A work friend jokingly suggested that I Velcro or tape a Baggie to the outside of my stm skinny case, and carry my stylus in it. I laughed at her suggestion at the time, but I’m not laughing anymore.

My iPad diagramming series:

• My Wacom Bamboo Stylus
• iPad diagramming II
• iPad diagramming

See here?

First doodle with the stylus

This definitely opens the door to more detailed drawing. I’ll need to master the “wrist protection” mode, though. Wrist protection disables screen input in a variable region that’s defined by a movable marker, so that your hand can rest on the screen without drawing spurious lines.

I haven’t mastered the art of setting the marker at just the right spot to give enough room to draw, yet enough resting space for my hand. I kept fiddling with it up and down. (Well, I’ve owned the stylus for only 20 minutes…)

I think I’ll take this into work tomorrow and try copying an existing whiteboard diagram into the iPad using Noteshelf.

I’ll need a new iPad case. Arg! The stylus comes without a case, which is fine since a case would represent yet another separate thing to carry. I’ll want to carry the stylus with the iPad or else I’ll lose it, or damage the tip. My current case is an stm skinny, and it’s been decent but it doesn’t have a stylus holder.

My iPad diagramming series:

• iPad diagramming II
• iPad diagramming

My drawings mutate a lot as I create them:

• I’ll start out leaving space for objects (e.g., server boxes, database symbols), and then decide the objects need more space. (For practical or esthetic reasons.)
• I’ll assign colors to different entities, and later change the color assignments.
• I’ll start recording attributes A, B, and C for state transitions, and then decide to drop B and add attributes D and E.
• It’s very rare that nothing has to change. But even then, I’ll wish I could move the whole diagram on the whiteboard or page in toto, because it’s grown in a direction or to an extent that I didn’t anticipate.

I often wish I could do a diagram twice — once as a dry run, once “for real.”

These alterations happen more often to my drawings than they do for others. At least, it seems that way to me.

Whatever the diagram is, I need to the keep it around for a while. And refer to it, scribble on it, and update it. And sometimes share it.

Since “back in the day,” I’ve used a whiteboard for this. Or sometimes pages from a pad of graph paper. I’ll noodle around, sketch things out, and leave it up.

For sharing, I’ve resorted to snapping a photograph of the whiteboard with my iPhone. (Or a couple of photographs, which I then stitch together with AutoStitch.) If the photo’s not adequately square, I straighten it out with Genius Scan. And then e-mail it. The mail message can get pretty large, so this can be a nuisance.

Eventually the whiteboard needs to be erased, or is accidentally erased. Or I lose the graphing paper doodles, or decide to throw out the diagrams.

In December, I received an iPad 2 as a gift. And I’ve gotten around to thinking, why not step up my game and use the iPad for this? (Yeah, I’m being dramatic and rhetorical. Sorry. I’ll re-phrase: “I’ve decided to use the iPad for diagrams and simple drawings.”)

I haven’t completely figured out how I’ll do this. I’ll write about my experience here as I go down the learning curve, mistakes and all.

Apps

I knew that I needed two tools to make this work. (This was my first mistake! I didn’t know it at first, but I needed three tools, as I’ll explain later.)

1. I need to draw and write freehand on the iPad.
2. I need to share my drawings, and sync them with my other devices. (MacBook Pro laptops, and my iPhone too.)

The second choice was the easier one. I’ve been using Evernote and Together for my information collections. I started using Together, and liked its UX metaphor. Then Evernote surpassed it in syncing and sharing documents, and it has iPhone and iPad apps. So I started also using Evernote. I’ll eventually have a date with destiny and make myself stop using one of them, and on that day, I’ll move all the clippings from one into the other. But not today.

I selected Evernote as my syncing and sharing vehicle. I sprung $45 for a year’s subscription to Evernote Premium, because I wanted the note history (to recover from big mistakes), offline notebooks, and no more advertisements in my face.

Then I looked for good drawings apps. Based on online reviews and some friends’ recommendations, I quickly narrowed down my choices to two apps: Penultimate and Noteshelf. While I played around with them, I realized that I also needed to buy a really good stylus. More on that below.

