And, that greatest of midwestern traditions, the Garage Sale.  We’re finally rid of all our old stuff. Thanks go out to James and Heather, who were our erstwhile and exhausted partners in the little venture.

Happy Monday, people. Let’s be careful out there.

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• We bought a house.
• It’s in Medina, OH, which is about forty-five minutes from where we currently live.
• There is no job change for me involved.
• My wife is taking a faculty position at the Music Settlement, where she will be teaching fiddle.
• The kids are very excited.
• The parents are also very excited.
• We got it for an excellent price.
• It’s in a wonderful neighborhood where the kids can walk to school.
• Lots of mature trees.
• I have a shed I will be transforming into an office.
• We take possession on June 30th.
• We move in on July 2.

I will post pictures as I’m able.

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We’ve been packing steadily for the last three weeks, and thankfully, we’re nearly done. The move to/from Los Angeles helped us trim our belongings to a manageable truckload, so it’s really not so bad. Moving out of a house we owned for a decade was much more difficult.

Today is all about packing up my office, including my sound equipment. The new house will not have an office per se, at least, not until I run power to the shed in the backyard. Yes, you heard me…I’ll have an outbuilding to convert into my little man-pit. My wife is debating whether the lock will go on the inside or the outside of the door. She’s just so adorable, don’t ya think?

Other items on the agenda: a piano recital for my youngest daughter, packing, cleaning out my car, packing, prep lists for our family vacation to Kure Beach, NC in late June, packing, and packing.

I might also be packing, if I have time.

Side note: This warrants more of a post, but the first issue of Lightspeed Magazine was outstanding. I highly recommend you pick it up.

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I drove to a neighborhood called Glenville on the east side of Cleveland.  There, at 10622 Kimberly Ave, is former home of one Jerry Siegel. It was in this house where he and his buddy Joe Shuster created on of the greatest icons in world culture.

This is the place where Superman was born.

Last year, author Brad Meltzer and a group of comic fans raised over $100,000 to renovate the birthplace of the most famous fictional character of the twentieth century. He pointed out, quite fairly, the City of Cleveland was letting the house rot, and that it was going to come down to the fans to save it.

And save it, they did.

Now, there’s a sign out front, and a plaque that tells you what you’re looking it.  But unless you knew to come here, you’d never know it existed.

The house is both inspirational and heartbreaking at the same time.  It’s wonderful that a bunch of people pitched in to raise money to save it. At the same time, the neighborhood is a mess. The vacant, boarded-up houses nearby are rotting; one had a sign to ward off looters: “NO COPPER. PVC PLUMBING ONLY.”

There are no fast food joints here. No large-chain gas stations. No Seven-Elevens. Hardly any business at all.

If there was ever a place that needed a hero, Glenville is it.

And yet, sitting there in my car, looking at the house, I was inspired. Two kids, two poor, frustrated, hormone-addled high-school kids created something wonderful there. That deserves some respect. That deserves some homage; some reverence.

Superman’s fame isn’t tawdy; it isn’t cheap. Unlike Batman, it isn’t born from angst and darkness. Superman is one of the most rare creations, he’s famous for being the Good Guy. There’s a purity to Superman that is utterly lacking in in most pop culture icons. It’s his signature, his staying power; it’s why people still look to this fictional character with hope.

These two kids took a man and gave him three things: 1) Morals, 2) Strength, and 3) Bulletproof Skin¹.  That’s it. That was the formula. Hardly original. in fact, other parts of the Superman myth were cribbed entirely from other sources. Doc Savage, for instance, was known as the Man of Bronze and had a Fortress of Solitude. Superman was not created in a vacuum…he was a mashup of things that came before, and he is greater than the sum of his parts.

As a creative guy, this gives me hope. There is a myth of originality that creative folks cling to, as if there is anything new under the yellow sun. All we can do is remix and recast not only without shame, but also without guile.

And greatness? Superman achieved worldwide acclaim and recognition. The Siegel and Shuster families, however, have been fighting for the rights to Superman for years.

