rob_au's Friends' Journals

Cute caps

jdavidb — 2010-08-19T21:55:41+00:00

I'm doing some quick code generation (the output is Java), and I found myself writing the below routine. I like it because of the names I picked for the variables. Not exactly self-documenting (although it is when you think about it), but this is throwaway. You can probably tell what the code is doing and why I named the variables as I did, and you might be entertained.

sub uc_prop { my($prop) = @_; my $p = substr($prop, 0, 1); my $P = uc($p); my $rop = substr($prop, 1); return "$P$rop"; }

Strawberry Perl install rolled back

jdavidb — 2010-07-26T20:34:33+00:00

Strawberry Perl 5.12.0 was almost completely installed when suddenly it flashed some message I didn't see into the install wizard and the progress bars started moving backward! I have never seen anything like it. I realized the progress bar caption had been changed to simply "Rolling Back Action" and watched as at least three anonymous "actions" were rolled back, progress bar by progress bar. Then the install wizard simply told me "Strawberry Perl Setup Wizard ended prematurely Strawberry Perl Setup Wizard ended prematurely because of an error. Your system has not been modified. To install this program at a later time, run Setup Wizard again. Click the Finish button to exit the Setup Wizard."

I wish it would tell me what the error was so I might have some hope of correcting it.

On tour: Open Source Bridge, YAPC::NA and other fun things

jarich — 2010-07-21T01:30:30+00:00

After the fun I had at OSCON last year, it was no effort at all for pjf to convince me to spend June and July in the USA this year, conferencing.

Portland, Oregon

I arrived at midnight on the 31st May and was met at the airport by Schwern, pjf and Nadia, who took me onwards to donuts and pies. Having traveled for something like 30 hours at the time I was rather wiped out and probably not as appreciative of this as I should have been, but I soon got to bed and slept very soundly.

Schwern warned me ahead of time that he was going to be a busy, and thus less friendly host, and that he and his housemate Nick had been a little guested-out due to an almost endless procession of house-guests. He must have exaggerated. Between them, Schwern and Nick took us to the local farmers' market, to a parade, to numerous dinners and drinks out, and more. Schwern helped us get to the conference location, and also accompanied me home most nights.

Open Source Bridge

The conference was Open Source Bridge; and it is unlike any community-run conference I've ever attended. It was extremely professionally run, with copious amounts of information, high quality keynotes and speakers, an excellent feedback system... big and little things that the conferences I've been involved with are still struggling with after 6+ years and this was only OSB's second year! My talk was very well received, I was spoiled for choice for every single session and the unconference at the end really just capped things off. It was good to see so many familiar faces, and I caught up with some Australians, and Australian-expats that I hadn't seen for quite some time.

If you get to choose the geek conference you go to next year; make it Open Source Bridge!

More Portland, Oregon

The following two weeks, Sherri and Christie kindly hosted Paul and I. When I ran into some personal issues, I could not have hoped for more generous hosts. Sherri made sure I got out of bed each day, and many days Schwern and others made sure I got out of the house. Apparently we were lovely guests, but really Sherri and Christie were excellent hosts. Sherri cooked copious amounts of extremely yummy vegan food, and let me eat it for breakfast and lunch. They took us strawberry picking, to a great Ethiopian restaurant, and took me to an amazing vegan cafe for breakfast on my last day in Portland.

YAPC::NA, Columbus, Ohio

Next up was YAPC::NA in Columbus, Ohio. Very much like YAPC::EU I felt completely at home in this crowd. It was great to know that I could walk into any conference talk and have a pretty good idea of the topic matter. It did feel a little strange that many of the big names, and the people I view as particularly important knew me, but many of the regular people neither recognised me nor my "handle", but I suspect I shouldn't have been so surprised.

My tutorial was very well received, I met a whole lot more people, learned a bunch of new things, and got all fired up about finishing writing our Enterprise Perl course and documenting perl5i. It was really, really awesome to catch up with Karen, Jesse and Piers again, specifically.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Milwaukee wasn't originally on my list of places to visit, however a friend online invited me to drop by and visit, and I had a few days free, so why not? My friend, Jordi, and Sarah, invited me to stay with them. Jordi is an astrophysicist who spent some of the first afternoon explaining to me how it is that neutrinos do in fact mutate. Which was actually much more interesting than I think he thought I'd find it.

We walked the riverfront, found great restaurants, saw the music festival from afar, went to a nearby Strawberry festival (yum!) and spent time playing with the newly arrived arduino set. I've been wishing I could get involved with arduino for years, but also never been into electronics. Jordi and I worked through the basic tutorials with his board, and I found the whole thing very cool!

To top the trip off, Jordi and Sarah invited me to hang out for drinks with some of their colleagues one evening (they all work at the nearby university). I had a thoroughly good time, and felt I fitted in just fine, even though most of them use Python. :) After drinks there was dinner (with 3 free drinks for the ladies) and then Tron. Ah, good times.

