boo_radley's Friends' Journals

joukevisser.com

jouke — 2009-10-04T11:25:34+00:00

I finally got around to set up http://joukevisser.com/. For now it only contains Dutch information, but I'll be blogging in English when it will be about Perl or IT in general.

My guess is that blogging here won't be happening that much anymore.

Perl support for Appcelerator Titanium?

jouke — 2009-08-13T06:14:07+00:00

I recently started playing with Appcelerator Titanium or Titanium for short. It's an extremely cool tool that lets you build desktop or mobile apps using standard web technology like HTML, CSS and Javascript. The real coolness of it (to me) is that it also allows the developer to use Ruby, Python and C++ in <script> tags. The really uncool thing is that Perl is not on their radar.

But hey, Titanium is Open Source (Apache license), and the piece of code that makes those language bindings is called kroll. In this git tree you can see that they've created bindings for Javascript, Ruby, Python, and that they're working on support for PHP. If my C++ skills were better, and I'd know more of Perl's internals, I might have taken a shot at contributing, but I think there are people out there who are better at this...

So if anyone feels up to it, and would want to contribute to this potentially great product, I'd like to see it supporting Perl!

Hello!

rozallin — 2008-06-19T01:14:56+00:00

This is just a test. Nothing to see here at the moment, but nice of you to drop by anyway. Later!

use.perl.org atom feed

ask — 2007-10-05T23:10:02+00:00

The use.perl RSS feed is messed up in some particular way that makes Google Reader unable to parse it (at least it was a few days ago).

I setup a Feedburner feed to parse it and output something cleaner:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/useperl

- ask

ack rocks

ask — 2007-03-24T04:08:58+00:00

I've mentioned it before, but ack really rocks. I've noticed that on both consulting and startup projects I use it almost exclusively over grep now.

As I slowly, very slowly, get out of the habit of making pipelines for my searches it's tremendously useful. Another habit I need to pick up to enjoy it even more is that ack has a proper regexp feature set. I realize grep does too, but I don't remember my owl book well enough to ever get much use out of them. Perl regexps on the other hand...

Anyway, if you haven't tried it before - go get it.

The svn repository and issue tracker is on google code. Or maybe Andy is using rt.cpan.org for bug tracking? I guess either will work... (?)

Comeback

jouke — 2007-03-12T05:50:38+00:00

Yes, I'm working on a comeback. The horrible situation that prevented me from doing what I want, when I want is over.

The main question that has been asked a lot in the past months was "is pVoice dead now?". The answer is "No". I will restart working on it in the weeks to come.

Other questions have been asked about my modules. As to my knowledge, nobody has actually taken over the maintenance of my modules, so I should be able to pick up that too. Soon.

The change for the better came just as sudden as the change for the worse 6 months ago, so give me some time to get back on track.

You'll be hearing from me.

Masonic

chaoticset — 2006-11-13T15:39:19+00:00

I've got Mason purring on my WinXP laptop, so I can finally practice some of the stuff I've read about in the Mason book for so long.

Virtually Virtual...Like, Whoa, Man

chaoticset — 2006-10-06T16:04:15+00:00

It occurred to me that I'm virtually not here...and then when I started to wonder what I meant by "here", I became amused. I'm literally nowhere anyway, right?

Enough of that. I'm killing a few moments while CPAN installs Text::Template (which, amazingly, I did not install to my laptop at any point in the past year!)

When I installed all the software I thought I would need on my laptop (such as the ubiquitous image editing software that costs a small fortune, is probably mostly used illegally, and rhymes with Badobe Kyotoshop), I went hunting down modules just like everything else. I apparently just forgot a few of the ones I wasn't using quite so much, but when I found myself needing a templating solution for who-knows-what, I immediately thought, "Text::Template will do this rapidly. Use it. Be finished as soon as possible."

And it wasn't there.

And now it is...so I must go. :)

Nick Ing-Simmons

ask — 2006-09-26T23:59:46+00:00

Oh no. This is so sad.

update from Graham. Thank you Nick!

mmm yeah...cpan modules

jouke — 2006-09-24T15:13:28+00:00

Anyone who wants to become maintainer of any of my modules, just send me an email with your PAUSE id and I'll see how I can hand this over (if you know the HOWTO, let me know, I've never needed to do this before).
That also counts for the person who responded to my last use.perl journal entry who wanted to take over Win32::SAPI5

Radio silence starting now

jouke — 2006-09-24T10:10:25+00:00

Without going into details (and no, don't mail me because I won't tell you), this posting is merely to let you all know not to expect anything from me in the months to come.

Something terrible is happening in my life and I can't predict when it will be over.

Any predicted releases or co-operations won't be happening, nor will I respond to any emails.

I can just hope it will all turn out ok.

