Ian McKellar

We already have information, why do we need more data?

I love gadgets and metrics and pretty graphs. I’ve been using Endomondo to track my cycling, primarily my commute. I know it’s about 6.5km an I ride it in between 22 and 26 minutes. I can even share or embed my workout here. I love that shit. When I get to work in 21 minutes I feel awesome. What it doesn’t tell me is that riding to work is good for my health. I don’t need a fancy app on my $500 mobile phone to tell me that.

Fancy pedometers like the Fitbit or Jawbone’s newly announced Up are neat gadgets, but are they really going to help anyone become healthier? More importantly are they going to help stem the slide of some countries into unhealthy patterns like obesity?

The target market for these devices is affluent and health conscious. They already know that they should be eating less fat, more fiber and exercising more. They can afford a good bicycle, a personal trainer or fancy running shoes. Anyone who is forking over a hundred dollars for a pedometer already knows more about the impact of their lifestyle on their health than these gadgets will give them.

These gadgets aren’t doing anything to educate less health literate Americans about living healthier lifestyles. They aren’t doing anything to address childhood nutrition here or around the world. They’re a distraction from the real problems we face.

I still kind of want one.

The full Bradley Manning / Adrian Lamo logs

(06:08:53 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: What’s your greatest fear?
(06:09:24 PM) bradass87: dying without ever truly living
via Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Everyone should read (apparently) this full chat log. In it Manning, a 22 year old depressed man, questioning his gender reached out to Lamo for someone to talk to. While Manning poured out his story of growing up with abusive, alcoholic parents Lamo repeatedly assured him that he was safe to talk to. Manning denied having a “doctrine”, but he did have a clear sense of morality:
(1:11:54 PM) bradass87: and… its important that it gets out… i feel, for some bizarre reason
(1:12:02 PM) bradass87: it might actually change something
(1:13:10 PM) bradass87: i just… dont wish to be a part of it… at least not now… im not ready… i wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me… plastered all over the world press… as a boy…

via Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed | Threat Level | Wired.com.

When Lamo was chatting to him, Manning had been demoted and had lost his access to classified networks. Any good or ill he had done by leaking to WikiLeaks was over. He was going to be discharged. He’d started to set up his identity as a woman. He was just 22, trying to serve his country, serve humanity and work out who he was.

In the future, Gizmodo will have their own war correspondents

Oh wait. We’re already in the future.

The Current State of OAuth 2 from @aaronpk

The Current State of OAuth 2

View more presentations from Aaron Parecki

A pretty good summary of the current state (as of June 2011) of OAuth 2. I wish I’d been able to see the talk or find a video online.

Emissions taxing and trading in Australia

After many years of proposals, counter-proposals, coups and general disappointment the Australian Government has announced its scheme to allow the economic impact of carbon pollution to be managed by the free market.

I’m really really proud that as a country we’ve reached the point where there’s a plan in place. It’s taken longer than it should have. In 2007 it was a policy of both major parties yet for a while more recently it had been a policy of neither. We’re one of the first countries in the world to pull this off.

The plan announced by Julia Gillard sets an initial price of AUD $23 per ton of CO₂ produced, along with subsidies for many industries and tax cuts to low and middle income Australians. A few heavily polluting industries will take a hit, but that’s the idea. Businesses that aren’t pollution-centric seem to largely support the scheme.

There will be a transition in 2015 to a free market emission trading scheme. Amusingly Tony Abbot. leader of the conservative, supposedly free market Liberal Party opposes the idea of allowing markets to determine prices. There’s been some shrill, populist freak-out over new taxes, but the impact is likely to be small enough peoples’ lives that it won’t be an issue at the next election. I’m expecting the bursting housing bubble will be more of a worry.

Foursquare’s reflections on their design decisions for their v2 API

As we sunset foursquare APIv1 and announce some amazing new milestones for APIv2, now seemed like as good a time as any to reflect on some of the decisions we made in APIv2 and see how they’re holding up. Fortunately, we were able to draw on both our experience with APIv1 and from tight iteration with our client developers (especially Anoop, who is awesome!). We’re pretty happy with the result, but we still made a few mistakes. Hopefully there are some lessons for anybody else out there who gets stuck designing an API.

via APIv2: Woulda, coulda, shoulda | Foursquare Engineering Blog.

