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cpenner461on Celery - Distributed Task Queue

I've been using Python RQ (http://python-rq.org/) as a lightweight alternative to celery. It uses Redis as its backend so I guess that might not meet the "SQLite" qualification, but has been light weight enough for my application (e.g. no reqt for a message queue like rabbit). Really liking it so far.

cpenner461on Introduction to Guitar

A thought on the price of a guitar... People often cringe at the thought of spending several thousand dollars on a guitar (or I guess other instruments too), but for myself and probably most of this crowd, I spend that much every 3-5 years replacing computers as they age and become outdated. A nice guitar will last you a lifetime if you take care of it. You can even pass it onto your kids. I tell myself it's a wise investment!

cpenner461on Introduction to Guitar

Second the vote for Seagull. I'm pretty sure they're all made with solid tops, but are still affordable (last time I looked starting in the $300 range. I think you need a "good enough" guitar that will stay in tune properly and sound decent, but that doesn't need to be a $2000 guitar. There are a bunch of big brands that fit this, but I think the Seagulls are some of the ones that don't feel cheap while actually being affordable.

EDIT: for those not aware, a solid top is preferred to a plywood top for tonal quality. Most of the cheaper guitars use a plywood top. That said, a lot of plywood tops sound pretty good these days, but I tend to be a purist in these sorts of things so greatly prefer the solid tops. :)

cpenner461on Automatic: Your Smart Driving Assistant

1996 and later. http://www.epa.gov/obd/

cpenner461on Python at Netflix

Hey jedberg - any plans/timeline for open sourcing aminator? It sounds pretty cool...

cpenner461on Do you smoke test?

I wonder what this does to the mindset/culture of the team knowing that "the tester will catch it". Does this lead to lots of sloppy code that the tester now has to catch? Vs not having the tester and having a mindset that "I better make sure my stuff works". Obviously there's a balance that must be met, but this is something we've debated at my current job. Thoughts?

cpenner461on The Perl Renaissance

Ahh yes - point taken.

cpenner461on The Perl Renaissance

So technically not "do/while", but:

  while(some_condition):
    do_stuff

cpenner461on Five days with Pebble

Thanks for the overview of your experience. I'm eagerly waiting for mine to ship. How did the shipping process work? I.e. did it just show up on your doorstep one day or did the Pebble account site tell you when it shipped? I keep checking my account every few days but there's no sign other than I've done all I can do for now. Trying to figure out what the rest of my wait will be like. :-)

cpenner461on The Minimum Viable Kitchen

I thought stainless knives were actually too hard and therefore can't get as good of an edge to begin with? Could be remembering wrong though...

cpenner461on Fitbit, why can’t I have my data?

Just got a Jawbone UP, and I can login to my account with them and download a CSV with my data. It's just a daily summary though (i.e. not the full hour by hour or whatever interval it's recording at).

cpenner461on Data Mining 3.4 billion Web pages for $100 of EC2

Anyone have any experience/thoughts on using spot instances with Hadoop? Specifically, regular instances with Hadoop installed (not via Elastic Map Reduce). The cost savings are potentially huge, but I'd hate to lose my instances 80-90% of the way through a set of long running (12-48h) jobs. I guess if I had EBS backed instances I could relaunch and resume, but I'm not sure how well that'd work in practice.

cpenner461on Accumulo - A Secure BigTable Courtesy of NSA

I'm curious to see how things will play out between the likes of Accumulo and HBase.

cpenner461on Why I'm done with Scrum

Several comments about the notion that at some point you outgrow Scrum. For those who have reached this point, I'm curious what you've switched to? Or has it been more of simply relaxing some of the constraints/procedures? Asking because I've recently started to wonder if/when we'll need to modify our mostly-Scrum process.

cpenner461on What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers

Heh... Every time I watch this I try (unsuccessfully) to see how much the check is for. I guess part of the timelessness of it, you just substitute whatever the current value of "not a very good one" would work out to be.

