I just got back from an awesome day of hanging out at The Hacktory. I spent about the last 10 hours hanging building things, and spinning up ideas with some great people. We got some ethernet run, unpacked and cataloged some gorgeous solder stations. We got some AC setup, and we planned what kind of trouble we’d be getting into at The Last HOPE.

And actually, I didn’t move to Philly for this. But why I moved to Philly is a much longer story, not nearly as fun, and does not include robots.

On my day off, I’m at IndyHall hacking around on a python module for doing some Taskpaper tasks from the command line. I call my creation TaskPyper! Yes, that’s bad of a name. I know already, lets move on.

Part of doing this was to spend some time learning to package and get code distributed along the way. I expected that repository stuff would be hard, and installer/packaging would be easy. Instead I found it was the other way around.

Oddly enough getting a project up on google code was dirt easy. I’ve tried to work with sourceforge before, and had some luck, but it always was a 3 or 4 step process. Google code it took just a minute to fill out a form to get taskpyper setup in their repo. The only confusion I had at all was that my google code repository password is different from my general google password. Which makes a lot of sense, but wasted 5 min. of my life to figure out.

Repository in hand, I started to wrap my code into a module. Finding the best practices for making a small module was a bit frustrating. Python’s own Module page is a decent read, but a bit obtuse, and it doesn’t help much in deciding how or what to package. There is a Distributing Python Modules page, but that didn’t really scratch my itch either. I ended up just mashing the best advice from both and putting that into the repository. I’m still a little unsure, and unsatisfied with the solution I put together from those pieces.

Anyway, it’s nice to have spent 3 hours, and generated a small tool that solves one problem. In this case, listing todays tasks on the command line. It’s also nice to have a small hobby code project to work on where I can concentrate being driven to craft code, rather than be driven to Get Things Done for a release.

The cute 20something bagger at Whole Foods and I got talking when I got groceries today. She ended up telling me about watching a woman let her 2-year-old pee in the bushes on the street outside Eastern Sate Penitentiary. After some laughs and the meat of the story, she mentioned off-hand

“She was (you know) even a white woman. Can you believe it?”

My smile died, my tongue turned to stone, my head to cotton. I stumbled over a ’see you later’ and walked out. That’s the racism that will haunt my generation. I hate it. But I’ll speak softly on it, because I’m sad and afraid that maybe I’m no better than anyone else.

I spent most of today working with the Apple debugging/profiling tool Instruments (built on top of DTrace) . It’s a great tool in many ways, and adds a good GUI to the dataset it collects under the hood in DTrace. We have a guy doing UI and testing on NR Mac, and recently he has been doing GUI bugs. So, naturally I suggest we record his tests as Instrument Templates, so we can replay them on new builds, and see if we have the same behavior.

Simple idea, and a decently cool one I think. Now, to make it hands-off I imagined taking screenshots every few steps, so a tester/developer can fire the program and walk away, and look at the results post-facto. If something like that already exists, I’d be dammed if I can find it, partially because the name Instruments is so generic that every search I did ended up swimming in extra data. I’m 2/3 of the way through adding ScreenCapture (via OpenGL example code) to our debug build of the App itself, so we can do this.

Has anyone else out there tried anything like this? Any success?

World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) rocked. I really should post more on it, but I dropped out of the sky and into Philly 12 hours late (12 noon Tuesday, instead of 12 midnight Wednesday) and right into busy. After getting home and recovering, I had to deal with some Hacktory access emergencies (that resolved themselves) get unpacked and pick up my cats (Damm, I missed them a lot) and get some rest. Today I went to work, and had to rush out the represent TheHacktory and MakePhilly at an event at 5, then off to a play at 7:30, and now back home. And don’t get me started on tomorrow! I look forward to working late Friday night, not interacting with anyone, and zoning out with some code.

WWDC Rocked, and was insanely busy. My 2.5 day vacation following the conference was awesome as could be, and is probably 2 of the top 10 days in my life. But it was mostly adventure, and only a bit of relaxation. And getting back to Philadelphia, and dropping right into the mix again is great too. But I need a break from interaction, things I should be doing, and a chance to geek out for a while with no care but the project right in front of me.

As it turns out, I’m one of the organizers for Ignite Philly. Ignite is a cool program centered on short 5 min talks by folks in different interesting/crazy/great industries or doing cool/breakthrough/amazing projects. The talks (with slides) are limited to exactly 5 minutes. Long enough to get people a good idea of what is up, but short enough that if you’re bored, you won’t be bored long. It’s been getting some attention from old media, and the new media.

I say ‘as it turns out’ since my part as an organizer has been lightweight to say the least. None of the folks I invited could turn up. None of the tasks I took on panned out, and to top it off I’m out at WWDC this week, so I can’t even go and watch the thing!

Despite my myriad of failings, the other planners made it happen, and happen right. If you’re in Philly, and want to hear about some awesome stuff that is happening in Philly, and around the East Coast then drop in. It’ll be an awesome time, and if you’re bored with someones talk, you know at most you have 4 more minutes to put up with ‘em. I’d be willing to wager you’re not going to be bored at all though.

EDIT (2008-06-11) Also now there is some Philebrity coverage. Wh00t!