Site: July 2006 Archives

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

Haskell in 5 steps

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 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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