EuroOSCON day 0

jouke — 2006-09-17T20:56:10+00:00

This morning I left home around 9am and after a very tiring trip I arrived at my hotel in Brussels around 4pm. I wasn't thinking about EuroOSCON too much yet (more about how to finish pStory), but I had planned to go to the early registration at 5pm.

That was a good thought. I ran into Aron and -o darn I can't remember your name!-. We agreed to see each other again at 6 in front of the Plaza hotel to find a place to eat. When I got back, a lot of people from the EuroFoo were sitting in the lobby so I had to walk in and say hi to at least barbie, kudra, pdcawley, Jesse Vincent, Piers Harding and a few others. Later Jesse, Aron, Karen Pauley and -yes I still can't remember your name- went to the Groote Markt to grab something to eat. We had a very good time talking about anything and everything.

These early meetups always get me in the right mood: there's another conference coming up with many nice talks and lots of interesting people! Let the fun begin :)

YAPC::Europe - day two

jouke — 2006-08-31T23:11:38+00:00

Did I manage to finish my presentations last night? Yes. Did I feel satisfied? Not really. I felt ashamed actually. I still don't know why, but I cannot get pVoice to work on my own laptop. It simply does nothing. No window. No error. Period.

Now, if I didn't need the application itself, it wouldn't matter that much, but instead I was to give a presentation about pVoice! Now how do I demonstrate an application without being able to run it? I didn't know. Luckily I found an animated gif where (and old version of) pVoice is being demonstrated, and I used that instead.

So this morning at 10:10 I started the presentation for about 25 people in the Onion room. Although I felt very bad about not being able to actually demonstrate pVoice, I think the presentation went well. Or so I was told ;-)
After I finished Stray Toaster came up to me to tell me he was interested in contributing to the OA module I spoke about yesterday. And I was *very* delighted.

After the break I continued with my "Introduction to wxPerl" presentation, where I worked through by showing different examples, and changing them as I showed where to find the syntax of different methods in the documentation. The main complaint I think wxPerl is getting, is that it's poorly documented. That is so untrue. The problem is that people just don't know where to find the documentation or actually, how to use it properly. So my main focus was on finding the information you need in the documentation by showing examples that are readable and simple enough to extend.

By the way, I put links to the slides and the example code on [URL:http://wiki.birmingham2006.com].

After lunch I ran into my booking.com colleague Jacqueline Kerkmeijer, who represents our HR department here. We (booking.com) are desperately seeking qualified people and that's the main reason for us to sponsor YAPC. So Jaqueline is running the Booking.com booth at the conference, and I've seen her talking to quite a few interested people. Let's hope she's able to find a Few Good Men (or Women).

YAPC::Europe - day one

jouke — 2006-08-30T10:52:52+00:00

Yesterday evening I went to the Panama bar to meet up with the people who had already arrived for the conference. Having not been to the last two YAPC::Eu's, it was good to see all familiar faces again (and drinking a few beers with them :) ).

I went back to the hotel on time to try and fix a few bugs in the OA-module-to-be, because I wanted to show a little of it in my presentation of today. As I'm writing this, I'm attending the "The Inaccessibility of Perl" presentation by Stray Toaster, and I've just finished the last slides of my presentation of this afternoon.

Now I still have the other two presentations to finish, which I will be doing tomorrow. Since I've done both of them before, I hope it's merely a matter of updating these...I guess there will be no socialising tonight, but preparing instead...There are still more nights to catch up with that...

Arriving in Birmingham

jouke — 2006-08-29T17:48:57+00:00

This afternoon I arrived in Birmingham for YAPC::Europe. The flight on the KLM Cityhopper was pleasant and swift, and as it turns out, the weather here is no different than in Holland ;-)

I had thought that immediately after checking into my hotel (the MacDonald Burlington) I could start writing the slides of my talk tomorrow "Accessible Applications in Perl". However, I hadn't even landed yet and the office called to check if I had been able to work out the Unicode bugs in SAP::Rfc with Piers Harding. Last night I had left the office very late while knowing that SAP::Rfc crashes in certain situations (when the last character of a field is a multi-byte unicode character), and I didn't know yet if Piers was able to fix it yet.

So I checked into my hotel, unpacked, opened up the lid of my laptop to find an open wifi hotspot, logged on, mailed Piers, and within minutes we were chatting and testing. At 5:30 (CET, I'm not yet functioning in BST) everything worked, I called the office to tell them, and I could finally start writing slides ;-(

As I write this, I have just finished the last slide (it's 6:30 BST now), but I really need to test it out to see if I have enough to fill the 20 minutes, or maybe even too much...

First off to grab some dinner and then back to the hotel to finish everything.

