an enviroment and instantly see if my script is working or not.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/10/26/returning-to-normal/Wed, 26 Oct 2011 22:35:39 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/10/26/returning-to-normal/The last few months have been a bit hectic: a few weeks traveling through NYC and DC, a new job in San Francisco, a cross country drive, and a few apartment moves. Thankfully, my life has finally reached the point where I am comfortable again and can start coding and writing in peace. My new job has kept me quite busy, but what little free time I find, I try and make good use of.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/08/18/journal-0-2-0/Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:14:08 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/08/18/journal-0-2-0/I’m releasing v0.2.0 of Journal today, a Python command line tool that I’ve created to help with keeping a journal for work/personal stuff! Check PyPi for the latest or do an upgrade install with pip, pip install -U journal. Main changes include: Support for viewing entries on a specific date and over a specific time period The ability to create multiple entries at once from the command line Python 2.5 compatibility (thanks to Tox) Read on for more details.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/08/16/journaling/Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:32:46 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/08/16/journaling/I’m releasing 0.1 of Journal, a simple Python CLI tool to help with keeping a journal for work/personal stuff! Inspired by Peter Lyons’ article on career development, I decided to write up a script to help manage things. The idea from Lyons’ article is to keep a chronological log of everything you do at your job. This mirrors my own experiences with working so far: keeping meticulously notes of what I’m doing is always helpful and not too much extra work, since I always carry a notebook around with me for this purpose.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/08/09/pyohio2011/Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:22:31 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/08/09/pyohio2011/I attended PyOhio this past weekend, a great Python conference which I was pleasantly surprised existed! After moving to Pittsburgh last year, I’ve been looking around for meetups and ways to meet other developers. I found Ruby, Javascript, and Python user groups but this was the first major conference I’ve seen in the area. I attended with a friend I met from my local Pittsburgh Python usergroup and had a blast.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/07/13/managing-vim-buffers/Wed, 13 Jul 2011 20:21:52 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/07/13/managing-vim-buffers/Buffers are Vim’s underlying way of managing text and perhaps a little confusing to work with at first. Most GUI text editors have a direct “one window to one file” correlation. You can open multiple documents and until they are saved as disk files, they just exist on screen. Most times when I’m using Vim, there is only one window open, but I am working on multiple files and switching between them quickly, which is where buffers come in.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/06/22/fabric-for-python-automation/Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:33:49 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/06/22/fabric-for-python-automation/I gave a talk earlier tonight at the local Python usergroup on Fabric, a Python library for “application deployment.” I’ve mentioned Fabric before on here, documenting how to create dynamic Fabric commands.The presentation went well, but I was most interested in the reception of the talk and how I targeted the talk. I gave a talk earlier tonight at the local Python usergroup on Fabric, a Python library for “application deployment.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/06/19/weekend-python-hacking/Sun, 19 Jun 2011 22:59:04 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/06/19/weekend-python-hacking/I’ve been able to get some time and focus this weekend to hack on a few Python side projects. In the sense of learning and self documentation, here are some things I learned: Know the difference between __str__ and __unicode__ (and __repr__). Don’t put Unicode in your str unless you want random unicode exceptions. An interesting snippet to get the best of both worlds: def __str__(self): return unicode(self).encode('utf-8') I wish Python packaging and “building a module” best practices was simply laid out somewhere.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/06/06/vim-plugin-tagbar/Mon, 06 Jun 2011 22:26:06 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/06/06/vim-plugin-tagbar/Continuing with upgrading and explaining my Vim setup, I’m going to cover Tagbar and TagList today. Both are plugins that provide high-level views of your source code at a class and function level, similar to Eclipse, Visual Studio, or other IDEs. The view is available in a quick toggle sidebar, which you can sort and use to jump around in your source file. Both plugins make use of Ctags, which parses the source code for most popular languages.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/05/30/the-state-of-my-vim-configuration/Mon, 30 May 2011 00:14:38 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/05/30/the-state-of-my-vim-configuration/I’ve grown to become a huge Vim fan over my years of programming, probably beyond what most people would call normal. I think my interest in Vim stems from my interest in the tools that I use to code; I appreciate the manner in which I write code almost as much as the code I write. In the craftsman philosophy, I’m a big fan of functional tools that serve their purpose well, CoolTools for example.