Dropping

Especially with digital products, so many things come into existence quickly, continuously checking in whether something exists or not can take a lot of time and attention.

“Dropping” would be a simple web app/social network that would let people post something like “Trello GitHub Issues integration” or “cheap coworking space in Humboldt Park” and when such a thing drops, another user could click “It’s dropped” and insert a URL to that thing.  Users would get a notification when something they’re waiting for drops and be able to confirm whether it really meets their needs.

Published
Categorized as Ideas

Installing numpy into a virtualenv

I ran into some problems installing numpy in a virtualenv on Ubuntu 10.10.  I’m not sure what the root cause of the problem was, but my environment is a little weird in that I have a number of different python versions installed and virtualenvs using different versuons of python.  The setup for numpy wasn’t finding global environment configuration variables from the call to sysconfig.get_config_vars.  I ended up fixing my issues by copying the global Makefile and pyconfig.h into the virtualenv:

$ mkdir -p /home/ghing/.virtualenvs/foodgenius-analytics/local/lib/python2.7/config/
$ cp /usr/lib/python2.7/config/Makefile /home/ghing/.virtualenvs/foodgenius-analytics/local/lib/python2.7/config/
$ mkdir -p /home/ghing/.virtualenvs/foodgenius-analytics/local/include/python2.7/
$ cp /usr/include/python2.7/pyconfig.h /home/ghing/.virtualenvs/foodgenius-analytics/local/include/python2.7/

Twitter interface to CTA bus tracker

CTA Bus
CTA Bus photo by seizethedave via Flickr.

About

This is a Twitter (and hopefully, later, a plain old SMS) interface to the CTA Bus Tracker so those of us with simple mobile phones can find out information about our busses.

Ever since I moved to Chicago, I’ve been riding the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) busses almost every day. I’ve missed my bus more than a few times too. CTA has a Bus Tracker website that works from computers and mobile devices with web browsers (there’s iPhone apps as well), but my phone only does SMS.

This is a work in progress as I’m coding it mostly on the bus on the way to and from work.

Usage

In order to do anything, you have to follow @ctabt.

The best way to show how to use the system is through some examples:

Get help

d ctabt help

Get all stop names and IDs for Eastbound route 77

d ctabt 77 east stops

Get the name for Eastbound route 77 stops at Sheffield

d ctabt 77 east stops shef

Get upcoming busses for a particular stop by name

d ctabt 77 east shef

Get upcoming busses for a particular stop by ID

d ctabt 77 east 9288

You can abbreviate most parts of the commands

d ctabt 77 e s shef

Related Work

  • Implementing this was made possible by Harper Reed’s awesome opening of the Bus Tracker API.
  • CTA Tweet Feed has Twitter/RSS feeds of authoritative and user-generated updates about riding the CTA.

Links

Testament

Testament is a Django-based prison book project management application originally written by Andrew Badr. It lets volunteers track sent and returned packages and inmate requests in the hopes of minimizing delays for inmates and helping the book projects evaluate their services for themselves and funders.  It is used by the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project and other prison book projects.  I am a contributor to this application’s code and migrated from a pencil and paper on index card database to Testament while coordinating the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project.

Installing VMware Server 2.0.2 with Linux Kernel 2.6.31-*-rt Ubuntu Studio 10.04

I’m working on a virtualized environment to run scalable instances of the Public Mapping Project app.

While the project offers an EC2 AMI, my boss wanted to run this on our own hardware, so we’re going to use VMware.  To develop the instance images, I wanted to install VMware Server 2.0.2-203138 on my notebook which is running Ubuntu Studio 10.04 with a 2.6.31-11-rt kernel.

The installer provided by VMware doesn’t work out of the box for Ubuntu Systems.  So, I followed the instructions in the Ubuntu Community VMware Server Documentation which instructs users to use a patching system developed by Radu Cotescu.  While this was easy to use and clearly documented, it didn’t work for me.  This is what happened:

ghing@geoffsnotebook:~/Downloads$ sudo ./raducotescu-vmware-server-linux-2.6.3x-kernel-71f8b66/vmware-server-2.0.x-kernel-2.6.3x-install.sh .You have VMware Server archive: 	VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.i386.tar.gzChecking for needed packages on UbuntuYou do have the linux-headers-2.6.31-11-rt package...You do have the build-essential package...You do have the patch package...Extracting the contents of VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.i386.tar.gzFound .tar file for vsock moduleFound .tar file for vmci moduleFound .tar file for vmmon moduleFound .tar file for vmnet moduleExtracting .tar files in order to apply the patch...Untarring ./vmware-server-distrib/lib/modules/source/vsock.tarUntarring ./vmware-server-distrib/lib/modules/source/vmci.tarUntarring ./vmware-server-distrib/lib/modules/source/vmmon.tarUntarring ./vmware-server-distrib/lib/modules/source/vmnet.tarTesting patch...Creating some simlinks for the newer kernels...ln: creating symbolic link `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.31-11-rt/include/linux/autoconf.h': File existsln: creating symbolic link `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.31-11-rt/include/linux/utsrelease.h': File existsApplying patch...Preparing new tar file for vsock modulePreparing new tar file for vmci modulePreparing new tar file for vmmon modulePreparing new tar file for vmnet moduleChecking that the compiling will succeed...Trying to compile vmci module to see if it worksPerforming make in ./vmware-server-distrib/lib/modules/source/vmci-onlyUsing 2.6.x kernel build system./home/ghing/Downloads/vmware-server-distrib/lib/modules/source/vmci-only/linux/driver.c: In function ‘LinuxDriver_Open’:/home/ghing/Downloads/vmware-server-distrib/lib/modules/source/vmci-only/linux/driver.c:363: error: implicit declaration of function ‘init_MUTEX’make[2]: *** [/home/ghing/Downloads/vmware-server-distrib/lib/modules/source/vmci-only/linux/driver.o] Error 1make[1]: *** [_module_/home/ghing/Downloads/vmware-server-distrib/lib/modules/source/vmci-only] Error 2make: *** [vmci.ko] Error 2There is a problem compiling the vmci module after it was patched. :(

I began to suspect that my problem could be related to the realtime kernel used by Ubuntu Studio. Googling, I found that other realtime kernel users were having problems installing VMware products.

This thread offers a description of the problem and a patch for another VMware project. Based on this I was able to create my own patch for the VMware server kernel module sources. I then modified Radu’s patch and was able to run his shell script to successfully install VMware server.

Relevant files:

To use, simply download my updated version of Radu’s patch and save it in the directory where you unarchived Radu’s installer scripts.