Older blog entries for cwinters (starting at number 11)

First of two demos of the framework that we had to be ready for, although this one was certainly the lighter weight of the two. The lack of phone calls means that everything must have gone well.

We decided on an initial name for the framework (OpenInteract) but we haven't gotten the licensing stuff worked out yet. I'm thinking GPL/Artistic (just like perl), but we have to get NDA stuff worked out first, plus a little infrastructure would be a good thing...

Got a new hard drive today and installed it, along with transferring the old CD ROM out and moving a newer one in. (The old one wasn't cooperating with the mp3 ripping s/w -- yes, I've been bitten by that bug. I can see a rio in my future...). Doing stuff with hardware can be very satisfying. As long as you do it every once in a while rather than eight hours a day. The first task assigned to me when I got the job at IREX a few years ago was to build a bunch (10+) of cheap-o intel machines, configure them with Win95 and get them on the network. The cheap-o-ness of them manifested itself in the myriad cuts sprouting on both hands from the crappy metal used in the cases. Ouch. Mark and Christopher still chuckle about that...

The k5 happenings have been amazing, and really underscore the ease with which almost anything on the web can be taken down. Things like this make me very nervous about having a large, public community site. How many such attacks does ebay get? I don't like relying on the whims of script kiddies as to whether a site of mine gets taken down.

In any case, it's excellent the support Rusty has received. The /. guys have been excellent -- I'm sure they put a bug in the ear of VA Linux about the hardware, to boot. Hopefully he'll find a good home for it if he decides to move it (which I think he was going to do anyway).

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Also: Barb got a job! It only took a couple weeks after she left the symphony, but she'll be teaching middle school english at a private school about five minutes away. It's amazing how little compensation teachers get: what a shame.

I also had something bouncing around my head about version numbering reluctance, but it's not quite there yet...

badger: You should be happy with the nokia monitor. I got the 445xi+ a few months ago and absolutely love it. 1600 x 1200 is no problem, although the monitor can do better, I think I'd go blind if I went any higher.

Do addictive personalities do addictive things all the time, or just with certain things? For instance, after getting the new everclear cd last week, I've probably listened to it 30+ times, playing certain songs many times in a row. Is it just that this CD happens to fit my mood when I'm coding, or am I getting addicted? (Everclear: you can't stop!) Gaming is similar: how many person-hours of folks on advogato are getting sucked up by diablo 2?

This crossed my mind last night when a commercial came on talking about a special on A & E about gambing addiction. A lot of the creepy addicts are the folks in front of slot machines just yanking the lever like rats in an experiment, waiting to get their pellet. I suppose the motivation (making the big score) is the same when you get addicted to poker or other games where you have to think a little (or a lot), but slots are just so dehumanizing. Brr.

At the same time, when I went to Las Vegas a few years ago for comdex, I purposefully didn't do any gambling except for placing a bet on the Steelers -- which I was able to make a few bucks on, woo hoo! But in the back of my head I thought that it would be in my personality to totally fall into the trap they setup for you, spending all your waking hours giving other people the money from the ATM machines which are so conveniently setup, or from your credit cards, draining whatever hope you have of planning your future. I know there are people who can just do a little gambling, but I have a hard time with potato chips!

The other thing I'm getting addicted to is keeping up with advogato diary entries.

mrchrist: I'm actually running into this problem (free software development vs. employment as a programmer) as a result of a rewritten NDA that everyone at work was given. It's got some of the standard stuff -- you can't take work that you do that the company elsewhere being the pertinent one. I wondered what would happen if we release(as planned) our web application framework under the GPL/Artistic license. Would everyone be able to work on it except me? The clause is written for proprietary "stuff", whether that's software or oil-finding hardware or whatever, and I wouldn't expect the lawyer who drew it up to know about open source. So people are looking into it, and the NDA is as yet unsigned...

skvidal: I highly recommend getting a cat, particularly from your local shelter. Cats are very low maintenance, and generally sleep when you're not around. (They also sleep when you are around.) They can be wonderful companions, and my experience has been that once I got a cat and lived with one for a period of time, I could't imagine not living with one ever again.

schoen: having gone through the "wedding fun" recently, I can totally relate to the Macy's experience. In fact, the registry is not only for Macy's, but also all the other Federated department stores (Burdine's, Lazarus, and a few others that are specific to a geographic area). And you can get to the same registry online at the Wedding Channel site. Apparently, all these stores get all their goop from the same warehouse(s). It's funny to think of it, because Macy's has this New York quality to it, and Lazarus is just, well, Lazarus.