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/05/29/simple-sidebar-navigation-with-sausage-js/Sun, 29 May 2011 11:41:56 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/05/29/simple-sidebar-navigation-with-sausage-js/Several weeks ago, a friend linked me to Sausage.js, “a jQuery UI widget for contextual pagination.” I would call it more of a sidebar navigation widget. The example page was intriguing and prompted me to add it to this blog. Requirements My inital goal was based off the CouchDB example linked on the Sausage homepage. I was slowed down by trying to figure out the exact JS and CSS requirements, which aren’t specifically listed out, and some conflicts with my local CSS for this blog, the main Sausage div requires height 100% and I had something else set to 100% height which didn’t work well…https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/04/11/air-speakers-for-everyone/Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:44:01 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/04/11/air-speakers-for-everyone/Earlier today, the private key from Apple’s Airport Express was found and released, along with some Perl code, finally allowing for anyone to create their own “Air Speaker” without using the Airport Express. With this code, any OSX or Linux computer can now be turned into an AirSpeaker, that any iPhone or iPod Touch, or iTunes, can now stream music to seamlessly. This really is fantastic because it allows a great deal of flexibility with how you play music, which has been limited for years now.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/04/02/on-easily-replacing-text-in-vim/Sat, 02 Apr 2011 15:43:41 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/04/02/on-easily-replacing-text-in-vim/Or more specifically: search and replace using the current visual selection. Lately with my job, I’ve been spending more time refactoring old code than writing new code. Refactoring and manipulating code (and text) is something that I think Vim is great at, once you really understand the different modes and motions that Vim has, see Stack Overflow for a good summary. Vim’s Search and Replace mode is what I’ve primarily been using and while refactoring, I found some Vim tricks I wanted to share.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/03/31/toggle-audio-output-from-the-command-line/Thu, 31 Mar 2011 22:51:19 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/03/31/toggle-audio-output-from-the-command-line/I spend alot of time at my computer and with that much usage, have both speakers and headphones for different hours of the day. I was initially physically swapping 3.5MM audio output plugs on my speakers, lotsa actual effort! I then figured out I could plug my headphones into the “rear” speaker output and switch output through the audio control in OSX, much easier! But that was even work, to open the audio panel and chose the correct source, so today I figured out how to toggle sources in Applescript and the command line.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/02/17/dynamic-fabric-commands-for-managing-cloud-servers/Thu, 17 Feb 2011 23:07:54 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/02/17/dynamic-fabric-commands-for-managing-cloud-servers/Fabric is a Python CLI tool for interacting with remote servers, that I’ve been pushing at work the last few months. It’s great for organizing simple tasks to run locally or remotely, this blog is even being deployed using Fabric currently! It’s a great tool. The two main ideas of Fabric are that you have hosts and tasks you apply to those hosts. Fabric uses fabfile.py as its default instruction file, similar to a Rakefile or makefile.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/02/16/shmoocon-2011/Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:25:44 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/02/16/shmoocon-2011/I attended my second Shmoocon earlier this month in Washington DC, a conference which I’ve begun to describe to my friends as a ‘hacking and security’ conference. Shmoocon is a wonderful mix of computer security folks, physical security folks (lockpicking), and hackers (folks just interested in how things work). It’s fun to attend and find many examples that prove you really aren’t as safe as you thought, you really can’t trust most companies or people, but there is plenty that you can do about it, once you know to how to defend yourself.https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/01/20/upgrading-to-blogofile-0-7/Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:51:10 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2011/01/20/upgrading-to-blogofile-0-7/I saw recently on PyPI that blogofile, the Python blog engine that builds this blog, updated to version 0.7. This prompted me to upgrade my blog from 0.6 and detail the changes here, since the blogofile docs don’t seem to have kept up. For the most part, this was discovered through trying to build my blog until it worked. I used the the blogofile init simple_blog and blogofile init blogofile.com projects as examples of “working” 0.https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/11/07/scraping-comcast-s-website/Sun, 07 Nov 2010 20:21:29 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/11/07/scraping-comcast-s-website/It’s bad enough that I cannot get FIOS at my apartment and am stuck with Comcast cable, but their website is a terrible mishmash of redirects and “preloading” pages, making it near unusable. My only reason for using their website is to verify my automatic billing is setup and that my bandwidth usage is below their 250GB cap. I decided to automate this and through