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Mar. 6th, 2012

Insanity, Madness

Professional Photographers? Professional Whingers

Read this: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/22/opinion/phones-instagram-apps-stern/

Then read my ranting essay in response to that guy's self-entitled ranting )

Feb. 16th, 2012

Calm, Collected

Countering Constants in Unit Tests

In Perl, some people will do funky stuff like this:
  package FooBar;
  use constant {
    CONFIG_VALUE_A = 'foo',
    CONFIG_VALUE_B = 'bar',
    };

If I want to override those values (e.g.: while running your application on my system, or building a test suite) I have to use a construct like this:
*{FOOBAR::CONFIG_VALUE_A} = sub { 'my new foo' };

Please don't use constants for things which might vary (such as hostname, database server, database name, user name or password). Constants are for things like Pi, or G or h (and even then, the cosmologists tell us that h is not really constant in space or time).

To handle configuration variables, I recommend tools such as Config::IniFiles.

That is all.

Feb. 15th, 2012

Calm, Collected

Kobo Touch, Sony Reader or iPad?

In which I contrast the Kobo Touch, Sony Reader and iPad 2 in terms of reading books.

Let me cut to the chase: If I was forced to choose only one of these devices, it would be the iPad. But for the purposes of exclusively reading books I would choose the black Kobo Touch.No photos, sorry. I can't capture the bedazzling effect of the Sony Reader's shiny bezel. )

Feb. 13th, 2012

Calm, Collected

It's Monday 13th. Is your data secure?

Some points to consider when reviewing your backup strategy: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/poremba/bulletproofing-your-data/?cs=49333

Note the last point especially: have you tried recovering your data onto a brand new computer?

And remember that tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day. You can buy a 1TB drive for the price of a dozen roses :)

Oh, and another story about losing stuff: http://www.documentsnap.com/carbonite-ceo-and-i-join-the-idiot-club/

Jan. 30th, 2012

Music

Making O'Reilly ePubs usable on the Kobo Touch

Due to my weak and undisciplined nature I have succumbed to "more shinies syndrome" and now I have a Kobo Touch. I have a large collection of O'Reilly books in ePub format, which work just fine on the iPad, but crash the Kobo. So I set out to massage my O'Reilly books to the point that they are usable on the Kobo.

Details of my book massaging behind the cut )

A huge THANK YOU to O'Reilly for being sensible and releasing their publications with no DRM, which allows me to edit my copy as I see fit. This is why I buy your books (in addition to them being technically excellent).

Jan. 12th, 2012

Music

On Copyright and Monkeys

Before you get to my post, here is some background reading. They're short, so please go read them now:

This rant is about copyright and who owns it. )

Jan. 9th, 2012

Calm, Collected

Getting Started with Selenium

Computer geek stuff behind the cut )

Nov. 29th, 2011

Insanity, Madness

Lighting Storms vs Internet

       My traceroute  [v0.80]
Lancelot.local (0.0.0.0) Tue Nov 29 23:16:29 2011
         Packets               Pings
 Host  Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1.     1.3%   159    8.0  15.2   2.0 252.8  30.0
 2.    25.2%   159  127.3 11728  88.6 41193 13142
 3.    28.9%   159  124.6 11540  73.8 41163 13464
 4.    28.3%   159  132.1 11576  97.7 41127 13406
 5.    27.0%   159  188.2 11795 117.6 41994 13570
 6.    28.3%   159  136.3 11676 118.5 41948 13640
 7.    27.7%   159  132.4 11671 117.4 41867 13569
 8.    28.3%   159  211.5 11623 114.7 41875 13617
 9.    27.7%   159  140.0 11566 124.5 41723 13539
10. ???
11.    30.2%   159  121.8 11486 117.5 41682 13623
Yes, that's a 41.7s ping time. After every lighting strike in the neighbourhood, it takes a while for the traffic to start flowing again.
Insanity, Madness

Kindle is not for technical books

Here are some ways that Kindle (App for Mac OS X) fails me:

  • Does not support code blocks (i.e.: pre formatted text)
  • Has poor widow/orphan control (i.e.: page breaks between headings and the subsequent paragraph)
  • Touching my scroll wheel will send me many pages back or forth through the book, leaving me to waste my time getting back to where I was.

If anyone from Amazon is reading, I'll let you know that I'm not enjoying the experience. I only buy books from your store because that's the only place I can get some of them.

Oct. 18th, 2011

Calm, Collected

Rails made easy

Really easy: use Locomotive. It'd a defunct project, looking for some motivated people to pick it up and run.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel.

This was a response response to John Cromartie's "Getting Started in Rails is Insane."

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