Older blog entries for fxn (starting at number 396)

Back from YAPC::EU::2005

I am back in Barcelona from the YAPC, I had a great time again this year. I met some new Spanish guys, and put some faces to names I hadn't seen before, such as Abigail, Simon Cozens, Nicholas Clark, cog, or Larry Wall himself. Simon gave his Maypole tutorial with my laptop.

I finally went to the conference alone by plane and train via Lisbon, and unfortunately I couldn't attend on Friday the talks by Abigail, and the Big End, aka the auction. The conference was being recorded so I hope I can watch them anyway.

The organisation was really excellent, and there were just TWO guys behind it for most of the work.

/me waves from YAPC::EU.

mod_perl Success Story: BBC

This was sent to the mod_perl mailing list today:

We have been running ModPerl to deliver dynamic applications as part of bbc.co.uk for the past 4 years. At present we have well over 50 applications ( and growing ) using Modperl and based on the Apache::Registry framework. These include community, message boards, games, voting, quizzes, searches and listings applications. It serves a sustained 500 application requests per second using a distributed architecture.

As we have adopted Apache 2.* on our head-end servers we will next be looking at how Modperl 2.* can help us in our application layer.

Komodo 3.X For Mac OS X Test Program

There is a test program for Komodo 3.X Alpha 1, a preliminar release of Komodo 3.X Professional built for Mac OS X and with support for Ruby. I have played around with it a bit and works fine.

Stas Bekman in Barcelona

Stas Bekman, of mod_perl fame, came to Barcelona on July and gave a four-hours seminar, organised by Barcelona.pm. We had dinner afterwards. I wasn't sitting near him and the restaurant was a bit noisy, so unfortunately I couldn't talk with him too much.

Going to YAPC::Europe

I plan to go to the YAPC::Europe, in Braga this year. The perfect excuse to do a trip with the motorbike with my wife :-).

Ruby Again

Ruby is in the radar again, partly due to Rails. I read the second edition of the Pickaxe (the first book I read from cover to cover in PDF), and subscribed to ruby-talk again. Wow, Ruby as project has advanced a lot since I did an immersion back when 1.6 was stable. Particularly documentation is much much better.

I am looking forward Agile Web Development with Rails, whose last heard publishing date is the 9 of August.

Executing External Programs in Halk

One of the many constraints in the design of Halk is that the execution of programs has to be safe, which for me implies avoiding the shell altogether. Since another requirement is that it has to run on Windows this reduces the choices to Python 2.4 (subprocess), or Java 1.5 (ProcessBuilder).

Ruby on Rails

There is a lot of inertia around Ruby on Rails lately. Boy those guys are good, look at this new video!

Nothing Remarkable

Nothing worth blogging lately, working, teaching, hanging around freenode#perl at night, and reading. My code editor has been mostly quiet at home.

Destiny's Child in Concert

I went yesterday night to see Destiny's Child in concert. I had a great time, the performance was somewhat commercial, somewhat sexual, and the sound not too good, but they transmitted that force so characteristic in their music. And, hey, Beyoncé is spectacular on the stage.

Unfortunately black musicians rarely visit Barcelona. I wish someday I see my favourites Erykah Badu, or D'Angelo.

Fake Certifications

Suddenly my cert counters in MyAdvogato report 5 new suspicious Masters. The corresponding accounts are clearly artificial, for instance this one. I don't see a pattern in the way the certs are assigned though. Is this some kind of attack to the trust metric? Just a way to trick Google? raph, any way to moderate this stuff?

Mac OS X 10.4, first hours

I couldn't install Tiger out of the box due to a problem in the disk, fsck reported more than 50 Overlapped extent allocation (file \d+). Lucky me, some guy documented what that means and how to fix it in single user mode. After that the installation was smooth.

There are infinite changes in Tiger, for infinite greater than 200. Some changes are cosmetic (as the merge of title and toolbars in some applications), some are major upgrades (as Xcode 2, or QuickTime 7, or Preview 3), some are important new additions (as Spotlight, or Dashboard, or Automator), and some are removals (as Stuffit). Tiger is the first Mac OS X where Java 1.5 runs, you can get it separately and it does not interfere with the installed 1.4.2.

I have to explore almost everything yet, for instance I have not touched Automator at all yet (I am very curious though about how they did approach the design of such a tool), but playing around with this new toy I noticed Safari RSS is fast, damn fast, in addition to have a cool interface to RSS feeds. The integration of Spotlight in the system is such a powerful feature that I am sure I can't foresee its secondary effects yet. One of the clear applications are smart folders (which are virtual, live folders defined by a query) in the Finder and in Mail.app, also upgraded. Mail.app by the way has been refined but has a new toolbar nobody seems to like.

I expected the result set in Spotlight searches to be more immediate than it is. Sure, they come up very quickly, but not immediately as I'd expect from an index and the demos in Apple conferences. I wondered for instance whether I could launch applications with Spotlight instead of with Quicksilver, but at least in this G4 that's not practical. Maybe that's dramatically improved in G5s.

Dashboard is an interesting addition. As people develop widgets that are helpful for me to have there, I'll see whether I integrate Dashboard in my desktop usage. I don't monitor flights so often :-), but the dictionary and the calendar are already useful for instance.

As usual John Siracusa has written a detailed review in Ars Technica.

Barcelona.pm Monthly Meeting

Barcelona.pm had its monthly meeting tonight. We were nine people today, and had a great time. This month I was the one to give the talk, which was a summary of the main changes since Perl 5.8.0. The presentation is in Catalan, I uploaded it in PDF format, and as an interactive QuickTime movie (1.9MB), where a few beautiful Keynote 2 transitions and animations can be seen.

Tiger Arrived Today

I have a nicely packaged black box in front of me, if everything goes fine my next entry will be written with Safari RSS :-).