And the house in Glenville, where the two boys drew on old pieces of wallpaper, nearly passed away entirely.

The house serves as both inspiration and cautionary tale. It is both despair and hope, both dread and faith.

And between those, it endures.

Just like all of us.

(Click below to read the plaque)

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1. In the beginning, he couldn’t fly. He could only leap.

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Also, some friends in real estate think that prices will drop since the tax credit has gone away. This might very well work in our favor.

More news as it develops…

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Exploring Django Part One, or, I Made a Half-Monkey/Half-Pony To Please You

In this first part of a three-part talk, Evil Overlord Chris Miller will show all the budding Evil Masterminds who attend how to get started with the Python-based Django web application framework. Topics covered will include:

1. URL Mapping for Fun and Profit,
2. Templating Engines for the Faint of Heart, and
3. Girding Thy Loins With The Power of Data Models.

Souls of the innocent will not be provided — expect to bring your own and some to share with the class.

Seating is limited to 30 people for this event, so register early!

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The rules:

•   You have at most 20 minutes for your presentation, including questions
•   Code must be posted to BitBucket by May 3 to facilitate people following along during the presentation.
•   You’ve got to stick to the project requirements, in the spirit of keeping this a fair comparison there should not be any additional graphics, styles or javascript tricks that are not built-in functionality of your framework.

The project:  A simple blog.

•   Post list
•   Post details page, including comments per post
•   RSS feed of last 10 posts
•   Ability to create a post, this should be protected by user authentication
•   Ability to create comments, this should not be protected by authentication
•   A blog post contains: title, contents, author and post date

A wiki page will be posted in the next couple of days on the Clepy site to answer some of the questions we’ve received.  You can learn more about us and subscribe to the mailing list at http://clepy.org.

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Good night.

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• We had three excellent keynotes, but the one that stood out was Mark Shuttleworth’s discussion of Cadence, Quality, and Design, in which he discussed the discipline of development on a timed schedule, and how it has helped the Ubuntu teams.
• David Beazley’s Understanding the Python GIL was as crunchy as I’d hoped. He did a series of tests on how the Global Interpreter Lock acts when dealing with threads on a single or and then on multicore machines. It was outstanding.
• Catherine Devlin gave a talk about how to build command-line interpreters using cmd and cmd2, then as a bonus explained how SQLPython can make your life better. A commandline shell that allows you to interface with Oracle, MySQL, or PostGRes as if you were in a Unix shell?  Yes please!¹
• C. Titus Brown’s discussion of implementing different continuous integration packages was as entertaining as could be, and brought home several good points (mostly, just use Hudson. Really.).
• Finally, Ned Batchelder demystified several layers of confusion during his talk on Tests and Testability.  I’m looking forward to playing around with his ideas at work this week.

I’m beat. There’s one more day of talks, then I’m on my way back home. Not sure when I’ll be able to get my Day Five post up, but I’ll try to do it before I fly out.

Thanks for reading!

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1. This talk completely blew me away, and I’m wondering if she accepts sacrifices or tribute.

1. Van Lindberg formally opened the convention.
2. Steve Holden¹ gave an overview of what’s new at the Python Software Foundation, and what’s coming down the pike. THere was a strong emphasis on diversity as a key goal for the next year. These was also discussion about the possible creation of an Associate membership in the PSF wheere people could donate money and become a member. Nothing definitive on the latter yet, but it is under consideration.
3. Finally, Guido van Rossum put the twitterstream of #pycon tweets on the screen behind him and took questions from the stream for about 40 minutes. Of special note was his comment on Django vs. Turbogears (“Django. Sorry, Turbogears guys.”), Django in general (“Django sucks. But they all suck.”) and vim vs. emacs. (“I use emacs. I also use vim. I’m not very good at either.”)  In all fairness, it was hard to delve deeply into any one topic, so discussion was light and all in good fun.