feedback from other Comcast users, found some interesting results about their bandwidth caps.https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/10/09/the-ssl-redirect-loophole/Sat, 09 Oct 2010 17:59:16 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/10/09/the-ssl-redirect-loophole/ssl loop hole redirect? https://amazon.comhttps://www.asktherelic.com/2010/09/05/large-graphs-with-google-chart-api/Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:44:22 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/09/05/large-graphs-with-google-chart-api/Yesterday, I saw forum post about predictions for when a video game (DNF) would get released. That prompted me to generate a multi-year vertical bar chart graphing the number of predictions per month/year over the last several years and I felt like sharing the process. I love making graphs. I also love using Google’s Chart API for making quick but decent looking graphs. They get the job done easily and since it is an HTTP API, it’s easily to manipulate, share, and program.https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/05/23/an-interactive-python-workflow/Sun, 23 May 2010 21:05:53 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/05/23/an-interactive-python-workflow/I’ve been doing a fair amount of screen-scraping and reverse-engineering of web applications recently and wanted to share my workflow. When working with dynamic web applications whose output is dynamic or unknown, Python’s REPL (Repeat Eval Print Loop) combined with IPython is great choice for quickly getting something working. Python’s built in libraries combined 3rd party libraries Say I wanted to emulate a normal user in a web browser. First I would make a request to a homepage, then I would browse deeper into the website.https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/04/26/accessing-google-reader-via-oauth-and-python/Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:19:40 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/04/26/accessing-google-reader-via-oauth-and-python/Last month, Google Reader announced support for accessing user data via OAuth. Previously, access was unofficially allowed using the ClientLogin method, which required the user’s login and password. OAuth seems to be the recommended access method for the future, due to security it provides for a user. I’ve finally had a chance to figure out OAuth using Python and how to get your Reader data, so I wanted to share my method.https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/04/12/awesome-osx-software/Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:27:24 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/04/12/awesome-osx-software/Many years ago, when I switched to OSX from Windows, I quickly knew it was the right choice to switch. As the years have passed and my knowledge of all three major platforms(OSX, Windows, and Linux) has increased, I’ve become more confident and happy with my choice of OSX. While the OS defines how you interact with the software, but the software defines what you can accomplish and enables you to do so.https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/04/05/my-perfect-osx-terminal-setup/Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:44:13 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/04/05/my-perfect-osx-terminal-setup/As a programmer and a part-time sysadmin, I spend a huge amount of time in the OSX Terminal and find it be one of the better CLI environments I’ve used, after some tweaking. Windows + Powershell or CMD (shudder) is just terrible. Linux with Xterm comes close, but doesn’t have the same easy usability that I enjoy about the OSX Terminal. Today, I’d like to share my tweaks and explain what I enjoy about them.https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/04/05/fixing-macfusion-with-osx-10-6-3/Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:11:58 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/04/05/fixing-macfusion-with-osx-10-6-3/MacFusion is a great little app that allows you to mount network locations over SSH, which I’ve mentioned before. With the latest 10.6.3 update in OSX, the latest version MacFusion 2.0.3 breaks. Unfortunately, the developers of MacFusion haven’t touched the app in over 2 years. I found a fix on the MacFusion Google Group. A third-party developer, nall, fixed the problem and updated the binary to 2.0.4, available at http://github.com/downloads/nall/MacFusion2/Macfusion-2.0.4-SL.zip. This version works fine for me on 10.https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/02/25/a-new-branch/Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:25:14 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2010/02/25/a-new-branch/I’ve been writing on this site for a couple years now, slowing figuring out how to organize things and finding out what I like to write about. I’ve finally come the conclusion that it’s time to split into two sites, asktherelic.com and thebehrensventure.com. Ask the Relic (this blog) will focus on programming, sys admin, web dev, and other tech things I’m trying to make a career out of, while TheBehrensVenture will focus on my random travels, stories, and adventures.https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/11/10/bash-history-punchcard/Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:13:54 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/11/10/bash-history-punchcard/I love the punchcard graph on GitHub, showing the hourly/daily/weekly output of a project in a nice and neat format. I decided to apply the punchcard format to my Bash history, one of the random bits of data I have lying around. By default, Bash just stores history commands sequentially with a number and the command. To store the command