orware

Thanks for the reply, I'll look into putting in an official issue request for it in [2] you shared but just to add on a bit...on our end we're really not developer oriented at all (I've put up a VisualSVN server quite a few years back and then put up a Gogs server about 3 years ago) and I'm pretty much the only person that uses it.

Our CS offerings are pretty minimal so even though I would love to see usage expanded there as well (teaching/using Git for instruction) the reality is it would be lucky if 50 students made use of Git during a given schoolyear since the offerings are that limited right now (and we don't generally get a lot of signups for those classes). It'd be awesome to expand our program and also create some sort of tie-in with Silicon Valley companies somehow (we're a community college in Southern California in a rural community so job opportunities for tech locally are really slim...so unless we built some sort of partnership for remote opportunities where people could stay local and have a good remote job people basically have to leave to other communities in different parts of the state to get work).

So going back to the staff side...I'm just trying to get our own IT staff onboard with using Git and hopefully start integrating more DevOps type things into our workflow, but it's difficult when you don't have the right tools available (or there's a pretty big cost to them). For example, I love the idea of us starting to create private containers but we need a container registry to do that and that's something GitLab could help us out with. The other main thing is the issue boards which I think we'd be able to make good use out of as well, but can't really test out those ideas at the present moment easily.

For Confluence, I don't have a ton of experience with it...the main thing is that at least one of the other community colleges that's a bit of a tech leader in the state is using it for their documentation stuff and the state's CCC Tech Center is using it too so that makes folks think it's the best solution to try out. To be honest right now though we're not doing a great job on documentation currently, even though we have a lot of other "low-hanging fruit" type options to be able to try out and just document things currently if we really wanted to do so (so what I'm saying here is that I don't think getting/implementing Confluence would actually solve our documentation issues here...but it would be nice if GitLab had a piece that you could point at as equivalent to Confluence that way people could be more comfortable with using it as a whole solution, rather than looking at that one capability as "missing" and discarding the entire solution because of it).

A response shared by the other college using it mentioned the following use cases that they used Confluence for:

- Team Project Sites District-wide (new and ongoing software implementations) - “Bookshelf” Searchable district-wide software documentation library (Banner, Onbase, DegreeWorks, Argos, etc.) - Technology “Knowledge Base” – district-wide searchable problem/resolution, FAQ - District IT Policies and Documentation - Development Team Private Documentation (Banner, Onbase, DegreeWorks, Argos, etc.) - Operations IT Team Private Documentation - And more!

In terms of web application development, I'm the only staff member really doing that currently...pretty much all the rest of our "development" work consists of our analysts writing database queries, with the occasional database view/procedure being written, but that's the team that I'd like to have to start using version control a bit.

Our Ops side of the house still needs a lot of work to get into the "DevOps" mindset, and I've been limited in the stuff that I can try out and experiment with as well (e.g. I've wanted to experiment more with Docker, but since we're a Hyper-V shop primarily understanding Microsoft's support of Docker has taken some time...plus moving into production is another stage, etc. and I basically have to sort out those new approaches on my own).

Congrats on the new release!

Since GitLab for Education was announced I've been trying to get our college signed up for it, but it's been difficult so I was hoping I might be able to share some GitLab for Education Requests:

Working in a community college it's been really tricky to get the agreement signed for us to take advantage of this at all (that's more of an issue with the way we work in particular, but I just wanted to throw it out there that it would be nice if we could sign up for the licenses completely online without needing to wait and get an agreement signed because for example our president doesn't want to do an esignature so that means sending it over to their office for signature, waiting a long while, getting it back, and then finding out our deadline passed and haven't to try it all over again so if that process could be changed, or better yet removed, that would be great).

Related to the GitLab for Education license limitations...I originally though the Education licensing would cover usage for our IT Department staff as well, but it definitely seems to be limited to just Faculty/Staff type usage which ends up being a bummer for us since now I can't promote it anymore internally with us a free option we can sign up for anymore and other ideas I was potentially thinking of (the Group Issue Boards seemed like it could potentially be a nice way to organize Kanban Boards across the college and make it so that staff from other areas outside of IT could make use of Kanban Boards too...we've been using Kanboard inside of IT for a few years now, but haven't made a strong push to have other departments use it). In terms of affordability, that would limit us to licensing GitLab primarily for IT stuff only + for 10 users that's already going to be a pretty big cost for our small college / IT department.