YAPC::EU preparations

jouke — 2006-08-25T10:48:24+00:00

Why is it always so that I start with my presentations on the last days before conferences? This time I think it's not too difficult to explain: I only sent in my proposals on the last day, and expected to present only my pVoice presentation. However, all three presentations were accepted, and I had to prepare my 'Accessible applications in Perl', 'pVoice' and 'Introduction to wxPerl' talks.

Since then, work was extremely demanding, and when my holiday started, I got caught up with doing stuff with my kids so much, that there wasn't any time left to do anything else. Although I must say that part of that was writing a new application for Krista, based upon my new OA module, which of course I can use for my first presentation.

This Sunday, my kids will return to their mother, Monday will be a day at the office in Amsterdam, and Tuesday I'll be leaving for Birmingham already. If I weren't going to work with Piers Harding tonight to make sure the new Unicode compatible SAP::Rfc works for Booking.com, and I wasn't going to visit my sister for her birthday on Saturday (with the whole family of course), who lives in the other side of the country, I could say I have enough time to work on my presentations.

I have to really, really get it done in the spare moments I have left or else....

Basics are done, now trying out

jouke — 2006-07-10T12:11:09+00:00

Since the basic functionality (except still the menu issues) of the OA module is done, I figured the way to get it ready to roll is to try and write a real-world application and see where more work needs to be done.

I'm confident that it's still far from finished, but by writing a real application, I can find out what works, what doesn't work and where I need to simplify things for the programmer. I'll be writing an accessible media player...hang on for more news

Now this is something I didn't expect...

jouke — 2006-07-03T17:49:16+00:00

This striked me as quite a surprise. A Wx::MenuItem and also a Wx::Menu is not a subclass of Wx::Window. This means you can't query a menu's position, nor its size. Since that's not possible, I can't draw a box around a selected menu item to indicate (for a switch user) that it's selected.

Quite a disappointment, and I have no clue whatsoever how to solve it. I've dug in the wxWidgets sources, and it uses the platform-specific calls to create window menus, so there's no easy way to get around this.

I'm afraid I'm left with only two choices: either code my own menus and replace the wxWidget's menus (which is not an appealing option), or I'll drop the accessibility of menus (not attractive either).

Suggestions welcome!

Peace and quiet...and then the heat

jouke — 2006-07-02T14:59:51+00:00

This weekend I had my children at my house. Luckily the weather was great, so we had an enormous good time in the sun with the (small) "swimming" pool in the garden.

They've gone home (to their mother) now, so the peace and quiet is back in the house...and thought I could pick up the work on the OA module again. However, with the enormous heat we're experiencing here at the moment, that's not easy...

check it out! (from cvs)

jouke — 2006-06-29T18:35:54+00:00

Documentation is far from done, but in case anyone wants to play with it (I don't expect so... ;-) ), you can check out the sources of OA like this:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@pvoice.org:/cvsroot co OA

anyone interested?

jouke — 2006-06-29T09:39:44+00:00

Yesterday evening I went on and finished the touchscreen and 2-switch access (for mouse buttons and keystrokes). Now before I get too excited and code on like a maniac, I think the best step now is to document what I've got so far and put it in cvs.

That brings me to the question if anyone is interested in joining. If so, just drop me an email and I'll give you committer rights on the repository.

Event handling

jouke — 2006-06-28T09:01:34+00:00

I couldn't just leave the code to rest yesterday, so I went a little further. I started working on the (accessible) Event handling.

To make everything as easy as possible, a programmer should normally only worry about one event, namely EVT_OA_SELECT (I'm using OA as the prefix for everything...it stands for Open Accessibility, and currently it's also the name of the module, better suggestions are welcome). EVT_OA_SELECT($object, \&OnSelect) will work like you would expect: if the $object has been selected by the user (in any of the ways that will be defined), it executes the sub OnSelect. If you already have an event handler associated with any control, you can simply use this one beside it and it will do the same.

Tonight I'll implement OA::Config, where you can set/get the configuration of your accessible application (what kind of input device, how many switches, etcetera).

wow

jouke — 2006-06-27T20:07:12+00:00

I just sat down, looked at my screen and the only thing I thought was "wow"...

I hadn't thought that I could make such progress in so little time. The module set I'm working on is really getting there now. I can tell you a bit more now what it's supposed to do...

When I started working on pVoice more than 5 years ago, I had a specific problem for a specific person that had to be fixed. Therefore the AAC::Pvoice modules that came out of pVoice, were never really useable for any other type of application, which limited my possibilities quite a bit. Especially since Krista is getting older, and I want to write more 'grown up' applications for her.
The ideal situation would be to have any kind of GUI application accessible for people as limited in their physical abilities as my daughter. And then preferrably without any modifications to the original source code. I realize of course that that's not really possible.