After a short coffee break the various tracks started up. While everyone seemed to be getting something out the talks they attended, my personal experience was that it was rather it and miss. The single outstanding talk was an exploration of the Python Dictionary, explaining how it allocates memory, resizes itself, and assigns addresses in RAM. It sounds dry but Brandon Craig Rhodes did an excellent job, and was easily the best speaker of the my day. A close second was Grig Gheorghiu‘s discussion of RESTful web services and how to construct them using restish.

The day finished off with a set of lightning talks, the highlights of which were Greg Wilson’s request for articles for his next book entitled Beautiful Software Architecture, Ned Batchelder’s report on recent changes to coverage.py, and David Huggins-Daines’s demonstration of PocketSphinx, a speech recognition engine which will transcribe .wav formatted audio to text.

By then end of the day, most of the folks I was hanging with were beat, so we split up and grabbed dinner. Some of us walked back to my hotel and hacked on code for two or three hours, which was fun. I haven’t been able to hack with a team since I left Mahalo, and I do miss it.

Tomorrow looks to be another full day. Check in late in the evening for a recap of Day 4.

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1. Chairman of the Python Software Foundation

1. The talk started 30 minutes late.
2. We spent the first hour configuring our computers, something we could have done before the talk if there had been any notes circulated.
3. Even once we got there, there were no notes. The speaker would add the commands he was running to a notes.txt file, then we would go download it from his computer via HTTP.
4. When asked how to configure Firefox profiles on Windows, the answer was “I don’t know.” The Windows folks banded together to solve the issue, but…I mean…come on. You’re presenting to a multi-OS room. It’s your responsibility to understand the material.
   

<snip…>

Rather than get all frothy and unkind, I will only say that an ounce of preparation goes a long way. I did learn a few things, but the talk was so much less informative than yesterday’s tutorial that I left feeling that I would have done better just reading the docs on my own.

Now, that being said, this is not a problem with PyCon, just this one tutorial. I still have very high hopes for PyCon in general. Tomorrow is the first day of the formal conference, and I look forward to seeing what it holds.

Stay tuned for Day Three.

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You’re not at DragonCon anymore, Mr. Miller.

The Regency is a very different place when not festooned with cosplaying geekazoids¹. That’s not to say there are no geeks, just that colorful superhero and anime costumes have switched to black shirts/hoodies and blue jeans. It’s not full the full-on stereotype, mind you: there are enough hipster-coders in the mix to break up the monotony.

At the time I write this, it’s 8:42 am and I’m waiting to filter in for the first tutorial I signed up for: Faster Python Through Optimization. This is after my first choice, Test Driven Web Development, was canceled due to the speaker’s business life stomping down on his lecturing life.

I’ve just been asked where the registration desk is again. Again, unlike DragonCon, there’s more than one convention in the hotel this weekend. People are confusing one with the other. It’s easy to tell the between the participants: khakis and colored oxford shirt? Manufacturing conference. Black Tee with laptop bag? PyCon.

So far, the wifi is…minimal. This is disappointing, but it’s still very early: I’m willing to bet they just haven’t gotten there yet.² The staff peoples are working hard this morning…I’m watching them lay powerstrips and set up cameras. It looks like there will be an archive of all the talks. This is great: I can use them for review later if my own notes are lacking.

Time to go. More later.

I must steal a line from my friend Kris Johnson to describe the Optimization talk. It was like a toasted wheat bagel: good for me, but very dry.

The speaker was well prepared: sample code was burned to CDs and a fifty-three page handout that contained all the information for the course. Any worries I had about not having complete notes are now gone.

(This is where the non-programmers can skip to the end. The rest of you, read on.)

The information was excellent. We started off looking at how to use cProfile and Guppy to benchmark and profile code. From there we wrote several tests for comparing operations on various data structures: finding the intersection of two lists vs. two sets, Slicing off pieces of a large list vs. using a deque. From there, looked at how to speed up various math functions with NumPy, using psyco for JIT optimization, then finally moved on to using the multiprocessing module to make the best use of multicore systems.  Finally, we looked at how to combine strategies to get the most bang for your buck.

