July 2006 Archives

Now, is it just me, or do these two look like they could be brothers?

For those that don't know, the one on the left is our own local Alan Young , The one on the right is Uri Guttman . In person the two seem that they could be brothers (Probable father, Rodney Dangerfield).

In true open nature, if you are interested, a lot of the Session Slides from OSCON are posted

I still have my notes and comments to post for several session, many will relate to slides posted up here. Enjoy.
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I know I'm fully scarred now. As I sit in a discussion by a six-apart employee talking about Building an Object Relational Driver that Doesn't Suck Ben is teaching his concepts using a conceptual recipe storage database, with comments/etc.

After knowing Joe and seeing the start of his openrecipeformat , I find myself wanting to scream. yes his model is technically right, it doesn't come near to what would really be wanted.

Of course, it is a trivial design just to get the point across, but I am scarred! :)
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Audrey Tang gave an extremely interesting presentation today that turned up being a description of several amazing modules she has been working on and pushing into the Jifty framework. I had a lot of trouble describing all the things to Harley and James, so I just wanted to link to her blog, entry where she has her slides. They will explain far better than I can.

Audrey's RHOX Presentation

Things to take away:

• RHOX is a great new acronym
• CPAN the gathering
  • I want that game :)
• Great declarative tools are in Perl5 now
• Perl6 modules are more than just basic tools now, very advanced stuff
• Mini Languages are much easier now
• Audrey can freak out even seasoned Perl developers
  • ex. bless( $obj => 0); (think about that now...)
• XML::All
• Object::Declare
• Scalar::Defer
• Turn cookies into Inodes, and split your compressed, encrypted session data and keep it on the client
  • easy way to not be limited by 4k blocks
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Tuesday night is always a fun night at OSCON, and this year looked at setting new expectations for the future. The evening started off with the Presentation of the Google Open Source Recognition awards, which gave some nice money and trophies to important, yet unrecognized members of the open source world.

Following this, Larry Wall gave the annual "State of the Onion" speech, which I'm sure will be posted on Perl.com before too long. His speech this year was themed on the family, and how Perl was like a child that was just maturing out of the teenage years. While much of the speech was humorous as always, he made very valid points as to how Perl has been changing, especially as she enters the Real adult world in terms of her peers and parenting. He had a very interesting graph as to the development of the Perl6 language, and made specific points as to the state of Perl6, including just how many test cases it now passes, and how much of it will be workable by Christmas, actually right along the expected timeline (amazing).

Following Larry, the Perl Mongers gave out their White Camel awards, the first of which going to the creator of Perlcast

After the White Camels, Kathy Sierra of Passionate Users presented on Creating Passionate Users. While slightly edgy ;) her presentation had many great points about what makes any project/community/etc be more than just "not suck". She talked about the importance of making your users have a true passion, and what that would do for them, and you. I'm quite interested in reading the book she mentioned now. A coworker had just finished that and highly recommended it. Also, the best image of the night goes to Cognitive Seduction

Finalizing the night, Damian Conway gave his "Davinci Codebase" presentation. This extremely well written presentation was a humorous display that took the davinci code, and integrated more geek puns and jokes than you can imagine. The really tricky part is how he got some of the strange math and cryptography examples to work so well together, such as the reverse crypted text, that was readable, but when crypted, gave other phrases, then once again could be read in a different direction. or the prime number when 'unzipped' turned into said crypted text. gah, it was scary.

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Jesse Vincent of Best Practical along with Robert Spier of some little company called Google Presented on Extending and Embracing RT. So what is RT ? Well you could follow the link, but that would be too easy.

RT is Request Tracker, a "Ticketing System". A generic way to file a notification into a queue, and then manage it inside your corporate workflow. How you use a ticketing system varies greatly on your company, and what you need. RT is designed to be flexible enough to meet those needs.

I didn't need to take too many notes outside of the slides, but that was largely because the slides explained things very well, and I have also read the RT book , and use the program.

The slides gave a lot of extra information on tools and methodology to directly work with the insides of RT, both for using it's api's for interfacing with the data, as well as customizing the code itself.

One of the main things I pulled from this was assurances on certain features my job has been most interested in, and a knowledge that upgrading our older internal version will really give a lot of very wanted toys to certain people.

Charting and graphing is now built in, instead of needing the Statistics plugin, or your own tools (still easily available though). The entire interface has been redone, and is now XHTML strict + CSS yay, the default homepage is a user customizable page, with droplets.

RT is a system that now more than ever I heartily recommend for organizations who need to manage queues, tickets, requests, and any other name that applies to this basic management concept. It's amazing power, plentiful features, and ease of extensibility lend itself to small and large organization alike. And of course, it knocks the socks off that lame Bugzilla product :)

Tuesday morning I attended Tim Bunce's Presentation on Advanced DBI (Slides Coming Soon). I attended this presentation several years ago, and wanted to see the updated version.