New York City

My next scheduled stop was the big apple. While at YAPC::NA I discovered that a fellow Melbourne Perl Monger (Patrick) had recently moved to New York, and he insisted that we should stay with him. I had some minor adventures getting to his place, but received a very warm welcome, and was glad to take a cold shower. That was the first summer-like weather I'd seen for my whole trip thus far.

While in New York, I explored the New York Public Library (and saw the Rose Room), had a tour of Google with lunch (thank you to Tom Limoncelli), caught the Staten Island ferry, saw the Statue of Liberty, walked down Wall Street (and saw the cordoned-off outside of the New York Stock Exchange), checked out the Empire State building, the Sex Museum, Times Square and the Rockerfella(?) building. Much touristy stuff.

Patrick and Helen were lovely hosts, and it wasn't their fault at all that the temperature refused to drop to something reasonable for the whole time I was in town. ;)

Minneapolis, Minnesota

My last touring destination was Minneapolis where Steven Levine arranged an amazing weekend of activities to keep me busy. I did my best, but arrived with the start of a sore throat and fever. I arrived on a Thursday afternoon and first up was dinner with Matt and Deb followed by a scotch tasting. Even though I'm not a scotch drinker, I wished I was well enough to participate, but having already had some paracetamol, I dared not. It seemed like a lot of fun though.

On Friday, Steven took me out to a favourite breakfast location (which we did every day, actually), and then later to a wedding of two of his dear friends (Denise and Jim), neither of whom I knew. Both bride and groom sought me out and told me how glad they were that I could come. There was shape-note singing, morris dancing and contra-dancing and a fantastic time was had by all - especially me! I also got to meet more lovely people including a sweet, sweet gentleman by the name of Mal.

On Saturday we drove off to a little township which has a cafe in a cave, explored some antique stores and enjoyed the river before going to the arts museum (very cool) and then saw a documentary about Joan Rivers (fascinating) and finishing with dinner at Pizza Luce's (with a fun story attached).

Sunday was July 4th. So we started the day with a traditional block party at Matt and Deb's with a children's bike parade (or race), more morris dancing, a jazz band, singing and much neighbourly entertainment. I also managed to squeeze in a chance to run off and meet another friend, Yevgeny, for coffee where we talked about scuba diving and the Con I hadn't made time to attend). We ended the day with dinner with Michael and daughters followed by fireworks. By this point I was taking painkillers every 4 hours just to be able to talk, so I was getting a bit worried.

Monday we'd planned to go to the Taste of Minnesota festival, but I asked instead if I could go to a doctor (after talking with my travel insurance people first). The doctor was lovely, ran some tests and advised me to take various over-the-counter drugs. They helped immensely, and made it possible for me to attend the sea shanty singing that evening (although the drugs weren't quite good enough to allow me to sing).

The next day was a day of sad farewells. I felt so welcome and adopted into Steven's crowd that I would have loved to stay in Minneapolis for another month! However, it was time for my next adventure, so Steven drove Mal and I to the airport and he headed off to work. Mal I and had some minor fun getting through security, caught our planes in different directions, and thus far, lived happily ever after.

Two weeks on, and I might be over whatever it was that made me sick, too.

Hiveminder: personal RT, for free

jdavidb — 2010-07-19T16:58:36+00:00

You mean someone will provide RT for me to use for free on the web? And they've built an awesome AJAX-y frontend for it? And they allow me to tag tasks and they encourage me to keep my work todo list and as many personal todo lists as I want in here? And they give me awesome search utilities for figuring this out and keeping it organized?

It's almost like a dream come true.

Strawberry Win32 GUI programming

jdavidb — 2010-06-09T15:10:53+00:00

If I wanted to write a Strawberry program to run as a daemon and periodically pop up alerts on my machine, and I had no Windows Perl GUI programming experience other than an abortive look at WxPerl years before anybody ever thought of Strawberry, what module would I be looking for?

Another StackOverflow question moved: what's the deal?

jdavidb — 2010-05-20T14:18:10+00:00

Stack Overflow is made significantly less useful when ignorant people move Perl programming questions to serverfault.com because the questions are about "servers, networks or the administration of many machines.".

This kind of ridiculous micromanaging by people who are awarded points for being anti-helpful is what destroyed Wikipedia as a place I wanted to participate.

Testing gurus, would you please chime in?

jdavidb — 2010-05-07T17:16:23+00:00

The question is how to test a class that installs system services: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2790072/unit-testing-installation-of-services

Facebook privacy - Instant personalisation and connections

pjf — 2010-04-23T06:31:18+00:00

Facebook privacy - Instant personalisation and connections
Facebook has been announcing a number of changes recently, many of which will impact your privacy. While you may not have seen them hit your account yet, they will almost certainly do so soon.

Connections
In the past, Facebook had a whole bunch of free-form fields for things like location and interests. You could put practically anything you wanted in these, and show them to your friends. For things like interests, there was some basic search features, but they weren't very advanced.