Went down to DC for a couple days for work stuff. Looks like we'll be rolling out the framework sooner than I thought, and for a site I've been working on since mid-1995. Neat.

When I got home the new Kinesis Ergo keyboard I ordered had arrived, and I'm using it now. It's very humbling to not only have to teach my hands (and wrists, and fingers) what do to again, but also to realize that certain motions I have always done were, in the touch-typing sense, wrong. For instance, since the keyboard is split into left- and right-hand sides, I can't cheat anymore with the middle keys (y and n, in particular) with the wrong hand. I also had a tendency to chord certain uppercase letters with the same hand -- definite no-no.

General typing speed (not using any funny characters, just 'letter' typing is not bad after an hour or so of practice. However, I suspect that many of the single-hand chording incidences will appear when I start coding (perl) in xemacs :)

Also got a couple out-of-the-blue net things recently. deusx sent an email and said he'd heard about SPOPS and was curious if/how it overlapped with Iaido. Since that isn't really discussed anywhere except here, I assume that he found it through the diary entries. It also lights a fire under my ass to actually release the stuff as a proper project.

And a fellow navy brat from my youth (as in 6 or 7 and earlier, since our dads knew each other) was poking around the web for her name (who hasn't done that? be honest) and found a story I'd written which had her name it it. Funny. Even funnier is that she lives in the D.C. area. Everyone seems to pass through that place at some point in their lives...

Well, the framework has been up and running as CGI on NT. It's just such a waste that it makes my spine cringe every time I think about it. Oh well. At least when they start doing some real work on that machine, we have an upgrade path for them (PerlEx to the rescue!).

Finally figured out what I think is a decent error reporting scheme between SPOPS and the framework. Before, SPOPS would die with a hashref with various pieces of information inside it. All fine and good, and sets things up for in the future calling die with an object instead (Alzabo has stuff setup like this, altho I don't know how well it works.)

However, the problem comes when you've got a eval {} wrapped around something that could be setting $@ to either a hashref or the normal string. Uh oh. Fortunately, the mod_perl guide comes to the rescue, courtesy of the ever-present Matt Sergeant. In it you see how to override the CORE::die function in perl and wrap your own. Neat, I thought, just check to see if $@ is a hashref and if not, put it inside one. Then everything checking the results of an eval {} can expect a hashref.

Of course, silly me forgets about the various CPAN modules being used. They certainly can't be expected to check whether $@ is a hashref or not. It's possible to overload the stringify 'operator' so that evaluating $@ (the hashref) in a scalar context actually returns what's in $@->{error}. But that's a little too much mucking about in the base expected behavior for me, particularly for something I'd like other people to use :)

So, I'm simply going to have all the SPOPS classes and objects set error information in a common package which anyone can inspect as needed. And on an error, they'll die with a simple scalar. And everyone will be happy.

Lesson learned: keep simple things simple.

Egads. Trying to port the framework not only to work under CGI, but also to run on NT. What braindead IIS engineer decided to tie STDERR to STDOUT? Unless you create a $SIG{__WARN__} handler, all warn() and carp() (etc.) calls are put out to the browser! And if you don't print out the header first, the browser will either ask if you can download the page or simply refuse to show it. What a pain.

I will be so happy when mod_perl works on NT without the current request serialization hassle.

Lots of traveling last week to visit and for a wedding. Driving 17 hours to florida (and 23 or so more successive hours in the next few days) wasn't as bad as I thought :) And it was actually nice to get away from email (etc.) for a few days. Although it was a little difficult to get back into the swing...

yapc was, of course, excellent. I don't know how Damian Conway ever gets to sleep with all those smarts running around in his head. Rusty posted a story about the quantum stuff which gives better details about it. One of the interesting side-effects of hearing him talk is that whenever I read his Object Oriented Perl book or any of the voluminous documentation his modules provide, I'll have an Australian voice running around my head...

Another cool thing was meeting some folks who are doing somewhat similar object persistence stuff. Schwern's talk on Class::DBI was interesting, and I think I'm going to swipe a few ideas from it -- with proper attribution of course :) Having something akin to 'stored procedures in perl' is very nifty.

