use Perl

I woke early before all of my family and I was wide awake right away. I jumped out of bed and started to make breakfast. The kids woke up and I got them seated and fed. I went on to pack the lunch bags for the kids and then skipped out of the door.

We got there early got registration set up pretty fast and mounted the video cameras in the 4 auditoriums. Everything got started, domm announced next years venue Lisbon and cog gave his 'How to get the most out of a YAPC' talk.

It was good to see so many familiar faces, I cannot remember any names but a few, it is so difficult when people have both real names and nicks and PAUSE ids and in addition I am bad with names.

The conference seems to run smoothly, apart from the WLAN, which does not cover so good in the auditoriums. We got approached by a lot of vegetarians who did not tells us they where vegetarians in advance. A lot of people also paid for a guest to the conference dinner without having a guest, so we will have some refunding to do, but that will have to be done after the conference.

The first day seemed to go quite well, I got home late and never made it to the Globe for the party there.

The Oslo.pm was handing out business cards promoting the next NPW in Oslo in April 2009, the front side had some text and the back side a picture of Larry Wall. When I got home my oldest sun showed me his pokemon cards, I told him I had a card too and showed him my Larry Wall card, so now Larry Wall is a part of his deck...

A third of the attendees showed up and I wounded up running around talking to a lot of people, unfortunately I did not get to talk to all of the people I intended, but I expect I can catch up during the conference.

domm came Monday afternoon to crash my sofa for one night, my oldest son was totally fascinated by his haircut, but wondered why he spoke swedish :)

domm has been so kind as to bring my kids some candy and a jigsaw puzzle - and some chocolates for me and my wife. It was really good to see him and this really sparked my expectations to the conference, since this is very my much what it is all about in my opinion.

I went out to eat and had a few beers with domm and some of the other early arrivals. I feel no stress and I am really looking forward to the conference. We never made it to the Globe as had been written on the WiKi, but I did not want to push people around all of Copenhagen.

I sometimes go into a loop where my workflow contains pushing a distribution several times to application host. I prefer working in the editors on my local machine and not in vi/vim on the application hosts (and then I have to pull back stuff to stick it in CVS).

This takes quite a few commands since I have to push it via a jump host via SSH. So I attempt to make the commands I have in my history as one-linerish as possible so I do not have to skip through several steps.

I have been cursing at Module::Build's ./Build dist, since it kept prompting me to decide whether I wanted to overwrite the existing tar-ball with the same name, being the product of the command.

gzip even has a force flag!

Today I went back and had a look at the docs and I fell over the --gzip option.

So now my command looks like this:

% ./Build dist --gzip='/usr/bin/gzip --force'; scp somedistribution-1.00.tar.gz jonasbn@jumphost:~/

I a do not have to answer yes everytime I want to deploy a new distribution.

Next step would be to make the jump host transparent so stuff would go to the designated application server on the other site, I am sure this can be done,propably involving some serious tunneling - I just not had the time to figure out how and we do have quite a few application servers, so I have to figure out some nifty approach.

Hints are welcome...

We finally got the last details working with Paypal and we were satisfied with the test results.

So the YAPC::Europe 2008 payment is now open.

http://www.yapceurope2008.org/ye2008/purchase

So get your ticket now and be shown in bold on the website, we look very much forward to seeing you in Copenhagen for the 9th. European YAPC.

One of the Google ads on The Register caught my eye so I clicked the link and it brought me to a page where a download could be initiated.

When I start the download however I am redirected to a page where I am greeted since I already have an account with Internet.com... but no download happens and I am not able to click any additional links only administer my account/profile/newsletters and so on.

What I am doing wrong?

I have tried to click Logout and try again, but I am still logged in. I have experienced simular trouble with Internet.com/JupiterOnlineMedia, but they did not respond to my mail.

All winter I have been running with large groups of runers and I was quite amazed as to see how stupidly a group of people react to obstacles and other entities in traffic.

A good thing about runners is however that they notify each other, when encountering obstacles.