These free-form fields are now changing into "connections". Like existing fan pages, connections represent an actual relationship, rather than just text. Also, just like fan pages, they're public, so you can see all the people who like cooking, or mushrooms. The new connection pages include extra information including text from wikipedia, and an automatic search through both your friends and all public posts to look for content related to that subject. The same applies for your location (hometown and current), your employers, and education!

From an application developer's standpoint, this is a great change. The existing free-form fields were next to useless. From a privacy standpoint, this is an interesting change. It's great to be able to find friends who share your common interests, but because connections are public, you're not just revealing that information to your friends. You're revealing it to the whole wide world. For any user who just accepted the defaults the defaults, I now know the city where you live, who you work for, where you went to school, and what you enjoy doing, in addition to who your friends are, and what you look like.

Luckily, you don't have to convert your interests and locations to connections. However if you don't, those parts of your profile will simply cease to exist. Facebook would really like you to convert to connections, and you'll get a scary looking message about parts of your profile being removed if you don't. Of course, not all of your interests will map to new connections, and those that don't will be discarded in any case, so whatever you do you will be losing information, including potentially the dates of your employment and education. For me, that's not a big deal, but it might be for you. If you do want to continue listing your interests in a free-form and private fashion, I recommend you simply add them to your "about me/bio" section.

If you do convert your interests (and Facebook will ask you to do so sooner or later) then keep in mind that these (along with your existing fan pages) are very public. Your friends, family, employer, potential employer, applications, websites, enemies, and random people on the Internet will all be able to see them. If you don't want that, your only recourse is to remove those connections.

In theory, you can also edit your birthday, and change your age to under 18, which limits what Facebook will publicly disclose about you, although your connections are still very broadly published. Unfortunately, as I discovered the hard way, you can only transform from an adult into a minor once, so if you've edited your birthday in the past you may not be able to change it now. In fact, if you've already converted to the new connection system, then your birthday will no longer show up as something you can edit, so make sure it's set to a date you're happy with before going through the conversion.

Instant Personalisation
Facebook is rolling out changes to allow websites to automatically access your "publicly available information", which includes name, profile picture, gender, friends, and "connections".

What's that, I hear you ask? Are these the same connections that I just added to my profile during the conversion process? They sure are! I bet you just love the idea that when you visit a website, they not only automatically know your name, your location, and your friends, but also a detailed list of your interests, activities, education, and employer!

Luckily, you can turn instant personalisation off. There's a new ticky box on the applications and websites privacy page. For some users, this is on by default, and for others it's off, and I'm not yet sure how that's determined. If it's not ticked now, and you later go through the connections conversion process, then I recommend you go back to double check it's still unchcked.

Having ensured that instant personalisation is disabled, I bet you're feeling pretty safe. However there's a great little clause if you read the fine print: To prevent your friends from sharing any of your information with an instant personalization partner, block the application...

That's right, your friends can share your information. This actually isn't anything new; applications your friends have installed can also view your information, but you probably don't want them sharing your info with the instant personalisation sites either.

So, in addition to unticking a box, you probably want to visit the applications listed in the FAQ entry and block them, too.

While you're at it, I recommend you look at your list of authorised applications as well, and remove any ones that you no longer need. It's very easy to authorise an app these days (in fact, commenting or liking this blog post will do so!), so you might be surprised to see what's there.

Finally, if you want to protect against accidental leakage of your profile information, consider logging out of Facebook before browsing other websites. Sure, this may be a pain in the arse, but Facebook can't share your information if you're not logged in.

Conference Talk at OS Bridge
I'll be talking more about Facebook privacy, along with some practical demonstration of tools, at the Open Source Bridge conference from the 1st-4th June 2010.

Bob Jacobsen interview on FLOSS Weekly

merlyn — 2010-04-23T03:55:11+00:00

Last week, I interviewed Bob Jacobsen for FLOSS Weekly. Bob used Perl's Artistic 1.0 license on some Java code to manage model trains. The code was later patented by an Oregon-based company(!) and then Bob got sued(!!) for Bob distributing the other company's patented code(!!!). The good part of the story is that this is the first test at the US Federal Appeals Court level for an open source license to be enforceable even if no money exchanges hands, and... we won!

Bob spent a lot of time and money on the case though. Listen to the podcast and contribute to his legal defense if you care about open source.

Ball of mud song

jdavidb — 2010-04-20T15:01:23+00:00

Anyone got any good songs about working on a ball of mud?

From UTC to US/Central

jdavidb — 2010-04-01T17:57:23+00:00

I've been living on UTC time since just before the end of Daylight Saving Time, 2005. Today I have reset my workstation to Central time. It's like looking at the world with fresh eyes.

My settings on websites will follow at some point.

