belg4mit's Journal

Top-level namespace pollution is evil

belg4mit — 2010-04-22T22:57:26+00:00

Why's it evil? Because not everyone hunts for modules by using a search engine. Because you're less likely to see that you're needlessly reinventing the wheel. et cetera et cetera

People need to read perlmodstyle and think before they upload. Indeed, PAUSE should exact a pound of flesh or some other substitute before accepting top-level modules.

While we're at it, maybe we can thunk people with a clue-by-four who don't include a module description, etc.

CPAN bug tracker update

belg4mit — 2010-01-06T14:24:06+00:00

Hooray! CPAN's RT has been upgraded to the modern 3.8 series.

Namespace pollution

belg4mit — 2009-10-14T19:14:00+00:00

Arggh! Enough with the bloody vanity pseudo-pragmas and other modules to enable some combination of features-you-love-and-so-should-everyone-else sprinkled all-over CPAN. Create a bloody ToolSet or ToolSet::Bundle. That's what they're for, and it keeps all of that crud^Wbeauty collected together for ready comparison and retrieval.

Perl Advent Calendar 2008

belg4mit — 2008-11-28T23:15:00+00:00

Is currently lagging, and may not be up at the turn of the page without some help. I've got term papers galore, and cannot contribute until nearly mid-month. If you're interested in participating, see http://www.perladvent.org/2008/FAQ-submit.html

P.S. Don't worry about ideas. If you have some, they're welcome, but we've got a list of candidates too.

CPAN RT

belg4mit — 2008-08-22T16:42:27+00:00

As I've been installing/customizing RT at work, I've taken a renewed interest in rt.cpan.org as
I've reported various issues. I've been "familiarizing myself" with RT to better help the local
users, a.k.a goofing around), and have customized my front page. I've tweaked "Bugs in My Distro"
a bit (to do so you have to duplicate the search, since it's a globally shared resource), but
mostly just the sort order, etc. More interesting I think, is this second box I've added to the body,
"My Issues." It uses the same layout and display options as "Bugs," but instead shows you all the
outstanding tickets you've reported elsewhere.

Requestor.id = '__CurrentUser__' AND QueueAdminCc.id != '__CurrentUser__' AND (Status = 'new' OR Status = 'open' OR Status = 'stalled')

The upshot of this is that you might then not feel so bad about having a few open bugs yourself,
or be so incensed that you supply patches :-P

Advent Calendar needs help

belg4mit — 2007-12-13T04:08:15+00:00

Please contact us about contributing!

http://perladvent.org/

This is the final countdown

belg4mit — 2007-11-23T19:38:30+00:00

One week left until December, we're still looking for volunteers/contributions for the perl advent calendar; details.

Happy accident

belg4mit — 2007-10-30T18:29:14+00:00

While idly searching* I came across a rather funny result.

*I was wondering if somebody had created some sort of perl module pertaining to and dubbed solipsism, or a variant thereof.

Perl Advent '07

belg4mit — 2007-09-30T20:15:43+00:00

I've finally managed to transfer perladvent.org from Mark Fowler, so historic links should work (soon). However, the modern monger address will continue to work as well. While it may seem a little early to begin thinking about the calendar, it's very stressful to write & edit things Just In Time, so I'm putting the call out for contributors and assistant editors. I just entered a graduate program and will not be able to devote much time to the calendar until the third week of December; this also means I can't really write things in advance. If you're interested, please see the FAQ s and contact me ASAP. Do not worry if you have no ideas of what to write, we've got a fairly large backlog of possibilities, although we certainly welcome other suggestions. In addition, we need some artwork for the calendar splash page in keeping with general perlish and X-mas themes. Prod artsy coworkers, submit your own open-licensed masterpieces, or request clarification and inspiring suggestions. Finally, keep in mind that the more people who participate, the less stress and effort each must bear ;-)

OT: Super TB fucktard

belg4mit — 2007-06-02T15:43:33+00:00

Is anyone else as outraged about this as I am? I seriously hope they press criminal charges (compare willfully spreading the significantly less communicable HIV) against this guy, perhaps in all 4+ jurisdictions even. What a dumbass. His attempts at apoligizing and justification are infuriataingly pathetic too. "I was told if I was anyplace but Denver I'd be dead." Bullshit. The fucking told you go check into the hospital. No soup for you. Go to jail (once cured). Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Pet Peeve

belg4mit — 2007-04-23T14:25:25+00:00

It does not matter if the dictionaries have caved into people's miuse of language... bimonthly = every two months, semimonthly = fortnightly = every two weeks. etc. etc. Nice and clear and consistent (biannual). We now return you to your regularly scheduled silence.