While I was pleased with the content, the presentation was a little lackluster only for the reason that most programming presentations are challenged: the instructor mostly read from his notes. To be fair, he seemed a little nervous, and the fact that some of his examples failed because of configuration issues did not help the poor guy. I felt for him.  The interesting that happened was that people paired up when things went awry to solve the issues. I worked with a woman named Ada³ to figure out the problem with some of the timing functions in the code. The pair programming enhanced the talk, and I feel like I got more out of it.

(Welcome back, non-programmers.)

All in all, I’m pleased. I’ve already learned some new concepts and they are spawning new ideas that I’ll probably play with over the weekend. Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Testing Websites With Python and Selenium, which looks promising.

See you tomorrow for Day Two.

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1. This is a term of endearment. I count some of those cosplayers as friends.
2. This was, in fact, the case. The hardworking staff fired up the internet connection, and everyone logged on at once, flooding it. About 15 minutes into the tutorial, the internet returned, and several gasping programmers logged in to Twitter. Myself included.
3. This flipped my geek bit a little.

I’ll be at:

• PyCon: Feb 17-21 in Atlanta, GA
• Balticon 44: May 28-30 in Balimore, MD
• GenCon: Aug 6-8 in Indianapolis, IN
• Con on the Cob: Oct 14-17 in Hudson, OH. This one will be something special…Kris and I have a Clever Plan we’ll talk about in coming months.

If you’re going to be at any of these, drop me a line and let’s find some time to meet up.

Also, the latest episode of TRICKSTERS has been posted on The Secret Lair. Remember the girl on the doorstep from last week? Yeah. There’s more to her than meets the eye.

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This week’s missive from Kris Johnson calling us to arms was outstanding, and must be shared.

Did someone say “Gunpowder Plot”? That means no crossbows, no rocket launchers, no gravity guns, no crowbars and no alien derezzers. Guy Fawkes wouldn’t have any of it, gentlemen! But Guy blew it, and not in the way he intended. His little plot might have gone more to his liking if he’d added zero-point energy weapons and red-hot rebar to the mix. I, for one, refuse to limit myself to gunpowder in deference to a FAILURE, sirs! I will use every resource, be it of terrestrial origin or brought here by dimension-hopping freakshows, to blast your sorry faces to oblivion! Remember, remember, the fifth of November The Crossbow with Rebar so Hot I can think of no reason The Crossbow with Rebar Should ever be forgot. Shotgun, shotgun, I double-tap To separate your skull from cap. A rocket launched into your eye Across the screen your corpse does fly; my laser tripmine laid in wait To halt your dash and foul your gait. Holloa boys, holloa boys, WASD! Holloa boys, holloa boys, the winner, it’s me!

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“YOU Gotta Be Tough” was a popular T-shirt slogan worn by Clevelanders during the 1970s, a grim period marked by industrial decline, large-scale population flight and an urban environment so toxic the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire. These days it still helps to be at least a little tough; a fiercely blue-collar ethos endures. But instead of abandoning the city, local entrepreneurs and bohemian dreamers alike are sinking roots; opening a wave of funky boutiques, offbeat art galleries and sophisticated restaurants; and injecting fresh life into previously rusted-out spaces. It’s a vibrant spirit best exemplified by Cleveland’s new all-female roller derby league, whose wry name, the Burning River Roller Girls, and home, a former GM auto factory retooled into a 60,000-square-foot sports facility, say it all.”

read more: 36 Hours – Cleveland – NYTimes.com

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Buying grape jam is even easier. Run out to the store, deal with the crowds, find the brand of grape jam you want, wait in line, pay, walk out, drive home, and enjoy.

Cost-wise, it’s all about the same.  There’s no huge savings in doing it yourself.

So why bother to do it yourself? With making jam, or with anything else?

Satisfaction When done well, the homemade jam tastes so much better than the stuff from the store. Part of this is physical and real: using fresher ingredients in a small setting, you can achieve  better results. The other part is psychological: you took the time and did it yourself with your own two hands.  There are few better feelings than knowing you have learned a new useful skill.

