I just pushed a new version the Calendar About Nothing:

• mtah fixed a problem with the JSON routes. Gah, totally my fault.
• jqr cleaned things up a little, patching broken windows, etc. One really nice thing: he fixed a potential infinite loop in feed processing.
• Kalin Harvey added a capfile.
• kastner.

And the big update:

• lachlanhardy wrote a jQuery widget so you can post the calendar to your site.

Thanks for the updates, everyone.

Also, I’ve been working with the Heroku guys on getting the weird intermittent server error on IsLOSTOnYet up and running. I think it’s fixed now.

Saul Williams’ trek through the midwest between shows sparked some musings on Twitter.

Driving from Denver to Kansas City. My mind travels at a faster pace than my body. I mark my way with words. If the newest technology enhances transparancy then this is an ideal time to share your process. Share how your mind works. How do you think?

Do u associate w/negative thoughts and ideas? Are u cynical? What do u profess? What would u proclaim? Are you more concerned with like-minded agreement? Are you a naysayer? Perhaps, like me, you raise questions…

But who am I fooling? is this viral voice my voice or a thumbprint personae? Is it really that deep? Maybe its just a simple way of posting ur whereabouts incase loved ones need to find you. Maybe its a reflection of the human mind…. Each tweet a thought yearning to be acknowledged. Where does the quest for attention begin…and how does it beget survival?

I have passing thoughts all day. Thoughts that I ignore. Thoughts I don’t associate with. Then, there are thoughts that I do identify with. These are the thoughts that I voice and take ownership of by saying ‘I’ or simply pursuing them. For everything I say, there’s a million thoughts I did not say. Some because they came from weak or narrow-minded places. Some because it would leave me too vulnerable.

The mind, like this stretch between Denver and Kansas City, is an open field. All of this farm land! What will I harvest? Fields of patience; rows and rows of clarity. But most importantly, how will I travel? Highways of doubt, winding faithways of fearlessness, step by step…. …and here is a train. What does it symbolize? Expedience. Decision making. And the blood, sweat, and tears of those who laid the tracks.

This is my train of thought as I type into this digital rock and ponder thumb pianos…. Kononolingus…

Twitter asks us “What are you doing?”. But if everyone actually answered that, it’d be a wasteland.

Luckily, Saul managed to make a stop in Portland on the Oddity Fair tour. I’d highly recommend checking it out (plus, you’ll get to see Les Paul’s sick bass playing skills).

Oh yea…

After the show, Saul jumped the fence to get a chance to meet the fans up close. It was suggested that I go say hi, but what do you say in those situations? Saige (friend at ENTP) did go introduce herself, and apparently mentioned that her shy coworker was a huge fan. She pointed me out, so Saul grabbed my shoulder and said hi. It was a cool, awkward moment… and I couldn’t think of anything more profound to say than “Oh hey, awesome show – I’m a huge fan blah blah”.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a great system administrator. I was a windows guy for so long, so my only exposure to linux was haggling with shared hosting accounts to run my stupid php apps. While my linux/administration skills have grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years, I still get caught up on something as simple as cron jobs. The syntax is very terse, and probably easy to parse for computers. For the rest of us… Well, what the hell does this mean?

*/6 * * * * rake ts:index:delta

According to my new project, CronWTF, that “runs rake ts:index:delta at minutes :00, :06, :12, :18, :24, :30, :36, :42, :48, :54, every hour.”

Okay, to be honest, it’s not that hard to read. Most of the time my jobs run multiple times a day, so I’m only dealing with the first 2 fields (minutes and hours). The real reason I wrote this was for punishment for royally botching up the cron job for the Calendar About Nothing.

I wanted to run the update task every four hours:

* */4 * * * rake seinfeld:update

Then, my server would periodically run out of memory and my host would have to reboot it. I happened to be on the server during one of these ruby storms and noticed a bunch of rake processes piling up. Then I parsed the crontab that I had written: Runs rake seinfeld:update every minute, on hours 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, every day.

Shit! My intensive job scanning 400 github feeds was running 60 times every 4 hours. So, the seeds of CronWTF were planted. I wanted it browser based, so the library is pure javascript with no knowledge of browsers, frameworks, etc. My next step is to make this accessible from the command line through spidermonkey. I could even make it available to ruby apps through the ruby/spidermonkey bridge. I don’t know how it’d be useful, but who cares?