Penultimate has a Zen-like simplicity and elegance. The user documentation is just a few pages. (Penultimate pages — see the screenshots here.) Within a few minutes, I was zipping around and doodling with ease. It’s easy to know your way all around an app when there aren’t that many options to remember. It took a few tries before I got the hang of how it handled notebooks (collections of drawings), but it wasn’t all that hard. And it’s only 99¢.

Penultimate’s simplicity is its greatest strength and weakness. There’s no keyboard text input, and no zooming. Unless you’re very good at writing very, very small, you’ll very quickly fill up a page. Even if I used a stylus, Penultimate’s page size is too small.

Noteshelf for iPad costs $5.00, which is pricey for an app but not pricey in the grand scheme of things. My time’s worth more than $5/hour, that’s for sure.

It’s got oodles of features. More than I can fully digest at one sitting. It’s got zooming, which is critical for my needs. It’s got tags. It’s got text input. (You have font choices, up comes the keyboard, you type text in a text box, etc.) It’s got Holy Crap bucket loads of features.

On the minus side, it’s got Holy Crap bucket loads of features. I mean, nowhere near as many features as some other tools I use. (Like Emacs, the One True Sacred Editor.) But it’ll take time to learn my way around the app. Then again, I need to learn only the features I’ll use.

I’m leaning toward Noteshelf. But I’m not deleting Penultimate from my iPad just yet. I might, conceivably, prefer it for some kinds of sketching.

I’d like to buy a stylus, please

I quickly discovered that drawing with your fingertip is fun for about 30 seconds. Then reality sets in. One’s index finger (even one’s pinky finger, if you’re flexible) is far too large and blunt a tool for good precision drawing and freehand writing. I tried drawing a box and writing simple text (“apache server”) within it, and the results were not pretty.

Off I went in search of a good stylus for the iPad. I relied heavily on a MacWorld review of iPad styli. You can quickly narrow down a stylus choice by considering what you’ll use it for: Navigation (tapping the screen with it instead of your finger), artistic drawing, or writing. I couldn’t care less how my stylus performs as a navigation or artist’s tool, so I was able to quickly narrow down my choice.

I decided to buy a Wacom Bamboo Stylus, which cost me $35.00 from Buy.com. It’ll arrive this week.

Next steps

I’ll learn my way around Noteshelf, and await the stylus’ delivery. Then I’ll teach myself this new way of working. I’ll report back on how I do.

We hope candidates will have some experience with Python or Django, but search technology experience (e.g., tuning, tokenizers, parsers, relevancy rank tweaking, aggregates and pivots) in now more important, and emphasized, in the the job.

Here’s the new description:

———

Founded in 2009, IP Street develops and markets software to help corporations, law firms, financial research firms, and government agencies better analyze patent information.  Our goal is to make IP data easy to get, use, and understand, so everyone can have access to high quality and transparent information.

A significant facet of our application’s capabilities are derived from Solr and other search technologies. We’re seeking a great full-text Search developer with experience in:

• Solr, Lucene, or other search engines
• Full-text search schemas, tokenizers, parsers, and rules for returning statistics and meaningful analytics
• Automated workflows that process millions of objects
• Data quality metrics and repairs

You’ll be joining us at a great time! Revenue is coming in, and we’ve done two Angel funding rounds at increasing valuations.

Key Responsibilities.

• Enhance our Solr engine to provide more statistics and meaningful analytics to the product
• Enhance or tune our use of other search technologies, e.g., LSI
• Enhance and extend the existing code base to add new product features. Our application is written in Django and Python, with an almost all open-source technology stack
• Occasionally wear testing or devops “hats,” as the needs arise
• Write unit tests for your code, and do performance analysis
• Demonstrate technical leadership within the team
• Communicate well with the team, in writing and orally

Qualifications.

