So I recently started trying to buy Kindle books rather than paper books. The reason for this is two-fold: I don’t have space to buy and keep books as we’re living overseas in a small apartment. I buy a lot of books I just want to read but not keep. Previously this meant every few months I’d cart piles of books to Powells to sell. This was/is annoying. Obviously not everything I read is available on the Kindle but a lot of it is and the other stuff I don’t mind buying because it’s low volume and I do still like the feel of paper when I’m reading.

So we’re off to Mexico for a week. Neither of us has been before and our expectations verge somewhere between roaming bands of mariarchi players and cartel gun battles. I am hopeful it’s not the latter. We’re going to fly into Oaxaca, spend a few days there, doing some things that I am as yet a little vague about but will probably involve eating and drinking lots. Then we’re going to fly to Mexico City.

Most startups operate on the practice of delivering Minimum Viable Product or MVP to customers. The MVP has the bare minimum of features needed to achieve a goal or attack a target market. You get out code, features, functionality and fixes fast to customers to demonstrate the value of your product or service. The MVP concept is awesome and I’ve become a real convert to it. You get the product to deployment, get it in the hands of customers fast and maximize the crucial return on investment of your precious investment or starting capital.

So here we are again with a new site design and a new blog engine. I discovered a while back that I had changed the way I write both professionally and for this blog. Basically I now write locally on my machine the vast majority of the time, version control everything (albeit I’ve never quite gone as far as Cory Doctorow does with Flashbake), and more and more prefer to write in something like Vim or in a Markdown-enabled simple editor like Emdee.

I introduced Bunraku earlier in the week. It was a bit POC and messy in places so I took some time to clean it up tonight and release v0.0.3. The major changes are: Added /node/detail/node_id screen that shows details from the specific run (linked as a click-thru from the specific run on main pages (see picture). Added /node/node.example.com screen that shows all runs from that node Now uses Redis hashes instead of storing JSON - The overall code has been refactored and cleaned up in a lot of places The report processor is much cleaned up and simpler to understand The unfortunate piece is that to upgrade you’ll need to flush your existing Redis data (I promise I won’t do this to you again … the refactor to make this a lot better involved me slapping my head at my previously stupid approach) and start again.