Do you remember being surprised or even amazed at all the things your grandparents or your parents knew how to do? How one or more of them know some trick or some way to handle a situation, be it home repair or cooking?  Where do you think those skills came from?  They came from learning how to do it themselves.

Passionate Experimentation It is very convenient to be able to pick up whatever you want from the grocery whenever you want/need it. But the product is bland, it’s uniform, it’s designed to appeal to the most people it possibly can.  When you do it yourself, you can make adjustments for your own palate. Not satisfied with how Smucker’s jam tastes? You can work to improve upon it.  Maybe you want to try a flavor that you’ve never been able to find before, like a clove-spiced apple jelly. Once you know the basics, you can start to experiment and improvise. You can try new things, and the thrill of discovery is a wonderful feeling. Learn the simplest form, then write your own recipe.  Record it, pass it down.

When The Revolution Comes… This is a joke between my wife and me. In the back of our minds, we’ve always wanted to know that if our lives were to change radically we would have the skills to pick up and carry on. It’s something that also plays off of seeking simplicity and eating real food, as well: when we make things ourselves, we know what’s going into them, and we know we can repeat the process however many times we like.  Knowing how things actually work is useful, whether you’re speaking of machinery, or ingredients in a recipe.  There are skills we use in business, then there are, in my opinion, Real World skills. Skills that you need to survive. I recommend learning a few of the latter.

At the end of the day, do you have actual, useful skills?  If you were lost, who would you want with you?  The guy who spends his weekends hiking, or the one who understands how to use social media to build trust networks?

The Concern and the Challenge No generation in the history of the world has lived more in it’s mind the current one. We live our lives being spoon-fed stories via movies, television, the Internet. We play long and involved games sitting on our couches staring at illuminated screens. We flit, digesting information from RSS feeds to Twitter to NPR to Podcasts.  My great concern is that, in time,  we will live our lives in our minds — we will cease doing things in favor of watching and/or reading about things.

Creativity and passion are not something you can experience by observing, not something can get from an illuminated screen. Watching someone chop wood does not make it possible for you to swing an axe. The goal of doing it yourself is just that most simple of verbs: TO DO. Act. Create. Participate and engage in the world around you instead watching in fly by on someone else’s Twitterstream.

I challenge you to do something new this week. Cook a new meal, walk a new route, seek out a new experience. Find something beyond the words to occupy yourself. Embrace an experience. Do it yourself.

(Update: People have asked for more detail about the jam-making process itself. That’s coming in a mid-week article, complete with pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.)

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Links for this show:

• Pinax
• Origins 2009
• War, Season 5 of Heaven
• Fluxx and Family Fluxx
• Are You The Traitor?
• Necessary Evil
• The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia

Names dropped: Kris Johnson, Jim Van Verth, Mur Lafferty, Ken Newquist, David Moore, Erin Moore, Natalie Metzger, Andy Steigle, John Cmar, Laura Burns

Download the show here.

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We decided to make day three a shorter day, only travelling 434 miles so we could rest a bit. The late nights were really starting to take their toll.  My dear son brought a cold along with him, and since all good children should share, my mother-in-law and wife caught the plague late in the day.  The minivan sounded like a TB ward with all the coughing.

Still…we were able to hit the hotel by around 9pm, which was an improvement, and Elk City was fairly good to us.

Day 4

Day 4 was brutal, but we needed to get east of St. Louis. 661 miles on the road, total of 13 hours with stops, etc.  Got my father-in-law hooked on 7th Son during the drive, which was worthwhile. It eas a pretty subdued day, just pushing on to make it to the destination.

We finally rolled in around 10:30pm, and once the kids were winding down, we prepared to hit the sack. Look! Mouse turds on the sheets!  After 40 minutes of calling and waiting, we were able to get fresh sheets and fall asleep.  By then, it was after midnight.

Today, we get to Cleveland. It’s another long day (607 miles), but it will be nice to collapse at a house instead of a hotel.  And tomorrow…we do NOTHING.

Thanks to everyone who have been tweeting to me while I’ve been on the road. It’s made the trip much more enjoyable.

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