I consider myself pretty up to speed on web development.

I’ve spent the last two days trying to find a hosting solution for the data structures eBook…. I looked at too many of the following:

• Google App Engine — I’m a long time GAE user, but the setup I have uses sphinx to generate content on the fly which it wants to store in pickle files on the local file system.  This doesn’t work with a GAE and some other systems that treat the file system as read only and expect any writing you do to go to a database.
• heroku — seems very promising, but I’m not sure how to configure web2py so it doesn’t need any local file system write access.  The lack of ssh access is a bit disconcerting.
• dotcloud — seems promising but the app kept hanging for no discernible reason.  I fought with it for the better part of the afternoon before deciding to move on.
• fluxflex — easy to get web2py installed, (1 minute)  but a real pain to try to work with a real app.  I’m not going to use the web interface for all my editing.  I want to git push and/or git pull to deploy and update the app.  It doesn’t seem possible to get both ease of installation and robust configuration management.
• pythonanywhere - non-starter
• webfaction — Its not free, but at least it has a command line I can work with and I’ve got the whole thing running.  The only confusing thing about webfaction is that they don’t list web2py as a supported framework, but when you type it in under other it magically works for  you….  The other annoying thing that I just discovered is that the 256MB limit is way too low for the default configuration.  I just now got a helpful email saying a support ticket had been opened for me because I was using too much memory.  This was like 15 minutes after I finally got my app running and I’d made about 5 page requests.

preppeller:

Wooohooo!! Just a quick tumble to say that Alfred has been chosen as a winner of the Macworld 27th Annual Editors’ Choice Awards.

This is an absolute honour and a lovely feeling after putting so much of my life and soul behind Alfred since his birth until now. Here is to his future! :D

Cheers,
Andrew 

I can see the campus from my house, its about a 20 minute walk, all downhill for the first half of the trek, then slightly uphill the rest of the way to the Olin building.  I’ve always thought that biking to work would be the way to go, but I hate getting home all sweaty and gross.  The problem is the uphill trek.  From the River to My House is about a 300 foot climb over the course of just under a mile, a 6% grade for those who care to know.  But trust me, its steep.  It takes a lot of work to get up to my house, even on my road bike.
But, awhile back I was reading about some of the new electric assist bikes, and I thought hey, I haven’t bought a new bike in a long time.  So, I started doing a bit more research and decided that one of the Trek Ride+ bikes would be great.  I ended up with the Trek FX+.  Sadly, my local bike shop can’t sell the Ride+ bikes, so I had to go to La Crosse to find this one.  The good news is that this is a good time of the year to get a new bike!   30% off was the sale today.

I took it for a ride around LaCross and up the only little hill I could find,  the Cass Ave Bridge, not much of a hill, but I knew I was on to something when I felt like I was riding on the flats with the wind at my back, when I was actually going up a little hill.  After riding it around downtown a little longer I went back to the shop, smitten.  The only decision was which panniers to get so I can haul groceries and my stuff to school.
Jane hasn’t ridden it yet, but I have the feeling I know what she’ll want for Mothers day.  This would be the perfect option for our cycling marriage.  I could ride my road bike and she could ride the electric assist.  I think I see some longer bike rides together in our future :-)
The other great thing is that no gas is required.  Its all battery operated, and as I coast down the hill the battery is recharged.  I’lll be able to easily cruise my way to school, and then on the way home I can engage the electric drive at the bottom of the hill, and get the assistance I need to climb up to my house.  I won’t arrive home sweaty, and I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that I got a few extra minutes of exercise, and didn’t use any gas!  The only downside is that I’ll be only inches away from the Whippy Dip as I ride home, but as long as I can get by there I’ll be fine.

I love it when a good plan comes together.  Last summer we decided to finally take the plunge and build a pizza oven at the lake.  After looking at the options to site the oven, and thinking about a fireplace/oven combination, we finally decided to combine the pizza oven project with our desire to replace the aging and increasingly ugly outdoor bar area.
In late June I contacted a few different stone masons to start to get an idea of cost and availability.  I was immediately impressed with David Marek www.layersofstone.com and his ideas on the project.  I checked some references and decided that my initial impression was correct, that David would be a good guy to work with.  Here’s his original sketch of our project.



David was able to start tearing out the old bar, and working on the replacement the last week of July.  He just finished the project last week, in time for us to enjoy some Pizza with our friends this last weekend.  The result was beyond my expectations.  Here’s a photo of the final outcome that you can compare with the plan:















For more shots of the project you can check out my Flickr Photo Set
Last saturday was the inaugural pizza baking.  It took about two hours to get the oven fully up to temperature, but the wait was well worth it.  We used this crust recipe and pre-baked the crusts on both sides for just a few seconds.  The crusts came out very light and crunchy.  I’m looking forward to trying out lots of different crust recipes, but this was definitely a winner.

Its fun to see my sabbatical project getting loose the wild.  It is always a bit scary to work on something creative and new and then let other people play with it and respond to it.  Such is the case with the new eBook I worked on during my sabbatical.  Unlike other eBooks that you may be aware of,  this book — in the words of Emeril — “kicks it up a notch”.  Using some cool open source javascript code that I’ve had to modify and bend a bit for my own use this book allows the reader to try their hand at Python right in the book.  Examples are fully runnable in two different ways.  Each section has an accompanying video.  My co-author, David Ranum and I are using this book in class this Fall and its fun to see how the students interact with the book.  We’ve had none of the usual Fall frustration at getting Python installed on students machines.  You can have a look at the book here.  Note, you’ll need a good modern browser, and a gmail account.  We’ve had the best success with Chrome and Safari.  Firefox 6 works but seems  a little flakey at times.