Tim Bunce is the creator of DBI, the Perl Database Interface, and a great source to tell you what you need to know about DBI. I'm appending my notes to the slides here, that might pull some of my perspective to them.

The biggest highlights of the presentation to me:

• Enhanced Debug modes
  • now can provide coderef's for dispatching at debug and error levels
  • Easy ENV vars to turn on debugging
  • Easy to enhance
• Enhanced Profiling
  • Multiple levels for great verbosity
• swap_inner_handle
  • this method is a "Brain Transplant Voodoo" method
  • Will allow some magic that we want to do with automated handling for read-only slaves, and write masters (See this space later for logic when we figure it out)

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I'd better catch up. On Monday afternoon I was signed up for MJD's Higher Order Perl class. This was a very useful class, but wound up being stuff I've already heard/read. During the break I jumped over and caught the last amazing half of Damians' amazing Vim class. This one had some great tools I hadn't seen before, and is just another reason that your company should look at hiring him in for training. Even if your company doesn't even want to think about Perl, that was one of the most useful presentation's I've seen.

As for MJD's class. I really must say the content was extremely good, and his style of presentation is very nice, but it was exactly stuff I'd seen before, and what I'd read in his most excellent Higher Order Perl book. If you want to really change your view of what Perl is, or if you are a Lisp/Scheme/other functional programmer and want to see how Perl can work for you, check this book out.

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The easy way to get started. Yes, the absolute minimum, but good links to get started with.

Haskell in 5 steps

I never linked to this before, and another person here at oscon reminded me of it:

Perl 6 Periodic Table of Operators
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This morning I attended Damian Conway's presentation on his 7 principles. This seems to be an updated presentation of his Sufficiently Advanced Technologies, with several new modules that raised great points.

Below I've pasted my raw notes, which will likely be only slightly helpful without the slides (which I have the copy of). But I will highlight here the main points:

1. Sufficiently Advanced Technologies
2. Design By Coding
3. Evolve by Subtraction
4. Declarative beats Imperative
5. Preserve the Metadata
6. Leverage the Familiar
7. The best code, is no code at all

Damian of course had excellent examples to support his points, with quality progressive code so you could see the process.
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OSCON 2006 is here. At the hotel, getting ready to have my brain stuffed tomorrow.

Before heading off to OSCON, I took the weekend to visit my old hometown. I grabbed a rental car and headed off to Washington. At about Centralia I took highway 12, and headed to the coast, just missing getting to watch the sunset over the Pacific :( From there I took the 101 up the west coast, stopping a could of spots before finally deciding to sleep at Kalaloch beach. This location was chosen basically because every site before there was full, and I didn't want to keep on going. So I managed a couple of hours of sleep in the front seat of my car, before waking up to watch the sunrise over the forest from the ocean. What a beautiful site! I did figure out my camera has trouble focusing in low light conditions with thick fog though. Understandable, but leaves most of the pictures I took in a sorry state.

From there, I went on to enjoy some nice hikes in the Hoh rain forest .

Continuing on, I went along the north end of the 101, through part of my old stake, Forks, Port Angeles, Sequim, etc. then broke off, crossed the Hood Canal Bridge and down into Poulsbo (Little Norway). No trip to Poulsbo is ever complete without a visit to Sluys Bakery! My favorite's are the Cinnamon Cup (with the most amazing whipped cream cheese frosting ever), Pecan sticky bun, and Rosette's. This place is also home to "Poulsbo Bread" which you can sometimes find in stores in Utah.

A few stops to see old family friends, and some kayaking gear, and I was on my way to visit my Sister and another friend in Tacoma, where I ended up my night.

Oh yeah, and a dinner at Famous Daves , mmmmm.
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So I guess I should follow up Joe's Post about our party with my contributions. The food was good, the style of party was great. I agree about how nice it was to be able to taste everything without stuffing up on one food. My family came with 2 dishes, and one cheese. I'll relate here my part, and leave Kelly to discuss her part.

My main appetizer was some tasty chicken quesadillas, with (according to Alton's Rules) a sauce and a dip. The quesadillas were straightforward flour tortillas with cheese and grilled chicken. The chicken was rubbed before cooking so it was well seasoned, but the quesadilla's purpose was to be a tool to try out the dip and sauce.

The 'sauce' was actually just a store bought salsa. I can't find a link for it, but "Meza" brand fire-roasted garlic salsa, which occasionally is available at Costco has quickly become my favorite store-bought salsa. It's not all that hot (although a hit of sauce can help that), but it has this amazing garlic flavor that really makes it stand out on it's own, more than well worth it.

