If you’re like me, you didn’t always make good decision growing up when choosing what tools you used to rip music onto you computer. I have a lot of music, much of which is a smattering of mp3, ogg, flac, … Continue reading Converting Audio Files to MP3 in Nautilus
There a number of undocumented commands for Gondor, and I hate asking in IRC multiple times, so I’m starting this list. Please feel free to put more in the comments. I’ll add them as I discover more. Create a new production instance on a stack: gondor create –kind=production <instance-name> Env variables: Set an env var: gondor env:set [instance] VARIABLE=var instance is optional here, it will set it globally if not supplied. Read env vars: gondor env [instance] [VARNAME] both instance and VARNAME are optional, using without instance will just show global vars, and without VARNAME will show all env … Continue reading Undocumented Gondor Commands
I’ve recently taken up learning tango dancing as a new hobby. I’ve been doing it for several months now and have to say that it’s quite enjoyable. I mentioned to someone in conversation how when I dance, I feel very elated afterwards, and they remarked that there’s probably quite the testosterone response from tangoing. Not being one to let a good opportunity for over-examination go to waste, I did a quite good search for articles on tango and hormone release. Turns out that one exists. Here’s a link to an abstract. The study tested levels of both salivary cortisol and … Continue reading It Takes Two to Benefit Cortisol and Testosterone levels
I’ve recently been using Gondor as a hosting platform for a business I’m starting. I needed to set up a task to update my search indexes every 30 minutes, so I thought of Celery. Asking in #gondor on freenode, I discovered that the Gondor guys had recently gotten whatever backend was needed to make Celery periodic tasks available on Gondor. They haven’t yet gotten around to documenting it fully, but it turned out to be relatively simple. Setting up Gondor for Celery: The Gondor docs have a great page on this. Follow the directions and you should be good. I … Continue reading Creating a Celery Periodic Task on Gondor
I heard about Factory Boy this last summer at a Django meetup in LA and figured I’d give it a shot. I ended up using it on a small project and intending to write a post back then, but I got distracted and never finished the project. I’ve been working on another Django site the past month or two and decided today would be a good day to convert all of my partner’s code into using Factory Boy. First off, Factory Boy is a tool for generating data in tests. Pretty much any project you have is going to need … Continue reading Converting Django Tests to Use Factory Boy
I’m currently in the process of downsizing my number of computers to a single laptop (or maybe two… I mean who doesn’t need at least 2 laptops these days?), so I got a used macbook pro from a friend and have been trying to make the conversion to developing on it. So far I’ve spent far more time sysadmining on the mac than I have on ubuntu in the last 2 years. Not worth it for the pretty icons, but I really just go the macbook for the touchpad and battery life which are pretty gangbusters. Anyways, setting up postgresql. … Continue reading Fixing Postgres on Mac 10.7 Tiger for Django
I was recently watching a video on YouTube about how to spot a liar and toward the end of the movie, the guy mentioned something interesting. He has physical cues for himself which he uses to trigger certain states. Touching his pointer finger to his thumb recalls the state of meditation for him which helps him suppress micro-expressions when he’s negotiating. He also will raise his right big toe when he needs to remind himself to be patient with people that he doesn’t care for. Hearing this set me to wondering: could I train myself to recall or trigger certain … Continue reading Life-Mod: Physical State-Anchoring
Note: this is a follow-up to this post: https://jeffammons.net/2011/04/fencing-tournament-physical-and-nutritional-preparation/ Alright, so I survived two tournaments since posting last. The first one on May 1st was a much tougher crowd as it was a regional qualifier, meaning I was fencing pretty much strictly highly rated fencers. I knew that going in though, and I think I got some useful learning out of it. I finished 33/36, so not dead last which I suppose I can be happy about. I also lost my direct elimination to a B, but only 8-15 or something like that. The second one, on May 7th was a … Continue reading Fencing Tournament Follow-up
I signed up last week to compete in a fencing tournament on May 1st. Since then I’ve been contemplating how to approach the tournament. I haven’t done any fencing competitions for 2+ years. I’ve gained a lot of sophistication and … Continue reading Fencing Tournament Physical and Nutritional Preparation
If you wanted to find fish, where would you go? Certainly not the desert. Despite trying to avoid this for as long as possible, I’m going to devote a post (partially) to some of my thoughts on romantic relationships. Luckily this concept applies to more than just meeting women though. It just happened to occur to me while thinking about picking up women in a grocery store. To set the scene: I recently went grocery shopping at both Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, and as I often do, I was checking out women in the store (in a non-creepy way … Continue reading Locational Filtering
Jeff Ammons 