I’ve started the habit of opening up a devlog post each morning and just filling it up as I go along. Let’s hope I can keep this up :)

• Merged a couple of Android patches. The app is getting better every day without too much involvement from me, and yay for that :) I’ve gotten closure over the Android app – it was fucking terrible, and now it is quite awesome. Need to write another post about that.
• Fixed annoying bug with mysql connections being reset in Quarry’s query runners after a few hours. I had fixed this earlier when I was using pymysql directly with reconnect(ping=True), and assumed that switching to SQLAlchemy would’ve fixed it for me automagically. Apparently not. MySQL Y U SO BAD?
• I have sudo access on labmon1001 in prod! First Wikimedia production cluster machine I have root on, and will spend time over the next few weeks setting it up to run graphite. Should be fun!
• Getting slightly better at packaging python things. Packaged python-txstatsd with no lintian errors, and only a couple warnings :)

Devlogs again! Let’s see how long I can keep this one up.

Been a whirlwind few months. I’m moving to the Wikimedia Ops team soon! The Wikipedia app has been released! Lots of excitement around, should do a bigger post sometime with details. This should just follow usual devlog format of stuff for the day

• Completed deployment of changing the results backend of Quarry to SQLite. That was a fun exercise, and I should write about that separately. Still have some unicode issues left (mostly from the MySQL side) that I’ve hacked around for now.
• Quarry now uses a cron based query killer instead of relying on Celery. The day before I had force killed the celery deamons and this meant the query kill tasks didn’t run, leaving zombie queries behind. The simpler cron based killer won’t have this issue, since it’s super simple and does only one thing. The only reason I didn’t do this before was that I had not known about SHOW PROCESSLIST before (yes, I suck). It seems to be working fine now, but doesn’t kill superseeded queries immediately. Should be interesting to figure out how to get that done properly.
• I’ve started trying out Atom again. My previous attempt ended quickly when I ran into a bug which didn’t wrap text at all. A restart seems to have fixed that. The Vim keybindings are ‘ok’ – there’s no hlsearch, which is painful, but I can live with it. I prefer the fuzzy finder in it to Ctrl-P in Vim.
• Started working on making labs monitoring with graphite possible again. Our graphite / txstatsd roles weren’t meant to be run on trusty, so working on porting things to make sure they work fine on both. I’ve immensely come to appreciate ops over the last year or so, and am quite enjoying my work in that area :) I’ll probably be doing more of these over the next week, since Quarry has reached a nice state now and I await more usage before I spend more time on it.
• Also did some code review on the Android app. It’s been chugging along quite happily these days :)
• Ran into a awake-when-he-should-not-have been Oliver Keyes and we have conspired to start some researchy things. I cleaned up some of the python code, and am writing out things to do. This should be fun!

This is a best effort translation of the song ‘Clubbule Mabbule‘ (Drunk in a Club) from Tamil to English.

(Come on, I smoke, I drink, I'm in a live in relationship)

Fuck, get lost. This is modern culture, eh? If you call this westernization modern culture, then this song is dedicated right for you. Hip hop tamizha, your Aaadheeee.

Women roaming around drunk in clubs What the fuck is happening in Tamil Nadu I salute you all All your honor is flying away

Women roaming around drunk in clubs What the fuck is happening in Tamil Nadu I salute you all All your honor is flying away

Hi girls, first you say ‘how are you?’ After knowing me for 10 months you say ‘Who are you?’ Just three words ‘I love you’ Don’t you even know the meaning of that?

Hey Sheena, Leena, Meena, Veena, Don’t show off as knowing only little bits of tamil with a foreign accent, If you leave Tamil Nadu and go out, does not mean you have to forget your mother tongue Tamil

Rohini, Yohini, Yamini, Kamini, Think they are hot but are actually funny, Don’t blame men pointlessly, (He is looking at me only!) Why do you do this?

Women roaming around drunk in clubs What the fuck is happening in Tamil Nadu I salute you all All your honor is flying away

Women roaming around drunk in clubs What the fuck is happening in Tamil Nadu I salute you all All your honor is flying away

I’m not blaming all women, The deity who gave birth to me is also a woman. All the guys come to my side, or these girls will spoil you as well

Of 100, 50 are like these, Roaming around clubs drinking and smoking, From the time when women cooked nice food, OH MY GOD NOW THEY ARE SMOOKING GANJA WHAT A SHAME

Women roaming around drunk in clubs What the fuck is happening in Tamil Nadu I salute you all All your honor is flying away

Women roaming around drunk in clubs What the fuck is happening in Tamil Nadu I salute you all All your honor is flying away

Pretty woman, with pretty eyes BUT SHE HAS ONE BOTTLE OF RUM!

Pretty woman, with pretty eyes, BUT WITH RUM SHE HAS HALF A PACK OF CIGARETTES

Pretty fairy, I don’t need you, You are dancing heavily drunk.

Gone are the times when women wore jewellery, Now they keep smoking everywhere. Instead of wearing sarees, THEY ARE WEARING HANDKERCHEIFS!

Women roaming around drunk in clubs What the fuck is happening in Tamil Nadu I salute you all All your honor is flying away

Women roaming around drunk in clubs What the fuck is happening in Tamil Nadu I salute you all All your honor is flying away

Gone are the times when women wore jewellery, Now they keep smoking everywhere. Instead of wearing sarees, THEY ARE WEARING HANDKERCHEIFS! THEY ARE WEARING HANDKERCHEIFS! (Shows handkerchief for emphasis)

As far as I know, this is not satire.

