Older blog entries for cwinters (starting at number 59)

Got back from YAPC NA yesterday. Tons o fun. Got to talk about OpenInteract in a talk and, despite a few small technical issues (thanks for crashing Netscape!) things went well. We gave away a box of t-shirts too, which is always a nice introduction. (Geeks are such suckers for t-shirts, myself included of course.)

Montreal seemed like a decent city but it's difficult to say from my limited exposure. I did a bit of exploring, but it was pretty aimless and geared to just get me out and about rather than learning. (Although the Basilica of St. Patrick's was quite impressive.)

Lots of fun stuff at YAPC: normal Damian Conway entertainment and mindbending stuff, the 'delta force' of hackers who can't decide what to do for lunch/dinner, rants about project management/testing/etc. from Mr. Schwern. Things were a little different this year for me since I was visiting the city rather than going home every night. Made for more immersion :-)

I sat in on a calendaring BOF (hi srl and Skud). It might be interesting to have some SPOPS objects you could use to serialize calendaring information -- you could in theory plug it into Reefknot and have it Just Work as part of its storage layer. (In theory.)

But that (among other things) will have to wait a bit -- we're finally (we got married last April) going on our honeymoon to Greece starting Thursday. As long as there's money in the bank account, we should have a wonderful time despite our disorganized best efforts to try otherwise.

Also, in a rare bit of airplane and conference productivity, implemented iterators for SPOPS and SPOPS::DBI, which might make it out the door before we leave if I have a fit of sleeplessness...

New versions of OpenInteract (1.07) and SPOPS (0.40) have been released. I took way too long to make these releases happen -- getting away from the 'release early, release often' idea. I think one of the reasons this idea is important is that people are more willing to invest their own time in a project that's active, and a good measure for 'active' is time between releases.

OTOH, nobody likes releases a few weeks apart that only fix a handful of minor bugs.

Hardware update #1: new keywell for Kinesis keyboard came as advertised on friday. It was a little difficult to get the connector out of the slot -- kind of like getting a snapped key from a lock -- but I eventually got it out. I have a normal keyboard again!

Hardware update #2: new motherboard, cpu and memory got RMA'd back to $VENDOR. They couldn't figure it out either.

I noticed I'm posting more often here in the last couple of weeks, almost certainly because I'm not working directly with people anymore. I'm trying to be very conscious of any unintentional changes in my lifestyle so I don't get out of control again. Then again, I just worked all weekend...

The nice people at kinesis are sending me a new keywell (that's their term for it) for just $30, plus shipping so, unless I screw something else up, I'll be back in typing-happy land again tomorror. Cool.

Slogging through a fairly large OpenInteract site done on an old (6 month) version by some junior programmers. Fun. But at least while I'm doing that I'm finding featurelets to add (and adding them) and bugs to fix (and fixing them). On the downside, it's delaying the 1.07 OI release and the 0.40 SPOPS release and stealing time away from another Really Important Deadline as well as preparing a presentation for YAPC.

(BTW, just curious: is anyone from Advogato going to YAPC?)

Also, someone just came out with an alpha for DBD::LDAP, which if it works well would be superfly since we could plug it into SPOPS and have it Just Work.

Ack -- while cleaning my Kinesis countoured keyboard I broke one of the connections from the one set of keys to the controller, so the entire left-hand side won't work. (I'm so gd clumsy sometimes...) I've grown terribly dependent on it and am afraid the nasty wrist pain will come back since I'm back on the standard keyboard.

There's been a couple of folks in Cornell doing neat-o stuff with SPOPS -- it's very fulfilling when people take something you've coded, even if it has a fairly narrow purpose, and do something you never thought of with it.

Icky hardware stuff: got snazzy new mb and cpu but problems abound. Methinks it's a problem with the power supply, new one coming will test that out. Way, way too much time spent screwing around with it, reading forums, newsgroups, scouring google, etc. Arg.

SPOPS now supports lazy loading, which means that listing hundreds of HTML page objects won't eat up all your memory and demand more. (Doh!) New release (0.40) should be out shortly.

OpenInteract is going well. I created a relatively simple project management app for myself, mostly for the app but also to get back up to speed on things. Mission accomplished on both counts.

Did an informal presentation about OI last friday down in DC. Wouldn't you know it, I'd neglected to install a browser on my laptop, so it was all talk talk talk. A couple of people seemed to really get it, which was nice. I think after YAPC I'm going to make an effort to get around to various perl user groups to give a talk on OI, as well. By then, I'll have a browser on my laptop and even prepared slides!

dyork: Could you check that link on your DocBook instructions again? I tried it and got an error. I'm very interested in this.

Well, it's official now: I'm on my own. The previous place went through some recent turbulence which, combined with the fact that I was once again the only developer working on a product, got me looking elsewhere. And where did I wind up? Right back where I started, basically, except I have much more freedom than before.

Most of my time is contractually spoken for by one of my previous employers, which means stability. But the company I just left is (80% sure) going to hire me for projects and training as well. Hopefully this will be a good excuse for me to get out and meet people and see what else is around too -- something I don't always naturally do.

Before I left, I gave three days of training on the product I've been working on for the last six months along with the whole J2EE/EJB/... framework. It seemed to go well, but I noticed a disturbing tendency in myself to talk in abstractions rather than use concrete analogies. For one of them one of our more creative developers rescued me: in talking about serialization, he made the analogy that you can talk about food over the phone (a serializable object) but you can't send a big mac over the phone (a non-serializable object).

I'm going to miss working in the same office as these guys -- they could be crude at times, but always clever and rarely mean-spirited. We'll see what develops.

Plans for the summmer are jelling: yapc in mid-June, Greece in June/July (finally a honeymoon!) and Monterey, California for a wedding in early August -- with a few days for padding.

I'm getting back into OpenInteract/SPOPS development. I was a little burned out for a bit -- I wonder how often this happens to other people? I just needed a few weeks away from thinking about or doing anything with the project (other than idle wakeup/shower wandering mind thoughts). However, a developer in Germany has been asking a few questions on the -dev list and privately about OI and it's been acting as kindling for more ideas -- surely a good sign. I hope to be able to drum up interest at yapc, and one of the surest ways to do that is have excellent docs for people to learn from. ("Gentlemen, you have your assignments.")

I have two more weeks at The Company and then I'm on my own, although a big chunk of my time is already spoken for, so it's not as risky as it initially sounds. I still have some mixed feelings about leaving -- the developers that are left are generally quite bright and if other folks had started Java development a couple months ago I might still be there. But if I'm going to be working by myself, I might as well be doing someting I really like :-)

Another job change is in the future. I'll be working for myself -- I grabbed the domain name warefor.com just because it sounded cool in a development sense, marketing sense and old english sense. Working primarily on OpenInteract and implementation projects, which is excellent. OI development has been stalled for a few weeks because I'm trying to get a life, so this will kickstart all that.

More later...

pjones: Glad you're not generalizing or anything.... Try coming up to yapc in a couple months and see what the community is really like.