RIP Jaime Escalante

jdavidb — 2010-03-31T12:43:26+00:00

Jaime Escalante, America's best math teacher, passed away last night. Escalante built a spectacular mathematics program in a struggling inner-city school district, teaching disadvantaged children all the way through Advanced Placement Calculus. His story was depicted in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. I've got to say this man was really one of my personal heroes. When Sarah and I started talking about homeschooling our children it was thoughts of Mr. Escalante that made me get really serious about the kind of education our children could have with us directing.

Ada Lovelace Day (Part 2)

pjf — 2010-03-25T14:36:27+00:00

Ada Lovelace Day (Part 2)
Today is Ada Lovelace continuation day; a day for continuing blog posts reflecting on the awesome contributions of women to science and technology. Here is my continuation from my previous post of my personal heroines.

Selena Deckelmann (@selenamarie)
Wow. Selena. Where do I start? Selena does everything. She runs the Open Source Bridge conference, the Portland Postgres User Group (PDXPUG) with @gorthx, the Code'n'Splode tech group, and gives talks at Ignite Portland and numerous conferences worldwide. She has an amazing garden, keeps chickens about as well as I do, and boundless energy.

And I mean boundless energy. Selena seems to be awake before dawn, will party into the night, and seems to always have half a dozen projects on the go at once. Selena coming off a trans-pacific flight is only slightly less bouncy than normal. As if that wasn't enough, she's also an amazing host, and was kind enough to let Jacinta and myself crash at her place last year when we were visiting Portland.

Selena is also an amazing public speaker, a great storyteller, knows more about databases than anyone else I know, and went to Nigeria to help combat election fraud. She is well-versed in awesome.

Selena is responsible for convincing me that I really need a pull-up bar at home.

Karen Pauley (@keiosu)
I first met Karen at a Sydney Perl Mongers meeting a few years back. Karen is the Steering Committee Chair of the Perl Foundation, and is quite frankly one of the most friendliest and interesting people I've ever met.

Karen is responsible for making sure things get done, and a lot of her work is behind the scenes. In fact, I think it would be correct to say that Karen is awesome at meta-work; she has the rather unenviable task of encouraging technically minded people to do productive things. Her talk at the Open Source Developers Conference on managing volunteers was brilliant.

I'm personally indebted to Karen for listening to all my crazy ideas, sending me the most amazing Christmas Cards from Japan, providing fashion advice, making me laugh (a lot!), being an awesome person to hang out with at conferences, and for standing in the hot Australian sun with a digital SLR. If you've seen photos of me draped over a nice looking sports car, then that's probably Karen's work. ;)

I aspire to become anywhere near as good a conversationalist as Karen.

Mary Jane "MJ" Kelly (@mjmojo)
I met Mary Jane completely by chance at OSCON last year. At the time, I thought that she was pretty darn awesome. What I didn't realise is that she's much more awesome than I first thought.

Mary Jane is full of ideas. Cool ideas. Ideas which involve industrial cutting lasers, 3D printers, quilts, robots, fractals, untraditional business cards, topography, steampunk, using tattoos for social hacking, and adventures!

Better still, MJ doesn't just have great ideas, she implements them too! I'm hugely looking forward to seeing her talk at this year's OSCON, which is all about hacker spaces and building awesome things.

Mary Jane is actively involved in computer security, particularly in the field of anti-fraud technologies in on-line gaming. MJ founded the Girls In Tech Seattle chapter, and organised the 2007 Northwest Security Symposium.

MJ has a wicked sense of humour that never fails to make me smile, shares my love of costumes and cool events, and is solely responsible for my knowledge of waffle-makers.

Honourable mentions
There are a lot more women in technology who have been hugely influential in my life, either by changing the way that I think, or from teaching me amazing new things. In particular, I'd love to give a special mention to Leslie Hawthorn, Sulamita Garcia, Emma Jane Hogbin, Allison Randal, Audrey Tang, Jenine Abarbanel, Akkana Peck, Brianna Laugher, Brenda Wallace, Mary Gardiner, Donna Benjamin, Raena Jackson-Armitage, Pia Waugh, Sarah Stokely, Ricky Buchanan, Lindsey Kuper, and Liz Henry.

I don't have an Ada Lovelace Day list on twitter, but I do have my techwomen list, which includes all of the above and more.

Ada Lovelace Day (Part 1)

pjf — 2010-03-24T11:59:48+00:00

Ada Lovelace Day (Part 1)
Today is Ada Lovelace day; a day for reflection on the awesome contributions of women to science and technology. Today, I would like to pay tribute to some of my personal heroines, and as you'll see, there's quite a few of them. I've tried to list them in roughly chronological order.

Dr Katherine Phelps
In my early teens I had a Commodore 64 with a 1200/75 baud modem, which I used to access local bulletin board systems (BBSes). This was the start of what I would discover was a lifelong joy of communicating with people from behind the safety of a monitor, or in the case of the C64, a television.

Katherine, and her husband Andrew, ran one such local BBS called the Rainbow Connection, and I met them both at a BBS meet-up. Katherine seems to have a knack for encouraging younger people to excel, and taught me the basics of HTML, and even had me editing web-pages for Glass Wings and other websites. In fact, it's due to Katherine that I got my first exposure to the Internet and Internet programming.

