I’ve been working with Celery, Twisted and Cyclone recently on a side project I have going on, however the integration between Celery and Twisted is not ideal for asynchronous programming which prompted me to jot down some notes for what I’ve worked out.  Hopefully this will be useful to someone, also if anyone wants to offer a better way I’m all ears .

Celery has some built in methods to allow you to check the completeness of a remote job by calling the successful() method on a returned AsyncResult object.  For example you can do something like this…

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As many of you know that follow my blog I’m an avid user of Linux and Mac. I haven’t had a full-time Windows PC since around 2001, so when I need a BIOS update it can sometimes be painful since most of the tools for updating a PC’s BIOS are written for Windows. Recently I needed to update my Dell D830’s BIOS to A15 from A08 and had to do some serious Googling to figure it out so I thought I would jot it down for others.

Before we begin you’ll need two things installed on your Linux machine…

1. The first thing you’ll need is the dellBiosUpdate program. Depending on your distro you’ll need to Google around and find the appropriate package for your distro that contains this program and it’s associated libraries.
2. Second you’ll need either Wine installed or an old Windows PC lying around.  My wife has an old Dell Windows machine so I chose to use it rather than bloat my Linux distro with Wine.

That’s it for prerequisites, the rest is easy. (more…)

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Ouch! I let one of my domain names expire on Tuesday and BAM someone pounced on it. Not normally a big deal unless it’s worth something, this one was. It wasn’t that it was valuable monetarily, however it was the primary domain I used for my Wordpress MU site. I suddenly found myself with a half working website, not good. Took me an hour or so to piece everything back together so I thought I’d share it.

1. Stop lighttpd
2. I had to change my DNS records at my provider and update with a new domain to take over for the lost one .
3. Modified /var/www/wp-config.php variable DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE with the new domain
4. Modified /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and replaced the old $HTTP["host"] entry
5. Unfortunately WP sticks the domain name of your primary site EVERYWHERE in the database which was a real bummer.  After I had found it in more than a few places I decided I’d better dump the database, replace using vi and then import the database back.
6. mysqldump -u username -p wp_databasename > databasename.sql
7. I then used vi to do a global replace of the old domain with the new
8. I then dropped the old database and recreated it with the same name.
9. Importing the database is easy with mysql -u username -p wp_databasename < databasename.sql
10. Restart lighttpd

I think that’s it.  It seems to be working again and hopefully this will help someone out of a jam in the future.

Word of caution:  I’d do a backup of everything before I starting and I also can’t promise that this will work if some WP plugin is doing anything strange with the domain name.  Good Luck.

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Originally published in Open Source Business Resource January 2010

“…success comes entirely from people and the system within which they work. Results are not the point. Developing the people and the system so that together they are capable of achieving successful results is the point.”

Leading Lean Software Development

Recently, that quote stirred some controversy among my peers. The part about “results are not the point” was hard for some people to understand and come to grips with. Aren’t results always the point? Well, as with most things, “It depends”. The people and community that evolve around an open source software project will ultimately determine its success. Even if the core team launches the project with spectacular productivity and results, this phase of evolution will be fleeting if the necessary processes and community to make the project a long lasting success are not put into place.

This article presents some of the actions open source community leaders can take to ensure not only results, but a system that encourages productivity and longevity.

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I’ve been using the Bloog blogging software that runs on Google App Engine now for about a year at mindby.com.  One thing I’ve noticed is the performance of Google App Engine + Bloog is unpredictable.  This is apparently due to the loading and unloading of the application in the Google infrastructure + probably some inefficiencies in the Bloog platform as it relates to AppEngine.  Don’t get me wrong I love the simplicity and elegance of the Bloog platform and its REST based architecture, but at this point I’ve grown frustrated with performance and am moving on.

After a brief look at a few open source platforms and hosting providers I’ve settled on Slicehost and Wordpress MU.  I decided to host the Wordpress installation at Slicehost because I’m a bit of a techie and will undoubtedly find myself wanting to do more than allowed at Wordpress.com.  I also used MU instead on the regular Wordpress install because I wanted a little more flexibility in the future to host multiple blogs if necessary. (more…)

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