Today was a glorious day, at least by the standards of the weather we've been having around here lately. Mid-40s and sunny, warm enough to wander about town wearing a long-sleeved shirt and vest. Which is exactly what I decided to do after noon after decided that the weather was to nice to stay inside and clean. I started with my favorite fair-weather activity, wandering around Riverside Park and taking pictures.
I went to the Riverside Arts Center to hear the presentation by Doyle Palma of HyettPalma of their study for downtown Ypsilanti. I took a bunch of notes, which I'll pretty much leave out of here because hopefully soon the actual report will be online. I will say I'm filled with cautious but strong optimism. The presentation and the presenter seemed on the level — I'm normally very skeptical of things like this, so I dial up the BS detector's sensativity, but I didn't get much from this.
Two of the baristas (Otter and Miro) from the Ugly Mug (my local Coffee Shop of Record) are competing in the Great Lakes Regional Barista Competition this upcoming weekend. I volunteered to serve as one of the judges for a test run they did this evening. It was an interesting process, and a lot of fun. Through my co-worker Charles (who also volunteered) I got the judges guide, and had read through it a couple times before we started.
Obviously, a few updates have happened to pyremctl. Version 0.3 introduced the “complex” interface to remctl, which is useful mostly for sending commands to the remote server that involve null bytes, or want to send more than one command per connection. 0.4 fixed a couple lingering bugs in the “simple” interface — making sure I didn't free a null pointer if a malloc failed, and not calling DECREF on an object I don't need to.
Today reenforced the rule that if I need to understand something really bizare, I need to go to the Ugly Mug and start drinking espresso. For over two years I've wanted to write a python module for remctl (I remember working on this sitting out on the patio of Stomping Grounds, back in Ames). My initial attempt was using SWIG, which generated incredibly ugly code and required a small but annoying change to the remctl source.
Because there's nothing more fun than biking in 20 degree F. weather, I headed over to help out with the Loveless Alleycat, put on by Jimmy. I wimped out and strapped the Croque Monsieur to the back of the General T'so for the ride over to Ann Arbor, since I really haven't ridden since Night of the Living Tread II. The race seemed quick. Ten stops people went to, then they came to my checkpoint, where I pointed them to the end at Ambrosia, a coffee shop on Maynard.
One of the first things I did when I moved to Ypsilanti was to search for my Coffee House of Record — the place that was my coffee house. After some searching, I decided February of last year to make the Ugly Mug my CHoR. My habbit, since I came with the idea a couple years ago with Stomping Grounds back in Ames was to keep track of everything I spent, and add it up each year.
On the walk from the bus stop this evening a random idea started going through my head, which eventually coalesced into the title Chapwick's Field Manual for the Persistently Perplexed, by Cap't C. W. Chapwick (Ret'd.) Don't know exactly what I'd put in it, but I thought I'd stash the idea here.
Amtrak: It's not just a journey, it's an Adventure This has certainly been one of my more memorable train journeys. My plan was to take the train from Ann Arbor to Mount Pleasant, IA, which is a couple hours south of where my parents live, instead of flying back to Iowa for Christmas. The train left Ann Arbor about fifteen minutes late, which, by Amtrak standards, is early. We hadn't even made it to Jackson when one of the cables that connects the cars and supplies them with electricity fell off and was damaged.
Fully k5 zephyr has been in various states for the past few years. Recently, gendalia, a former co-worker of mine back at Iowa State has been tasked with pounding on it at work. Last week I loaded the new code in the TPROA realm to assist with doing cross-realm testing. After some difficulty with getting my kdcs to work with a combination of having a principal with only des-* keys, being able to convert those into a srvtab, and have the kdc be able to find the keys when given a direct v4 tgt request (solved with a combination of pounding on my kdcs like a confused caveman — the kvno on my zephyr/zephyr went from 2 to 25 — and ifdefing out anything that was trying to get k4 credentials) we had something where we could send back and forth.