I find myself working in a Windows environment due to some temporary problems with my Linux installation. In terms of user experience Windows is not terrible. But more notable, things mostly just feel the same. My computing experience is not very dependent on the operating system… almost. Most of what …
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Silver Lining: More People!
OK… so I said before Silver Lining is for collaborators not users. And that’s still true… it’s not a polished experience where you can confidently ignore the innards of the tool. But it does stuff, and it works, and you can use it. So… I encourage some more …
Core Competencies, Silver Lining, Packaging
I’ve been leaning heavily on Ubuntu and Debian packages for Silver Lining. Lots of “configuration management” problems are easy when you rely on the system packages… not for any magical reason, but because the package maintainers have done the configuration management for me. This includes dependencies, but also things …
WebTest HTTP testing
I’ve yet to see another testing system for local web testing that I like as much as WebTest… which is perhaps personal bias for something I wrote, but then I don’t have that same bias towards everything I’ve written. Many frameworks build in their own testing systems …
More Sentinels
I’ve been casually perusing Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp. One of the things I am noticing is that Lisp traditionally has a terrible lack of sentinels: special objects denoting some kind of meaning. Specifically in Common Lisp the empty list and false and nil …
The Web Server Benchmarking We Need
Another WSGI web server benchmark was published. It’s a decent benchmark, despite some criticisms. But it benchmarks what everyone benchmarks: serving up a trivial app really really quickly. This is not very useful to me. Also, performance is not to me the most important differentiation of servers.
In Silver …
What Does A WebOb App Look Like?
Lately I’ve been writing code using WebOb and just a few other small libraries. It’s not entirely obvious what this looks like, so I thought I’d give a simple example.
I make each application a class. Instances of the class are “configured applications”. So it looks a …
Configuration management: push vs. pull
Since I’ve been thinking about deployment I’ve been thinking a lot more about what “configuration management” means, how it should work, what it should do.
I guess my quick summary of configuration management is that it is setting up a server correctly. “Correct” is an ambiguous term, but …
Joining Mozilla
As of last week, I am now an employee of Mozilla! Thanks to everyone who helped me out during my job search.
I’ll be working both with the Mozilla Web Development (webdev) team, and Mozilla Labs.
The first thing I’ll be working on is deployment. In part because …
toppcloud renamed to Silver Lining
After some pondering at PyCon, I decided on a new name for toppcloud: Silver Lining. I’ll credit a mysterious commenter “david” with the name idea. The command line is simply silver — silver update has a nice ring to it.
There’s a new site: cloudsilverlining.org; not notably different …