PurpleFS

Paul Visscher announced PurpleFS:    (KCN)

PurpleFS is a FUSE filesystem that allows you to transclude Purple Numbers.    (KCO)

In other words, PurpleFS is a filesystem interface to the Purple library. Super coolness.    (KCP)

(This, by the way, is an excellent example of Leave A Trail. Paul is part of the Church Of Purple, and there were any number of public places he could have announced this tool. I didn’t happen to be on any of the ones he chose (although it’s also possible that he just hasn’t posted to any of those places yet). And that’s perfectly okay, because he blogged it, and I follow his blog. He left a trail. It’s nice and efficient for all involved. It’s loose coupling, but it’s tight enough to maintain a sense of community and to enable tighter collaboration in the future.)    (KCQ)

Purple v0.9

After RecentChangesCamp earlier this month, I drove up to Seattle to visit Chris Dent and others. Chris and I spent a day talking shop and life, and also taking care of a few things that we’ve been discussing for a while. The biggie was extracting the Purple Number generator from PurpleWiki into its own library and creating a RESTish front-end to it. The result — Purple v0.9, available on CPAN.    (K9N)

Not only will Purple make it easier for folks to incorporate Purple Number generation in their own software, it will also enable us to start properly experimenting with distributed Purple Numbers. Right now, I can transclude content between this blog and my Wiki. With Purple, I’ll be able to transclude from Chris’s blog and any other sites using these Purple Numbers (including all of Blue Oxen Associates‘s collaboratories.    (K9O)

It was very cool to get this done, and more is to come. Chris has already started to incorporate it into PurpleWiki, and Paul Visscher has already started to incorporate it into perplog. You can read Chris’s commentary and follow more on the Church Of Purple‘s progress at the Purple collaboratory.    (K9P)

People Time

Adina Levin quotes Peter Kaminski:    (21Y)

“Time together in person is too important to spend working.”    (21Z)

Reminds me of something Paul Visscher and Jason Cook told me when I had dinner with them a few weeks ago. I was asking about the hacker community in Dayton and whether folks ever got together to do code sprints. Paul responded, “When I get the chance to see these people in person, I’d rather just hang out with them.” Jason told a story of how he went to one local hacker gathering, where everyone was in a circle, staring at their laptops, something he found rather unappealing.    (220)

To some degree, it shows how spoiled techies are in the Silicon Valley. There are so many of us here, doing code sprints doesn’t necessarily interfere with socializing. When Seb Paquet met up with me in December, he had just come from Marc Canter‘s party and was in awe of how easy it was to run into cool and interesting folks — not just techies — around here. (Hey Marc, where was my invitation?!)    (221)

Stopover in Bloomington

On my way from Fort Wright to St. Louis, I stopped over in Bloomington to have lunch with Chris Dent and some of his colleagues, Joe Blaylock, Kevin Bohan, and Matthew O’Connor. Matthew is one of The Canonical Hackers.    (1YQ)

Lunch conversation was good — spent two hours longer than I had planned. I especially enjoyed meeting Matthew, as well as Paul Visscher and Jason Cook a few nights earlier. You can gather a surprising amount from interacting with folks via email alone, but it’s still only a partial picture. It was good to finally meet these guys in person, and to get a sense of their personalities and passions.    (1YR)

Arrived at Scott Foehner‘s place in St. Louis at around 8:30pm. Had dinner on The Hill at an Italian restaurant called Via’s, then went to Milo’s, a neighborhood bar, for drinks. I was surprised to learn that folks in St. Louis brew beers other than Budweiser. Had a Schlafly’s there, which was very good.    (1YS)

Dayton Redux

Just completed my adventures in the Midwest and South. Will post my notes from my trip over the next few days. -EEK    (1Y4)

Some interesting facts about Dayton and Cincinnati, courtesy of Paul Visscher and Jason Cook:    (1Y5)

  • The Wright brothers are from Dayton.    (1Y6)
  • So are the Sheen’s and the Lowe’s.    (1Y7)
  • So is Edwin Moses.    (1Y8)
  • The aluminum can pop top was invented in Dayton.    (1Y9)
  • Jerry Springer was mayor of Cincinnati, by all accounts a pretty good one, until he was caught giving a check to a prostitute. The check bounced.    (1YA)
  • There are no strip clubs in Cincinnati. Where do folks go for adult entertainment? Dayton, of course.    (1YB)
  • The weather in Dayton is fairly moderate, as Midwestern towns go. Apparently, even the bad weather avoids Dayton.    (1YC)

I talked to many Midwesterners throughout the trip. None of them raved about the area — many complained about the people, the politics, the lack of decent restaurants, etc. — but few of them had any desire to leave. I think a big part of that is family.    (1YD)

I chatted with someone on my trip who suggested that folks on the West Coast have adventurers’ genes. After all, our history is one of exploring the frontier and of immigration.    (1YE)