This nugget from Jacob Kaplan-Moss is a bit old, and from a Django-centric perspective, but captures what’s been tripping me up with Python web app frameworks and building RESTful APIs:

Conflating models and resources

In the REST world, the resource is key, and it’s really tempting to simply look at a Django model and make a direct link between resources and models — one model, one resource. This fails, though, as soon as you need to provide any sort of aggregated resource, and it really fails with highly denormalized models. Think about a Superhero model: a single GET /heros/superman/ought to return all his vital stats along with a list of related Power objects, a list of his related Friend objects, etc. So the data associated with a resource might actually come out of a bunch of models. Think select_related(), except arbitrary.

Victory! A satisfying win over the league leader avenging an earlier loss this fantasy season. That makes for four wins in a row. RG III closed the door on Monday Night Football, but if I’d have started Cam Newton, the deal would have been done Sunday night.

On my side, it was mostly pedestrian performances with RG III scoring 18, Arian Foster and Stevan Ridley for 13 apiece, and Tony Gonzalez (Go Bears!!) for 17. I will pat myself on the back though for grabbing Cecil Shorts off of the waiver wire and getting 17 points out of him.

I also lucked into my opponent’s QB, Drew Brees, having an uncharacteristically bad game, delivering 1.37 points. Brees is usually good for 20+. Hey, whatever it takes.

Now I’m locked into the first or second seed for our fantasy playoffs with one regular season game to go. Need a little help, but I already like how week 14 is working out.

[embed]https://twitter.com/DidTheWizWin/status/276151891841409024[/embed]

Somehow I lucked out and had a ticket for the second Washington Wizards victory of the season. Against reigning NBA champs, the Miami Heat, no less.

Have to say I was fairly subdued until the final minute, when I realized the Wiz could actually win. Otherwise, I was anticipating collapse, but the Heat never really turned on the defense.

I’m not rooting for Windows 8, but I hope it spurs Apple to do something interesting with the well nigh useless (for me) iPhone lockscreen. Brent Caswell takes a crack at a redesign:

What isn’t very straightforward is the lockscreen. I set out to make the lockscreen flexible and open to the apps on your device, without throwing everything that works really well out the window. But before I get to my ideas, how does the lockscreen work now?

Seems like a missed opportunity for both high utility and magnificent delight.

Via Daring Fireball

P.S. Without having to jailbreak the device.

Link parkin’: [embed]https://twitter.com/pypi/status/275454924970680320[/embed]

simplekml is a python package which enables you to generate KML with as little effort as possible.

Took a quick look at the docs and seems quite elegant, thorough, and useful.

On the drive in to work today I was listening to the local guy talk, faux sports talk, AM show. They opened a segment with a freestyle rap which I could immediately ID as Q-Tip but couldn’t place the track name.

DJ finally announced it as Excursions from The Low End Theory. Hit the parking garage, got outside of the building, and had it downloaded in 5 minutes through the modern miracle of LTE.

Life’s good, but why the hell have I been sleepin’ on The Low End Theory? Gotta’ get that on my Jesusphone 5 post haste.

TIL that Jacque Vaughn is the head coach of the Orlando Magic. I remember how I used to love college basketball and Vaughn’s Kansas Jayhawks team was one to watch every game.

Man I’m old.

The list of PyCon 2013 talks was announced:

As you may already know, this was an incredibly hard decision for the Program Commitee: we had over 450 submissions for only 114 slots on the program. Further, the quality of submissions was very high; the committee debated each and every talk very closely. I want to sincerely thank everyone who submitted a talk: the quality of PyCon comes from our speakers, and this year you all blew it out of the water.

Sounds like the potential for a great program. Unfortunately, I can’t be as excited as I was last year since I’m not as confident that I can get away. Still, I’m quite interested in the more hardcore groupings like “Big Data” (yeah I know buzzword compliant) and even more so in the tutorials lineup.

Following the Python PyPi Twitter stream reveals a number of toolkits that help you build RESTful APIs. These modules usually get you most of the way mapping models from an ORM into an API. However, where they’ve always fallen short for me is in easing the generation of search end points. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but I need more help in 1) handling incoming query args, 2) turning them into searches against the model(s), and 3) generating a RESTful response, especially the resource URLs.

LazyWeb, make it so!

