current

Hood River to Toppenish

2011-08-14T00:00:00Z

Join me at Civic Hack Day Baltimore

2011-02-07T00:00:00Z

Now that the Socrata-powered OpenBaltimore is officially launched, I’m excited to be joining the gang from Tropo on Saturday, February 12 for Civic Hack Day at the Beehive. It should be a great opportunity for everybody to start getting their hands dirty with Baltimore’s new data site and build some awesome apps using the SODA API. I’m looking forward to interacting with the Baltimore open data community to see what we can create together.

So, if you’re in the Baltimore area and you’re interested in open data, come hack with us!

Cross-posted from the Socrata Dev Blog

One Vim Server to Rule Them All

2011-02-02T00:00:00Z

Or to rule your Mac OS X spaces, at least.

I’ve always hated the “vim cruft” that tends to accumulate on one’s machine. I try to keep my Linux virtual desktops or my Mac OS X Spaces partitioned off by topic or activity, but that tends to break down after a few days of hacking.

Finally inspried by nicoe’s One vim server per desktop post, I ported his solution from Linux to OSX and ended up with the following script:

It relies on Tom Feist’s little “spacefinder” utility, which basically dumps out the number of the current space that you’re on. I wrote up a Homebrew recipe, in case that’s how you roll. If you save it as a shell script somewhere in your path, it’ll automatically spawn a new MacVim server instance the first time you vim in a given space, and then force all subsequent opens to that same MacVim server. Neat stuff.

Forwarding HTTP via SSH tunnels for local development

2011-01-29T00:00:00Z

I spent far too long trying to figure this out myself, so hopefully this will help somebody else.

There are a ton of awesome platforms out there, such as Tropo’s IVR and SMS technology, that interact via your code via a service or script that provide. Developing against them, however, is a pain in the ass since you need your script or API to be externally accessible on the web, and you can’t always hang a port to your development machine out on the public Internet.

Some services such as Tunnlr will (for a fee) help you set up a web-accessible tunnel back to your development machine. However, if you have a colo or VPS available, you can easily set that up yourself for free using the following SSH command:

ssh -gnNt -R ":$REMOTE_PORT:0.0.0.0:$LOCAL_PORT" $YOUR_VPS

-g Allows remote hosts to connect to the port you create
-n Redirect stdin to /dev/null 
-N Just set up the tunnel, don't launch a shell
-t Force pseudo-tty
-R Set up a port on the remote machine that tunnels back to a local port

$REMOTE_PORT The port number you'll connect to remotely
$LOCAL_PORT Your local HTTP port to Apache, Thin, Rack, whatever

Make sure you poke a hole in your firewall remotely for $REMOTE_PORT. Another key discovery for me was to add the following to my /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

# For remote SSH tunnels
GatewayPorts yes

That tells SSHD to allow remote hosts to connect to your -R forwarded ports. Enjoy!

Photo from jhf’s CC-licensed Flickr stream

And your little dog too...

2010-12-21T00:00:00Z

As is traditional every couple of years, I’ve grown sick of my old blog template and created a new one. Except this time, I’ve gone out on a limb and dumped WordPress in favor of it’s relatively unknown distant non-blood-related cousin, toto. No more cruft, just pure hacker-friendly blogging.

Photo from Ron, Ron, Ron’s CC-licensed photostream.

Here, let me hold that for you...

2010-05-11T00:00:00Z

Just a few shots from a wedding I attended this weekend.

Instapaper + Amazon Kindle = A Perfect Combo

2010-02-25T00:00:00Z

This post should only be interesting to you if you’re one of those people who reads things on the Internet.

Instapaper is one of those “neat” web services that I signed up for once-upon-a-time and quickly discovered I didn’t really have a good use for. “Yay, I can save things from the web to read later!” I thought, and then quickly realized thats what bookmarks and todo lists were for.

Then this Christmas my awesome girlfriend surprised me with an Amazon Kindle. I love it. It’s lightweight, gets incredible battery life, and is as easy to read as a paperback book, plus I love being able to buy books on the go. But I still found myself stuck in front of my computer too much, catching up on my backlog of blog posts, news stories, and other articles that are too much commitment to finish reading within a feedreader.

This continued until I found out about Instapaper’s updated support for the Kindle. It’s so simple it’s almost magical. I tag a couple of blog posts and news articles using Instapaper’s bookmarklet, and if I don’t get around to reading them on their site or with the iPhone app, they’re automatically emailed to my Kindle once per week. The format of the converted articles works great with the Kindle, and is complete with images, section headings, and links back to the original articles.

Of course Amazon does charge for the data transfer of the converted document, but it’s quite inexpensive. My last Instapaper update, which weighed in at probably 15 articles and about 500kb, only cost me $0.15.

Getting backspace to work with the Snow Leopard Terminal and remote Linux boxes

2010-02-22T00:00:00Z

This is mostly just a note for myself, since I always seem to forget it when I set up a new OSX machine.

When SSH'ed into remote machines, usually Linux boxes running Debian, I’ve found that my backspace key doesn’t work properly in OSX Terminal. There’s a fix you can do in termcap that’s probably more robust, but I’ve found that setting your terminal type to rxvt does the trick nicely:

Epic powder skiing in... Pittsburgh?!

2010-02-22T00:00:00Z

Forwarded to me by another ex-burgher:

Epic. I love the “first descent” of Mt. Washington. Makes me wish just a little that I was still in Pittsburgh.

Update: I’m totally addicted to the Miike Snow song they used as a soundtrack. Buy it, its worth the $.99.

chrismetcalf.net... On your iPhone

2009-01-05T00:00:00Z

Today I discovered and set up MobilePress, a great WordPress plugin that allows you to set custom themes for mobile browsers. So now iPhone users (and yes, BlackBerry users too) get an experience optimized for their smaller form factor.