• Significant experience using and tuning Solr, Lucene, or other search engines with similar capabilities
• 3+ years related experience in Python development
• 1+ years experience in Django development, or a strong interest in learning
• Experience using one or more of: MongoDB, CouchDB, or another NoSQL database; Celery; Redis; PostgreSQL or another SQL database
• Experience using latent semantic indexing search technologies would be a plus
• Experience integrating with open-source 3rd-party libraries
• Experience creating customer-focused software to process data and generate statistics and analytics
• Solid troubleshooting abilities, self-directed, and proactive
• Enjoy all aspects of software product creation — design, implementation, and debugging
• Familiarity with using OS X as a development environment, and Linux as a production environment
• Bachelors Degree or equivalent in Computer Science or Software Engineering
• Excellent communication skills

Salary is DOE.

Please send resume to johnd@ipstreet.com.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 48,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 18 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

I’ve fixed my goof. We’re nominally looking for at least seven years of Python experience, and at least three years of Django experience, for this slot.

Founded in 2009, IP Street develops and markets software to help corporations, law firms, financial research firms, and government agencies better analyze patent-related information.  Our goal is to make IP data easy to get, use, and understand, so everyone can have access to high quality and transparent information.

We’re seeking a great data visualization developer skilled in UI look and feel, and user experience. We have graphics expertise already; we’re looking for someone experience in working with page templates, XHTML, JavaScript, jQuery, and charting packages.

You’ll be joining us at a great time! Revenue is coming in, we’ve done two Angel funding rounds at increasing valuations, and we have $ in the bank. If you want more responsibility and authority, no problem, you can have as much as you want!

Key Responsibilities.

• Enhance and extend existing page templates and JavaScript to create new product features
• Work with Product Manager and other team members to prototype and refine proposed new features
• Swiftly classify reported problems as being front-end or server-side
• Occasionally wear testing or other “hats,” as the needs arise
• Communicate well with the team, in writing and verbally
• Overall focus on putting the customer first

Qualifications.

• 7+ years experience in developing web application front-ends using JavaScript and a template-based web framework, such as Django
• 4+ years experience in Ajax, JSON, jQuery or similar JavaScript library
• Experience building single-page JavaScript-heavy applications
• Well-versed in object-oriented design patterns used in UI
• Solid experience with cross-browser coding and testing, and solid UI troubleshooting abilities
• Extremely familiar with web application performance best practices
• Solid ability to be self-directed and proactive
• A history of building usable, accessible web apps
• Enjoy all aspects of software product creation — design, implementation, and debugging
• Bachelors Degree or equivalent in Computer Science or Software Engineering
• Excellent communication skills

Bonus Points.

• Experience in working with a graphing package, such as Highcharts
• Aptitude for creating compelling data visualizations
• Experience with JavaScript MVC frameworks, such as SproutCore or Backbone

Salary is DOE.

Please send resume to johnd@ipstreet.com.

Founded in 2009, IP Street develops and markets software to help corporations, law firms, financial research firms, and government agencies better analyze patent-related information.  Our goal is to make IP data easy to get, use, and understand, so everyone can have access to high quality and transparent information.

We’re seeking a great Python developer with experience in: Automated workflows that process millions of objects; data quality metrics and repairs; search, particularly with Solr or Lucene; and/or general data mining. Our stack, and development & production environments, are almost all open-source. The key technologies are Python, Django, Celery, Solr, and PostgreSQL.

You’ll be joining us at a great time! Revenue is coming in, we’ve done two Angel funding rounds at increasing valuations, and have $ in the bank. If you want more responsibility and authority, no problem, you can have as much as you want!

Key Responsibilities.

• Enhance and extend existing code base to add new features to the product
• Extend Solr engine to provide more statistics and meaningful analytics to the product
• Design or co-design new product features, including designing the client and server-side tasks, and creating APIs
• Occasionally wear testing or devops “hats,” as the needs arise
• Write unit tests for your code, and doing performance analysis
• Demonstrate technical leadership within the team
• Communicate well with the team, in writing and verbally

Qualifications.

