Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
I feel a need to keep an eye on what the hell I’m doing at work, and
how long time I spend doing it. I know that there are lots of apps
around which help you track time spent on projects, but most of them
are graphical apps. I wanted a console app that could live in my
screen session so that I could work from home and still have a
totalitarian view of what I was doing at any given point in time.
A quick trawl through Freshmeat didn’t
turn up anything other than the aforementioned graphical apps, so I
happily sat down and started work on my own, using my recently
acquired knowledge of Perl’s terminal capabilities. I wanted a
full-screen app that I would just press a button in and switch tasks.
While writing this, I needed a trivial time conversion that I had
forgotten. While googling for it, I discovered a time tracking app
written in Perl that used it for its own purposes:
tt. Ironic, huh? The app
isn’t exactly what I envisioned, but it’s more full-featured than
mine, so I’ll give it a try. Otherwise I’ll develop my own app
further.
Posted at 22:32,
in the comp category.
I’ve tried learning Python through Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive
Into Python, but I’ve
discovered that I haven’t enough time to really get into it. Perl is
the language I use most days, both in work and personally, and it’s
hard for me to break out of the Perlish mindset. Any “serious” Python
coding would be sysadmin and report stuff, and I’d just try to remake
Python in Perl’s image.
I’ve finally grokked Perl references, and I’m reading the second
edition of the Perl Cookbook with real pleasure. Some of the
quirkier passages from the first edition are gone (and Randal Schwartz
seems to be persona non grata in this edition), but that’s
outweighed by the treatment of Perl’s Unicode support (crufty and
gnarly though it may be — the price of backward compatibility) and
the new switch statement. Perl must be the only language older than
10 years where switch is an experimental feature.
Jim has apparently volunteered to become
the Perl expert at his salt mine, for which he deserves equal praise
for foolhardiness and pity. I think that he’ll find enough cool stuff
in Perl to satisfy his C++ roots, what with all the esoterica
available in the dark corners of CPAN
(Acme::Bleach,
anyone? Or how about
Acme::Apache::Werewolf,
by a hardcore Warren Zevon fan?)
I’ll never be a Perl guru, but I do think I can become a competent
Perlist.
Posted at 21:56,
in the comp category.
- The Clicker: HDTV buying - Part I, the basics - Engadget - www.engadget.com Tags: hardware hdtv tv.
- FedoraCore2InstallGuide - RT Wiki Tags: fedora install rt.
Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 16:20,
in the links category.
~>
Diego: Beginnings.
Posted at 18:51,
in the links category.
~>
Jeff: Why is forever. Programming has become a right-brain activity while left-brain work is outsourced.
Posted at 10:12,
in the links category.
~>
Carlos: SOAP is Comatose But Not Officially Dead!. RESTful services are succeeding while WS-* are just vaporous documents.
Posted at 16:00,
in the links category.
- Bill de hÓra: The Fog of Service There’s no easy way to get a higher level overview of “IT telemetry” data. Tags: devel logging snmp sysadmin.
Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 07:05,
in the links category.
- The Infinite Matrix | Cory Doctorow | I, Robot Tags: s-f short-story.
- Coding Horror: Multiple LCDs 3 LCD monitors under Windows, tips and tricks. Tags: hardware lcd monitors multiple-displays windows.
- Securing Blosxom on Apache Tags: apache blosxom security weblogs.
Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 20:35,
in the links category.
- burnatonce downloads Tags: cd-burn iso-image software windows.
- DeepBurner - Powerful CD and DVD burning package Tags: cd-burn iso-image software windows.
- Brushed Mac theme Tags: series60 themes.
- Arkitek theme Tags: series60 themes.
Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 22:21,
in the links category.
~>
China Mieville: Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. Via BoingBoing.
Nice to see Lucius Shepard’s Life During Wartime on this list.
Posted at 00:07,
in the links category.