Free commit bits for Data::JavaScript available

belg4mit — 2007-03-24T19:17:41+00:00

I've been really bad about maintaining Data::JavaScript, so if anybody is interested in getting contributor maintenance rights for CPAN let me know, preferably with a respectable sample patch*.

Here are some of the things on the TO DO list:

Merge ::LiteObject and ::Anon functionality into D::JS
Code cleanup, including removal of Exporter; this naturally follows from the former.
Explore Data::Dumper and it's $Pair or similar to sit atop one of these engines?
Likewise JSON? (Update: and therefore obviously therefore array literal syntax)
A reasonable means of defining hash sort order
Consider a less verbose format (option) for generic output, such as that proposed by Scott Wessels
#AB's code output var facts = new Object; facts.string = 'Joseph'; facts.xor = new Array; facts.xor[0] = new Array; facts.xor[0][0] = 0; facts.xor[0][1] = 1; facts.xor[1] = new Array; facts.xor[1][0] = 1; facts.xor[1][1] = 0; #vs. SW output var facts = new Array(new function() { this.string = 'Joseph'; this.xor = new Array(new Array(0,1),new Array(1,0)); }
I have an old patch for this, it sort of preserves references.
A sane way to handle all of that. Probably a single engine with multiple wrappers for different output options?
Fix documentation i.e; clearer description of what data munging is done (minimal by default, if you want to embed JS within JS strings, more need to be done [somewhere])

*The patch could be for (part of) something on the TO DO list, or anything else appropriate.

Christmas Wish: One last write-up

belg4mit — 2006-12-23T04:07:15+00:00

Please, somebody, earn yourself a book! Christmas Eve and Christmas are both taken care of, I just need one last entry for tomorrow (12/23/2006). If you're interested in making a serious go of it (and hopefully writing something that'll require minimal editing ;-) I can supply ideas.

Contribute content and you could earn an O'Reilly book!

belg4mit — 2006-12-07T21:33:52+00:00

While speaking with O'Reilly Media, Inc. (they changed their name) regarding the use of the camel trademark and the Perl Advent Calendar, they offered up some prizes to participants. void where prohibited.

Thanks guys

Perl Advent

belg4mit — 2006-12-01T18:02:03+00:00

Whilst waiting for the main article submission to be accepted I figured I should note for anyone whom might happen upon this, that the new Perl Advent Calendar is available. Smaakelijk!

Hypocrite?

belg4mit — 2006-03-08T23:01:20+00:00

So maybe you've seen this ad on PBS, where the father is reading Little Red Riding Hood to his daughter. The camera pans around the room and there are a bunch of characters from different PBS shows that chime in with comments about the construction of the house, the value of the antique bed, etc. It ends with a tagline of, "There's more than one side to a story." It's a brilliant spot. Yet, in the wake of the conservative dustup over PBS I can't help but feel it's more than a little tasteless.

apples to pineapples

belg4mit — 2006-01-11T19:59:13+00:00

O'Reilly has a cute pic when you submit errata

Why is it...

belg4mit — 2005-10-08T01:40:08+00:00

that fruit-on-the bottom yogurt sits nicely in the cup but pre-mixed gets all over the lid?

YM fun with English

belg4mit — 2005-10-05T20:59:54+00:00

Yesterday morning
Yesterday
Yesterday evening
Last night

Recently discovered IO::WrapTie when looking for a pre-
existing solution more elegant than my homegown our
with lots of globs and refs solution to support scalar file-
handles with tie. I haven't gotten around to merging
it into IO::Pager yet.

Ain't nothing New(s-worthy) 'bout N'Orlens

belg4mit — 2005-09-02T17:13:47+00:00

Someone forwarded a message from an out of touch member to a mailing list I'm on, which contained this drivel:

our worst fears have been realized; our wonderful madcap city is being pummeled and brought up short by the end result of being ignored by our city, state and federal governments for 300 years. Levee breaks? who would have guessed? (anyone who lives here is the short answer). ... My family has been in LA since the 1760's and ain't leaving now...

Emphasis added.

WTF? WTFH? Please standby as we send a rocket-propelled GPS clue-by-four to assist you in your time of (mentally defecient) need. How about the result of 300 years of ignorance? Sticking your collective heads in the sand, covering your ears and repeating "Na na na I can't hear you"?

See the graphic at the bottom of http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4207202.stm Oh wait, you were aware it was an eventuality and are still surprised? Nuts to you then.