Lastly, I know there's Wiki functionality and GitLab Pages already and that can be used for documentation to a degree, but is there any work towards building/including some sort of Confluence alternative into GitLab as well?

Right now we'd like start using some sort of nice, comprehensive documentation option, but I'm not really sold on Confluence at the moment. Admittedly, right now with the info about us needing to license GitLab for our IT department staff as well being fairly new to me that's thrown the whole idea of using GitLab out the window (almost), but the lack of a Confluence option built-in to GitLab would be another potential blocker for us (I do like the idea of having everything all under one system if possible to simplify usage for us).

tldr: If you can make edu licensing completely free (for staff too) and simple to use/signup for (without an agreement needing to be signed), plus add a Confluence alternative that would be awesome!

While there's still some features we'd like the software to have, running Metabase for the past 2 years or so on our campus has been really straightforward (I love that I can just deploy the JAR directly, rather than having to fiddle with Tomcat separately).

Maybe this new funding is part of the reason why we haven't seen a new Metabase release since early December ;-). I sincerely hope that the open source-ness of the solution doesn't go anywhere as they seek to monetize the product further.

In the places where our Research department has shared the few dashboards we've created in the system so far at conferences or with others here on campus we've gotten positive responses and it sounds like we're hoping to ditch our iDashboards software (which hasn't been used much at all...even with paying a $10k+ license renewal fee each year) and start using Metabase solely moving forward.

Good luck to the team and I hope they can continue making Metabase into an even better product!

The Buffalo Web Framework for Golang: https://github.com/gobuffalo/buffalo

Neat site, I just signed up...hopefully I can find a neat company to do some additional work with (working for a college is great from a stability perspective, but it doesn't always force you into the most interesting of projects...so the ones I come up with I have to find time for outside of the normal day to day work stuff that comes up...hopefully if I can find a good company to do some extra work for it'll help provide an outlet for me to continue my personal growth :-).

Hi Jeremy,

I too want to say thank you, even though I have only started with the material. Your philosophy on how to teach the subject I feel will be much more useful to me than the classes I was signed up for recently (and lost interest in rather quickly). It's a lot easier to get excited about the practical things surrounding the topic which is why I'm looking forward to diving into the new content.

On a related note, one thing I do see a heavy emphasis on with the material is on the Computer Vision / Image Processing side of things which is certainly understandable considering how popular that area is specifically right now.

Something not really computer vision related though that I'm curious about (and I'm not sure if it's covered in the new/existing lessons) would be on how to craft a data set using data I might have accessible to me, but which isn't necessarily image-based, and to apply these techniques to that sort of data set to come up with predictions (I bring this up, because one of the goals I have for learning about this topic specifically is to see how I might be able to apply it back to my job at a community college and if I can pull historical data related to our students and use that for forecasting / recommendation purposes and create some useful applications our students can utilize...as a simple idea one example would be using historical data about the current student, and maybe data from other similar students, to predict success in a student's upcoming courses).

Thank you and keep up the awesome work (and for sharing it freely :-)!

Please add Oracle support when you have an opportunity (I was going to give it a quick try, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to have support for Oracle just yet and that's the primary database our internal systems run off of).

About 3 years ago now (in 2014, time flies) I had two past students who had graduated from our community college and then gone on to get their Bachelors in Computer Science who hadn't been able to find jobs after graduating and that had been maybe in 2010/2011 or so. I worked with one in the Spring and then the other during the Fall semester.

They each were very much at a beginner level so I essentially started providing them with books out of my library and having them work through those and me providing lots of feedback to them and guiding them up in their skills (starting with HTML, CSS and working up to JavaScript and modern PHP programming, with things like Composer/Packagist and new frameworks like Laravel coming into the conversations and also trying to introduce them to other needed developer skills like Git/Github that would help make them employable).

In each case they were volunteering for that semester with my small Online Services department of one (me), so my main goal was building up their skills so they could be marketable next time they started applying for positions and I wasn't trying to use them for just building things I needed to build (if anything, I spent quite a bit of one on one time with them and took them out to lunch most of the days they spent with me a few times each week).

My work at the time was a bit all over the place so I wasn't doing a ton of development myself but I had been adding in a lot of these skills too so it was good to review with them and share what I had learned which in also helped reinforce my own knowledge too.