In Welcome to the Machine there is a line that goes “provided with toys and scouting for boys”. I had initially assumed that it was referring to a young guy who is gay and is ‘scouting for boys’.

And then a few days later I realized that it is talking about ‘the book‘. That is now doubly funny because of the Boy Scouts’ attitude towards gays

Another nice, one off Discworld book. Nice bits about how Gods are created by us, and need us more than the other way around. The philosophers are incredibly funny wherever they turn up too. The Desert after you Die bit was… beautiful – Judgement happens, but by yourself. Fun digs at governments and organized religion throughout made it rather enjoyable :)

4/5

Finished that yesterday. Fun digs at war, and fun digs at people (literally) stuck in a paste despite being in the present. The bit with the Greek philosophers was also nice. No memorable recurring characters, however.

3/5

Pro Git is a nice book I recommend to newbies – yet I hadn’t fully read it once. I decided to do so, and I think it was reasonably useful. Most of the stuff in here I already knew, and the treatment of the stuff I did not (Git Internals, mostly) wasn’t deep enough to be useful. Nevertheless, reinforced some useful concepts in my head and probably gave me enough strong foundations for when I decide to dive into the actual internals of git more (probably by reading the source code?). Also looked very newbie friendly, so I’ll continue recommending this to people who want to learn about Git.

I’ve been reading a lot over the last few months (Discworld + Foundation gives me about 24 books in the last 3 months), and figured I’d extend that for the next year with a little more underlying planning. So along with Bala, Arun & Surya, I’ll try to read a hundred books this year, and also do a blog post each about them.

Hogfather is the 21st book in the Discworld series I’ve read. Rather wonderful commentary on rampant consumerization of… everything, incredibly well placed (and funny!) ELIZA references and an undercurrent of ‘importance of belief’. The God of Hangovers was a nice touch.

4/5.

Contains a list of Discworld Novels. Am reading them all, and will cross them out here as I finish each. Number of books currently finished: 24 (as of 16 Jan 2014)

• The Colour of Magic (1983) (Rincewind)
• The Light Fantastic (1986) (Rincewind)
• Equal Rites (1987) (Witches)
• Mort (1987) (Death)
• Sourcery (1988) (Rincewind)
• Wyrd Sisters (1988) (Witches)
• Pyramids (1989) (One-off)
• Guards! Guards! (1989) (City Watch)
• Eric (1990) (Rincewind)
• Moving Pictures (1990) (One-off)
• Reaper Man (1991) (Death)
• Witches Abroad (1991) (Witches)
• Small Gods (1992) (One-off)
• Lords and Ladies (1992) (Witches)
• Troll Bridge (1992) (Short story)
• Men at Arms (1993) (City Watch)
• Theatre of Cruelty (1993) (Short story)
• Soul Music (1994) (Death)
• Interesting Times (1994) (Rincewind)
• The Discworld Companion (1994) (Companion)
• Maskerade (1995) (Witches)
• Feet of Clay (1996) (City Watch)
• Hogfather (1996) (Death)
• Jingo (1997) (City Watch)
• The Unseen University Diary (1998) (Diary)
• The Last Continent (1998) (Rincewind)
• Carpe Jugulum (1998) (Witches)
• The Sea and Little Fishes (1998) (Short story)
• The Ankh-Morpork City Watch Diary (1999) (Diary)
• The Fifth Elephant (1999) (City Watch)
• The Science of Discworld (1999) (Science)
• Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook (1999) (Recipes)
• The Assassins’ Guild Yearbook and Diary (2000)
• The Truth (2000) (One-off)
• The Fools’ Guild Yearbook and Diary (2001) (Diary)
• Thief of Time (2001) (Death)
• The Last Hero (2001) (Rincewind, although this is debatable)
• The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (2001) (One-off, children’s)
• The Thieves’ Guild Yearbook and Diary (2002) (Diary)
• Night Watch (2002) (City Watch)
• Death and What Comes Next (2002) (Short story)
• The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (2002)(Science)
• The Wyrdest Link (2002) (Quizbook)
• The (Reformed) Vampyre’s Diary (2003) (Diary)
• The Wee Free Men (2003) (Wee Free Men)
• The New Discworld Companion (2003) (Companion)
• Monstrous Regiment (2003) (One-off)
• A Hat Full of Sky (2004) (Wee Free Men)
• Going Postal (2004) (Post Office)
• Once More* *With Footnotes (2004) (Compilation of short works)
• The Discworld Almanack (2005) (Almanack)
• Thud! (2005) (City Watch)
• Where’s My Cow? (2005) (Picture Book)
• The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch (2005) (Science)
• Wintersmith (2006) (Wee Free Men)
• The Post Office Diary (2007) (Diary)
• Making Money (2007) (Post Office)
• Unseen Academicals (2009) (The Wizards, Rincewind)
• I Shall Wear Midnight (2010) (Wee Free Men)
• Snuff (2011) (City Watch / Sam Vimes)
• Raising Steam (2013) (Post office)

You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although ‘synergistically’ had probably been a whore from the start Going Postal, Terry Prachett