When it comes to maintaining this blog, I’m trying to stick to the DRY
principle expounded in The Pragmatic
Programmer (“don’t
repeat yourself”). I’ve recently discovered
del.icio.us, and it’s every bit as cool
and tagalicious as everyone says.
It’s pointless to grab URLs and post them here as linkblog
entries and then do the same thing on
del.icio.us. That service is way better than anything I could come up
with, and it has an API. Keep it simple, and don’t repeat yourself.
To that end, I’ve spent a happy evening coding a little perl app
that’ll grab the latest entries from my del.icio.us account. If
they’re tagged with linkblog, they get posted here too. One place to
enter the data. Maintaining it will be a bit different, there are some
things, such as attributions, that can’t easily be handled in the
del.icio.us interface. But I can always fix that later.
The app is not ready for prime time yet. I’ve based it more or less
blatantly on this code but
tweaked it for my setup. I’ll post a link when it’s finished.
Posted at 00:32,
in the scrivener category.
- Reason: Neal Stephenson’s Past, Present, and Future: The author of the widely praised Baroque Cycle on science, markets, and post-9/11 America Tags: interview.
- jwz - Hula Tags: devel hula open-source.
- Publishing Quick Links in blosxom with del.icio.us via xmlstarlet - Archives - Blog - 0xDECAFBAD Blog Tags: bloxsom devel.
- deloxom.pl grab del.icio.us entries for inclusion in blosxom. Tags: bloxsom delicious devel.
- XMLStarlet Command Line XML Toolkit: Overview I’ve been looking for this. Tags: command-line devel xml.
Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 21:03,
in the links category.
- Pattern Share design pattern repository. Tags: devel.
Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 10:42,
in the links category.
Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland.
I read this book in about 24 hours, a very enjoyable read. Like
William Gibson’s, Coupland’s prose is fluid and nearly frictionless,
and he relies on this property to slip the reader effortlessly through
plots that are thin and rather silly.
Like Microserfs, Miss Wyoming offers glimpses into the incubators
of popular culture — in this case: Hollywood. But unlike his
depiction of hackers in love, his LA cast seems cardboard-like. The
central protagonist’s history of drug and sex abuse are alluded to,
but seem tacked on, not part of his character at all. And the
eponymous Miss Wyoming is a blank slate, an impossibly naif
ex-beauty queen who’s words of wisdom are not hers at all, but
transparently the author’s.
Enjoyable read, none the less.
Posted at 16:22,
in the books » read category.
- Bill de hÓra: programmers’ block Tags: devel.
Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 01:05,
in the links category.
- Coding Horror: Gettin’ Greppy Wit It using PowerGREP on Windows. Tags: devel unix-tools windows.
Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 00:30,
in the links category.
- F Lock Key Info how to remap “extended” function keys on MS keyboards. Tags: hardware windows.
- Swap Ctrl and CapsLock registry hacks to swap control and capslock keys on Windows. Tags: hardware windows.
Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 10:08,
in the links category.
The Last Grain Race, by Eric Newby.
18-year old Eric Newby signs on as an apprentice on the barque
Moshulu in 1938, bound for Australia for grain. His middle-class
background contrasts with the Finns and Ålanders serving alongside him
in the fo’csle of this last example of a sailing merchant ship. With
humour and warmth he tells the tale of sailing round Africa to
Australia and back via Cape Horn.
A great read, like all books by Newby.
Posted at 22:05,
in the books » read category.
~>
Chris: WikiPad for Series 60. Must play with this.
Posted at 21:41,
in the links category.
Today in #mobitopia:
16:16 <Netminder> tags are the new black
16:16 <diego_> heh that's good :)
16:16 <Moof> Netminder: I'm currently writing tag-aware blogging software
16:17 <diego_> I am writing a tag-aware operating system. There will be no
files or applications or anything. Only tags.
16:17 <Netminder> my pet monkey just received first round funding on a
tag-enabled venture he's working on.
16:17 <diego_> I am talking to Shell as well, developing tag-based fuels.
Posted at 17:37,
in the comp category.