Kind of in the middle of the semester and then toward the end I gave them a realistic mini-project or two that they could work through for the college that way they can have something to point to that they had done (one of the things I remember sharing with each of them is that in an interview it's really nice to be able to point out specific stories/scenarios/projects that you've worked on to share).

Locally those jobs are pretty rare, but luckily the first guy was able to apply for a job that had come up just a month or so after the Spring semester and get one of the good local jobs in web development. For the second guy it took a little longer, but he ended up being able to get a position in San Diego and he and his wife moved up there (his wife needed to transfer to another school for her work, but I think it at all panned out for them).

I rarely get to talk with anyone else locally about what I do, so in that way it's pretty lonely so when I do have someone locally that's interested in programming/development it's always nice to share and help them out.

It's hard to keep up on an ongoing basis since it is pretty energy intensive, but it's definitely nice/rewarding when you do have good people to mentor.

In this case do you mean the firmware being provided by Linksys for the hardware, or an additional layer of firmware embedded into the wireless hardware in some way? It actually looks like for the Velop they are using some form of OpenWRT it looks like from what I can see when I pull up the sysinfo page in the router so it makes it seem like they would have the ability to customize/tweak the buffering settings in some way (I took Georgia Tech's Networking class about two years ago now, but it was pretty neat to learn about the buffer bloat problem there in that course and how they were mentioning bigger buffers weren't necessarily better for performance).

Over the weekend I setup one of the new consumer mesh products that's available, the Linksys Velop, with 9 nodes covering a good sized area between two homes.

One thing I've been noticing though is that there is considerable latency/packet loss at the moment (there is only one wired backhaul at the primary node and all of the other nodes are connected to each other wirelessly).

I've been running Ping Plotter against to all of the nodes and there seems to be considerable packet loss (a few percent) and spikes in latency (average for the two closest nodes to my laptop is about 15 ms, the middle ones out a ways are about 30-40 ms, and the furthest ones are at about 60 ms) but the spikes can be in the hundreds or even thousands of ms.

The area covered is about a 500 ft by 120 ft rectangle more or less (with my house on the bottom left of that rectangle and the other home on the bottom right of that rectangle).

My question would be...would this BBR algorithm help in some way to reduce the latency/packet loss in a situation like this? Or does it only apply for these other situations that Google would normally be encountering/dealing with?

Thanks for the input!

I actually would love to hear more about your perspective on the crypto used in Zerotier and why it shouldn't be used for remote workers and those sorts of things.

I've been a user for quite a while and it's been really nice (and generally I've really only had trouble using Zerotier on really locked down wifi networks), but given their Technical FAQ info it sounds pretty convincing to a lay non-security-expert person that it is relatively secure: https://www.zerotier.com/tech_faq.shtml#security

As far as using it for remote workers, in comparison to how our current VPN option at work functions (currently a SonicWall Firewall/VPN) it definitely seems to work more easily/consistently so it's been something I've wanted to share so we can try out (but if there are big security issues with doing so I'm sure myself and others would love to get your thoughts on Zerotier in particular).

Thanks!

It also seems like this particular video is part of a larger (82-video) playlist on "Extreme Scale Computing" training that they did there at the Argonne National Lab (it'd be nice to be smart enough to work there :-).

Link to the full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGj2a3KTwhRb6LNVucPkw...

I believe the comment is referring to how the newer ARM CPUs in smartphones utilize small battery efficient cores for basic stuff and can ramp up to more power hungry cores for the heavy stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE

Hi Kratisto...yup I did. It appears that Teams isn't actually for our type of organization yet (since we're an EDU organization using Office 365...seems like it won't be available to us until early next year so we'll have to wait until then from the responses I received back from our Microsoft sales people over at Computer Land).

Thanks for sharing that link!

Another piece to this (for those using MySQL as their backend) is that updates to MySQL can improve things quite significantly as well.

In my work environment I"m the main MySQL user so I had setup a dedicated MySQL 5.5 server a few years ago that I hadn't upgraded to any newer versions since then (hey it wasn't broke right?). But recently I had been looking into upgrading just because it felt like it was time, but earlier this week I was checking out some performance degradation on one of our sites and noticed in my local copy it was actually running quite a bit faster.

