Tool Building

I've put what is probably an unreasonable amount of time into building my own software tools - not particularly novel tools, necessarily, just glue to create support my own idiosyncratic ways of working.  For example, back in 2003 I had a Sony Clie; as a way of attempting to understand what the big deal about blogging was, I put together a working mobile-photoblog with a .forward file and 50 lines of shell script - I could take a picture from the Clie, add text and a title to an email message which would go to my posting address.  Even had a handful of readers.  About the same time I started turning my README files into blog input (I was already doing plenty of writing, so why change my habits when I could build tools around them?)  This led to some kind of gross ad-hoc parsers for the kind of text-shorthand I used, which at least worked as a way of getting them on the web.

These days, I've come to believe it's worth some amount of effort to use the tools other people come up with, rather than inventing everything from scratch, satisfying though that is.  For example, MarkDown syntax appeared in 2004, is close enough to what I was doing already that simply hand-re-writing my README files into it would be trivial, and gets me away from having spent 7 years on and off tweaking regular expressions to generate what I have now. Of course I can argue that spending that time is why I now know that MarkDown is what I wanted in the first place, and it was a good playground in which to develop skills with various bits of Python... but it's getting in the way more than it is helping, at this point. I've actually got a prototype that takes the RSS of this blog, upgrades it to MarkDown with some extensions, and generates the corresponding page on my own site... eventually this will point there instead, and "gadgets and tech" will go back to being a category and not an entirely separate project.

This isn't the only bit of consolidation I've been doing - I finally have all of my photography in one collection, a single 33M KPhotoAlbum XML file with tags and metadata for over 80 thousand pictures.  There are still a bunch of older captions (from bins, the old perl gallery tool, and from some ad-hoc software of my own) that need to be folded in, but not an enormous number of them.  This has allowed me to dig up a few interesting things from my earliest photographic efforts, so it hasn't just been a filing exercise; it has also been a good way to see the progress in both camera tech and personal skill over a decade.

Pycon 2011 is in Atlanta, GA, next week, and while I hope to do a bunch of coding while I'm there, I don't want to build up quite as much of a backlog of future projects and wishful thinking as I have in the past - while by habit I do seem to be a builder of infrastructure, it's primarly bespoke personal infrastructure, and doesn't really increase my development velocity that much - I want to make things happen.  We'll see if I actually pull that off :-)

Post-XMAS tools - Toro 1800 Power Curve Snow Thrower

Burned out an (admittedly underpowered) older, smaller electric snow thrower after two years, and replaced it with the newest Toro 1800. It's an amusing bit of "we live in the future" that one can use Amazon Prime to get a snowblower delivered before a predicted snowstorm :-) I've now used it to clean up after 3 major snow storms, totaling an "official" five feet or so, just in the last month.

Nice features of this particular snow thrower:

• Extension handle so you can repoint the ejector nozzle while still holding the push handle (you can't change the vertical angle that way, just the relative direction, but that's often all you need.) 
• Lots of power (for an electric) - the one that I burned out would stall out in wet or thick snow, the 1800 is usually only limited by being able to push the unit itself - the only thing I've ever had actually stop the blades was a fair sized chunk of solid ice.
• Light enough to carry up and down stairs (so I can easily use it off the driveway from the basement garage, then bring it upstairs for the front sidewalk.)

Annoying "features":

• The grab-bar safety interlock seems to be trying to require two hands; this makes it a little harder to lean and push the unit at the same time, and also fails to leave you a hand free to manage the power cord. 
• Louder than my earlier unit - still in the "large vacuum cleaner" range, doesn't come anywhere near a gas-engine blower, but it's still louder than cars on a nearby street.

As far as electric snow throwers in general are concerned, I prefer them over gas-engine ones for noise, smell, and vibration, even if they fall short on snow-berm work (I've generally used a shovel to break up the berm and then the snow thrower to disperse the chunks, which works pretty well.)  They're also not necessarily faster than hand-shoveling, especially with a large shovel - but since they don't involve any lifting I am so much less fatigued and strained after the cleanup effort that I don't mind the extra time, and the New England snow storm pattern is usually a day or two of mess followed by at least a day of sunshine to clean up in, or at least it's seemed like that for the last couple of years.

Of course what I actually want is a Robomower-class unit that goes out and starts clearing before the snow has stopped, with a protected (heated?) docking station of some sort, but we're not quite there yet...