Archive for June, 2007

YAPC::NA 2007 Perl Conference, Houston

Saturday, June 30th, 2007

I was at the YAPC::NA 2007 Perl Conference this week at the University of Houston in Texas.

Once again, it was a great conference, with about 200 people attending.

It was my first time in Houston, and boy was it humid. My eyeglasses fogged up every time I went outside. It might be the most humid place on earth, even moreso that Bali (on the equator.)

YAPC is a great value. The conference, 2 days of tutorials plus book and 5 nights of dorm accomodations was $384.

Sunday

- got up an hour before my flight
- hot and humid outside airport in Texas
- took bus from the airport, 73 and 30, 88 doesn’t run on Sunday
- city is not a war zone like Detroit or other inner cities, but rough. one drunk on the bus
- staying in Taub dorm in “the quadrangle”, has ok common
basement with TV lounge, weight room and laundry room
- spent evening at The Cadillac Mexican food restaurant
- very off-campus $25 cab ride
- $30 fajitas and cheesecake

Monday

- meeting rooms are in the 3-storey University Center
- scattered around vertically
- coffee
- number of fast-food restaurants: Wendy’s, Subway, Chili’s Too
- Cougar shop
- TV lounge with wide-screen flat-scree TV
- Game Center with FPS, pool, air hockey and bowling

Larry gave 2 talks in morning

- briliant comparative language analysis
- Perl borrows from other languages heavily
- Perl hits the sweet spot for programmer freedom
- Prolly too many object models in Perl5. one is enough.

Lifetime of Many Hats

- born near Pasadena
- almost drowned with styrofoam surfboard
- liked to specialize in everything
- dropped out of original uni program, worked, went
to missionary school and studied linguistics, back to uni

The Perl Foundation

- case study of dev shop that couldn’t find enough perl programmers,
tried Java, ended up with 25 of each
- creating materials for the public in MBA-speak
- Forester called them and asked for scripting language survey participation
- the analyst groups rank language by current capability
and long-term strategy equal weighed, perhaps problematic for perl
which has a mature perl5 but fuzzy perl6
- somebody has written a Perl module for the Facebook API,
overlooked in their initial API release

Dave Rolsky

- error, validation, logging
- good talk

Abigail

- sudoku solver with Perl regex
- regex is NP complete … so let’s do something insane
- 250 Kilobyte regex to solve 9×9 sudo, 90 minutes to run
- he can solve it by hand in less time

Tuesday

Resume talk was funny. Basically, don’t do things
like send a picture of yourself in a disco, show up
late, or be difficult. Based on real-world experience.

Perrin Harkin

- always thoughtful and practical
- but lolcats galore in slides
- tried VMware for snapshotting environment, 4x slow
disk io on their hw, moved to lvm
- uses version control, indifferent, cvs good enough
for a long time anybody who said otherwise was a crackpot
- use 2 branches (dev on main plus maintenance branch)
- test is important, Test::More is not enough because
of namespace pollution?
- tried to store db operations and roll back in perl,
prolly better to just truncate

Casey West

- working at SocialText, SocalCalc
- started project with MochiKit, web 2.0 ish framework
- roundelement for rounded corners
- cross-browser keyboard modifiers
- animation lib
- functional
- did one lolcat to mock Perrin
- switched to MooTools for JS, smaller memory footprint

Evan Carroll, Houston.pm, Dealermade

- catalyst with Dojo, template toolkit
- ruby with scriptaculous JS, integral

Nice dinner in Hilton ballroom.

Auction hosted by Uri. Quite humorous, raised about $4,000.

Dorm party afterwards, lot of alcohol. Talked to Julian Cash
a little. He is very artistic.

Talked to Beth and Adrian, 2 bioinformatics perl chicks.
Beth runs Ubuntu on her Powerbook G4 and Adrian Debian on her Dell
notebook.

Taub dorm party.

Wednesday

Beth from Ithaca did a talk on database programming with postgresql.
She uses it for bioinformatics work.

Some type of skit about the power of the yapc perl t-shirt.

Town Hall meeting rehashing usual Perl adoption issues:

- lack of corporate funding
- lack of PR
- lack of mindshare vs other languages
- poor state of Perl distros, but in LSB

Richard Dice mentioned some feedback from Forrester Research.
Perl was rated ok overall, with a hole in WSDL support.

This YAPC finished about $6,000 in black.