Showing git status in my Zsh prompt

I like Zsh. It’s a powerful, efficient shell. It’s better than Bash by just about every metric (better performance, more features, better sh compatibility). I really have no idea why people keep using Bash.

Anyway, I put together a little piece of zshrc to show my current status in right-hand prompt – a prompt that’s shown right-aligned in the shell. Zsh has a couple of features that make this really easy.

First the prompt_subst options instructs the shell to do variable substitution when evaluating prompts. So if you were to set your prompt to '$PWD> ' then your prompt would contain your current directory. Of course you wouldn’t do it that way, %~ does that much more nicely, but that takes us to Zsh’s second feature, ridiculously powerful variable substitution and expansion. In my prompt I just use the simple $(shell-command) substitution, but there’s a full complement of file-io, string manipulation and more to be had.

	setopt prompt_subst
	autoload colors zsh/terminfo
	colors

	function __git_prompt {
	local DIRTY="%{$fg[yellow]%}"
	local CLEAN="%{$fg[green]%}"
	local UNMERGED="%{$fg[red]%}"
	local RESET="%{$terminfo[sgr0]%}"
	git rev-parse –git-dir >& /dev/null
	if [[ $? == 0 ]]
	then
	echo -n "["
	if [[ `git ls-files -u >& /dev/null` == '' ]]
	then
	git diff –quiet >& /dev/null
	if [[ $? == 1 ]]
	then
	echo -n $DIRTY
	else
	git diff –cached –quiet >& /dev/null
	if [[ $? == 1 ]]
	then
	echo -n $DIRTY
	else
	echo -n $CLEAN
	fi
	fi
	else
	echo -n $UNMERGED
	fi
	echo -n `git branch \| grep '* ' \| sed 's/..//'`
	echo -n $RESET
	echo -n "]"
	fi
	}

	export RPS1='$(__git_prompt)'

view raw

git-prompt.zsh

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Breaking into a debugger in Python

This is probably old news to most folks, but I only found out about this recently, more than twelve years into being a Python programmer.

The pdb (Python Debugger) module has a few useful functions. For years I’ve been using pdb.pm(), the postmortem debugger. It can be run from the Python shell to invoke a debugger after an exception. Traditionally I’ve done:

% python -i myscript.py
(some exception occurs)
>>> import pdb
>>> pdb.pm()
(Pdb)

But for this to work you need to be able to pass arguments to the interpreter (-i) and the code needs to throw an exception that isn’t caught.

Enter pdb.set_trace(). It begins the same interactive debugger that pdb.pm() provides upon request, from code. So in the middle of a function that’s confusing me I add:

from pdb import set_trace;set_trace()

and my code will stop, ready for me to tear apart its runtime state. I just wish it had a more descriptive name so that I’d have found it earlier.

Bonus: printing stack traces
Python’s stack traces in exceptions are pretty useful. It used to be difficult to get the current stack in Python, involving raising and catching an exception. Now the traceback module has traceback.print_stack() and traceback.extract_stack() methods.

Python’s collections.defaultdict

Today I again came across code that I was able to make simpler, clearer and safer using collections.defaultdict. I keep coming across experienced Python programmers that don’t know about it. Perhaps it’s time to spread the good word.

The defaultdict type is a dict subclass that takes a factory function to supply default values for keys that haven’t been set yet. For example

from collections import defaultdict
frequency = defaultdict(lambda:0)
for c in 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog':
  frequency[c] = frequency[c] + 1

Will count the frequency of characters in a string.

I often use defaultdict for dicts of dicts (defaultdict(dict)) and dicts of lists (defaultdict(list)).

defaultdict replaces some pretty simple code, for example the above code could be written:

frequency = dict()
for c in 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog':
  if c in dict:
    frequency[c] = frequency[c] + 1
  else:
    frequency[c] = 1

but I find using defaultdict is not just shorter but also much clearer.

The other classes in the collections class, especially OrderedDict and Counter (which is an implementation of the pattern I just implemented here on top of defaultdict) seem useful, but I’ve never found myself actually using them, whereas defaultdict is a common part of my repertoire these days.