Tonight Rachel and I met up with Shane and Alli, who are visiting from Kansas City, for a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and some of the most famous pizza in all of NYC.

Rachel and I walked across the bridge when we were here visiting before our move, but this was the first time we walked across the bridge at night.

We ate pizza at a place called Grimaldis and the pizza was amazing. The first bite brought a smile to my face. We will definitely be taking anyone that visits us here for at least one meal.

After dinner we walked around DUMBO a bit then parted ways.

On the way home, Rachel and I decided we had to have a little desert so we went to the chocolate room and split fondue.

We are now home, unwinding, and getting ready for tommorrow.

Over the last couple months I have been exploring non-relational data stores. It began when I started playing around with Google App Engine and really took hold when I read an interesting paper on Facebook’s open sourced database, Cassandra.

After some experimentation and more reading, I think I like the concept. Non-relational databases are schema-less, which means you can store whatever data you want in each document, and storing your data in documents makes it very easy to throw memcached on top of the datastore.

In trying to find the right database for my needs I tried a few different packages:

Google App Engine Datastore Google gets a lot of credit for starting this movement with their introduction of BigTable. Accessing this datastore through GAE is extremely simple and since it GAE is a hosted service there is nothing to install.

Tokyo Cabinet Tokyo Cabinet is extremely easy to setup and use. TC is not really a server, but rather a library of routines that access a local database file. It didn’t have as many querying options as a few of the others that I encountered so I didn’t do too much with it. If you do need this as a server, there is Tokyo Tyrant.

CouchDB CouchDB was pretty easy to install and fairly easy to use. There is also an excellent admin UI and a pretty cool rest api that allows you to build some impressive apps without much code. Querying is pretty advanced, but it relies on you writing your own MapReduce javascript functions.

MongoDB MongoDB has been my favorite so far. It has some pretty nice querying abilities and some good client libraries. I haven’t built anything big with it yet, but I think this will be my data store of choice.

I wrote about vi the other day as a tool I am quickly finding I can’t live without. Screen is a development tool that I use everyday and have known for quite a while that I can’t survive without.

From the GNU website, screen is:

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.

and a little later:

When screen is called, it creates a single window with a shell in it (or the specified command) and then gets out of your way so that you can use the program as you normally would. Then, at any time, you can create new (full-screen) windows with other programs in them (including more shells), kill the current window, view a list of the active windows, turn output logging on and off, copy text between windows, view the scrollback history, switch between windows, etc.

Essentially that means it is a program that emulates as many terminals as you would like in just one terminal. I love screen because I can set up my full environment and then keep it that way for months or years at a time. Everyday when I get into work, I fire up screen and everything is just where I left it the night before.

Before starting up screen, you need to make sure you have a good ~/.screenrc file. I am not really sure where I stole this one from, but this is the one I use:

vbell on
nethack on 
autodetach on
startup_message off
pow_detach_msg "Screen session of \$LOGNAME \$:cr:\$:nl:ended."
shell -$SHELL
defscrollback 1200
msgminwait 3
hardstatus alwayslastline "%{.cb}%-W%{.rW}%50L> %n %t%{-}%+W%L<%-37=%{+b}%{.bc} %D %Y-%m-%d %{.bY}%c%{-b} %{.bc}%l "

I really am not sure what all those options do, but the one I care most about is the last line. That option places a fixed status line at the bottom of the screen. It numbers all your screens and also provides a few system stats.

To fire up screen I use:

screen -D -RR

There are a lot of different options for screen, and I definitely don’t know them all, but these options reattach to my previous screen. Once reattached I am taken back to exactly where I last left off. In the screenshot above I have three screen windows,

• the first window (#0) I use for both editing swap-bot code and using svn
• the second window (#1) I use to quickly switch to the database
• the third window (#2) I use to continuously keep a tail of my apache logs running

Without screen I could either open up three different connections to the remote server and cycle through the windows as needed or just have one window open and cycle through the programs I need by typing the command each time.

To effectively use screen, you only need to know a few commands.

• <C-a> 0 s takes you to window 0. Any number 0-9 will work.
• <C-a> <C-a> – takes you back to your last window.
• <C-a> A – allows you to name the current window
• <C-a> ‘ – lets you type either the number or name (partial name works too) of the window to switch to
• <C-a> esc – puts you in the dungeon (not sure why they call it that) and you can scroll back through previous lines using the arrow keys or <C-b> (back) and <C-f> (forward)
• <C-a> ? – shows you the help where you can learn all the commands

And that is all it takes to become let screen help you become more efficient.

One of the biggest changes in my daily life since moving to Brooklyn has been my commute. Everyday I take the R or M train – I get on whichever comes first – at Union St., take it to Pacific Ave. and switch to the D train. Two stops later I am dropped off about a block from my office. Waiting for the D at Atlantic usually only takes about 2-3 minutes. From door to door, on a good day, I can get to the office in less than 30 minutes. If I get really unlucky with the trains it could take up to 45 minutes.

Since we are so close to Manhattan, the train is pretty full by the time it gets to me. All the seats are taken, so I have to stand. Luckily, the first train ride is only about 3 minutes and then the second is only about 10 minutes.

Previously, an hourly daily commute would have been spent in traffic in a car. Now I get to read my Kindle for most of that hour a day. I really enjoy my commute and feel like I am being productive to and from work each day.