Talked to Perrin a little about file uploads and memory leaks
on mod_perl. He recommended either using Apache api,
reading by row, or using exit in your Apache::Registry script
to force child to die after the upload.

Talked to a Larry a little about parallel programming
with Perl6. Seems like comprehensive support for features
found in other languages like Haskell.

Thursday

Damion was unable to come to YAPC this year, so Randal Schwartz filled in for him for 2 days in the Advanced Perl training tutorial.

Randal did a good talk on his page-by-page views on Damion Conway’s Perl Best Practises book from 9 am to 2:30 pm.

I tend to identify more strongly with Randal’s programming style than Damion’s in some cases. For example, I’m not a big fan of English.pm.

Randal delved in detail into some areas of Perl upon prompting by the audience. He spent some extra time talking about Perl control structures.

GoDaddy Domain Backorder Feature Kinda Works

Saturday, June 30th, 2007

I own a couple dozen domain names, and several happen to be registered with GoDaddy.

I don’t recommend using GoDaddy for valuable domains because of their eccentric founder, and their overzealous enforcement of DMCA complaints – which means they may forfeit your domain without substantial proof of infringement.

Also, GoDaddy is aggressive at spamming customers on a weekly basis with promotional upsell offers. And they telemarket you to upsell. And their website is ugly. And they guarantee only 99.9% network uptime. (You get the idea.)

Anyway, I decided to try the GoDaddy Backorder feature.

I already owned jebriggs.com, didn’t think it was likely that I would ever get briggs.com (lots of companies named that), but thought it would be an improvement to register jbriggs.com when available.

For $18.99 per domain name, GoDaddy promises to inform you of whois record changes, attempt to register an already-registered domain name when it expires for no additional charge for the first year.

So I “backordered” jbriggs.com last year.

jbriggs.com expired on April 6, 2007 and became available on July 24, 2007.

How well did GoDaddy Backorder perform? Not very. A domainer (squatter) was able to register it and point it at a parking page.

Fortunately, after apparently not making money in 5 days, the domain became available again and was automatically registered to me.

What’s really odd is that I received an alert email informing me that the nameservers for jbriggs.com were changed to godaddy servers, but I wasn’t explicitly notified that I had acquired the domain itself.

Update: I got the congratulations email about 20 hours after the domain was registered.

Mobile METAR, TAF and AIRMET Reports

Monday, June 18th, 2007

I couldn’t find a convenient and free way of accessing aviation METAR, TAF and AIRMET reports on my Blackberry, so I created a couple HTML front-ends to the NOAA National Weather Service Aviation Weather Center Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS) site that are mobile-optimized for screen size and bandwidth.

I live in the South Bay Area, so I defaulted the values to my region. But you’re welcome to do View Source …, copy the HTML and customize your own forms.


ADDS METARs UI by James
ADDS METARs UI by James
ADDS AIRMETs UI by James
ADDS AIRMETs UI by James

I’ve been happy with the free AccuWeather mobile UI for viewing radar and satellite images. It’s already conveniently optimized for mobile phones, so I made no effort to deep-link into any such products.

NOAA NWS Aviation Weather Center Aviation Data Service (ADDS)
Weathermeister

Upgrading Awstats and GeoIP

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

Just upgrading from awstats 6.4 to 6.6 tonite.

Time to also update the MaxMind GeoIP database. Actually there’s 3 free ones now: GeoIP.dat, GeoLiteCity.dat and GeoIPASNum.dat.

Not much new in awstats, although there are breakdowns by Linux distro and city.

I’m also using antezeta’s more comprehensive robots.pm file – seems to be about a year ahead of the file included with awstats, or about 15% more robots.

Awstats is a good log analyzer, though it doesn’t do clicktrail analysis like expensive commercial software such as Omniture can do.

Awstats still helps you spot:

  • Google AdWords click fraud
  • broken links
  • deep-linkers
  • abusive users and bots
  • downtime
  • search keywords
  • competitors viewing your site.

Awstats
MaxMind.com
MaxMind database downloads
antezeta.com: GeoIP Information for AWStats
antezeta.com: Enhanced Robots.pm for AWStats

Jet flies on after being hit by asphalt chunk

Friday, June 15th, 2007

Folks, if your plane gets hit by a 7′x10′ chunk of asphalt, you should take a look before departure.

Metro Music in the Other Park Concert with The Tubes

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

My ears are still ringing a little, but I’m glad I went to the free KFOX 98.5 Metro Music in the Other Park concert in downtown San Jose tonite.