The Dip was the part I made that really stood out (imho). I started my caramelizing an onion with some fresh garlic (out of my garden). After I had gotten almost the color and crust I wanted, I hit it with some sherry cooking wine, and recaramelize some of the nice crusties back. I then mixed this with a basic cream dip base (mayo, sour cream, lemon juice, salt, pepper), and some crusties from cooking the chicken. Tasty.

As for our weird cheese, we actually just picked up a bit of Jarlsburg, because my wife claimed she had never heard of it.

Now Kelly can blog about her customized fresh raspberry/blueberry/strawberry cobbler!
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At HostingCon, Ivan was passing out the new Freeside T-shirts.

It's fun to have a shirt to a GPL project that I'm actually a developer on, not just for a tool I use.

And if you are interested in learning about good, open source, enterprise quality billing infrastructures, drop me a line, or join us on IRC.
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While I'm not much of a baseball fan (actually, I really dont' care for the game), on Friday my family and I went to a Orem Owlz game. It was quite enjoyable to watch the game as a family. The stadium they have is pretty nice, and our seats were great. It's small enough that really any seat would be good.

For the price, I'd recommend most anyone to take their families out to the local ball game sometime. It's relatively cheap, it's a nice place, and some great weather. This coming from a guy who really doesn't like the game, and yet still had a fun time. I love the idea of supporting the small town, local teams. The players really seem to try harder (vs overpaid major league folks), and the game of course is right in front of you.

As you can see, the kids were ecstatic.

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This week I noticed a rather interesting change in the stats on this site. Right towards the end of my vacation, where I had gone just over a week without any new posts, I began getting a large surge in traffic. A very large surge.

This traffic has a couple of interesting things to note about it. During the week preceding the upswing, I noted quite a few comment spam attempts mostly from Texas poker sites. Then this large swing in hits began, and most had referrer sites coming from a long list of texas poker sites :)

It was interesting to watch this heavy increase in traffic after almost exactly one week from my last post, all now including a referrer from sites that had been attempting comment spam. After I began posting again, the traffic quickly began to slow down to normal levels.

My biggest peeve, is I now have windows/IE as my top os/browser hitting my site :( what a lame stat.

My best guesses at what they are doing:

• They noticed that the comment spam wasn't arriving, and changed what they sent thinking they could bypass security
• They thought the spam was in and were following up with hits causing google/alexa/etc to then reindex the page (especially on popularity as part of their SEO.

The interesting part I find is in their waiting for a week of inactivity to follow up with their very noticeable barrage. Is that the standard preying on abandoned blogs?

I didn't get a chance yesterday to post about this, but I would like to thank Thayne for giving a very interesting PLUG presentation on Wednesday.

Thayne showed off the Realm Systems K9 unit. This slightly large thumbdrive is actually a quite nifty little device. Inside it's a PPC 400mhz chip, with memory and a fingerprint scanner that allows you to basically take over a computer for your needs. A portable device that keeps your applications and data ready to use any other computer as your host terminal. Read on for some interesting things we saw...
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I saw some code for a very clean tab library that I thought I'd share out. Looks like a nice clean implementation, MIT license. Works great in safari
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Hrm, since updating my site, I don't seem to be picked up by the planet . At first, I had a problem where my personal rss feed wasn't displaying, and then it was in reverse order (whoops). I'm hoping with a new post, and everything squared away, it'll redo the feed correctly.
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Well, I'm finally running on a slightly newer version of catalyst today. After some recent refactoring of the Catalyst Framework, I needed to update this blog code a bit.

As of now, things are working again, but only about 90% of the way (encouraging aint it?). I hope to have the rest up soon, but this has definitely been changes for the better. Lots nicer code, stabilized api.

My biggest problem though, is that the makefile wasn't getting rid of some old code, like it was supposed to. Things were breaking because I had a stray .pm sitting around that wasn't working. Finally debugged that, and a lot of things are working again. I bet I have a few more breaking other little features. I'll get those cleaned up soon.
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Wow, back from a long time without a computer, what a nice break. Just a note, dont' get Cingular service if you are traveling through Montana. Data was non-existant, and voice connection wasn't much better, even in the cities.

We had a wonderful time, visited my families cabin in the Benchmark area of Montana, right at the junctions of the Scapegoat and Bob Marshall wilderness areas. Took a trip through the Lewis & Clark Caverns, and a little trip through Yellowstone.

This is a good year to hit the Playmill Theater We saw Forever Plaid, it was very well done, but I wish we were around to see them perform one of the others. They always do a great job with Joseph there.

As for why I was so far out of any connection, this picture should help show where I was

Physically, our cabin is just at the base of that mountain (Crown Mountain). For those interested, the rest of our family vacation pictures are here Plenty of beautiful mountain scenery, cool caves, and nifty geology there.