I, like many geeky computer types, am addicted to caffeine. I’ve tried to wean myself off of it more than once…but it’s not pleasant. For me, or for those around me. So a few years ago, I gave up on giving it up, and just embraced the addiction.

Unfortunately, all was still not well. The flaw is the morning; I am simply not fit to be around until I’m at least somewhat caffeinated, but I don’t make coffee at home before I leave. So my co-workers…well, they put up with a very, very difficult to deal with Ken. I feel bad about it, but what to do? I like my sleep!

I finally got a clue. This week, I started taking a caffeine pill immediately when I get up, and it is working great. I’m less cranky, feel better by the time I get to the office, and I’m less of a strain on my co-workers. Win-win! I was reluctant to do this for a long while; I had an…incident…with caffeine pills back in the early ’90s (there IS a lethal dose of caffeine, but I only got halfway there). So I’d been a little skittish. But I’m a big boy now; I think I can handle it. *grin*

I was reading an article this morning on the new American Airlines luggage charge (THAT’s gonna go over well), and noticed an aside starting on page 3…Las Vegas is using RFIDs in outgoing luggage tags now to help move bags more efficiently.

Now, I’m not saying I’m even completely against this, used correctly…but I had no idea that it was occuring. THAT I don’t like…especially since I have a bag sitting in the hallway that just came back from Vegas! Checking…nope, no I’m an arphid note on it.

But oh yeah…it’s there:

Nice, eh? And I carried this around (out of airport, past who knows what kind of scanner, on transit, etc.) without knowing about it. And of course, they’re all already sync’d with a person’s ID directly. Hrrrmmmm.

And as for slippery slope…from the article: This new system “won’t solve every problem, but it’s certainly played a part in allowing this airport to operate efficiently,” she said, “and it’s got the potential to do even more once it’s rolled out [on] a wider basis.”

I bet it does.

UPDATE: to clarify, I changed “…in outgoing luggage now…” to “…in outgoing luggage tags now…” above, after the post made it onto boingboing (woot!). It was a typo, and the photos make it clear what I’m talking about, but apparently people thought it worth mentioning. *grin* Sorry for any confusion.

It’s nice to have choices. Really, it is. But sometimes it causes the actual, you know, DOING of stuff to lose traction. I’m working on a new webapp, and I spent several hours this weekend going over the pros and cons of various development models:

1. Standard dev model, presumably under Django (similar to kenzoid.com’s backend)
2. Semi-standard model, but with CouchDB backend (either Django or Paste for framework)
3. Some workable framework (either Python or Rails based) with Amazon Web Services for messaging and persistence
4. Google App Engine

The standard model would obviously get me up and running the fastest, but I’m really wanting to do some serious work with these dynamic-schema databases (which all of the other choices use). It’s always good when you can learn something new while building something useful, so I’ve been leaning away from #1. Both #2 and #3 are doable, but Google App Engine promised the best of most worlds…dynamic models, etc., plus a framework that I’m very familiar with (supports Python, and includes a hunk of Django templating and such). Plus, it’s the new toy on the block; I’m all about new toys at home! (at work, I’m a production DBA, so I do the pushback thing when new toys show up. DBAs are generally horribly conservative when it comes to new tech and implementation. It’s not that we’re just cranky, though (though that helps). It’s because when it breaks, WE get to keep both pieces, and put them back together, no matter who broke them! But trust me, dev types…I understand the attraction. *grin*)

So I’ve been wanting to choose GAE pretty badly. Problem is…I didn’t make it into the first 10,000 invites. Probably by a long shot; I didn’t hear about it for about 24 hours for some bizarre reason. So there’s some indeterminate amount of time that I have to wait until I could actually publish anything to the world. Note: doesn’t stop development; I’ve already downloaded and started working the the App Engine SDK. But the prospect of no firm date for deployment made me reluctantly push App Engine to the bottom of the pile.

