Today Amtrak resumes full operation of the Hoosier State, ending an 18-month experiment in which Iowa Pacific proved rolling stock and on-board services. I had an opportunity to take this unusual train in June 2016 while on a business trip to Indianapolis. What follows are my notes on the experience.

Aboard the Hoosier State

We’ve just wrapped up the CLAMP’s Hack/Doc Fest at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. You can read Ken Newquist’s daily updates to see how the conference went, including all the gory details on the updated annotation in Moodle 3.1. Short version: it needs love. I’d like to talk about a most unusual aspect of the conference: Amtrak and Iowa Pacific’s Hoosier State, which runs between Chicago and Indianapolis.

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Or, I reconsider the Lake Shore Limited yet again, and find a use for it.

A frequent complaint about Amtrak service is that “you can’t get there from here,” and it’s a fair criticism. As a Michigan expatriate living on the East Coast I’m sensitive to these limitations. Michigan itself has comparatively good service: three Wolverines to Detroit/Pontiac, the Blue Water to Lansing and Port Huron, and the Pere Marquette to Grand Rapids. Unfortunately for me all three services pivot on Chicago. Coming from the East Coast, I’m facing hours of layovers and backtracking.

As an alternative, Amtrak offers a Thruway Motorcoach connection at Toledo to various destinations in Michigan. Thruway Motorcoachs are contracted buses which you can book with trains to help get you closer to your final destination. I’d resisted this option for years because of the timings in Toledo and general uncertainty about the whole enterprise. After a positive experience with an Amtrak bus in Florida in 2014 and a growing desire to avoid driving on I-80, I decided to take the plunge.

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Last December I went down to Philadelphia for WordCamp US 2016. Met some great people, heard some great talks, overall had a good time. Holding the after party at the Academy of Natural Sciences was a genius move.

Sitting at Lisa Yoder’s talk on Version Control Your Life: Alternate Uses For Git inspired me to try taking notes in Markdown (versioned in git) instead of Evernote. I’m trying to move away from Evernote anyway and it made perfect sense. I’m always working on the command line; I always have Typora open as scratch-space.

I ran into an immediate (and silly) snag. All the WCUS sessions are titled “This Is The Name Of My Awesome Talk”. That’s a bad filename if you’re working on the command line. Ideally I want my notes on that talk to be called “this-is-the-name-of-my-awesome-talk.md”. Manually typing all that is boring, and I’m lazy. Better way? Better way.

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• John le Carré_, The Secret Pilgrim_. A semi-sequel to The Russia House, consisting of the reminisces of Ned at the end of his career. Fascinating and absorbing.
• John R. Schindler_, Fall of the Double Eagle: The Battle for Galicia and the Demise of Austria-Hungary_. An account of the Battle of Galicia, the opening collision between Russia and Austria-Hungary in World War I. It’s always refreshing to read an account of Austria-Hungary which doesn’t place it in the shadow of the German Empire. I’m familiar with the subject but Schindler’s treatment of the ethnic issues in the military is fresh.
• Tim Hadley_, Military Diplomacy in the Dual Alliance: German Military Attaché Reporting from Vienna, 1879–1914_. I heard Hadley give a talk on this subject at the German Studies Association conference in Pittsburgh way back in 2006. The premise is that there was a disconnect between the reporting of German military attachés in Vienna and German strategic planning. This book is the outgrowth of that talk, and I can’t wait to read it.

Following on with running Nextcloud, I decided to play around with Nextcloud. This is very much a work in progress, with all my failures and blind alleys lovingly detailed. Note: some guides refer to both ownCloud and Nextcloud almost interchangeably. Nextcloud is a fork of ownCloud; technologically they’re very close. The Nextcloud desktop client is a themed fork of ownCloud’s and they’re compatible with the other’s servers.

Web application

At its core Nextcloud is a PHP application; setting those up isn’t complicated and there’s a good guide for doing so on a Raspberry Pi. I broke with it and opted for PHP 7 over for performance reasons. I used part of Andy Miller’s guide for that (ignoring the Nginx stuff) but I found I needed more PHP modules:

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I’ve been running Plex on a Synology NAS for the last year, with a Google Chromecast handling display. It’s worked well enough, but my DS 216 struggles at times to keep up with the movie (I’m not transcoding; that would never work). I decided to get into the Raspberry Pi game and build a Plex server on it, while keeping my media on the NAS. These are my notes on setup.

Image

I’m comfortable in Debian so I started with a stock Raspbian image on a 32 GB SD card. I used Etcher on OSX for this and didn’t encounter problems. I’d say it took 8-10 minutes.

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Due to circumstances beyond my control I found myself on a flight to LaGuardia (LGA) the other day, but needing to get back to Newark Liberty (EWR) to retrieve my car. LGA was terra incognita to me but I knew that crossing Manhattan via to reach New Jersey is a fool’s errand. I decided against the various van shuttles and used public transport. The only thing I knew about LGA going in is that it has no direct subway service, although it has been proposed. In the end, I used a combination of a bus, a subway, a train, and a people mover. On a good day it’ll take you an hour and 45 minutes and cost $15.

Bus

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Sometimes I joke that I do web development to support my railfanning habit. It’s not entirely true, but it’s always pleasant when the two intersect.

I’m a Trains subscriber. Trains is a monthly publication which serves both those who actually work in the railroad industry and enthusiasts (railfans) like me. Beyond the monthly print publication (which I get electronically, but never mind), Trains publishes a daily news feed called News Wire. There’s lots of good information here on the various comings and goings in the industry, though US-centric.

I use Zotero to index information for research projects–mostly railroading, but other topics as well. There’s an extension for Chrome, Zotero Connector, which lets you import web content directly into Zotero, saving a lot of manual entry. Many publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post are natively supported. When one isn’t, Zotero makes a best guess based on page structure and metadata. How well that works depends on how well-formed the page here.

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I’ve been building a CI/deployment stack with GitLab CI, Docker, and Capistrano. I’m hoping to give a talk on this in the near future, but I wanted to add a brief note on a problem I solved using SSH agent forwarding in Docker in case anyone else runs into it.

In brief, I have code flowing like this:

1. Push from local development environment to GitLab
2. GitLab CI spins up a Docker container running Capistrano
3. Capistrano deploys code to my staging environment via SSH

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Today at WordCamp Lancaster Ryan Duff gave a talk on “Choosing WordPress Themes And Plugins: A Guide To Making Good Decisions.” It jogged my mind about an incident on the WordPress.org plugins database I observed last year. This incident, though minor, illustrates the significant limitations with that place.

Two years ago–to the day–I called the WordPress.org plugins database a swamp and I stand by that. Ryan noted that there’s no canonical right way to select plugins and themes. You have to mitigate risk as much as possible. That means you have to look at a plugin in the round. WordPress.org gives you some tools for that: ratings, reviews, installation base, support forums. You can evaluate the social credit of the developer. You can review the code yourself, if you’re so inclined and have the technical background.

Here at Lafayette we use a plugin called Category Posts Widget. It’s pretty simple: it creates a widget which will display recent posts from a given category. Its original author released version 3.3 in August 2011 and then never updated it again. We’d been running it since 2010 or earlier. If we’d stumbled on it 2013 we’d have seen it was outdated and passed, but if a plugin keeps working you never really notice it’s been abandoned unless you have a regular review process (which we don’t).

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