Today, Katherine is still prominent in the fields of storytelling, interactive fiction, game-writing, and comedy. Katherine is almost wholly responsible for me getting into Japanese Animation, by showing me an nth generation, unsubtitled, videotape of My Neighbour Totoro, with herself and Andrew providing a very amusing translation as we watched. ;)

Kirrily 'Skud' Robert (@Skud)
I met Skud though Katherine, also while I was still at high school. At the time I was living with my parents as a quiet, introverted geek. All of my friends, and most of the technical people I knew, were also quiet and introverted types.

Skud pretty much shattered all the stereotypes I had for what it was to be technical. She was outgoing, opinionated, pushed boundries, made things happen, was extremely good with people, had unconventional social views, and was way cooler than me. She still is.

Skud has had a massive influence on my life. She started her own business (Netizen) and wrote a set of course manuals on Perl. Some years later, that same writing would form the basis of Perl Training Australia's own course manuals. Skud has been highly influential in the Geek Feminism movement (which has both a blog and wiki), and gave a critical keynote entitled standing out in the crowd at OSCON 2009.

Often I feel that whenever I discover a new experience, it's actually something Skud has been doing for at least a decade. I still fondly remember Skud giving me advice on etiquette at a rather incredible FOSS party a few years back. In fact, etiquette is another thing Skud is rather good at. ;)

Skud continues to be one of my most favourite people in the world, and I was delighted to have the chance to visit her in San Francisco last year after OSCON. My personal motto, never refuse an adventure, was directly lifted from one of Skud's new year's resolutions.

Jacinta Richardson (@jarichaust)
Once I got to university, I started an anime club. One year, working behind the desk, and with my hair in pigtails and balloons, a girl approached and asked about the club. At the end of the conversation she said "I might come back later", which when advertising an anime club usually translates to: "I think you're a complete freak, and I hope to never see you again in my life."

To cut a long story short, she came back, and she was studying Software Engineering. ;)

Jacinta was a receipient of a 2008 White Camel Award for outstanding contributions to the Perl community. Along with running Perl Training Australia, she's also one of the original organisers of the Open Source Developers' Conference, has helped with countless Perl Mongers meetings, and is largely responsible for our Perl Tips newsletter.

Jacinta also does a lot of behind the scenes work which is not easily seen. She has contacts in practically every user group in Australia, so Jacinta is often involved when organisation of Australian-wide events are needed. At conferences she's often giving up her own time to coach nervous speakers (including me!). In fact, Jacinta even had a hand in one of my most favourite talks of all time, @webchick's Women in FLOSS.

Emily Taylor (@Domino_EQ2)
I met Emily shortly after a phone-call from Jacinta saying that I was going to have a late addition to my Perl class. Emily arrived at lunchtime, and started as a bright, attentive student; she quickly caught up with the rest of the class, showed genuine talent, and was working on advanced exercises in no time.

However what got me really excited was why Emily was learning Perl. By afternoon of the first day, I was calling back to the office to say that our new student was awesome, and she was going to apply for the position of head tradeskill developer for Everquest II (EQ2). However I think it two at least two weeks until I discovered she was in my guild!

Now, Emily is indeed the grand tradeskill developer for EQ2. She has an awesome blog on MMO tradeskilling and MMOs in general. More importantly for Ada Lovelace day, she's also an active contributor to the Gamers In Real Life (GIRL) blog.

Emily presently lives in San Diego, where she distracts me yearly with photographs from Comic-con, and disagrees with me about what breakfast spreads are appropriate on toast.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's continuation of this post.

Things I didn't know about the Walls

jdavidb — 2010-03-19T17:00:01+00:00

Larry's son, Lewis, is writing a 2D game engine in Perl 6 using Rakudo (http://www.wall.org/~lewis/).

Larry's wife, Gloria, took the Revised Common Lectionary and expanded it to make a complete Bible reading program which covers the entire Bible in three years (http://www.wall.org/~gloria/lect/). And I wonder if maybe I'm not the only person in history who's ever written a program in Perl to divide up the Bible for reading, after all...

Gone

Ovid — 2010-03-14T08:02:43+00:00

Like many others, I'm no longer posting here very much. You'll find my new technical journal at blogs.perl.org. It's much shinier.

As you can see, use.perl visits have been dropping for a while (blogs.perl.org is too new to show up on that search) and the front page of use.perl has been sadly neglected. As for blogs.perl.org, after an initial rough start, plenty of people are switching over and are very happy with the shiny.

I have fond memories of use.perl.org, but it's just too old and out-of-date. Come on over to our new platform and look around. Plus, tell us what you want changed about it. (To be fair, while I was involved in the project to get it launched (mostly kibitzing and asking why things were stalled -- I'm such a marketroid :), the hands-on work was Dave Cross, Aaron Crane and the wonderful folks at SixApart.)