While I was making that decision, I wasn’t reading my GMail, though. I got my invite yesterday!! Google App Engine…front and center! I’m hip deep in the docs now, and hope to have something usable fairly soon. And since Google’s doing the admin heavy lifting, I can leave my DBA hat at the day office. Yay! Updates soon, true believers.

So…I haven’t jumped on the latest geek bandwagon yet, friendfeed. Well…to be honest, I did go ahead and grab my namespace, but no subscriptions yet. And that’s because I resist the model. I like aggregation…but I don’t like delegating that unconditionally to an external service. I want to have control of my data, and control of my URIs, when possible. I learned this the hard way with earlier services, so I’ve been trying to determine the best way forward.

So the heck with it; I’m creating my own uber-feed. Planet Ken! I’m using the Planet framework; instead of aggregating a bunch of users of a project (Python, Debian, etc.), I’m instead aggregating my own feeds…my blog, twitterstream, flickrstream, etc. And then I’ll import that into friendfeed, to close the loop. But if they fold…I’m still around. Yeah, baby!

Don’t get me wrong…I may have a control issue here *grin*, and I realize there are things that friendfeed can do that my Planet can’t. (reputation, commenting, etc.) But that’s simply where we are today; I think those things also can potentially be distributed. I think that’s a good idea. But I can’t work on that without having a decoupled feed to start with, so it’s worthwhile.

Both Atom and RSS2.0 are of course available, as well as the straight-up page. I have no idea how this experiment will go, so please drop me a line if you have any comments. Thanks!

Yoikes! I neglected to mention Starfish, by the absolutely incomparable Peter Watts in my earlier recommendations post. I read Starfish some time ago as an ebook available (along with most of the rest of his backlist) directly from Watts himself. He does this beause he rocks, and he wants to make you into the sort of Watts fanboy I am. *grin*.

Be warned. Starfish is terrific science fiction, but it is…um….well…dark. Seriously. But it succeeds in doing what SF is supposed to do;it uses the premise and extrapolations to pose questions about us. About what we do to ourselves, about how society values us (and our failings), and about just how twisted and far we might fall if we don’t stop and think about what we’re doing. It’s a distressing read at times, but it’s so, so worth it. If you’re local, just ask and I’ll be happy to let you borrow it.

Oh, happy day! Noted two great purchases today. Amie Street now has just about everything from Skinny Puppy available. Get it while it’s hot…albums are around $2-4 dollars each right now! And Steam has released Beyond Good and Evil for $9.99 (in fact, $8.99 right now). It’s a great, award-winning action game from 2003 that never had very much commercial success. I’ve never owned it, though I’ve played it partway through on console rental and enjoyed it. On the list now, though! Yeah!!

Catching up on my email and my subscriptions this morning, and I seem to be almost always presently surprised when I’m kicking the tires over at FORA.tv. There is SO MUCH good stuff over there; it’s really impressive. Here’s a clip from Randall Balmer on empty campaign promises in Presidential politics, from the full program Votes, Values and Religion Go to the Primaries. I’ve bookmarked the full program in MyFORA library to go back and view later.

One could honestly do a lot worse than just hanging out on FORA.tv for all your video (online and otherwise). The breadth of content is overwhelming!

Sweet! JChris of Grabb.it has already wired up an alternate implementation of Google App Engine. You can apparently with little to no effort take an AppSpot (Google App Engine’s hosting site) application, and instead upload it to AppDrop, which runs in Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure. Very nice!

It’s pretty quick and dirty, so I expect that it’s as much proof of concept that AppSpot isn’t making lock-in inevitable as anything else…but regardless, it’s still a great development. And the speed at which it occurred suggests to me it won’t be the last implementation…

Hey, all the cool kids are doing it.

kkennedy@huginn:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
114 mutt
84 exit
53 ls
29 cd
28 less
27 emacs
16 su
16 python
15 gpg
13 man
kkennedy@huginn:~$