cpenner461on Today is Goof Off at Work Day

Lots of comments on the effectiveness of a 20% policy - I'm curious what other folks experience is like with an internal hack day? It seems that if a company's culture isn't suitable for 20% time (for whatever reason), that an internal hack day might be a useful alternative (scratching developer itches but not "wasting" 20% of developer time on non-core projects). Any insight/recommendations from anyone who's done this?

cpenner461on A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it

The closest I think I've come to anything like this is a "soundproof" booth used for hearing tests. I remember that being eerily quiet (to listen for very quiet tones in headphones). Anyone know how this chamber compares to a hearing test booth? Sounds like it's probably quite a bit quieter...

cpenner461on The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

I think you're right for AI, and I'd gander Machine Learning for the other.

cpenner461on Show HN: My 1-year project, iPad IDE with GitHub and Heroku integration

At a glance (not having used either one yet) it looks like textastic has more connectivity options (sftp, WebDAV) but lacks deployment integration like this one has. IOW it seems like you could use worqshop for the complete life cycle of your app from dev to deployment.

cpenner461on Show HN: My 1-year project, iPad IDE with GitHub and Heroku integration

I've just recently started using Prompt (http://panic.com/prompt/support.html) for an ssh app. Using it is what has pushed me to start looking for something like this app to do light development (as in having ssh on my iPad/iPhone has opened the possibilities of getting "real" work done when needed).

cpenner461on Show HN: My 1-year project, iPad IDE with GitHub and Heroku integration

This looks awesome! I've been casually looking for/thinking about something like this so that I could take my iPad and Bluetooth keyboard when traveling but still be able to get some coding done. Heading to the app store now...

cpenner461on Twitter Ambrose: Real-time viz of Hadoop workflows

I see there are "future" plans for cascading and scalding, I wonder if there are plans for regular map reduce / oozie workflow visualization. It looks pretty neat, I'd love to use it for those runtimes...

cpenner461on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (February 2012)

Nashville, TN or Washington DC. Full time.

Doing really interesting work with unstructured "big data" in our core product Synthesys. Some of the technologies we're using:

* Lots of Java, some Python

* Hadoop

* HBase

* Cassandra

* AWS/EC2

We recently finished an investment round with Silver Lake and are looking to fill a variety of positions from core developers, to system administrators, to research positions. All the the technical details are at http://www.digitalreasoning.com/careers/.

Feel free to ping me (charlie dot penner at digitalreasoning.com) with any questions.

cpenner461on The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold

Agreed. I tried wearing them for a while, and while they were fine for running, I couldn't just wear them around casually and they always felt sooo good to take off. They're sized by length, so I had the right size but they were just too narrow for my foot.

cpenner461on The switch: Python to Node.js

> You don't actually need that though - there is a completely obvious way to write stuff without having to use that line.

Can you elaborate on that point? I thought that was the canonical way to do exactly that... http://docs.python.org/library/__main__.html. If there's an easier/less verbose method (pun not intended) I'd love to know about it.

cpenner461on One-time Secret: Share passwords etc with URIs that work only once

I'm often wanting something like this, and have often thought "I should build this" - congrats/thanks for actually building it!

cpenner461on Why I take sketch breaks instead of surfing the Internet

I've got a couple of guitars sitting close by, but I don't use them often enough during the work day. Have been thinking about doing something other than surfing for breaks, might have to start working some Knopfler bends myself!

cpenner461on LexisNexis open sources code for Hadoop alternative

HPCC is not a MapReduce framework.

Interesting, I quickly read through the article and didn't catch this until I read your comment. Definitely some slight of hand on their part.

(Although, now that I'm looking closer, their site does have a comparison to why they're better than MapReduce: http://hpccsystems.com/Why-HPCC/HPCC-vs-Hadoop/Components#be...)

cpenner461on Flash: 99% Bad

3) Good Free Toolchain: You don't really have to shell out 600 dollars for Flash. You can get your stuff done for free, using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK.

Interesting, I always assumed you had to buy the full Flash IDE to do anything. Granted, I never really looked into it at, but I wonder how widely known this is? Am I just ignorant? :)

cpenner461on [dead]

The initial report (from that link) was 5.8, they since updated it to 5.9.