Gamers over 30 and the South Australian elections

jarich — 2010-02-20T08:20:35+00:00

South Australia is about to have its state elections. The incumbents have already attempted to ban anonymous public comment on the elections and now are making a big deal about computer gamers.

South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson (think Minister for Justice/Law) has so far successfully blocked a R-18 classification for computers games in Australia. Our highest rating is MA (15+). The effect of this is that some games which ought to be R-rated are allowed to be sold to teenagers, some games get "modified" to make them appropriate and yet other games are not available at all (legally). We do have R-ratings for movies and some other media; but to allow it for games requires approval from all the Australian states; and Atkinson has been holding out.

In response, a political party called gamers4croydon have formed with the purpose of trying to get this rating approved if they win. Hooray! In the mean time, a gamer apparently stuffed a threatening letter under the Atkinson's family home at 2am some nights back. While I don't approve of such behaviour, I was baffled to hear that this makes Atkinson "feel that my family and I are more at risk from gamers than we are from the outlaw motorcycle gangs who also hate me and are running a candidate against me." Gamers are scarier than bikies? I haven't read the note; perhaps that one is.

So that's a bit of background. Then last night I read an astonishingly condescending article about gamers. This was written by Caroline Overington who has won the Walkley Award twice for investigative journalism, but that's no excuse for the tripe she's trotted out.

Let's see what she has to say:

[A]nyone over the age of 30 who spends any time deep in some sagging sofa, console in one hand, the other down the front of their pants, imagining themselves to be a combatant in some pretend city, is lame.
Anyone who has an avatar -- a dinky little cartoon version of oneself, bearing a physique that is in every way discordant with the physique of an actual gamer -- is major-league lame.
I know what you're thinking. Gamers, who cares? They don't participate in life in any meaningful way. As a rule, they don't even have jobs. With their wet hands and their weak chins, they'd never get through an interview.

I get that this is supposed to be funny, but it failed. Not because I don't have a sense of humour; but because telling me that there aren't any females in gaming isn't funny, it's marginalising. Telling me that gamers are so socially inept that they can't have relationships is not funny, it's marginalising. Telling me that gamers fail at life isn't funny, it's belittling.

Most of the gamers I know have jobs, have spouses and maybe children, are active in a number of different communities and are reasonably physically active. This shouldn't be surprising because the Interactive Australia 2009 Report tells us that the average Australian gamer age is 30 and that 68% of Australians play computer or video games. If all gamers over the age of 30 were as lame as Overington says, we'd have serious problems.

Spending your non-work hours playing computer games late into the night is certainly not a worse pursuit than spending them watching TV. At least with games you're actually required to do some thinking, rather than having it all be passive consumption. Sure there are probably hundreds of "better" things to do with your free time, but there are worse things too.

If Overington wanted to make a subtle dig at Atkinson's refusal to talk about 18+ ratings; I'd have expected her to poke some fun at the idea that computer gamers are more scary than bikies! As it is, I cannot make any reasonable guess as to what motivated this attack.

Barbie tries a career as a Computer Engineer

jarich — 2010-02-17T01:18:51+00:00

Mattel ran a competition for the public to pick Barbie's next career. There were about 5 options to choose from. Barbie's career as selected by girls around the world was News Anchor; however the popular vote was for Computer Engineer so they've done both.

A good write up with links to more has been done on the Geek Feminism Wiki.

Disappointingly, yesterday the BBC published an article criticising Computer Engineer Barbie's appearance and practicality. My response, which may be too long to appear in full in their comments field, is below.

I say "Good on Mattel!" Whether or not the current female geek population ever played with Barbie dolls is irrelevant. By having a Barbie doll looking like a confident IT geek, that's one more message to our children (both boys and girls) that girls can grow up to be into computers too. We need more messages like that, because all the literature I've read says that the numbers of women getting into, and staying in IT (in Europe, the USA and Australia at least) is dropping. If it's a men's playground now, what's it going to be when there's less than 10% women in it? How about 5%?
If you look at the careers section for IT in a Malaysian newspaper, you'll find that it's 50% women represented. If you talk to Malaysian business people you'll find that most of them take it for granted that women will apply for IT jobs and get them. No surprise then that there's more than 40% women in technical professions over there, and it's growing. Malaysian women have the same pressure to be beautiful as the English do; and it appears they carry this into their IT roles even more than we do and they've found a way to make it all work.
On the other hand, over here in the first world, our whole culture around who goes into IT is weird. We continue to perpetuate the unattractive stereotype that IT is full of pimply male teenagers who have no social skills; despite having thousands of high profile, attractive men with very good social skills in technical leadership positions we could point to. We continue to criticise, as unrealistic, any portrayal of geek women which shows them as being feminine, attractive, self-confident etc despite numerous women in IT being all those things and more (go read some of the profiles from the 2009 Ada Lovelace day).
There seems to be a fair amount of retrospective retribution going on: "I had to suffer and struggle to get accepted; so anyone coming after me should have to too!" That's not right. If we want more women in IT; we should promote the good bits, and actually try to be realistic about the bad bits rather than talking them up all the time. (As a woman in IT who goes to conferences, I do know that there are bad bits, but I also know that the creepy guys + those with no social skills is still probably less than 15% of the population).
So thank you Mattel for making it just that much easier to talk to girls about going into computers!

