Bierfaristo Blog

Each semester has a certain rhythm in terms of support needs. A couple of weeks before the semester begins, I start getting showered with support requests as people need resources set up for the beginning of the semester. Once the students are back, they need support as well, and for the first couple of weeks, I'm often constantly busy helping one person, while another person is standing in line waiting for support, and a third person is coming in the door with an emergency. Things slack off just a bit until mid-semester, when everyone who was supposed to get something set up and working at the beginning of the semester, finally gets around to solving their problems. At the end of the semester, there is a similar peak of requests, as people try to get things wrapped up. In between, however, there is a period of time when everything is set up and running and people don't much need me: a kind of doldrums. During these times, I can often focus on actually getting things done without constant interruptions. That's not how its worked out this year, however. There are so many large-scale projects stacked up that, as soon as the regular support needs have gone down, all those other projects are coming up: our need for an authentication system, a calendar server, migrating to specify, the clark website, migrating the servers, switching resources from msql to mysql, the department website, ISB support, etc, etc, etc.

In spite of that, I've managed to put in some time on the Participatory Virus Infection Simulation. You can't actually register for it yet, but I'm hoping that soon it will be functional. I need to build an action for the regcode module so that when people register, it will build 10 more registration codes for them to infect other people with. Or maybe it should make one code that's good for 10 other registrations -- that might work too. Then I need to polish the interface and directions so that it's clear what people need to do.

Today, however, I'm taking off enough time to go have lunch with Buzz. It's good to have friends.

This has been a week for festivities. It's nice to have a community of friends and family.

On Thursday, I went to a special dinner organized at the Blue Heron with 5 courses each served with a kind of BBC beer that was also used in the cooking. The first course was an appetizer of oysters with a vinaigrette made with Gold Spike Ale. For the second course, we had local farm-raised barramundi with a sauce made from River Ale. My favorite was the third course, with rabbit sausage, a mustard sauce with ham, and braised cabbage, served with Steel Rail. The sausage was exquisite and the sauce perfect. The cabbage was fine, but couldn't live up to the rest. The main course was a beef short-rib with horseradish mashed potatoes and shallots and carrots. Delicious (served with Drayman's Porter). The desert had chocolate cake with coffee ice-cream (made with the Coffeehouse Porter, which includes fair-trade coffee). I was supposed to go with Buzz but, at the last minute, he couldn't make it. So I went with Zane instead. Alisa doesn't like beer and couldn't go anyway because she was in the AEF Trivia Bee.

On Friday, Zane, Robbie, and Randy came over for a pre-halloween party. Robbie and Zane came on time, but Randy didn't show up. So we called him and eventually convinced him to join us for a bit.

And last night, of course, was halloween. I didn't go to any parties, but it was festive to hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters. We didn't get that many because the weather was poor. But the boys had a great time putting together their costumes and trick-or-treating.

When I was a kid, we had a boxer that occasionally would have head tremors. We called them "trembling muppies" and would give her a cookie as a palliative when she would get them. They probably didn't make the tremors go away, but they made us feel better to do something. Our current boxer, Penny, has also had these tremors a time or two in the past and had them again this morning. So I took some time to look up them.

The technical term seems to be "Idiopathic Head Tremors", which seems to mean "unexplained non-serious head tremors". There are other kinds of head tremors, due to tumors and things, but a number of breeds of dog, including boxers, are known to suffer from idiopathic head tremors. Here's a video of a boxer displaying the behavior.

The dog is conscious and alert and doesn't really seem bothered by the tremors. We don't have any cookies right now, but we do have some fig newtons, so I gave Penny a fig newton. She took it gingerly in her mouth, carried it over to the rug and ate it. After a couple of minutes, her trembling muppies were cured.

I bundled up the source for the print release system and posted it today. I posted a link to it at freshmeat. I'm rather pleased with it. It's fun to write code that works.

I had lunch with Hoogendyk today at the University Club. I got a monte cristo sandwich which was incredibly delicious. It was nice to catch up with Tom. We talked about photography and the University and second children. We don't get enough time to chat these days.