with a timestamp, you must set the HISTTIMEFORMAT variable in your bashrc.https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/10/24/git-line-totals-per-author/Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:58:17 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/10/24/git-line-totals-per-author/I finally switched all of my projects over to git or git-svn and have never been happier. Everything has so many more options than svn, everything is faster, and the universe of software for git is way better than svn. Switch now! Awhile back I wrote a command to print the total number of lines contributed per author for my svn repository because I wanted to see how awesome I am.https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/07/28/svn-line-output-totals/Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:23:04 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/07/28/svn-line-output-totals/I’m working in a group project currently and annoyed at the lack of output by my teammates. Wanting hard metrics of how awesome I am and how awesome they aren’t, I wrote this command up. svn ls -R | egrep -v -e "\/$" | xargs svn blame | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r Output: 2038 matt 433 john 263 ryan 186 alice 167 bob This command will print an full repository listing of all files, remove the directories, run svn blame on each individual file, and tally the resulting line counts.https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/07/17/edit-locally-run-remotely-via-macfuse/Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:37:02 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/07/17/edit-locally-run-remotely-via-macfuse/One of the most ample things I’ve had this summer has been time: time to read, time to code, and time to tinker (or waste) on improving how I code. While I am occasionally guilt of being too ‘meta,’ spending too much much time worrying about how I do work rather than doing work, I feel that having the idea to improve in your head is far better than stagnating. Some improvements are easy to invest in and quick to see returns of saved time, others are not.https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/04/17/barcamp-rochester-4/Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:29:49 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/04/17/barcamp-rochester-4/Over the weekend, Barcamp Rochester 4 took place here on campus at RIT. I have been helping to plan this event over the last few months and was pleased that it went off with any major problems! Around 60-80 people showed up of the course of an entire Saturday and there was a lock picking village that was open most of the day. I arranged most of the food and it seemed like my estimates were in order, I don’t think anyone left hungry!https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/04/08/munin-for-server-stats/Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:34:48 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/04/08/munin-for-server-stats/I switched servers recently, moving from a SliceHost VPS back to a spare machine to try and save some money monthly. One of the final pieces of rebuilding the server was to add a server status page. I tried at first with some php exec calls and command one-liners, but that was pretty limited functionally and required me to handle all the formatting. Then I found Munin, a script-based monitoring tool that uses RRDTool to create static graphs that you can view through your web server.https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/02/18/shmoocon-wrapup/Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:30:55 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/02/18/shmoocon-wrapup/Before I left this languish any more, here are my thoughts on Shmoocon 2009: it was a great time! The First Day I was last in DC about 6 years ago for my 8th grade graduation, so it was fun to view the city again from a different perspective. Some friends from RIT drove down Thursday night and we crashed at another friend's house around 2AM. We were up and moving by 10 the next morning, taking the Metro in to the city center.https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/02/05/shmoocon-this-weekend/Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:18:57 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/02/05/shmoocon-this-weekend/Still trying to get my trip in China written up, but a busy school schedule and great snowboarding this winter has taken precedence over the writting! To top that off, I’m 5 minutes from leaving for Shmoocon, a hacking and security conference in Washington, DC! If anyone who reads this is going, send me and email! I plan on taking pictures and providing a summary of the event when I get back, so have fun this weekend!https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/01/31/osx-terminal-and-finder-integration/Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:59:17 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/01/31/osx-terminal-and-finder-integration/I love the Terminal that comes standard with OSX and now thanks to 10.5, the Finder has improved a bunch as well. Between the two of them, I can get to the right directory and get what I want done pretty quick. Here are a bunch of tips to help integrate and work better with them. Finder For just navigating around, I use List mode (Apple + 2) exclusively. My hands sit on the Apple key and the cursor keys.https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/01/17/more-itunes-stats/Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:00:01 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2009/01/17/more-itunes-stats/My friend Drew updated his Perl iTunes library module in this post, adding an example script