About Anything

I’ve been buried in a new project that requires moving our company servers onto a more flexible platform. After a little investigating, we decided to use the Rackspace Cloud.

So far, so good. In a couple of weeks we’ve created and configured 6 servers, running Java, Tomcat, Apache and Postgres all connected to Boston and our existing London site using OpenVPN. It’s been remarkably easy. We’re currently running a beta test, with selected customers on this configuration.

Now that things have settled down a bit, I’ll add some details over the coming days describing what we did, and how we did it.

I was ready to trash Firefox after the last upgrade. Tabs kept turning into new windows in response to trivial mouse movements. It’s a bug — an extremely annoying one — clicking a tab once and then moving your mouse down causes a new window to open.

To fix, download this “Disable detach and tear off tab” addon:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12276

• Install it.
• Click tools >> Add-ons (or type Alt-T, Alt-A).
• On the bug489729, click “Options”.
• Check “Disable detach tab”.
• Click “OK”.

Enabling “Drop URL” will restore an older Firefox feature that lets you drag a Tab to a folder to create a link.

For father’s day, I was given my choice of netbooks. With very little though, I chose an Eee Pc. It’s small, not too expensive ($299 at Best Buy) and cute. I opted for the dark blue one.

I’m setting it up, with the goal of have as few apps as possible running locally. Ideally, I’d like to have only a browser and, until single signon actually works, a password vault. So here goes. It came with Windows XP home — I made sure I wasn’t going to get stuck with Vista. ideally, I would like to try Ubuntu, but I’m sharing it at times with my spouse and she’s more comfortable with windows. Perhaps when Chrome really is an OS, I’ll replace Windows.

The setup wizard was only a few clicks. It found the LAN fine, then asked be if I wanted to connect to my wireless. That was easy too.

Skype was preinstalled, so I signed in. It was the older client, which I like a lot better than the new one.

IE was preinstalled, with Bing as the default search engine. I took a small amount of pleasure in making my first search “Firefox”. It was odd that the results page pointed my to an older version of Firefox. A search for Firefox 3.5 landed my on the right page. Firefox offerred to import the IE bookmarks — whatever they were — but I skipped that step.

The first Firefox extension I installed was Xmarks . I’ve been using it on my development laptop for a few months. It promises to synchronize all bookmarks across PC’s, so here’s my first test. After the install, the Xmarks wizard appeared and asked if I had an account. Once logged in, it offered several synch options. I chose ‘keep the data on the server, discard data on this computer’ since I wanted my netbook to mirror the bookmarks on my laptop. I was also given the option to save passwords. I declined. Still too paranoid. One warning and a click later, followed by a 10 second I had all of my laptop bookmarks on my netbook. Nice!

After getting nagged a few times, by different sites I visited, I installed Flash.

Next was Seesmic Desktop — there’s just no web client that I like as well for using Twitter. Seesmic Desktop is built on Adobe Air, so I had to install that as well. Added my bit.ly api key so I could post short urls and track them. And, right after doing this, I discovered that Seesmic has a web app. So far, not able to configure my own bit.ly api key, so for now I’ll stick with the desktop app.

Next step was to reset the windows start menu and controll panel to classic mode. Much nicer than the XP versions.

The Eee comes with a trial version of Microsoft Office preinstalled. Opening the control panel, selecting add/remove programs, scrolling down to MS office and selecting “remove” almost took care of that. After removing office, I was left with a vestigial Power Point viewer that I had to remove as well.

So after about 45 minutes, I’ve got Firefox 3.5, with all of my bookmarks, my password vault and Seesmic desktop.

It’s time to actually use it. I’ve got a presentation scheduled in a few days and have a dozen slides drafted in Powerpoint on my laptop. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to complete tham and do the presentation on my Netbook. I’ll describe how that works in my next post.

I’m now able to find my way around Twine, still stumbling, but oriented enough that I’m moving my daily reads. You can find them at:
www.twine.com/user/astevens

Twine makes it easy to save a bookmark, image or video. It organize these, along with comments around interests.
But it’s biggest feature is that it makes it easy to share them with other people who share similar interests. Nova Spivak, the founder calls it an “interest network”. It’s at an early stage, but I still find it an intellectually stimulating refuge from the over-hyped and attention-draining worlds of Twitter and Facebook.

I’ve been distracted from my project to move my laptop apps onto web-based “cloud” services, but I’ve managed to progress on one front.

I discovered phpanywhere  a web based IDE for the PHP language. It includes a real-time syntax-aware editor and FTP access to files.