• 7+ years related experience in Python development
• 3+ years significant experience in Django development
• Significant experience using Solr or Lucene
• Experience using one or more of: Celery, Redis, PostgreSQL or another SQL database, mongoDB or another NoSQL database
• Experience integrating with open-source 3rd-party libraries
• Experience writing JavaScript is a plus
• Experience creating customer-focused software to process data and generate statistics and analytics
• A track record of creating great code and clean, well-defined APIs
• Solid troubleshooting abilities, self-directed, and proactive
• Enjoy all aspects of software product creation — design, implementation, and debugging
• Familiarity with OS X as a development environment, and Linux as a production environment
• Bachelors Degree or equivalent in Computer Science or Software Engineering
• Excellent communication skills

Salary is DOE.

Please send resume to johnd@ipstreet.com.

Rackspace changed their Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) server image without telling their customers. Our installation scripts unexpectedly broke. In the cloud, the rug can be pulled out from underneath you without warning, even in a very simple setup.

The Story

My employer is a small shop, and we use Rackspace Cloud Servers for our QA and Production systems. We use unmanaged VMs, from 256 MB to 16 GB in size, running Ubuntu.

Rackspace has generally been a very good hosting provider. My only significant complaint is with their cloud administrative dashboard — it’s slow, clunky, and often hangs. But we’ve learned to live with it.

When we upgraded from Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04, we had some typical upgrade pain with our Operations scripts. We had to remove some 10.10 package workarounds, and we switched some software from source builds to packages, because the 11.04 repository’s version was now acceptable.

We got past all that, and moved our systems to 11.04. Since then, re-building servers meant selecting Ubuntu 11.04 as the server image, running our Fabric scripts, and everything working predictably without surprises.

Until November 21…

I needed to rebuild our QA system for an impending big software release. I didn’t expect any problems with the server rebuilds themselves. I do the steps almost by rote: Initiate the rebuilds, wait, launch Fabric… Yawn…

BAM! The fabfile crashes. What the??

Our installation script’s first action is to disable the root account, and create a sudo account for software installation. For the first time in over a year, this was now failing.

My first thought was, maybe this one time our servers didn’t completely boot after the rebuild, for whatever odd reason. So I rebooted them. The root/sudo account part of the installation script still failed.

I did some sleuthing and found that /etc/apt/sources.list, which configures the software installation repository search, had changed from what it was in the earlier 11.04 server images. It used to be:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty main restricted universe
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty main restricted universe

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-updates main restricted universe
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-updates main restricted universe

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security main restricted universe
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security main restricted universe

Sometime between our last successful server rebuild and November 21, it had changed to:

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty main restricted

## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the
## distribution.
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-updates main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-updates main restricted

## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any
## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team.
#deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty universe
#deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty universe
#deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-updates universe
#deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-updates universe

## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to
## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu
## security team.
#deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty multiverse
#deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty multiverse
#deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-updates multiverse
#deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-updates multiverse

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'backports'
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as
## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes
## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features.
## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review
## or updates from the Ubuntu security team.
#deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-backports main restricted universe multiverse
#deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-backports main restricted universe multiverse

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's
## 'partner' repository. This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is
## offered by Canonical and the respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu
## users.
#deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu natty partner
#deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu natty partner

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security main restricted
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security main restricted
#deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security universe
#deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security universe
#deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security multiverse
#deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security multiverse

In particular, the natty, natty-updates, and natty-security repositories were commented out in this different file, and so were not included in the package searches.

The fix would be easy: Just uncomment six lines. But who or what had changed sources.list? Did someone at IP Street break our fabfile? Was I massively confused? I didn’t consider the possibility of the 11.04 image bits changing, because released bits wouldn’t change like that.

After more poking, a lightbulb went off…maybe the 11.04 bits had changed? Nahhhh. But… Maybe?

So I asked Rackspace if sources.list had been changed in the Ubuntu 11.04 image, or if I was suffering from massive PEBKAC. Here’s their answer:

You are correct in assuming we have changed the default Ubuntu 11.04 server image. This is part of our infrastructure migration from Xen Classic to Xen Server and required some changes to our images.