for providing a bunch of stats. I used his module previously, practicing my Perl skills and getting some basic stats for my facebook profile, but his example sets a good baseline for comparison. Here are my iTunes stats, check out his post to grab yours! Number of tracks: 14811 Total size: 130492.45 MB Average size: 8.https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/10/03/dual-monitors-done-right/Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:00:13 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/10/03/dual-monitors-done-right/After getting back to school and settling in, I put some serious thought into my current desk setup. Considering I’m planning on sitting at this desk for the next ~14 months (which is actually quite a long time for me stay in one place), I wanted to ensure that it was ergonomically sound. My main guide was a pair of Coding Horror articles, a programmer blog from Jeff Atwood. They had been on my mind for awhile, but I didn’t have the time or money until now to do something about them until now!https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/09/28/itunes-perl-and-you/Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:00:39 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/09/28/itunes-perl-and-you/I was updating my Facebook profile tonight and wanted to fill in the “Favorite Music” section with some real data from iTunes, considering I listen to 99% of my music through iTunes, my iPod, or iPhone, which means all of my stats get tracked through iTunes. Creating a Smart Playlist in iTunes of my most played music would be adequate, but I don’t know of a way to that data out of iTunes without copying and pasting, a boring and time waste experience, so I turned to Perl.https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/08/17/wordcamp-wrapup/Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:33:01 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/08/17/wordcamp-wrapup/It was a great day Saturday at Wordcamp, meeting so many interesting people, fostering some new ideas, and learn quite a lot. I’ve used wordpress now as my default blogging software for a few years, but I’ve never had the opportunity to get in touch with the community first hand, to see whose really behind the software. As my first Wordcamp, I had high expectations, and I wasn’t let down!https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/08/16/wordcamp-2008/Sat, 16 Aug 2008 09:55:13 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/08/16/wordcamp-2008/Checking in from Wordcamp 2008 right now! Here for the day, hoping to learn and meet some people that I only know through blogs! There’s a nice mix of user and developer oriented talks, along with some delicious food so far. The Mission Bay Center is a very new and grand center, it’s a great place to host this event. I will check in later with some more reviews and info hopefully.https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/08/10/defcon-16/Sun, 10 Aug 2008 23:53:26 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/08/10/defcon-16/As mentioned, I attended Defcon 16 this weekend in Las Vegas and had an excellent time! Defcon is a computer security and general hacking convention. Vegas provides an excellent background for a pretty technical and semi-serious event. It took place in the Rivera Hotel, which is quite old and busted hotel, but it works fine for a bunch of nerds that just want to drink and hack all day! Thursday We arrived around 6PM in LAS and checked into our room pretty quickly, just dropping off our things and then heading out to dinner at the Treasure Island hotel.https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/06/23/google-reader-shared-ninjas/Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:18:28 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/06/23/google-reader-shared-ninjas/http://www.google.com/reader/shared/15872734259957058852 Google Reader lets you setup a shared items website, which then has a few neat themes, including ninjas and ice cream! This is awesome.https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/05/31/exporting-notes-from-facebook/Sat, 31 May 2008 23:36:30 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/05/31/exporting-notes-from-facebook/I’m importing some lost data tonight thanks to Facebook Notes. My FB Notes are subscribed to this blog’s RSS feed, it pulls down all my posts and re-posts them. It’s kinda of a waste to duplicate data, however, my friends are on FB and I get some hits from that. It has also saved my ass when my host crashes and loses all my posts! My posts exists on FB, however, due to the closed wall environment that FB has, you have to work hard to pull it out.https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/05/29/google-io-2008-swag/Thu, 29 May 2008 21:49:35 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/05/29/google-io-2008-swag/I attended Google IO over the past 2 days, chronicling the event on my Twitter and Flickr pages. I’m incredibly tired currently, barely running off coffee and my thoughts are a mess so I will wait until this weekend to post my thoughts, but quickly: it was an excellent event, well run with great food and great ideas all around. Here’s a shot of my swag below.https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/02/06/my-new-vps/Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:58:24 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/02/06/my-new-vps/As an addendum to Shared Hosting Sucks, I’d like to share what my research found and where my new future host will be: Slicehost.com is a small hosting company located in St. Louis that fits my needs perfectly. $20 a month gets you 256mb ram, 10gb storage, and 100gb bandwidth! Once you pay, you have a