The second best situation is that I could make it as easy as possible for a programmer to adjust their existing GUI applications, so that disabled people can use them. Therefore I'm writing an extension to wxPerl that will /really/ (and then I really mean really) make it easy for a programmer to take any wxPerl application, and make it accessible using only one switch. Or two switches, or four if you like. Or using a touch screen and get extra visible feedback. Or even if you have a visual impairment...then it would be handy if your application started talking to you.

If this subject interests you, and you know how to write wxPerl applications, watch this journal in the time to come. I'll be releasing code soon :)

Progress

jouke — 2006-06-26T18:11:18+00:00

Slowly but surely I'm getting up to speed with pVoice related programming again. I've been working on a brand new 'thing' (call it a thing for now, it doesn't really have a name yet) that will allow you, as a programmer, to write easily accessible GUI programs, with hardly any modifications to your existing Wx code.

Although I have plenty of hurdles to take, so far it's looking pretty promising. As soon as I've got something useable (and given my limited free time it may always take longer than I hope), I'll put it in cvs and tell you about it here.

Making time

jouke — 2006-06-18T07:09:20+00:00

It's pretty hard to make time to work on pVoice it seems. My daytime job has been extremely demanding the past year and it looks like it won't be less demanding any time soon. Besides that, the family life eats up a lot of time too.

Krista has been in the hospital the beginning of this month to have surgery that is meant to repair the shortening of the muscles in her legs, which also caused her back to curve. This has been a painful and stressful operation, and as you can imagine, when your child is in the hospital, you don't get much work done (being a project in your free time, or your regular job).

However, the YAPC::Europe programme committee has accepted all three of my talks, and the more technical of the three talks depends on the work I will be doing in the time remaining until Y::E. I really need to make time now, instead of hoping I will get the time automatically...

this will be hard...

(languages that start with P) In The Morning

chaoticset — 2006-05-18T13:23:54+00:00

My PHP class starts later today, so I took some time this morning to install PHP and PHP-related Eclipse plugins. While I was nosing around the PHP installation, I noticed that I have Python installed (which I'd forgotten about a while back). So I decided to look for some Python plugins while I'm tossing a bunch of stuff into Eclipse.

I know, I know -- PHP? Well, yeah. I've only ever had one physically painful language experience, and it was VB, and it's years behind me. Java's been wonderful to me so far, as scary as that sounds, and I'm looking forward to trying something bizarre and interesting. :)

Restarting

jouke — 2006-05-18T10:25:13+00:00

For a number of reason I've been keeping quiet for a long while. No journal posts, no visits to monger meetings, and most importantly no work on any of my private projects, including pVoice.

Most of the reasons are history now, and I'll get restarted on pVoice development tonight. I'll be going to YAPC::Europe in August and Euro OSCON in September. Now what's left is making time to go to mongers meetings again...

I'll keep you posted

perl6-users list

ask — 2006-05-17T06:11:33+00:00

We setup a perl6-users mailing list.

Email perl6-users-subscribe@perl.org to subscribe.

A few more details in my mail to the announce list.

Interface Dreams

chaoticset — 2006-01-24T15:54:20+00:00

My current plan for MaLToL centers around a DB; the other components are intended to be a Java API, a Perl API, a Mason-based web gui, a Perl/Tk gui, and a Java gui.

Things are progressing reasonably. The API is OO, and currently has a single handler object keeps a list of the task objects (which are their own separate module that's not subclassed to the handler module). I'm prototyping the db in OOO's Base, because...well, because I'm lazy and I know Access. I'm taking a Java course and plan to start writing the basic parts of the Java API soon.

The only thing I haven't gotten any specific plans about yet is the web interface. I'm hoping to use Mason, but there's just nothing in my mind for what it should look like yet. Maybe I should kick some swatches around and see what I dream up.

Vitalitous

chaoticset — 2006-01-21T15:49:21+00:00

I've had some actual development going on of late.

Since I've been spending a truckload of time at school (or waiting for the car to be repaired, damnable machine), I've had plenty of time to haul out my laptop and pound away at various things. One of those things is my Java class, and the other is MaLToL.

Discussions with the professor currently acting as my advisor have led to interesting results -- one of which is that I am now officially in the Baccalaureate program. Yes. I'm going for the full four years! I'm actually really excited about this, even though it means I'll be doing a lot of non-Perl things for a while for school. I'm hoping to do plenty of them on my own time or within some form of employment.

Progress is slow but steady. Trying to keep myself to writing tests first, and trying to keep myself writing only one or two at a time. (Of course, I don't really have any experience with extreme programming in a "formalized" environment -- whatever that is defined as -- so if I seem to have any misconceptions or a lack of understanding, feel free to clear it up for me. :) )