~>
ACM Queue: an interview with Alan Kay
If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of
engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind
of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most
software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions
of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity,
but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
Posted at 23:49,
in the links category.
Michael nearly pulls the plug on his
blog. Low-life
spammers are responsible, of course. This actually makes me feel less
bad about pulling comments from this
blog. But it still
sucks.
Clearly, something has to be done. I see a great need for a Bayesian
filtering system for blog comments. This has worked wonders for my
email spam, and is a really good weapon to have in your arsenal. But I
haven’t seen anything like it yet, at least for Blosxom.
(Michael’s system, Movable Type, has its own problems with serving
pages. But the base problem is the same.)
I’m thinking about writing my own comment submission form that’ll use
SQLite or Berkeley DB to process the raw entries, apply Bayesian
statistics to them, and present them nicely for moderation. Blosxom’s
file-based layout has obvious drawbacks when it comes to rapidly
handling lots of data from different angles.
When I’ll have time for that is another matter.
Posted at 16:51,
in the scrivener category.
~>
Slashdot: retinitis pigmentosa sufferers get solar chip implants.
Posted at 22:35,
in the links category.
~>
Ryan: Coding tips from my brother Theoden. Via Ned.
Posted at 14:39,
in the links category.
I spent my free time this weekend re-designing my app for calculating
Swedish
holidays. It was
pretty crufty, having evolved from a simple app to update our
time-reporting database to being all things to all people — at least
those that grok command-line Perl. Let’s face it — that audience is me.
So I ripped out the central part which actually computes the dates and
put it in a module. I wanted to write a CGI that could be used online,
so I had to research how to install Perl modules as a normal user,
enable taint mode et cetera et cetera. I’m 15 minutes from
deployment when I suddenly think “hey, this is so freaking simple it
must have been done already” — and did a google for “svenska
helgdagar”.
Of course, #2 on that list is a
worthy competitor, with English and Swedish
translations, flag days, and output to different calendar formats.
Humph.
Anyway, my efforts are
here. Python
version next!
Posted at 14:23,
in the comp category.
For a long time I have been having trouble sending mail to people
using Microsoft’s mail clients Outlook and Outlook Express. I use
Gnus, an all-singing, all-dancing news-mail-and-everything reader for
use in Emacs.
The trouble was that if I included any 8-bit characters in the header
of the message, Outlook would translate any 8-bit characters in the
body of the message to an equal sign and two hex characters. This was
intensely irritating, as I naturally assume that all free software is
superior to commercial offerings, especially Microsofts.
The trouble is that the version of Gnus I’m using (v5.8.7) doesn’t
encode the headers in quoted-printable, thus confusing Outlook no end.
The solutions is to place the following in your .emacs or .gnus file:
;; iso-8859-1 support for headers
(require 'gnus-msg)
(add-to-list 'gnus-group-posting-charset-alist
'(message-this-is-mail 'iso-8859-1 (iso-8859-1)))
Thanks to Kai Großjohann for this info.
Keywords: Gnus, gnus newsreader, GNU/Emacs, Emacs, Xemacs, MIME,
mime, quoted-printable, transfer-encoding, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook
Express, mangled, 8-bit characters.
Note: this was originally posted on another server, I’m posting it
here in an effort to clean up my online life.
Posted at 16:17,
in the comp category.
The Pragmatic Programmer by A. Hunt and D. Thomas.
There’s a lot to like about this book. The authors advocate a
pragmatic approach to developing software: use what works. Don’t get
bogged down in methodologies, communicate effectively, test
ruthlessly.
The edition I read was pretty Unix-centric, which is fine by me. But
if you’re working in a MS environment you might be forgiven for being
mystified by Makefiles and Emacs.
I myself enjoy using Emacs for day-to-day editing, but I think a
well-designed IDE can leverage a language in way that a text editor
cannot. MS Visual Studio.NET was very nice, and the authors talk a lot
about the browsers available in the Smalltalk world. There are
advantages in both approaches. I’d rather write documentation in Emacs
than in Word, for example.