choice of several different Linux distributions, of which I chose Debian. It builds the image for you and then within 15 minutes you have a fully functioning server with an IP address and full root access.https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/02/01/shared-hosting-sucks/Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:57:14 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2008/02/01/shared-hosting-sucks/I’m a bit wired on coffee right now, but this is a rant that has been building for awhile. Shared hosting sucks. After years of experience with many different providers and situations, I’m fed up with it. The idea is great, a shared utilization of resources because usually one person on a server is not going to use 100% of the resources, but how the situation is with most providers is terrible.https://www.asktherelic.com/2007/12/06/blackberry-ocd/Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:46:36 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2007/12/06/blackberry-ocd/One of the interesting things I’ve noticed thanks to having a Blackberry now is how OCD I’ve become, checking the device constantly. I have it set to gently blink whenever new email comes in and only vibrate for an incoming phone call, but sometimes I find myself looking over to the device almost every 10 minutes, just expecting something to happen. It’s a bad habit to get into, getting dependent on this device.https://www.asktherelic.com/2007/11/27/blackberry-sync-under-osx/Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:39:07 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2007/11/27/blackberry-sync-under-osx/The state of affairs in OSX with Blackberries is pretty sad. RIM offers a free program called PocketMac, which amazingly works, but sucks very badly. It hasn’t been updated in a long time and is not a Universal binary. As part of my organizational work, I’m getting my contacts all in sync with Address Book in OSX, then dumping them to Gmail and my Blackberry. I have a PC with the RIM syncing software, which works fine and is a well developed piece of software, but i don’t want to add an extra middle man to my syncing.https://www.asktherelic.com/2007/10/21/coda-purchased/Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:25:35 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2007/10/21/coda-purchased/I guess it’s a big deal to me when I legally purchase software, because I just don’t do it very often. Piracy and other methods aside, most applications I use are actually open source or free. Free software is nearly as good or better than other software out there, for what I need generally. Coda though is a professional web designer solution that is totally worth paying for. Coda basically gives you one simple interface for everything you would need as a web designer.https://www.asktherelic.com/2007/09/18/tf2-beta-performance-on-my-imac/Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:28:27 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2007/09/18/tf2-beta-performance-on-my-imac/Surprise, I’m playing games instead of doing homework. Well, most of my homework is done and I can put off sleep, so oh well. My main normal PC died randomly yesterday, so I installed Bootcamp and Windows (ugh) and got the Team Fortress 2 beta installed tonight. At default settings, it suggested 1680×1050 and high character detail, low textures, high shadows, and not much else. It ran about 20-30FPS in a single player game.https://www.asktherelic.com/2007/06/04/blackberry-curve-thoughts-day-one/Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2007/06/04/blackberry-curve-thoughts-day-one/Since getting a Blackberry at work, I’ve been obsessed. Internet, chatting with friends, Google Maps, any piece of information I want, on the go, and in a great package. The old and busted model 7230 that I had nice, I wanted better. After my friend bought one and started nagging me, I caved and bought the Blackberry Curve today and am loving it! Key features that I love: Amazing Internet browsing.https://www.asktherelic.com/2006/05/03/hiddensource-beta-3/Wed, 03 May 2006 12:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2006/05/03/hiddensource-beta-3/So for those in the know, Hidden:Source came out with Beta 3 of their Half Life 2 mod. It is an excellent and very much improved version, which I can’t stop playing. My server has been updated with it and it’s running 24/7, as the name suggests. I’ve been having issues with Mani Mod and server crashing, but that seems to be all due to Mani Mod. The server code is alot more stable, which I love.https://www.asktherelic.com/2006/04/19/i-hate-apache/Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2006/04/19/i-hate-apache/Okay, not really, Apache does a great job for a webserver, very stable, very easy to use, and it works most of the time. However, I’m becoming incredibly fed up with it as I try to do more complex things. URL redirection and bandwidth limiting are not possible under my current configuration. URL redirection semi-works, although not under my main www directory, only under sub folders, why, I don’t know! I cannot get my htaccess file to have any access under the main www directory which annoys me to no end.https://www.asktherelic.com/2006/03/29/7th-serpent/Wed, 29 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000https://www.asktherelic.com/2006/03/29/7th-serpent/I’ve thrown up a new mod called 7th Serpent on the server here. It is an excellent total conversion for Max Payne 2, that has been a few years in the making, just recently announced. Check it out, leave a comment on how you like it. The website is at www.7thserpent.com. Also, Congrats to aavenr for his work on the mod, I heard he just recently got a job offer at DICE!