Ataraxia Consulting

Steve Earle recently released a new album entitled "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" (the title of an old Hank Williams song). I'm particularly infatuated with this album. Mostly for its simplicity. All the songs were recorded live, with little overdubbing. Just reinforcing that music doesn't have to be complicated and layered to be enjoyable and moving. The song that represents this ethos the best is "Every Part Of Me", the following are the lyrics and chords as I interpret them. Here's a video with him performing it and a brief audio clip of me playing the two major themes.

Prior to today I had considered this site, while not terribly popular (or frequently updated), to be relatively quick with little effort on my part. I may not host many high traffic sites, but I have my personal sites and a handful of others. I have a server specifically to handle the HTTP traffic, and a server to handle RDBMS. They use the private network afforded to me by Linode.com (my VPS provider of choice) so communication between the two servers is quick and doesn't count against my monthly bandwidth quota. It's worked for years, so I've had little desire to muck with the formula.

Last weekend I read Ryan Finnie's excellent article about getting CUPS printers to work with AirPrint (http://www.finnie.org/2010/11/13/airprint-and-linux/). I got a bit angry at Ubuntu/avahi/CUPS/Apple regarding some silliness involving the APIs that are used by CUPS internally for DNSSD announcement (like the fact it's broken in 10.04 and 10.10 because Apple changed APIs and the new API calls weren't packaged (yet?)). So after I finished ranting to myself I created the service file and boom, I could print from my iPhone.

Josh Wright today contributed a Python3 branch of the API. I've pushed this to the repo and cherry picked a few of the commits that apply to master as well. I've also created a github repo that will serve as the main access point for the repo from here on out. Please if you have issues, file them. Also you hopefully will find the examples useful, I'll be moving those over to the wiki as well. If you want to contribute please don't hesitate, Josh already identified the need for unit tests. Thanks to Linode for being a great resource, and thanks to everyone who has used and/or contributed to the bindings!

I've updated the python bindings to support the new Linode StackScripts method calls. An excellent feature to aid in the deployment of your new nodes. The documentation is also up to date, albeit in need of some verbosity. You can browse the source at my gitweb, or as usual you can access the source directly with git git clone git://github.com/tjfontaine/linode-python.git