Older blog entries for ask (starting at number 120)

CPAN Ratings

Please test my latest weekend project CPAN Ratings, but don't announce it widely just yet.

I put it on the production Combust server in the morning, but no one has added any reviews yet! :-)

(Yes, I'm aware that the server is making the ø in my name on the test review into unicode. No, I don't know why. It happens somewhere in Template Toolkit I think - and of course I can't make it happen on my development server and I don't have time to look closer this week).

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Dirty Pretty Things

<dirtyprettythings>

We went to see Dirty Pretty Things (trailer) today. A thriller, but with no sudden shocks. Set in London, but with no white Englishmen. With plenty of action, but no guns - or fights. The bad guy is in the business of making everyone happy, but everyone is miserable. A clever and intelligent script, but not too clever. With moral points, but not with waving fingers everywhere. If you want one of the usual hollywood happy endings you might be disappointed, but as a reader here I am sure you are not one of those people but smart and sexy. You'll like it. You'll be captivated. Highly recommended.

<Audrey Tautou>

They have started to run the Kill Bill trailer again (the same, or almost the same, as the old teaser trailer).

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Making presentations, new Omnigraffle

Usually I use a slightly hacked version of txt2slides to make presentations. Today I've been making something that's not going to be webified anyway, so I figured I should play with the fancy technicolor tools.

Keynote is super neat, but there are a bit too many "hmn, how can I make it ...." moments that ends up unresolved. Still very cool though. I used PowerPoint once and this is just so much more fun. When I make it save the presentation as a bundle the files gets saved in a way that's more compatible with revision control systems than such files usually are.

The new version of Omnigraffle is bloody awesome. I've been using it for a couple of hours and there's no end to the "ooh, clever" discoveries. The earlier versions were useful; 3.0 is amazing. When you resize an element it'll show you which other elements have the same size as your current size. Likewise for distances when you are moving things. So clever; and I thought I'd need to use the grid for that sort of thing.

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Perl.org thanks our sponsors

<Perl.org thanks our sponsors>

For the Perl Foundation booth at OSCON we made this poster thanking our sponsors. They have helped us to now be able to run the perl.org infrastructure relatively independent from any one particular sponsor (that's a nice way to say that we are no longer leeching on just one helpful company but instead on several). It's great.

The posters were about 4 feet tall and very nice; I meant to bring one of them home but I forgot all about it. We also meant to get a photo of notable perl people in front of it, but we forgot about that too. OSCON is busy and exhausting.

The sponsors of CPAN could fill up another poster, but that'll have to be another time.

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Sore throat

Like John Engler I've managed to get a summer cold. I've been mostly inoperative since some time in the weekend. It sucks. Luckily I'm not getting tired of drinking camomile yet. Viridiana thinks I should get some real medicine, but I like to save that for some day I really need it.

In the meantime I found out that Tropicana is a PepsiCo company; so now I only like orange juice from Florida's Natural, in particular since Horizon Organic got bought by Dean Foods. Yes yes, I realize it doesn't make any sense. Please leave me alone.

Brian started a weblog some months ago, and stopped again it seems like. I keep forgetting to add a link to Ben Hyde's weblog. Oh, and Kåre started a weblog (in Danish) about his and Line's impending trip to San Diego.

oooh, water is boiling. Time for some more tea.

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Perl.org Mailinglists

I have just been catching up on a bunch of perl.org mailing lists. I'm only subscribed to a couple of the public lists; everything else I read with gnus via the nntp interface. It's awesome. I can't thank Jim enough for colobus, our nntp server. (I even liked it so much that I based the first versions of qpsmtpd on the colobus code).

In related news: We are now running 127 public and about a dozen private lists at perl.org. The total subscription count is 44220 (with 31106 unique subscribers). The list server is sending out 3-400,000 mails a day. Of course neither of those numbers count people who are using the nntp interface.

Related news^2: I have been running the technicalities behind the lists (and a couple of other things for 4 years just about now. Notice the clever server name (tmtowtdi) we used for the first server ValueClick kindly let us have. The second one is called "Onion". (And after that I ran out of cleverness, so the next ones are called "x1", "x2", etc. I should know better)

As time flies when you are having fun... At first Jacob helped running the system and the last couple of years Robert has been helping me. (For which I am thankful; otherwise I would have gone completely insane by now). I know you are not going to believe me, but I swear he volunteered. That's how I remember it anyway.

Jarkko says: Have you ever juggled seven balls, an oiled sumo wrestler, a turned-on chainsaw, and an electric eel?

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ppol: ActiveState makes the popular perl for win32. Another alternative is to use perl on cygwin -- or of course install a real OS. :-)

gnome bloat

I'm sure libgtop itself doesn't really need all these dependencies, but sheez.

[root@george ask]# fink install libgtop
Information about 2686 packages read in 1 seconds.

The following package will be installed or updated:
 libgtop
The following 13 additional packages will be installed:
 audiofile audiofile-bin docbook-dsssl-nwalsh esound esound-shlibs
 gnome-libs-dev gtk-doc imlib libgtop-shlibs openjade opensp3 opensp3-shlibs
 orbit-dev
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 

audiofile? esound? docbook-dsssl-nwalsh?! I just wanted my program to be able to lookup memory usage.

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Diversity

<melrose sign> One of the fun and interesting things about Southern California is the amazing diversity. We have people from all over the world, of all sizes and belief systems. I read somewhere that the Los Angeles school district has students speaking more than 200 different languages. I think that was even without counting many dialects.

In West Hollywood the police cars have rainbow colors. The russians are living next to the jewish neighborhood. There are a lot of senior citizens. And next to them are the gays. Small houses in the part where my (tiny and rent controlled) apartment is routinely go for $750,000 or more.

<sunset at night> Anyway, that's not the amusing thing I wanted to tell. This is the only place I know where there are more billboards with scantily clad men than women. Luckily for me there are plenty of scantily clad women in this town as well -- lots of eye candy for everyone.

And I mean everyone.

v: I put gas on the car on the way home. Across the street there's a club where a bunch of girls were going in, only wearing bikini tops, very short skirts and tall boots. a: [enjoying the thought] uuh, and that's bad how? v: I think they were men.

Update: It's raining! Incredible. It's July! Water is pouring from the sky. I don't know when that last happened. February? March? Oh, I think it stopped again already. Building a city in the middle of the desert is really not that smart.

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The Truth Behind The Curtain - The Movie

The OSCON 2003 movie, The Truth Behind The Curtain is now available online. It has been slightly updated from the version we showed before the last keynote in Portland. We also added an explanation of the jokes. The jokes are so internal that even I had to get some of them explained; so don't feel bad if you want to read along while watching. It's seven minutes, and 50-60MB in the highest quality. (The finished DV file is about 1.6GB, a bit too big to make available :-) )

Nathan has been uploading other goodies as well and more is being added every few days, so go and check it out.

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