So you yell out if a bike approaches or a there is a hole in the road or something, as people get
tired the amount of warnings do however decrease, but in general it works, but the communication does have some flaws as I see it.

But runners have a lot to learn when it comes to calls (to use the term from volleyball).

I used to play volleyball and we would only utter the most necessary calls to communicate what we observed or intended to do, like take the volley from the other team, anticipate an attack or something - this system is very good and you do not have too much unnecessary communication and even with noise, sweat and exhaustion you are still able to understand what your teammates communicate.

When doing my service, and I guess this goes for all military like organizations, communication is streamlined to avoid confusion and misinterpretation, these things do happen but the protocol aims to minimize this as much as possible.

To give an example:

A team of runners are running along a path, a bicycle approaches from ahead keeping to the right as the traffic rules dictate. One of the runners spotting the bicycle yells:

If the team of runners is large enough not all will pick up the information. Some will only hear 'left' and some will only hear 'bike' aso.

To put this into context of a professional approach to the same situation, the interpretation should be quite different and the runner should have called:

This would mean that if just a bare minimum of the message get though such as 'right', people would pick up 'right' and adjust accordingly.

The optimal message would be:

Since we do not care if it is a bike coming and whether it comes from behind or from the front.

One positive thing I can say about the communication protocol among runners is that at least it is consistent.

Whether the group of runners is doing what the traffic rules say is a completely different story and often they do not and runners do not act as a swarm, they do all sorts of weird things, that might confuse others - but that is a different story.

A long time ago I talked to Josh McAdams who is also a runner about using a mp3 mediaplayer while running. I normally listed to music. He apparently listens to podcasts.

I was amazed.

But yesterday I thought I would give it a shot so I made a playlist consisting of podcasts with technical content. The selection of podcasts where all nicely subdivided into chapters, which is quite nice when listening, but this did not quite work out as expected while running.

After having listened for 20-25 minutes, the first podcast was over - it started over. The topic was quite interesting, but still, I wanted to move on to the next podcast in line, but it just skipped between the chapters and it kept going in circles.

I have to investigate whether I need to do some reconfiguration of my iPod nano, perpaps the repeat flag is enabled or something of the sort, but I guess this experimenting should be done while not running. My legs felt quite good, but my finishing time due to the time lost on dealing with technical issues. In the end I selected a music play list and continued...

Attempting to get Net::SFTP working I got the following error message from one of it's dependencies, Math::GMP:

perl Makefile.PL
Checking if your kit is complete...
Looks good
Note (probably harmless): No library found for -lgmp
Writing Makefile for Math::GMP

Since Math::GMP is a wrapper around the C library I guess the harmless part is sort of an understatement.

It sounded awfully familiar, not that Perl is the only text manipulating tool around, but still. http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/st3/?open&ca=dna-flht-05152008&S_TACT=106AH62 W&S_CMP=NEWS So I clicked the link and had a brief look. In points this is what it can do:

1. Translation of a file using Java™ translation bundles
2. Translation of a file using the Tivoli® Message Standard
3. Analysis of a file using an HTML page
4. Analysis using the Java highlighter
5. Use of the analyzer for searching and replacing

Here is my subjective translation of what it can do (in same order as above):

1. Localization translation
2. This one is very specific I will get back to that one later
3. HTML grabbing
4. Class name locating in files
5. Search and replace

So if you look at the second point, it is a collection of all of the above aimed at a specific product. I am sort of amazed by what IBM can do in the year of 2008, I do not know about you, but things seem to have gone downhill or are they just re-releasing old stuff to the new generations of CTOs and CEOs? If course it comes with buzzword compliance and all sorts of IBM dependencies and integration. I think I will stick with Perl as my 'Simple Text Transformation Tool'

IBM has developed a ROI automated testing calculator

I have not yet tried to enter some data, since I normally finde this sort of calculators too management, but just for the fun of it, I might stick give it some data from a current project to see what it would calculate.

Crazy IBM, they must have too much time on their hands...