When I got back to my office, I found that Daniel wanted to hang with me for the afternoon. He arrived, but then went the rounds with Tom to put money in a meter and talk with people around the department while I was helping people print posters. When he did hang with me, he found that he couldn't let 5 minutes go by without wanting to talk to me about things, so -- in the end -- we left work a bit early, since I wasn't getting anything done anyway.

When I got home, I found that one of Charlie's friends wanted to speak with me. "It's all hooked up," he said. "We just need to forward on ports 22, 80, and 10000."

"What?" I said.

"The server," he said. "We've hooked up the server and its running -- we just need to set up the port forwarding."

I looked at Charlie who said, "You said it was OK. Last night. I talked to you and you were like half asleep and you said it would be OK."

In the end, I helped them set up the Riverwolf Website on the mac we've been using as a home server. The machine they had set up was not created in a particular security focused way: they had the webserver running as root. In less than half an hour, I installed mysql, migrated their data, and got the site working.

I've been dieting and, as a way to reward myself, thinking about buying myself a new touring bike for next spring. I always liked touring bikes years ago, but when I got my most recent bike, I decided to get a mountain bike, since I'd never had one and it seemed like they were very popular. I like my current bike, but its a bit squirrely: the center of gravity is a bit too far forward, which makes it very nimble, but also likely to pitch you off if you don't watch it every second. What I want is a bike that wants to go straight: a touring bike.

Everyone says that touring bikes have gone out of style and that they have the last of the "real" touring bikes. But it turns out that everyone makes one: Fuji, Trek, Cannondale, Jamis, Kona... I've been looking at the small, custom shops in particular: Co-Motion, Rivendell, Surly, and Independent Fabrications. I've basically come down to trying to decide if I want to go the complete custom route with Independent Fabrications -- a local (well, Somerville) business -- or to buy a Surly, which isn't local, but is craft-made in the US and very well respected. I've asked my bicycling friends for input to help make the decision.

It's fun to dream about getting a new bike -- it helps me stay motivated.

Yesterday, we opened a new Intro Biology laboratory to students for the first time. Today I walked down and took some pictures. It really takes me back.

The first major project I took on when I arrived at UMass Amherst was to propose a redesign of the intro labs. It was an incredible experience to be fresh out of graduate school and having a transformative effect on the preparation of the majors at a research University. Scientists often are conservative about science educators -- my experience in graduate school had prepared me to expect that I'd be relegated to working with non-majors. It was a surprise to arrive and hear that the faculty *wanted* me to shake things up.

I met for months with a committee while I outlined my vision, persuaded everyone, found money on campus, and nailed down the design. The goal was to bring all the rooms together (rather than having them scattered around the building) and have a design that provided four octagonal tables, each for two groups of to work around computers, with each pair of tables connected with a long table for wet work. I had to make several compromises on what I wanted due to budget constraints -- and one person who just couldn't be persuaded that the design would work. She was convinced that the connecting benches needed to be as long as possible to make sure there was enough space. I had wanted them a bit shorter so that the benches could be off-set from one another to make it easier to circulate through the room. In the end, I got 95% of what I wanted, but not that. I rode herd on the project while tens of thousands of dollars of stuff was ordered, the rooms were renovated, and everything got set up.

We opened the rooms with much fanfare while I had some significant apprehension that the design would flop. But everything went swimmingly. Over the years, the labs have been a model of success. Now, a dozen years later with a bunch of brand-new iMacs, everything is still working great and even the furniture looks nearly as good as when we got it.

When we had the opportunity to set up a fourth Intro Lab, I was gratified that there was no question but to build it the same way. In the process however, I got the chance to fix the stuff that I hadn't gotten the first time around. In particular, I got my shorter tables and to make the benches off-set. It's awesome.