Torque is a (relatively) recently announced toolkit built on top of CartoDB 2.0 for performant browser rendering of large geospatially oriented time series data:

Torque allows you to create beautiful visualizations with big temporal datasets by bundling HTML5 browser rendering technologies with a generic and efficient temporal data transfer format created using the CartoDB SQL API. Torque visualisations work on desktop and ipads, and work well on temporal datasets with hundreds of thousands or even millions of datapoints. In anticipation of the Strata Conference starting this week in London, we have prepared some examples to share. Simon Tokumine will be there, so ping us for a private demo there.

Previously, I had found CartoDB a bit daunting for a hosted self-installation, but looking at the requirements now it doesn’t seem that bad. Feels like one of those tools where if you absorb the pain and get in on the ground floor, one can build a distinct competitive advantage. Working on tablets and desktops is a nice tease.

Finally got a chance to put supervisord into action at work. It’s very handy for organizing, launching, and managing a bunch of server processes. I’m especially liking the interactive command shell provided by supervisorctl. Plus I think it’s easily launchable from a cron @reboot action which is great for this non-root user.

How have I not heard of Pydoop until now?! [embed]https://twitter.com/pypi/status/274179982736121856[/embed]

Welcome to Pydoop. Pydoop is a package that provides a Python API for Hadoop MapReduce and HDFS. Pydoop has several advantages 1 over Hadoop’s built-in solutions for Python programming, i.e., Hadoop Streaming and Jython: being a CPython package, it allows you to access all standard library and third party modules, some of which may not be available for other Python implementations – e.g., NumPy; in addition, Pydoop provides a Python HDFS API which, to the best of our knowledge, is not available in other solutions.

Rafe Colburn’s reference to Christy Wampole’s How to Live Without Irony finally pushed me over the edge and I had to read her opinion piece. A good screed but before one gets all self-congratulatory about not falling for hipsterism, please check out David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”.

Admittedly Wampole is probably quite aware of the essay, but I’m not sure how many in the target audience are. This was the most impactful of the essays I read from DFW’s collection “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and has stuck with me for a very long time. Pretty much convinced me of the corrosiveness of television beyond the silliness of much of the content. Mule Variations has a good look at the importance of “E Unibus Pluram”, but it’s not a bad way to “ease” into DFW, if there is such a thing.

Hipsters are one thing but good luck assailing irony within mass media.

374 days of uptime, a bit over one year, is tricky with any machine and limited sysadmin attention. Pattin’ myself on the back, and a thumbs up for Linode. Now I can get get around to doing a distribution upgrade.

P.S. That’s the machine that hosts this here very blog.

Victory!! A week ago, I said there wasn’t much sweeter than going into the Sunday night game, knowing you had a win in hand. Well that feeling is topped by going into Sunday period, fairly comfortable you’re going to win and clinch a playoff spot.

I didn’t really plan it this way, but I had two fantasy players in each of Thanksgiving Day’s three NFL games:

• Robert Griffin III lit up Dallas, and delivered 35 fantasy points.
• Miles Austin, thanks for nothing
• Arian Foster, got his usual 20+, 26 in fact, befitting the #1 overall pick
• Shayne Graham, got the benefit of overtime for 11 points out of the kicker position
• Stevan Ridley, picked up some garbage points in New England’s shellacking of the Jets, delivering 15.7 fantasy points
• I learned my lesson last week about the New England DEF and they rewarded me this week with 25 in the bank

Rolled into Sunday with 113 points on the board, and 2 players left. Going into Sunday night, Aaron Rodgers would have needed a historic fantasy performance without giving up much to Randall Cobb, who I was starting. Neither did particular well, which was fine by me.

That’s three wins in a row. And if my math’s correct, I’m back in the fantasy playoffs.

Wondering how hard it would be to build a good set of autodidact materials for learning probability and statistics similar to Think Stats and Baseball Hacks. The twist would be to use sports repositories ala Retrosheet, cleanly integrated into pandas for analysis (bonus points for iPython HTML notebook usage), and then have a follow up course on building data oriented, interactive web sites.

Might be a market for that.