Investigating further, it seems that in the newer versions of MySQL (in my case, my local XAMPP was running MariaDB 10.1.x) the performance has improved quite a bit, particularly for the types of queries I was running on this site (which used a number of subqueries and GROUP BY clauses).

Without any sort of application level caching making this single switch from MySQL 5.5 to MariaDB 10.1.19 improved load times from about 3.0 seconds to 1.0 seconds and I'm going to add some application level caching as well to improve things further.

This was all without switching PHP versions on this particular site (which is still using PHP 5.4.45)...just thought I'd share since sometimes the slowness isn't always improved as much just by upgrading PHP (which is something I'd like to do too for this site, but at the moment the framework I'm using on the site isn't ready for PHP 7 so it'd be quite a bit of work to switch it out).

I am the Enterprise Admin...that's what I'm confused about, since I already went through their simple 3 steps to get started video which was essentially just flipping a switch in the Office 365 Admin area. I expected it to work right away, but then couldn't see where the actual main page for Teams was, so I kept on looking and eventually found it, but even so, it didn't seem to allow me to login yet...right now I'm chalking it up to them not being fully ready for everyone to use it.

Since this was harder than you expect it to find on the main announcement page...the page you want to go to in order to actually access teams is here: https://teams.microsoft.com/

And the app downloads page is here: https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads

I'm getting an error on my end though after following their activation steps so I need to figure out why it's doing that. (Shows me "errorCode=AdminUserLicenseNotPresent" so maybe there's an extra step I have to complete that wasn't mentioned)

One other thing to add...in creating the demo I wanted to use the Shakespeare JSON data set that someone had shared at some point on here (they had shared the link).

I ended up having a bit of difficulty using it at first because it had some extra tab characters throughout the file and PHP's json_decode() function didn't quite tell me exactly where the problem was.

Other tools didn't seem to be useful either (online validators are only for small files typically and don't allow file uploads) and even Notepad++'s JSON related plugins didn't seem very helpful.

I finally ended up using the JSON Streaming package available for PHP which allowed me to run through the file and identify some of the offending lines.

Then I noticed a pattern of the tab character not being escaped in the line strings and just did a mass replace/removal of the tab characters in the file which then allowed me to create the sqlite shakespeare.db file included in the repository.

This by itself might be useful for others to use as well in their own projects :-).

Most users on HN might not be too interested in a Library such as this (and I must admit the demo page I'm linking to above probably doesn't do the best job of explaining the background or utility of such a package), but hopefully a few of you will find it interesting.

As I mention in the page, I was drawn to the issue when I noticed how much memory was being used when I pulled a large data set from one of our Oracle databases here at work and I thought to myself, "Self, is there any better options?".

My main goal with the application I'm still working on, is to create a database proxy API (so I can submit a JSON request to this PHP application with an actual SQL query, that could then prepared/sent to the Oracle database and the results returned as JSON back to the user). Lots of security-related stuff I'm working on as well to make it happen in a way that won't cause any issues for the database, but this particular subproblem related to memory usage took up a few weeks of my time as I looked into and experimented with using JSON strings directly, and then into GZIP strings (particularly because GZIP was going to be the final output in most cases with Content Negotiation).

All in all it was pretty fun to build the package and just run various performance tests so if you have any questions feel free to ask and I hope someone might be able to use this in their own projects too :-).

Enjoy!

I'm currently working on a Database Proxy API Project I cooked up (essentially creating a way I so we could query our different MySQL and Oracle databases using a RESTful API) and it makes sense for me (from the RESTful perspective) to use a GET request to send the query.

However, I know that the request body (a JSON string or a JSON array that could contain one or more queries, along with one or more different decryption keys allowing the server-side to retrieve the connection details that are encrypted on the server) could be quite long (we have some massive SQL queries that get used elsewhere and could potentially be used with this new API once it's available) and I also didn't like the idea of some of the more sensitive information being in the URL, so I decided to implement it as a POST request instead of a GET.

It feels wrong (again from the RESTful perspective since I'd like my API to be fully RESTful) but from a user point of view I know I'm making the right decision.

If anybody has better ideas though, please let me know!

I'd love to be in a position to work with/learn from someone that's been as succesful as you in building a more or less solo business.

You didn't share a whole lot regarding which area/niche you target in your eLearning business (I'm guessing that it doesn't cover a wide variety of topics, unless you're a superstar that has a whole bunch of knowledge across a wide variety of topics :-).

