Writing Near Hills » Texas

Most people are not hipsters

Bill Sullivan — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:12:29 +0000

Ed Wendler Jr., a developer, noted that most apartment and condominium units are smaller than most families prefer. And influential neighborhood activists, worried about bearing the brunt of growth, could make even those difficult to build along the city-core thoroughfares such as North Lamar Boulevard, South Congress Avenue and Springdale Road, as envisioned in the plan.

That would leave the city’s fringes as the logical place for most growth to happen, Wendler said.

“Families will not stop wanting that lifestyle,” he said. “All (Imagine Austin) is going to do is push families out to Round Rock, Pflugerville, Manor, Kyle, Buda or the unincorporated areas around Austin. There is a lot of reality that will get in the way of this vision.”

- New Austin blueprint envisions new direction for growth

Most folks are still looking for a suburban style place to live. Frankly, even my neighborhood in central Austin is in some ways less dense than the Boston suburb I grew up in which was 20+ miles from downtown. If Austin is going to try to stop suburban style growth and encourage more “urban” development, then San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston should send the Austin city government a thank you note. You can’t make people want condos, townhouses, and apartments just because that’s the only housing you’ll allow to be built. Folks can always move somewhere else.

Another person leaving Austin

Bill Sullivan — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:10:37 +0000

Amelia Gray is an interesting writer. She lives in Austin, but is leaving town at the end of the month. Why?

“Austin is like the oasis in zombie movies.”

There’s more to it, of course. The overall unreality of life in Austin (and also the heat) over time wears on smarter people, it seems. I know it wears on me. I’ve seen a lot of very capable programmers leave town in the three years we’ve been here and I don’t expect the outward flow to stop. Austin is a small town and has a lot to offer, especially if you like to have mindless fun. Over time, though, ambition is a liability here and the ambitious seem to recognize that.

Lightening my school load

Bill Sullivan — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:30:28 +0000

In the CS department at UT, we have lots of servers we can log into to do our work. Each machine’s load is listed on a public website, so we can make sure we log into a machine with some capacity to spare. The routine is check the page, pick a machine, and ssh into it.

Checking a webpage when what I want to do is ssh into a server is kind of a bummer, so I wrote up a quick ruby script to grab that status page, nokogiri it up, sort the 32-bit servers, and then send me on my way. I assume that at some point the script will stop working and I’ll have to do a better job, but in the meantime I’ll enjoy not touching a browser when I do my school work.

#! /usr/bin/env ruby

# This script is pretty fragile in that it will break if the UTCS
# lab status page changes its HTML in a fairly small way. So far,
# it works great.

# It requires nokogiri (gem install nokogiri).

# I have my user name set automatically with my ssh-config file, so
# it doesn't figure into the ssh command below. Later, I might either 
# add some code for a -X flag with ssh, or maybe just switch to that 
# overall.

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://apps.cs.utexas.edu/unixlabstatus/'))

lines = doc.css('td.ruptime')

machines = Array.new

i = 6

while i+4 <= lines.length
  if lines[i].content == "Public Linux Workstations - 64-bit"
    i = i + 6000
  end
  if lines[i+1].content == "up"
    this_machine_name = lines[i].content
    this_machine_load = lines[i+4].content
    this_machine_data = Array[this_machine_name, this_machine_load]
    machines << this_machine_data
  end
  i = i+5
end

machines = machines.sort_by { |e| e[1] }

puts machines[0][0] + " has a load of " + machines[0][1]

exec "ssh " + machines[0][0] + ".cs.utexas.edu"

Wisdom from The Omelettry

Bill Sullivan — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:07:50 +0000

From the menu at The Omelettry.

Hello SXSW

Bill Sullivan — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:29:16 +0000

We grabbed our badges this morning and we’ll be hitting the first parties tonight. SXSW has begun!

The Fallingwater Project

Bill Sullivan — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 04:17:56 +0000

We felt jealous of Ted, so Kari and I are putting together a Fallingwater LEGO set. I’m going to take a picture after each session we work on it.

Back To School

Bill Sullivan — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:24:22 +0000

This past January, I started college again. It’s been going really well, but it takes time away from posting here.

Rivers are made of rain…

Bill Sullivan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:05:35 +0000

…at least in Hyde Park. Usually, our river bed is very dry and is missing, well, a river. But, we’ve had so much rain lately, we currently have an actual running river. It really makes the neighborhood that much nicer.

It's rained so much, we actually have a running river.

A Nerdy First Trip to Dallas

Bill Sullivan — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:18:23 +0000

Next weekend, Kari and I are making our first trip to Dallas, and it’s going to be nerdy. We have, at this point, driven around Dallas on I-35 three times, but we’ve never been through the city itself and we certainly haven’t stopped there. This time, we are specifically targeting the city, and we’ve got three great events planned.

Our first task is to attend the Facebook Developer Garage – Dallas, which is being held in fairly-central Dallas. This will be exciting, as it might be the first developer gathering for a platform I already develop on. There seems to be two tracks, technical and marketing, and I’ll be in the tech track. The business side of Facebook development seems straightforward enough, but technology can usually use additional explanation.Another fun aspect of this event will be getting a chance to see central Dallas. The DFW metro area is pretty spread out and nothing else on this trip will be eve slightly central, so spending some time near downtown should be worthwhile.

On Saturday and Sunday, we’ll be attending WordCamp Dallas 2009 at UT-Dallas. Obviously, WordPress is a platform I use, but I’m not really doing any development with it. Hopefully, this event will help me move from user to developer, even if all I manage to do is tweak a theme or something similar. Also, it seems like there are few, if any, WordCamps in Austin, so I’m hoping this event will pull in more Austin WordPressers than Kari and I. When we get back, I hope to attend some more WordPress events here in Austin and I hope to have met a few people involved in the WordPress meetups around here.

On Sunday night, as we leave Dallas, we’re going to see the Texas Rangers host the San Diego Padres in Arlington, TX. We’ve never been to this ballpark, and it is a minor obsession of ours to visit new ballparks (we’ve only visited one this season, and it was Tulsa’s minor league team’s stadium)[update: Kari pointed out to me after this was posted that we also visited the Portland, OR minor league ballpark this summer], so this is a great way to finish up the trip. This last stop, I guess, isn’t very nerdy, but at least we approach it in a very nerdy way.

Letters To Cleo Lives!

Bill Sullivan — Sun, 24 May 2009 23:36:13 +0000

Letters To Cleo live at The Parish in Austin

After about 14 years since the last time I saw them, I got to see Letters To Cleo last Friday. That’s almost half my lifetime, which has got to be a record for time between shows for me, probably never to be broken. I’m hoping they head out on more frequent reunion tours for the next few decades, as I’d be happy to see them every few years for the rest of my life.

We also got a great picture with Kay Hanley and a signed poster for the show. I feel like every show we see in Austin is better than the last, and Letters was no exception.