The discussion after the talk was also useful. I learned that nobody else seems to be tying security to object persistence, so maybe there's hope for me yet :)

Orwant's talk this year was somewhat cryptic, despite the fact that I felt smug when he mentioned Temple Grandin and I actually knew who she was. He seemed to be discussing all the difficulties regarding copyright in a roundabout way, which might be the only method you can discuss it with an auditorium full of open-source geeks.

Maybe it was me, but I detected an undercurrent of concern regarding the upper levels of perl and the divisiveness found on p5p. Questions like: where is this coming from? Is this inevitable when a community grows? I'm not sure these are answerable questions, but Larry seemed to accept some of the blame when he said in his talk that he'd been working on the new Camel book for the last six months and hadn't had time to play his shepherd role. He also said that people need to argue about what they're arguing about, not bringing all the baggage into every argument. (He also said this is a Good Thing for a marriage too, and being almost three-months married now, I agree.)

But that's just me on the outside looking in, so it's probably wrong.

SPOPS are fairly settled now, security and all. And the web application framework is coming along very nicely as well. I hope to get it implemented on my website soon (next week), but these things have a way of not working out.

Side note: how the heck to people come up with clever names for projects? Right now the framework is just "the framework", or sometimes "Interact Application Framework." (IAF isn't bad, because then the programmers can be the "Interact Application Force".) But it seems like you either think of something clever early (I like the name of Jellybean) or not at all.... Or maybe it's just me :)

Anyway: the framework. Basically, a lot of the admin crap that is assumed to be in a framework -- users, groups, templating schemes, error handling, themes and a consistent output scheme -- is working and working solidly. Security on a per-object and a task basis is also working ok. (Don't know how it will scale, but...) Creating content handlers is a fairly simple process, and enabling security in a content handler is a matter of putting a certain class in your @ISA and setting a minimum security level for each publically accessible method.

Caching works, but not in as nice a fashion I'd like. And some things can almost certainly be tightened -- that's what happens when only one person works on the code. (Oh, did I mention that punk Rusty is leaving us to go to OpenSales?) ("Punk" in the nicest sense of course :) For caching, it would probably be a good idea to look into how Mason does it. I believe that everything is a component, and the parent Mason::Component class takes care of caching. The only wrinkle in this is, of course, themes. And you don't want to cache something that has any specific distinguishing items in it -- error messages, for example :)

I had a chuckle yesterday when I typed in the wrong password for monster.com -- I got a totally blank screen except for "You typed in the wrong password. Please try again." in big letters at the top. They're running superbowl commericials and I've got better error handling!

Really looking forward to yapc again this year. Except this year I don't have to be all worried about my presentation :)

Collections are now known as SPOPS, or Simple Perl Object Persistence with Security. (Although I'm working on the security right now :)

SPOPS aims to be storage-mechanism independent, although almost all of the work so far has been done with the DBI backend. (I've used both Sybase and MySQL with it, and porting it to a different db should be pretty easy, as long as they support a the $sth->{TYPE} and {NAME} interface and you can reasonably abstract out an ID-generation mechanism. (Sequences, for instance, should not be a problem at all.)) I'm hoping to implement the User/Group stuff not only using the DBI interface but also LDAP, which would be neat-o. (It would also likely expose some subconscious design decisions influenced by my RDBMS mentality...)

They're now fairly well extricated from the other projects that were using them, which should make it easier for me to consolidate the three or four versions that are floating around my ~/work directory. I think I'm going to upgrade my website to use them later on today so I can test out the user/group stuff.

They are also much easier to use now, thanks to Rusty's prodding. Instead of forcing you to use get/set accessor methods for an object, the data are now in a tied hash, so you can simply do: $user->{first_name} = 'Chris' to set information and then do $user->save; to save the user object. No context switching, and using a tied hash means that you can interpolate the values into strings (or templates...) without a second thought. Cool.

You can nab them, along with a working-and-rapidly-developing banner ad management system that uses them (called AdHomonym), at the AdHomonym website. I'm not quite ready to put them up on CPAN yet. Once I get an LDAP interface written and reasonably tested (or maybe re-port the interface to GDBM files from a six-month old project), then I'll feel decent about it.

Anyway, demos of the ad system coming soon.