I love PHP. I've been reflecting a bit on the page release system Toby and I built over the summer. In about a week, 163 people have used it 902 times to print 5608 pages. The page-release system is a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine, using IMAP and LDAP for authentication (on two different servers); Samba, System V Unix printing, Unix command-line utilities, and MySQL -- with PHP being like the magical glue that ties it all together. I've used PHP for a dozen years for hundreds of projects and it's simply wonderful. Thank you, Rasmus, Andi, Zeev, and all the rest who worked so hard over the years to make it possible.

The semester has started and I'm feeling busier than I think I've ever felt. I'm being pressed to support more, more complex, and more dispersed resources. Every way I can think to describe how busy I am feels cliched.

I've introduced a big change in the BCRC: I've set limits on free printing. This summer, I had a volunteer who worked out with me the general outline of a web-based page release system that could be grafted in between Samba and lp (or any other unix printing system). We set the print command in samba to calculate the number of pages in the job and submit with it job-handling set to hold. After authenticating, the user can see their jobs and page totals, they can select jobs, and then they can release (or cancel) them. The system has a few tables in mysql to keep track of jobs and page quotas. We're still feeling our way forward toward a system for establishing personal page quotas and providing exceptions.

The semester has been looming over me ever since I got back. The public schools started this week. I was tremendously relieved when I realized that the University doesn't start next week, but the week after.

I've made progress in getting ready for the start of the semester. I've still got a few things to finish: a few wikis to set up and the graduate course resources. But I'm hopeful I can have those done by the end of the day on Monday.

The larger challenge is going to be developing a proposal for HHMI. I am playing a small part in one piece, but am taking the lead on a second piece. The deadline is soon: the beginning of October. I'm really excited about doing it.

We had a meeting about the other part yesterday. Elizabeth invited me to attend the meeting where she tried to persuade the chemistry faculty to participate. She did a masterful job and most of the faculty were won over, I think. I was flattered when one of the pieces of the grant would be to hire "another Steve Brewer" for chemistry.

For now, its the weekend. Lucy and I went to the library and I got some books to read on a rainy afternoon. Hurricane Danny is moving up the coast and its supposed to rain non-stop for the rest of the day and most of the day tomorrow. I'm making a pot of tortilla soup to keep away the gloom and the chill.

I spent most of today running errands -- it turns out you need to run errands, even in paradise. We ran the trap line around 10am. One of the traps had gone missing -- probably carried off by dogs. We searched around the trap side -- I went on a wide search all around, but we couldn't find it. Sigh. Another dead mongoose, probably.

As soon as we got back from the field, I led an expedition to the store. We stopped at KMart -- mainly to get rum. I got a bottle of pineapple flavored rum and a larger bottle of estate dark rum. The college kids go through it fast. We also got some johnny cakes and donuts. I'd been dreaming of the donuts since we'd been in the store last week. They'd been cooking the donuts and I could smell them while I was standing in line. Mmmm... Donuts....

The grocery store, we bought an enormous amount of beer and I laid in some more breakfast provisions and the ingredients for Thai Curry for tonight. Someone tried to make curry a few days ago and it didn't turn out well, so I wanted to make curry that was good. It has turn out quite well, but people aren't back yet. :-(

After the grocery store, I ran Tricia to the airport to drop off their rental car. Jacob, Tricia and their kids leave tomorrow. Luckily, the rest of us have a few more days in paradise. We still need to do the Cruzan rum tour (I'm not sure I need to go this time) and go to the East end. And we really should go out to Monk's Bath -- that's a tradition now!

We've got two mongooses out with tracking devices now. Now, if we can just recover the devices, we can actually get some data. It would be great to get some data.

We've been talking about grandiose plans for the next year. There is a road construction project going on in the refuge and we might be able to get funding to build some nature trails as part of the project. I'm going to think about getting my writing students to write some prose we could use for a guide to the refuge. Why not?

It's been great having Jacob here. We've been talking about establishing a network that could feed data back to us all year from the refuge. If we set up the network, we could use it for a lot of things: mongooses sure, but maybe dogs, tortoises, and land-crabs. Do people want to know where the land-crabs go? If they do, we could answer that question with these devices.