I’ve been inspired to use a few of the principles expounded in the
book in this very weblog. For example:
The DRY principle (“Don’t repeat yourself). Earlier I had a list
of links in the sidebar that was duplicated in my Bloglines
setup. So I wrote a script that fetches my blogroll from Bloglines
and puts it in its own post. Now I
only have to maintain my blog links in one place. The same principle
applies to my reading list and
the data of what I’ve listened to on Audioscrobbler.
Decoupling. I’m trying to keep the internal links of this weblog
consistent and decoupled from the current implementation (i.e., that
it’s situated on
http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog. That
way I can set it up somewhere else with little or no effort. (This
is in no way a vote of non-confidence in the
allaboutsymbian.com team who very
generously let me have some space on their server. It’s just that
I’m planning on getting my own server sometime and I want to be
prepared for that eventuality.)
Updated on Saturday, 2005-02-05.
Posted at 11:41,
in the books » read category.
An unshielded nuclear reactor, flying at Mach 3 at treetop level and
designed to drop hydrogen bombs was nearly
constructed in the 1950’s.
From the article:
Like Hula Hoops and Slinkies, Pluto is now an anachronism, an
all-but-forgotten remnant of an earlier — but not necessarily more
innocent — era. At the time, however, deadly as it would have been,
Pluto had the almost irresistible appeal of any radically new
technological innovation. Like the H-bombs it would carry, Pluto was
“technically sweet” to many of the scientists and engineers who
worked on it.
The “technically sweet” explains a lot. The technical challenges were
enormous, but could be overcome. I guess this explains why many
engineers can work with weapon systems — even though they’re to be
used for killing people, the technical challenges are often cutting
edge and really interesting. Project Pluto would have been fun to work
on.
(Via Boing Boing)
Update: Charlie Stross has read his history and incorporates Project Pluto in A Colder War.
Updated on Saturday, 2005-02-05.
Posted at 00:46,
in the alt category.
~>
Darla: Copying bookmarks from one phone to another.
Posted at 22:33,
in the links category.
~>
Mike: SymbianOS 9.
Of course the network operators aren’t going to like it very much,
and the existing manufacturers view it as a threat. But that doesn’t
mean it isn’t the right direction long term. That doesn’t mean it’s
not the best outcome for the end users. Everyone is thinking within
the framework of the existing business models, and that’s pretty
sad.
Posted at 20:59,
in the links category.
~>
Ned: Get out of the zeros!. A phenomenon which I have often noticed.
Posted at 20:45,
in the links category.
~>
Davezilla: IKEA is for lovers. Via Erik.
Posted at 17:18,
in the links category.
In a hopefully succesful repeat of last year’s visit to
Arvika we’re planning on
heading to Hultsfred this summer.
Hultsfred is the bigger scene, and is more often colder and
damper. But what the hey…
One thing that bugs me is that the signed acts
page
doesn’t have a syndication feed. Of course, you can pay for an SMS
service instead, which is probably more youth-friendly, not to say
more profitable for the organisers (at 3 SEK/SMS).
Hmm, can’t be that hard to screen-scrape that page…
Posted at 00:40,
in the alt category.
~>
Chris: nordic brown. Stattined.
Posted at 23:59,
in the links category.
~>
Hendry: Fsck you, SEOs.
Posted at 16:53,
in the links category.
~>
Henning: Goodbye TrackBack, I barely knew thee.
Now this is just the latest symptom of an issue I’ve been wondering
about for some time. When weblogging became the hip thing to do some
years ago, we already had newsgroups, forums and guestbooks burried
under truckloads of spam for viagra and animal porn. Even the worst
web programming tutorials began with a two page indoctrination about
how you should always assume that every user could be satan
himself. And yet the way comments and trackbacks have been
implemented up to the present day is just crying for abuse. “Not
having learned from past mistakes” doesn’t come close to what has
happened here.
Posted at 14:52,
in the links category.