Completely unscientific, coming from my mother-in-law’s basement in Palos Heights, Illinois, using speedtest.net:

• iPhone 5, AT&T LTE, 8.5 Mbps down, 0.9 up
• iPad 3gen, Verizon LTE, 24.2 Mbps down, 15.8 up
• iPhone 5, Comcast XFinity Wi-Fi, 0.5 Mbps down, 2.5 up

The XFinity pipe might be carrying the burden of IPTV on the cable box, but doesn’t seem like it’s living up to its billing. Upside is there’s no explicit bandwidth cap.

Verizon Wow!!

I’ve been a long time fan of Greg Linden, going back to the Findory launch. I don’t have a direct interest in his current projects other than they might open doors to computing for folks who hadn’t considered the potential:

Code Maven lets teens learn a little about how to program, starting with basic concepts such as loops then rapidly getting into fractals, animation, physics, and games. In every lesson, all the code is there — in some cases, a complete physics engine with gravity, frame rate, friction, and other code you can modify — and it is all live Javascript, so the impact of any change is immediate. It’s a fun way to explore what programming can do.

Code Maven is a curious blend of a game and a tutorial. Like a tutorial, it’s step-by-step, and there’s not-too-big, not-too-small challenges at each step. Like a game, it’s fun, addictive, and experimentation can yield exciting (and often very cool) results. I hope you and your friends like it. Please try Code Maven, tell your friends about it, and, if you have suggestions or feedback, please e-mail me at maven@crunchzilla.com

A diversity of hackers makes the world a better place. And who knows? Maybe My Little Guy (TM) will pick up Code Monster or Code Maven someday.

Good luck Greg!

Implementing Machine Learning. Now there’s a title I’d pay for, especially if it focused on modern graphical models. Programming Collective Intelligence goes part of the way on some of the basic approaches, but filling in the details on the stuff coming out of academic papers would be really helpful.

I wrote a pretty darn good “giving thanks” post last year. It’s still mostly in effect, so go read it again.

I’ll add two things for this year.

1. Health and Auto Insurance. You don’t need ’em til’ you need ’em, but I needed both this year. And I’ve been paying into Cadillac plans, which have now paid me back.

2. Our Veterans and Servicemembers. Working for a defense contractor you get an appreciation, but I’ve noticed a national uptick in public recognition as our wars wind down. I also got the rest of the story on why my did didn’t make it to the hospital for my birth. Drafted into the Army, he was escorting a casualty home.

Thanks to one and all who have, or do, help defend our country.

Link parkin’ since I’m doing some experimentation with Solr at work: [embed]https://twitter.com/pypi/status/263378764417871874[/embed]

mysolr was born to be a fast and easy-to-use client for Apache Solr’s API and because existing Python clients didn’t fulfill these conditions.

The Washington Wizards are still truly awful:

Because going to NBA.com or ESPN.com is too exhausting, here is your one-stop-shop for all your Washington Wizards needs. Not like you’ll need to check whether or not they won or lost any given basketball game they play, but this Twitter account is succinct, efficient, and will probably enjoy very little creativity going forward. Its lone tweet so far: [embed]https://twitter.com/DidTheWizWin/status/270914577804451840[/embed]

I attended last night’s game against the Indiana Pacers. As the contest started, I noted that no one on the starting five could actually shoot. Washington promptly went down by 17 points. Despite a spirited rally, the Wiz of course fell short, unable to stop David West, and unable to get a good offensive possession down the stretch.

The scary thought is that the team probably won’t be all that much better when John Wall and Nene come back. Lottery here we come!

Victory!! In fantasy football there’s not much sweeter than going into the Sunday night game (much less Monday night) knowing you already have a victory in hand. That’s the situation I found myself in and I did it basically with a QB, a WR, and a kicker.

• QB: Robert Griffin III, 39.7 points
• WR: Randall Cobb, 19.8 points
• K: Shayne Graham, 14 points

No one else scored in double figures, including fantasy #1 Arian Foster, and his team scored 43 points! Not to mention some unfortunate early morning lineup changes. First, playing Denarius Moore instead of Eric Decker or Miles Austin. The latter two only score 8 points but that was 8more than Moore. Second, pulling the Patriots DST for the Rams. -20 on the GM.

New rule. Never play Raiders.

Have to admit I was feeling a little nervous in the fourth quarter of the 4 PM matchups. I was only ahead by about 4 points, and my opponent still had Willis McGahee in his lineup in a close game. Little did I know that McGahee was out with a knee injury or that Stevan Ridley would seal the deal with a cheap garbage time touchdown.