But if I were in your shoes and looking to expand it would probably make sense to want to try and recreate the same success as the existing eLearning products in a new niche/area so you might need to recruit someone with a different specialty that has the requisite knowledge.

Another strategy I've seen used (this was about 10 years ago when I was fresh out of college and looking into how I could make money online), mainly by folks that were selling products in the "how to make money online" category, was the cross-selling between different groups of these people. Essentially, if you had purchased from one of them, it wouldn't take too long until you started getting emails from the one you had purchased from that mentioned a product from "one of their good friends" that sounded very good too and it was difficult to pass up wanting to purchase the other products (I definitely spent way too much during this period on these sorts of things before I realized how much money I was spending and realized I really needed to tone it down). It was effective though, and was more of a collaboration between similar eLearning companies selling products in this cross-selling fashion.

From the pure employee side, it looks like ZenPayroll has changed their name to Gusto (https://gusto.com/), but I think they have a pretty good offering for a small business wanting to expand and hire employees by helping to simplify the tax parts of things for you.

You also didn't mention if you were operating as a sole proprietorship or already as some sort of safer Corporation/LLC organization, which you would want to consider doing as well to help protect yourself, particularly if you would be hiring employees.

I myself have wondered / thought about the same problem you yourself have asked here though...I've just never been successful enough to actually be able to act on it (my little software business only makes about $100/sales or so per month so not enough to hire anybody unfortunately :-). How do small companies deal with this stuff? I think in a lot of ways they deal with it by having someone that's experienced with all of the "paperwork" side of things. My uncle for example ran a small business with his son painting cars, and neither was particularly knowledgeable about any of the business side...they just knew how to paint cars. My aunt on the other hand had experience with that sort of paperwork and taking care of it so she "abstracted" that away from having to deal with it. You'd likely need someone similar to help with those sorts of things (though again, Gusto may help with quite a bit of it, at least with some of the regular stuff related to taxes if their product hasn't changed much from the ZenPayroll days).

I wish you the best of luck, and if you ever want an eager, young fellow to work with feel free to contact me (email's in my profile :-)!

Exactly this.

I live in Southern California, but not in San Diego or LA where the prevalence of some sort of other tech work might be somewhat possible. Instead I live in Imperial County (bottom right of California).

Here, all of the decent paying IT work is in the County, State, Federal jobs available in the area, but this doesn't really represent Programming/Development work very well since those are even fewer amongst these organizations.

There are no real private software companies and while I'd like to start something on my own and go full time down the road, there's still tons of gaps in how that would look, and potential financial risk.

So where I'm at right now locally is really the best place I could be in.

But...I worked at eBay in San Jose for a time and I had two coworkers, one who aws a UX guy who worked out of Austin and came into the office about once a month in San Jose, and the other was a developer who didn't want to leave Australia so they flew him in every now and again too.

I really wished at the time that they could offer something similar to me, allowing me to stay down here in Imperial County (mainly to be close to family) but still get to come up to the Bay Area and work in the office every now and again (a nice mix of both worlds).

On the one hand, I haven't gotten any job offers from any companies lately, but additionally I would have the same concern as jphillipsio...if for whatever reason the company that hired me and allowed me to work remotely decided to let me go...how easy would it be to get another remote job with another SV company? If that didn't pan out, what would be the likelihood of me getting anything remotely similar locally?

Lot of things people have to worry about in these situations. Stability isn't always important...but it definitely becomes a big factor once you have a family or other responsibilities you can't just easily stop providing for.

Thank you very much for the extra details mappu! That answers my question :-).

Are we able to take the EXE and run it on JPEGs from a Windows machine without issue? (I haven't tried it myself, but probably will using the instructions I saw on Github a moment ago and report back...it looks like it should work though): https://github.com/dropbox/lepton/releases

However I am wondering about the two different EXEs available on the page (one has an avx prefix that I need to try and figure out). If anyone has info on that that'd be useful.

I could see this potentially being useful for schools and businesses doing quite a bit of digital scanning so I'm going to try running some tests using it and some images I think we have available somewhere.

I thought the last section was pretty funny:

"Acknowledgments Though several of the ideas presented here are unique to TRIBES, others have been assimilated from other sources over countless years of reading and the authors, being too lazy to research their sources, would like to thank everyone in one sentence."