Microsoft rant

belg4mit — 2005-05-31T13:07:56+00:00

I've recently been honing my wbesite back into some resemblance of order, repairing all the bits of rot incurred by changing physical hosts, restoring from backups after break-ins, etc. over the past few years. This was in part inspired by a recent mentioning of my site over there:
http://alum.mit.edu/ne/opendoor/200505/index.html

Below is the message submitted to Microsoft (not on their "report a bug" thing though since you have to call do that.) I used a Dominus quote as the subject, "You can't just make sh!t up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"

As if it was not brilliant enough to mysteriosuly have Internet Explorer randomly start GETing /favicon.ico now WMP tries media.smi for any media.foo link. And ohh! Get this, it looks for the SMIL file after the content, that's useful; get the presentation structure after the content. Here's an idea, if I, as the webmaster *wanted* the user to view something in a SMIL presented format I'd actually make one and link to *that*.

The least you could do is HEAD first.

Telepathic IP Theft

belg4mit — 2003-06-22T21:30:32+00:00

What is with everybody stealing my great ideas before I have them? :-P For instance, yesterday I was thinking about lighting and it occurred to me that you ought to be able to take a laser (very efficient, see link) and pull the same kind of trick used for white LEDs to create a high-efficiency light-source. That is, send the output through phosphors; white LEDs are actually UV LEDs. Turns out, somebody else is already on it! One current problem is that UV lasers aren't as efficient as some others

p5p, lost in the noise.

belg4mit — 2003-03-11T20:39:38+00:00

Waiting to see if any of the fruits of my weekend punting get accepted. (From the TODO) I like the idea of general generic object management, but any implmentation I've thought of is inelegant. I think switching over to purely IO::Handle would be a good compromise. The only problem is backwards compatability with the old calling style.

Electronic Books

belg4mit — 2003-02-17T22:32:17+00:00

I was just reading my microeconomics book. I really hate the terminology economists use as much of it is counter-intuitive. So the book is describing a new term called a "market basket". They then off hand mention that some economists use the term "bundle" instead, and I think "Great! I'll use that instead. It doesn't sound as lame." So I continue reading trying to do real-time visual search and replace, and it's not easy. I've run into this problem before, but never tried that solution. Basically, it'd be great for an electronic book to let the user define word filters.

Filesys::EXt2

belg4mit — 2003-02-15T00:27:10+00:00

Well I've churned out several versions of Filesys::Ext2. I doubt anybody uses it, but it's some good excercise; not that I don't have 10_000 other things to do. Damned if things don't work perfectly fine until you post it to CPAN, then you're stuck with that embarassing version number creep. I'm already working on the next version; there's a problem with the tests in the latest (solved), and I'm extending and enhancing as well. Helas a I'm having to jump through some hoops because what I really ought to do is port it to XS.

Yippee kai yai ay

Bots

belg4mit — 2003-02-08T05:12:13+00:00

How I hate bots. Especially stupid bots.
And most of them seem to be. I have been
visited by bots that seem to makeup their
own URIs to visit. They're based on existing
or deprectaed URIs, but clearly not right.
And it's not like my site is dynamic.

Well I just got done battling 140.115.237.243,
and damn if he wasn't annyoing. The damn thing
sent some 6500 queries in about 2 hours. It
seems this intrepid little explorer couldn't
take no for an answer. It would request one
cockeyed URI, which sort of looked like something
that used to exist but was moved, and get
mod_rewritten to my FTP server, where it would
thrash about for awhile. He and a few friends
that is.

Slash

belg4mit — 2003-01-10T19:03:45+00:00

Ach!!! Wtf is up with the new journal RSS feed format? I want timestamps! If they aren't going to be in a #fragmentIdentifier, they should at least be part of the name (like they were before).

Worse, the feed seems to be giving up nonexistsent articles [Matts] This sucks...
[pudge] Hi Gnat

UPDATE: And now it's back to normal... :-/

Little Miss Mary Sunshine

belg4mit — 2002-06-28T19:24:22+00:00

"Life is short, life is shit,
and soon it will be over."

-- Cabbie

!@#$!~

belg4mit — 2002-06-22T21:23:36+00:00

3rd fail(ed|ing) drive in less than 12 months.
I guess I'm going to have to breakdown and pickup
something a bit more modern soon >-|

As a stop gap I formatted my swap partition
(which never gets hit under normal usage anyways)
copied to there and mounted. That's a major
advantage of the Unices, mount++

mindURL

belg4mit — 2002-06-16T05:57:10+00:00

Well I've hacked out the majority of one of the projects I've been meaning to do recently. Long long ago, in the days of free things on the web, the people at NetMind had a free service called URLMinder. This allowed users to register themselves for notification when a webpage was updated. There were some tools for webmasters to add this to their website as well. Now they charge you to request for notification. They didn't even notify people who were using the service either, it just went away. So, I've written/am writing mindURL, besides I've been trying to make my site as self-sufficient/contained as possible. It's nothing horribly complicated (AppConfig :-() but I couldn't find anything out there so there ya go. If you're interested poke me, I'll be making it available anyways, but things tend to fall to the wayside.