Test::Class::Most

Ovid — 2010-01-31T19:25:10+00:00

Test::Class::Most.

Testing with PostgreSQL

Ovid — 2010-01-30T16:22:57+00:00

My new personal project has a PostgreSQL database. Here's how I'm handling testing.

Kuala Lumpur, Day 0

pjf — 2010-01-28T08:11:48+00:00

Kuala Lumpur, Day 0
After seventeen hours of travel, I've finally checked into my hotel in Kuala Lumpur. I'm here with Jacinta, and we're teaching Perl to a client next week, but we've arrived early to do some sight-seeing... and because we're insane.

Actually, it only feels like we're insane, because we've only just got back from LCA2010. In reality, going to KL so quickly means that we actually have something one of us might care to label as "a holiday". There's no chance of tacking a holiday on the end: we need to get home in order to clear the mail, launder clothes, and squish an entire month's worth of social engagements into three days before KiwiFoo, and then me spending two weeks in Sydney.

That's right. Four weeks of travel, with only three days at home. Maybe I am insane after all.

Kuala Lumpur is just like I remember it. Hot, humid, friendly people, and cheap, delicious food. Almost everything can be ordered with peanuts, and fried anchovies.

Today I feel like telling stories, so I'm going to recount the happenings of my day. Now would be a good time to get a mug of hot chocolate, or maybe skip to someone else's blog entry. I don't mind.

The trip was not a difficult one, but not an uneventful one either. It started with being picked up by the least competent taxi driver in Melbourne. Or more correctly, not being picked up. The taxi was clearly visible in the street, about a block or two away, and spent most of its time doing U-turns and driving back-and-forth outside a small group of houses. I suspect they were using a GPS navigation system, and it didn't know our street numbers. Trying to flag the taxi down with a high-powered diving torch, the sort which is capable of stunning small fish from a mile away, didn't seem to help either.

The torch did attract the attention of a completely different taxi, who, sensing that we were now quite late for our flight check-in, decided to take the most leisurely approach to driving that I've ever seen. From our conversation, I discovered the driver never gets speeding tickets, but was once fined four times in one day because his car had insufficient velocity. Since our car speed to be travelling down the highway with all the speed of warm molasses, I could understand why.

The flight to KL was lovely. Through good planning, a lot of luck, and er, an aggressively unscheduled seat change, both Jacinta and myself were able to secure three seats each to ourselves. As someone who is used to sleeping on airplanes, this is the height of luxury. During the eight hour flight, I slept for seven, and without the need for sleeping tablets. I awoke feeling relaxed and refreshed.

Getting to the hotel wasn't hard, but inefficient. The plan was to catch a bus to KL Sentral, a train to Putrajaya, and then use the hotel's complimentary shuttle from there. It now appears that we could have caught a train directly from the airport to Putrajaya, saving considerable time and some money. Still, the trip to Sentral resulted in some spiffy weekly tickets which looked like they'd be useful in travel.

Calling the hotel from the train, I asked if we could get a pick-up from Putrajaya. They seemed uncertain, and after some to-and-fro, they admitted that the shuttle doesn't go to Putrajaya station, despite it being the nearest major public transport centre. They do however go to Kuala Lumpur proper (where we were just coming from), and a shopping centre or two.

As it happens, I now discover the hotel's bus seems to be the transportation equivalent of "scattered showers": not in your area, and not when you care. So rather than using the hotel bus, we were introduced to the public bus network.

Putrajaya's public bus network doesn't work the same way as other bus networks do. There's a big bus station, with lots and lots of bays and busses, but the goal of the drivers is to collect as few passengers as possible. This is primarily done by locking the bus, sneaking out, having a smoke for half an hour, and then dashing back into the bus and driving off as quickly as possible before anyone spots you. Other tricks include waving passengers away when they try to enter, or telling passengers you don't leave until much later, and then driving off as soon as they turn their backs. In fact, should a bus foolishly leave its doors open for more than a few moments, it is almost invariably becomes jam-packed with passengers. All the busses seem to go to the same places anyway, just in a different order, and catching any bus is better than being outside in the heat.

The hotel itself is super-fancy. The room comes with bath-robes, slippers, a fruit-bowl, a fancy room configuration and furniture. Heck, even the bath-tub has its own phone, just in case you decide you need another bottle of champagne. The hotel seems to be filled with government officials and businessmen; not surprising, given the location in the heart of KL's government and technology district. I've never really liked fancy hotels; when travelling I prefer a more organic experience, but I think I've finally become to understand them. The people who frequent these hotels, almost by necessity, need to have so much money that the prices actually seem reasonable. For example, I'm eating a meal right now that costs the equivalent of dinner for six people on the streets of KL. That's an expensive meal, but it's still on the cheap side compared to what I'd be paying for the same meal in Australia.