One of the things I’ve been most concerned about is how to replace PHP Eclipse. This has the possibility of doing that.

Strong developer opinions, including “PHP is Crap“, and discussion about PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL. [Julian Andres Klode on his blog]

Today, I’m trying to grok Twine

So, today’s reads include some old articles.

A high level overview of Twine, at the time it was announced, by an investor. [Peter Rip on EarlyStasgeVC October 19, 2007 ]

Twine first impressions summarized from various blog posts right after its public announcement. [Richard McMannus on Thinking Space October 21, 2007]

A summary of the  March 10th Union Square Ventures put on a conference called Hacking Education with the theme of re-imagining how education should look in a web 2.0 world.
From the summary: “If the transition from the current high touch, but high cost, learning environment to an efficient peer produced learning network is as abrupt and brutal as the transition we are witnessing in the music and newspaper industry, the social consequences are likely to be a lot more severe. [Brad Burnham on unionsquareventures.com]

A brief piece on the difficulty of explaining authority. [on ACRLog]

Another demonstration that false memories can be easily induced. Students who had been told that they loved asparagus as children come to believe it to be true and rated themselves as significantly more likely to order it in a restaurant compared to before the false memory was induced. [Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily reporting on an article in Experimental Psychology]

An exuberant person account of the space shuttle launch. [Julianne on Discover's Cosmic Variance]

It’s always fun to review the current state of Star-Trek technologies. Nine of them, from Phasers (good progress) to Deflector Shields (no progress) are reviewed here. [Charles Q. Choi on LiveScience]

How to become a digital nomad. The solution is to digitize everything.  [Mike Elgan in Computerworld]

Human population density does affect animal populations, in this case, fish. [Christopher Stallings in PLoS One]

A little comic relief. The Creation Wiki entry for the Flying Spaghetti Monster may not be the funniest page on the Internet, but it’s pretty funny. And I wasn’t even aware that there was a Creation Wiki. [Sean in Discover Magazine]

More comments on Elsevier’s six fake journals. [Barbara Fister on ACRLog]

A simple conclusion: Culling impedes the evolution of avian host resistance against influenza. [Eunha Shim in PLoS One]

I’m embarrassed to write that I completely dropped the ball on my shitake story. Questions sent by a couple of readers reminded me that I’d left the poor mushrooms warm and moist in their humidity tent.

Shitakes grwing from the side of the log

Happily the story turned out well, in fact very well.

Within a week, small brown nodules started to poke out of the mycelium covered block. From that point on, it was a bit like watching a time-laps movie. The buds grew rapidly and quickly took on the characteristic mushroom shape as the cap opened up,  looking first like a conical hat and then spreading out like an umbrella.

Most grew out of the sides of the block, pressing against the humidity tent (aka plastic bag). The instructions warned that this could distort their shapes, so I adjusted the bag — I mean tent — daily to provide room.

When the first couple reached what looked to me like the prime eating stage, I pulled out the kitchen shears, clipped them off where they emerged from the log, walked the five-feet to the cutting board, removed the stem, sliced them up an dropped them into a saucepan of EVOO and garlic. Five minutes later, I was enjoying the freshest and tastiest shitakes I’d ever had.

Sliced and cooked with EVOO and garlic

My earlier forays with home agricultural have always resulted in a sudden oversupply of whatever I was growing, often at the same time that the neighbors were trying to give us their excess. While it’s hard to have too many tomatoes, it’s easy to have too many zucchinis. Thankfully, my shitakes cooperated remarkably well. I was able to harvest a couple of plump  mushrooms every 2-3 days for about two weeks.

On the plate with a few olives and yellow tomato

Once the crop was done, I set the log in a dry spot and let it go dormant. Two months later, now an old hand at the process, I soaked the log and set up the humidity tent. Two weeks later, I had another crop, pretty much like the first one. We had a family gathering planned, so this time I let them grow and was able to harves about a dozen large mushrooms all at once. It was a little tricky, because the ones that had emerged the earliest were showing signs of shriveling. They were still delicious.

The log is now drying out. I’m anxious to try another crop in warmer weather, which is only a few weeks away. The first two crops may have suffered because our kitchen drops into the mid 50’s (F) at night. If what I read is correct, a warmer environment should result in faster growth and larger mushrooms.

Prior posts on this blog about growing shitakes are at: Growing Shitakes — RTFM, Growing Shitakes — The Humidity Tent and Growing Shitakes.