June 3 California Primary: Ballot measures
All of the ballot measures originating in citizen petitions are on the general election ballot now so we have just a couple of measures on the primary ballot, both of them originating in the...
View ArticleJune 3 California Primary: Orange County
Here’s what’s on my ballot for anything that isn’t municipal or judicial.All of the Orange County offices are nominally non-partisan.The liberal Orange Juice Blog has another set of recommendations.US...
View ArticleJune 3 California Primary: Irvine and Judiciary
Finally to the end of the ballot!There's only one race in Irvine, for a short-term seat on the Irvine Unified School District board.There's a few judiciary elections. Judiciary elections are dumb. One...
View ArticleBike rides
I'm starting a list of nice bike loops around UCI, for "beginning to medium" cyclists like me. No gratuitous hills in there yet, but maybe I'll get bored of flat roads eventually!
View ArticleExploring the Mayday PAC FEC filings
I did a short analysis of Mayday PAC's July 2014 quarterly FEC filing (which doesn't include the final rush).
View ArticlePIL, Cairo, and numpy
Here are the incantations you need to perform to create a Cairo surface from a grayscale image in a Numpy array, doodle on it, and convert the doodled-upon image back into a Pillow image so you can...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Building a temperature data logger on the cheap
I needed an accurate and inexpensive temperature logger to calibrate our stage incubator for live cell microscopy and make sure that it was stable over time, so I built one. This was a very quick...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SDSC Summer Institute Wrapup
What would you do with 2 petaflops of processing power? It’s not an idle question: NSF’s XSEDE infrastructure offers researchers access to large-scale computing resources. I spent the last week at the...
View ArticleHomebrew Python 3.5 transition
Python 3.5 is scheduled to be released on September 13, 2015. Since Homebrew carries the newest stable version of its packages, the Homebrew python3 formula will adopt Python 3.5 very quickly upon its...
View ArticleBuilding Python extension modules on OS X with cmake or autotools
tl;dr: Please use -undefined dynamic_lookup instead of -lpython or -framework Python to build Python extension modules on OS X, no matter what python-config says. Only use -lpython or -framework Python...
View ArticleLiberating Irvine campaign finance data
Comrades of the Data Liberation Front rejoice! I come to report a successful action against the campaign finance records of the City of Irvine.There is a shocking amount of money in Irvine politics. I...
View ArticleInstalling botbot.me on Scaleway
BotBot.me is a logging IRC bot. Scaleway provides bare-metal ARM servers for €3/mo. Can we combine them? We can!Cribbed from the real install instructions, with extensions as necessary.Instantiate a...
View ArticleIntegrating Google Forms and Slack
Getting submissions to a Google Form to appear in a Slack chat is straightforward. You can use services like Zapier to do this, but it turns out to be easy to use Google’s scripting interface to get...
View ArticleVoting in the 2016 General Election: Candidates
As usual, some attempt to share my efforts making an even slightly informed decision about voting. More blather about propositions later.President: You probably don’t need my help here but um...
View ArticleImplementing a small language in RPython
Inspired by Alex Gaynor’s “So You Want To Write An Interpreter?” PyCon talk, I decided I wanted to try to write an interpreter! In this post I’ll talk about writing Baby’s First Interpreter, porting my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On Vancouver business license data
Yesterday was Open Data BC’s Open Data Day Hackathon, which was a great chance to learn about civic data sets and spend some hacking on them with data nerds and subject matter experts from the city and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Vegan Key Lime Pie-lets
I participate in a vegan cook-off with some friends once a month and I was happy with how my recipe came together for this month’s Pie-Off, so I thought I’d share!I made key lime pie-lets, consisting...
View ArticleCertificate spelunking for fun and profit
Google and others contribute TLS certificates to Certificate Transparency logs as they crawl the web, but there is less systematic effort devoted to discovering certificates from secure, non-HTTPS...
View ArticleA minimal Gmail API example
Once upon a time, I created a whole lot of gmail labels that I don’t use anymore. I wanted to clean those up in anticipation of Inbox going away. There are a lot of outdated examples for creating a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I declare! Personal infrastructure!
The time had come to rebuild my (circa 2014) VPS, which was running Ubuntu 18.04 and couldn’t be upgraded further. Inspired by glyph’s A Tired Raccoon’s Containerization Manifesto, I decided to try to...
View Article