The only thing which doesn't change is my surprise over the minibar. You want how much for a can of cola?

ah, dreams...

Matts — 2010-01-26T10:31:17+00:00

I just woke from a dream where it was rjbs' birthday and we got him an onion cake. Only the person who made the cake misunderstood, and instead of a cake shaped like an onion he cooked it WITH onions in it.

Bizarro.

Time::Piece test failures on Win32

Matts — 2010-01-25T23:23:53+00:00

Can someone with Time::Piece test failures on Win32 please contact me offlist? I have a proposed patch I'd like to test, but no Win32 perl to test it on.

Roles without Moose?

Ovid — 2010-01-25T14:04:31+00:00

Milliseconds are important.

Unless what?

Ovid — 2010-01-15T11:47:53+00:00

Unless what?

Perl 10.1.0 doesn't build on Cygwin

jdavidb — 2010-01-14T17:16:42+00:00

Is building on Cygwin not supported any more, I take it? Did we forget about it?

CCCMD = gcc -DPERL_CORE -c -DPERL_USE_SAFE_PUTENV -U__STRICT_ANSI__ - fno-strict-aliasing -pipe -I/usr/local/include -O3 -Wall -W -Wextra -Wdeclarati on-after-statement -Wendif-labels PATH=/home/dblackstone/perl-5.10.1:.:/home/dblackstone/bin:/home /dblackstone/bin :/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/cygdrive/c/Progr am\ Files\ (x86)/J ava/jdk1.6.0_16/bin:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS:/c ygdrive/c /WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/ZipGenius\ 6/:/cygdrive /c/Program\ Files/MySQL/MySQL\ Server\ 5.1/bin:/cygdrive/c/apache-ant-1.7.1/bin: /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Git/cmd:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/cvsn t:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/PuTTY:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/GnuW in32/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawberry/c/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawberry/perl/bi n:/cygdrive/ c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/QuickTime/QTSystem/:/usr/lib/lapack:/usr/local:/etc:/usr /lib:/lib:/sbin: /usr/sbin:/usr/libexec gcc -Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--export -all-symbols -Wl,--stack,8388608 -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base -L/usr/local/lib - o miniperl.exe \ malloc.o gv.o toke.o perly.o pad.o regcomp.o dump.o util.o mg.o ree ntr.o mro.o hv.o av.o run.o pp_hot.o sv.o pp.o scope.o pp_ctl.o pp_sys.o doop.o doio.o regexec.o utf8.o taint.o deb.o universal.o xsutils.o globals.o perlio.o p erlapi.o numeric.o mathoms.o locale.o pp_pack.o pp_sort.o cygwin.o \ miniperlmain.o opmini.o perlmini.o -ldl -lcrypt /bin/sh: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `(' /bin/sh: -c: line 0: `PATH=/home/dblackstone/perl-5.10.1:.:/home/dblackstone/bin :/home/dblackstone/ bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/cygdrive/c/P rogram\ Files\ (x86)/Java/jdk1.6.0_16/bin:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive /c/WINDOWS:/c ygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Z ipGenius\ 6/:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/MySQL/MySQL\ Server\ 5.1/bin:/cygdrive/c /apache-ant-1.7.1/bin:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Git/cmd:/cygdrive/c/Prog ram\ Files\ (x86)/cvsnt:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/PuTTY:/cygdrive/c/Prog ram\ Files\ (x86)/GnuWin32/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawberry/c/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawber ry/perl/bi n:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/QuickTime/QTSystem/:/usr/lib/lapac k:/usr/local:/etc:/usr/lib:/lib:/sbin: /usr/sbin:/usr/libexec gcc -Wl,--enable-au to-import -Wl,--export-all-symbols -Wl,--stack,8388608 -Wl,--enable-auto-image-b ase -L/usr/local/lib -o miniperl.exe \' make[1]: *** [miniperl.exe] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dblackstone/perl-5.10.1' make: *** [install] Error 2

Dear Recruiters

Ovid — 2010-01-13T13:06:11+00:00

Dear Recruiters

Next QA Hackathon -- What Do You Need?

Ovid — 2010-01-12T11:37:14+00:00

Read about the next QA Hackathon.

Most Popular Testing Modules - January 2010

Ovid — 2010-01-07T21:46:46+00:00

Stack Overflow career spam

jdavidb — 2010-01-07T15:26:00+00:00

I got a fairly innocuous spam from Stack Overflow advertising their new job hunting site, where they would like me to upload my resume.

Sorry, Stack Overflow; I'm smart for that (thanks to Andy Lester). I also don't particularly appreciate the spam, although it's the first I've ever gotten and wasn't too obtrusive.