The Tubes gave a really good performance. Fee Waybill still has a great voice (and is in good shape) and the guitarists were tight. The PA system was a little weak, but The Tubes still sounded great.

The singer even did costume changes for each song, which was a lot of fun for “What do you want from life?” and “White Punks on Dope,” where he did his Quay Lewd act.

He thanked the audience for supporting The Tubes and other 80’s bands for 30 years.

The lead guitarist, playing a Les Paul, did a smoking guitar solo.

The audience was quite odd – a lot of what looked to be ex-hippies and vagrants.


The Tubes: Quay Lewd and guitars

I got a lot of great photos with my Nikon D200 and 70-200mm/f2.8 VR lens (quite a handful.)

Photo Notes

  • spot-metering. started at f4, 1/2000, ISO 800 and ended with f4, 1/25, ISO 1600!
  • in-camera sharpening, high-iso NR, some Nikon Capture sharpening.
  • 70-200mm/f2.8 VR was prolly the best lens to use for this concert, 300mm would have been nice too. First time using a VR lens in a concert, used VR on normal, amazingly sharp results on the autograph signature of Randy Mantooth. not sure why focus ring was slipping off level.
  • crowd heads often in way, could Photoshop most out (or grow another foot taller)
  • should prolly have used hood, and should have started with f8 (and matrix-metering) of stage to get singer and backdrop in focus, used f8 for side view of stage with 3 performers in frame.
  • sore upper arm next day, need to do some weight exercises that simulate holding a heavy camera for 2 hours.


The Tubes: Quay Lewd and guitars

Friendster Says I have “A Maximum Number of Friends”

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007


Friendster: Too Many Friends

According to Friendster you can have too many friends. But they’ve been saying that since I had 745, and now I have 1000 even.

Recently they’ve also made the default user search query google (see screen capture) instead of in the Friendster database – bizarre.

I wonder when they will finally shut down their train-wreck of a site.

Friendster FAQ: What is the maximum number of Friends I can have on my account?

Parallax BASIC Stamp Kit

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

I have always wanted to play with the BASIC Stamp electronics kit, and Fry’s had the Parallax Discovery Kit #27807 on sale for $20 off, so I bought that plus a GPS module #28146 and an ultrasonic sensor module #28015. This kit is part of their Educational product line for schools. Radio Shack also resells their kits.

I’ve done some small circuit designs for people involved in audio applications, but I prefer a kit like this over a bunch of loose parts, since I’m not really a hardware guy.

Parallax invented the BASIC Stamp product line, which is a programmable microcontroller with flash memory on a board that runs a BASIC virtual machine (slowly). A nice Windows editing program is provided for editing and downloading code to the microcontroller. It makes prototyping moderately complicated designs almost trivial.

The $150 Discovery USB Kit includes a PCB with rev 2 microcontroller, small breadboard area (2 sq. inches), and power conditioning circuitry, a bag of discrete parts including LEDs, switches, servo, AD5220 pot and a 7-segment display, a USB cable, 2 manuals and a software CD. An AC adapter is not included, but you can either use a 9-volt battery or buy an optional adapter.

It’s a little over-priced. Basically you’re getting $20 in parts, a USB cable and 2 books. But it is a nice package, and I suppose I’m subsidizing a company that contributes to the educational market. For those on a budget, you can either buy a minimal kit and download the manuals in digital form, or buy a clone kit.

They should pre-insert the PIC IC (or use a ZIF socket) and bolt on the battery terminals. I had to use a lot of force to get proper insertion – almost enough to damage the PCB. I felt lucky when the IDE identified my board as still working.

If you download the latest IDE, make sure you get a file that is at least 6 MB to ensure you also get the online help files. The help is well-done – I’ve never seen circuit diagrams in a Windows help file before.

Parallax software is cross-platform, supporting Windows, Mac and Linux.

They also sell Javelin Stamp products, which run Java.

Parallax also has some robotics kits for building a single robot, a robot plotter, or 2 dueling robots.

The instruction set is fairly Open Source at this point, since it’s simple and people have “disassembled” it.

Parallax PBASIC Tokenizer Library
The Basic Stamp – an Overview and Instruction Set

Very cool.

See wikipedia for more information, including links to clone vendors who offer more features or speed, or the “C Stamp.”

wikipedia: Parallax Company
wikipedia: BASIC Stamp