Slightly off topic, but still related to Tribes...I remember purchasing Starsiege back during this time (if I remember correctly it and the original Tribes were released around the same time, along with Half-Life).

I never played the original Earthsiege I and II titles, but Starsiege was super cool for me as a kid, and it wasn't even really because I got to pass the game (it was kind of difficult for me at that age so it probably wasn't until ten years later that I actually played it again from the beginning and passed it).

The main thing I loved about the game was the big backstory book that was included with the game that really outlined the whole thing for you and gave you a pretty cool connection with the characters (looking back it was like a mix between The Matrix and the Terminator franchises in terms of story).

I'm not a movie director but occasionally I still find myself thinking about what a cool movie it would make and wish a new game for it would be released (since the last attempt got *nixed).

Tribes was cool too, don't get me wrong, and I played a fair amount of it too (though by 26.4 kbps connection kind of hurt my online play, lol), but compared to the more story driven Starsiege, I never got into it nearly as much.

I remember reading an old Reader's Digest Medical Compendium type book in high school that I had found at a thrift store and they had this story in there. If I can find the book I'll share how they wrote it in there (but he was self-conscious about putting his head on her bosom if I remember correctly so he came up with his alternative method because of that so as not to make her feel uncomfortable).

I'm a little confused by your careers page (mainly since you mentioned PHP specifically, which seems like it would be tied to the Lead Software Developer role) but there's also a Rails Engineer position mentioned so I'm curious about which direction the team is heading (towards more Rails or more PHP?). I'm mainly curious because I'm more of a PHP developer (but interested in doing work in Ruby and Rails too).

Also, I'm currently in Georgia Tech's Online Masters in Computer Science program and am kind of curious about the Atlanta area (if you can share a little more about life in the city).

Congrats on your current successes so far :-)!

Continuing to read these articles about water shortages, particularly in the Central Valley, definitely makes me feel fortunate that the water supply for Imperial County (we're located in the bottom right of California) comes directly from Colorado and the All-American Canal and we're not as subject to the issues a lot of the rest of the state is facing (I'm sure we have our own issues, but for the most part, water isn't really something we have to worry about down here).

Additionally, a recent Opinion piece in the local paper put it quite nicely: "Valley has reason to honor National Ag Day Imperial Valley Press (El Centro, CA) - Friday, March 20, 2015

Despite the obvious presence and abundance of the Valley's agricultural commodities, their true significance can be easy to overlook. Thankfully, National Ag Day aims to correct that.

National Ag Day, which is typically commemorated in March, and this year was celebrated on Wednesday, has the commendable purpose of highlighting the contributions of the nation’s agricultural community. It dates back to 1973, when the nonprofit Agriculture Council of America launched its National Ag Day program.

We too have tried to do our part through the years to highlight the important role ag plays here as well as in the far-flung markets that it has tapped into. Luckily, there hasn't been any shortage of examples, or eye-popping statistics, that we have been able to cite in the past to emphasize the significance of Valley agriculture, or mention now in honor of National Ag Day.

One of our favorites to cite is the fact that about 95 percent of the fresh vegetables consumed in the nation are produced in Imperial County and Yuma between the months of November and March. Another rather astounding statistic is that of the nation's 3,079 counties, Imperial County ranked No. 8 in total annual agricultural production, according to the US Department of Agriculture's 2012 Census of Agriculture.

It should also be noted that in 2010, American agricultural products worth an estimated $115 billion were exported throughout the world, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Yet, no commemoration of National Ag Day is complete without noting the some of the concerns that threaten to take productive farmland offline. Whether it's unforgiving forces of nature, cumbersome regulations or development trends that increase the pressure to transfer water from rural areas to more populous metro areas. Here in the Valley, we have already heard some concern about the amount of farmland that has been converted to house renewable energy projects. Concerns such as these aren't likely to disappear, unless they are addressed in a meaningful way, which hopefully does take place.

THE ISSUE: National Ag Day

WE SAY: Be proud of local ag roots."

Growing up down here you don't usually here too much about how crazy big ag is locally, but it certainly is an interesting thing to read about and learn that your community produces so much of the nation's fresh veggies.

As another person commented in this thread though, California water rights are complicated (I just feel fortunate that for the most part I don't have to worry about how much water I'm using...especially out in the country outside city limits where I live where we only have to pay a flat fee every 6 months and get our water pumped directly out of the nearby canal).