Yesterday Phil Wagner posted a nice little writeup about our project on his BrokenAirplane blog.

As I told Phil, this book is really a triumph of open source.  Here are the open source components we’ve used and modified for this project:

• The text in the book is based on the original How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Jeff Elkner, et. al.  You can find the non-interactive version here
• The Python Interpreter is By Scott Graham and you can find out information about it at Skulpt.org.  This was a really key piece and although I’ve spent a ton of time creating a turtle graphics module for it, the book wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without it.  In the book the pieces we refer to as activecode  all make use of sculpt, along with the really nice javascript editor Codemirror.
• What we call codelens in the book is based on work by Philip Guo.  I really like this part because students can step through the code a line at a time both forward and backward.
• Finally, the glue that holds the whole thing together is the excellent Sphinx publishing system.  This really turned out to be the key as Sphinx lets you create new directives to use in writing.   I was able to add directives to sphinx to make it really easy to include the interactive features without getting in the way of the writing.

I really think this Interactive Edition has huge possibilities for the future, I can see incorporating many other interesting kinds of visualizations, and video collections.  My future todo list is already very large, and I’m anxious to hear ideas from others as they use the book.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide Sixth Edition pdf download ebook - davidflanagan.com

I think I said that the plan for today was to head to the Palm Springs tram, and do a little hiking at the top of the tram then enjoy a nice lunch in downtown Palm Springs.  But two minutes before we walked out of the house we changed our minds and decided to go to Joshua Tree National Park.  Since we both have boys named Joshua, and they are staying together while we are out here in California, it made sense for us to check out this national park.  We are glad we did.

The south entrance to Joshua Tree is only about 25 miles away from Indio, so its a short drive to get to the park.  But, once you are there you find out how huge the park is.  We drove another 23 miles through desert scrub before we got to some of the really interesting parts.  The Joshua Tree National Park is a mixture of climates, it is part Colorado Desert, and part Mojave Desert, microclimates abound.

Our first big stop was at the Cholla cactus garden, its weird how these pictures almost look like they are underwater photos of coral!

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In the national park there are these small mountain ranges that pop up out of nowhere that look like someone just drove in a huge dump truck and left a pile of rubble behind.  In fact these are all granite, and formed from volcanic activity.

Because of all the different climates that are part of the park, the whole southern half of the park doesn’t even have any Joshua Trees!  You have to wait until you get to a little higher elevation which is in the north and west part of the park.  Here’s Jim and Karen standing under a very picturesque Joshua Tree.

The Joshua Tree gets its name from the mormon’s who saw it and thought that it reminded them of the prophet Joshua stretching his arms heavenward.  In fact the “tree” is part of the Yucca family.  It has extremely sharp  points on the end of the leaves which the loggerhead shrike (a bird) uses to kill its prey!

Our last stop in the park was a great little hike in hidden canyon.  Here you can get a sense of how these little mountains were created out of blocks of granite.  Its amazing to see the Joshua Trees along with the scrub oak, and Juniper trees just growing out of the rocks.

On the way home, we drove through the wind farm in the San Gorgonio pass.  This is a great site for a wind farm as the wind blows here all the time.  There are more than 4000 turbines here that generate enough power for the entire Coachella valley!  There are turbines here of all ages, some very old and very small, some with two blades, for working in higher winds, and some very new and large turbines.  Poor Jim, we discovered too late that you can get tickets for a tour of the wind farm!

Wow,  We were just here and just on this very same boat ride.  I wrote about it here:  http://blog.bonelakesoftware.com/2011/02/hiking-in-iguazu-national-park.html.  Now today I find out that two American tourists have died doing that same excursion.

Apparently the boat hit some rocks and flipped over.  With the power of the falls and that river its amazing that only two people died.  http://www.smh.com.au/travel/tourists-killed-as-raft-flips-under-iguazu-falls-20110322-1c4f9.html?from=smh_sb Its worth following the link to the article as it has an awesome picture of a rescue working being lowered from a helicopter that gives you a sense of the scale of these falls.

Its Thursday morning, and the earthquake drill is over.  Not that the drill took up any of our valuable time, all we had to do was put out a white towel to indicate that we were all OK.  The block captain surveys the block and then checks in with anyone that is not flying the white flag.  Walking around the block its as if the entire community of Heritage Palms has surrendered.

Its been a fun week, here in california with our friends Jim and Karen.  We rented bikes for the week from Big Wheel bikes and we’ve been on several rides.  Yesterday was a favorite, we rode from our house here to La Quinta (http://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/30256922/)  Its nice and flat, and through plenty of busy roads, but the bike lanes here are nice and wide and all of the drivers are courteous  towards cyclists.  The greatest thing is that there are mountains everywhere you look.

Tuesday we drove over the mountains to Temecula.  We had a beautiful view looking back into the Coachella Valley.

But a little while later we encountered some snow.  Yes, we came out here to get away from the snow only to drive into some in the mountains.  Its not nearly as bad as it is back home where the Twin Cities is getting hit with about a foot, and Kaia is getting even more than that in Moorhead.  Here’s Jim, Karen, and Jane having a snowball fight.

Although we had a fun day in Temecula we didn’t really find any wine to fall in love with.  The best I tasted was the Viognier at Callaway.  We had some great pizza at the Temecula Pizza Company.  Half gorgonzola and pear, half turkey and cranberry with white sauce.  We also had a small pepperoni and sausage, just for the sake of scientific comparison.

Today the plan is to go up the tram in Palm Springs and do some hiking in the mountains, then grab some lunch in downtown Palm springs.  From there who knows what the day will bring, we only have another 36 hours before we head back to the snow and cold, so we’ve got to make the most of it.