[embed]https://twitter.com/joe_hellerstein/status/268591026803965952[/embed]

[embed]https://twitter.com/joe_hellerstein/status/268593845283983361[/embed]

As a longtime Sade fan, all I can say is nicely played Professor Hellerstein (Go Bears!!), nicely played.

Victory!! Back in the win column. My team did it despite a craptaculous performance from my wide receivers. Eric Decker and Miles Austin combined for a whopping 6.7 points.

Thankfully, Tony Gonzalez (Go Bears!!) was in my starting lineup for approximately 30 fantasy points. Running backs Arian Foster and Stevan Ridley showed up as well. Basically half of my team carried the load.

Frankly though, it’s pretty sad when you’re sweating it out on Monday night, hoping the kicker does just enough to keep the spread. Especially since my opponent had the Pittsburgh defense against Kansas City, a situation ripe for defensive scores.

A comfortable 17 point win all told and the league’s second position firmly in hand with four games to go.

Link parkin’: Git & GitHub Foundations • Conflict Resolution Editor [embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=plcp&v=xfh13LcgqIU[/embed]

This is one aspect of git that I don’t have a good handle on. Hoping this YouTube tutorial from GitHub can clarify things. Also looks like there a few other YouTube tutorials on the topic.

Despite the unveiling of the 13-inch Retina MacBook, I’m still interested in extending the life of my good ’ole white MacBook. Partially just because I’d like to see how far I can push it, partially because I’m not really home hacking enough to justify the purchase, and mostly cause I’m currently in a thrifty phase. An article from ArsTechnica captures where I’m at:

Given that everything else is already maxed out, we wanted to upgrade to an SSD in order to squeeze a bit more life out of this laptop. If you have an older computer that already has the maximum RAM but still uses a hard drive, and you’re not in the market for a new computer anytime soon, you can give it a boost with an SSD upgrade.

Prices have come down significantly since the article posted last year. You can get 512 Gb of SSD storage for 400 bucks. On top of that you can replace the optical drive with a 1 Tb HDD for a total of $150. So for less than a Mac Mini, or 25% of the dream MacBook, I could probably get at least another year to year and a half out of my MacBook. Nice!

Too bad you can’t processor upgrade these things.

When I was in the AT & T store ordering my new phone, I saw an actual Jambox (affiliate link warning) for real. Looked much smaller than I thought, but I wondered if it was any good.

Marco Arment has an answer:

The original Jambox, while it’s a delightful product otherwise, has two major flaws for this use. It vibrates so much with bassy songs at high volumes that it can easily vibrate itself off the edge of whatever it’s sitting on. (Fortunately, it’s also very durable.) And while it’s impressively loud for its size, it can’t get loud enough for spoken podcasts to be heard consistently clearly in a noisy shower. …

I can also recommend the original Jambox, but with hesitation: it’s only the better choice if the price difference or portability are most important to you.

For my particular use cases, that’s actually a pretty good endorsement.

I’m old enough to remember when Plan 9 was new, shiny, and really interesting. Rob Pike, one of Plan 9’s creators, takes advantage of his profile at The Setup to lob a few hand grenades in the direction of “cloud computing”:

A bunch of Macs at home, Macs and Linux at work, plus of course the Google compute clusters. When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn’t connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn’t the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we’re still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.

I most enjoyed how this kicked the anthill over at Hacker News.

Jeff Barr writes regarding some new additions to SQS:

We announced the Simple Queue Service (SQS) eight years ago, give or take a day. Although this was our first infrastructure web service, we launched it with little fanfare and gave no hint that this was just the first of many such services on the drawing board. I’m sure that some people looked at it and said “Huh, that’s odd. Why is my online retailer trying to sell me a message queuing service?” Given that we are, as Jeff Bezos has said, “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time,” we didn’t see the need to say any more.

Eight years?! Why it seems just like yesterday that I was being somewhat prescient and errr, overly effusive about Amazon’s first bit of Infrastructure as a Service.

Link parkin’: RethinkDB

RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

Could this be the document oriented DB that MongoDB could (should?) have been?

After my great experience with streaming audio in Major League Baseball’s AtBat 2012, I started venturing out to see what the other pro sports made available. The National Hockey League has nuked itself with it’s lockout, but that still leaves the National Football League and National Basketball Association.