As for why the ‘universe’ repository entries are commented out, the answer I’ve been given from our Cloud Operations Engineers is that they want to keep the installs as close to the default CD installation as possible, for security reasons.

Unfortunately we do not at this time give announcements to customers for changes to the installation images. I have passed along your request for an announcement facility regarding changes to the default installation images. Unfortunately I can’t give an ETA that being implemented at this time. Feel free to also make the suggestion on our Cloud Feedback page here:

[snip]

Yikes.

I sent them back a polite (for those who know me, I was unusually polite) response pointing out this was a sub-optimal mode of customer interaction. They changed a released server image and did not tell their customer base!

Their reason for the change is rational. But they should have at least notified customers who were using the 11.04 image. Ideally, they shouldn’t have changed it at all, and instead changed their Ubuntu hosting procedures as of the next release. The repositories searched during a package install are completely unrelated to their hypervisor upgrade.

This should’ve been the end of my problems, because if Rackspace had changed anything else in the 11.04 image, their customer support person would have told me about it in this answer, right?

Wrong. After a few successful server provisions, our Postgres installation failed. The diagnosis here was easy. Seems that Rackspace decided to change the filesystem name. The virtual disk used to be mounted at /dev/sda1, but was now mounted at /dev/xvda1.

It was trivial to adjust the blockdev command string in our script. Just about as trivial as it would have been for Rackspace to warn their users.

Summary

After I got past these problems, and another one caused by our goof, I provisioned the QA system.

These problems weren’t hard to fix, but they required diagnostic time, stopped a straightforward process in its tracks, and goosed my blood pressure. This was happening in the shadow of another serious problem Rackspace was having with their Xen Hypervisor — Ubuntu 11.04 interaction.

The world can change underneath your feet in the cloud, even if you just have a server with a local disk and install the same OS you did a few weeks prior.

I can get to it from the Rackspace dashboard console. But it’s not on the network. Creating a VM without a network is kind of useless.

I first alerted Rackspace to this over a week ago. It’s still present in our VMs, and now impacts our company in a very serious way. Rackspace says their Operations team has to check the host machine to fix this. You’d think this would be easy to isolate and resolve, but….nope.

Does anybody else have this problem?

———

Update: Rackspace confirmed this is a system-wide problem! Until it’s fixed, after I rebuild a VM I have to ask their customer support to goose the underlying host machine before it’ll respond to the network. Yikes.

When you protect your tweets, you have to approve any new follower request.

This is easy if you use a desktop or laptop browser. But if you use a Twitter client application, or a mobile browser on Android or iPhone, you can’t approve new followers. In fact, you won’t even know about them. You’ll see new follower requests only if you view Twitter with a desktop browser. (I’m crawling slightly out on a limb here. I’ve tried a few iPhone apps, and none have let me approve follower requests. I can’t find references to Android apps that let you do this, either.)

This irks me.

All mobile web sites should have a “full site” utility link on the home page, if not on every page. Twitter doesn’t do this. You get only the mobile site, and it doesn’t include the follower-approval page.

How does a road warrior access the full site on a mobile phone? The snap answer is, “Use a browser that spoofs the HTTP User-Agent field.”

This isn’t so easy. I tried a couple of iPhone browsers with User-Agent spoofing (Mercury Web Browser Lite, Opera Mini web browser), and Twitter’s mobile site still came up. I didn’t hook up a sniffer, but the obvious guess is that some part of the User-Agent header (maybe a platform id?) wasn’t being spoofed. It tipped off Twitter that I was on an iPhone, so Twitter returned the mobile site.

The solution!

I finally tried Secret Browser. The ad-free mode ($1.99) has User-Agent spoofing, so I ponied up the bucks. Success!! I set the User-Agent to Mozilla Firefox 8.0, and up comes Twitter’s full web site. With a little dragging and zooming, I can get at the “new follower requests” button and approval page.

If you know of another iPhone browser (or better yet, a free iPhone browser) that lets you access Twitter’s full site, please let me know in the comments!