On both fronts the news has turned out well. The NFL charged me $24.99 for a full season of access to streaming audio for every game through their NFL 2012 iPad app. Probably a tad overpriced, but NFL Audio Pass is still worth it to me. The crappy thing is that the iPhone version of the app can’t do streaming audio. WTF NFL?! MLB has this down cold, so there can’t really be any technical challenges.

The NBA experience started out poorly, but so for looks promising. If you go to their site, the most obvious product is NBA Audio League Pass. This is Flash based streaming audio, which is free, but basically only works on desktops and Android devices. Not helpful to me.

However, the NBA Game Time 2012 iOS App has an in-app purchase of streaming audio for $9.99. The NBA site doesn’t exactly do a great job of publicizing this, but if it works well it’s a pretty good product. Essentially the same price as AtBat 2012 with just a smidge less polish on the app. I’ve got it running on my Jesusphone 5 streaming the Lakers at the moment.

Sigh. So now it turns out that the NBA audio only works on phones, contra the NFL. What gives guys? It’s the same damn OS and streaming audio is pretty mature.

Link parkin’: curlish

curl with flames on top

Ever had to speak to an OAuth 2.0 protected resource for debugging purposes? curl is a nice tool, but it totally lacks helpers for dealing with oauth.

curlish comes for the rescue. It is able to remember access tokens for you and inject it into requests. Facebook comes preconfigured so you can start using it right away.

Today I Learned about The Movie Database:

[embed]https://twitter.com/pypi/statuses/266869622580588544[/embed]

Looks like they have an extensive API.

Broke out Boogie Down Production’s Criminal Minded on the Jesusphone 5 today. Forgot how enjoyable the track Elementary was:

DJ Scott LaRock and I: KRS-One
Our mother’s first son and no, we’ll never run
From complex situations like you T-O-Y-S’s
Always talkin junk, yet in jail, you’re rockin dresses
I have arrived for the purpose of joy
Unlike any ordinary Bronx b-boy
I will volunteer my services and launch an attack
On you fake educators with your yakety-yak

Great beat too.

Yet again, the agony of Defeat.

This one stings because a I had great projection of 120+ points for my lineup versus my opponent looking at 83.

Key factors:

• RGII didn’t get in the end zone.
• I finally got McFaddened. Run-DMC gave me two points before bowing out in the first half with an injury.
• Arian Foster had a workman like 17+ points. His counterpart on the opposition, Adrian Peterson went for 32.
• No one else on my roster got in the end zone.

The only bright spot was Eric Decker who way overperformed with 25 points.

Just one of those weeks. Unfortunately, now I feel like my team is listing at 5 and 4 instead of cruising at 6 and 3. Still holding second place in the league though.

[embed]https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/257725572275376128[/embed]

What he said. And JavaScript datetime strings too. Taking cross-browser incompatibility Beyond The Browser.

[embed]https://twitter.com/pypi/status/265710020476428289[/embed]

I’m intrigued because I still have a soft spot for the Sphinx search engine, but the 0.2 release of sphinxit is not for me. Hard to kick the tires without documentation. But I’m rooting for the dev. Looks like an SQLAlchemy for Sphinx queries.

A while ago I finished Nate Silver’s new book (Amazon Affiliate link warning) currently enjoying a bit of attention at the end of this year’s political season. I enjoyed it, although I got a little too much poker, but haven’t had the time or urgency to put together a respectable write up. Thankfully, the estimable Stephen Few has done my work for me. I won’t steal his closing graf which is the summary I wish I would have written. Go read all of his post. But here’s a teaser:

I found a kindred spirit when I recently read Nate Silver’s new book The Signal and the Noise (Penguin Press, 2012). I want to give you a sense of the book and it’s powerful message by sharing a few excerpts from the introduction.

After a teardown looks like I shouldn’t be all that irritated about my limited window of smug superiority:

It should come as no surprise that Apple’s fourth-generation iPad, officially released today, is barely discernible from the third-generation iPad released earlier this year. Even the teardown experts at iFixit had a hard time telling the two devices apart after cracking open their aluminum and glass shells. The real takeaway is that third-generation iPad owners shouldn’t feel like they are stuck with yesterday’s tech.