Returned Sunday from YAPC in Montreal. Driving takes ~7.5 hours including stops and thirty minutes of traffic at the GWB. Heard great presentations and put faces to names and names to nicks. Revitalized my desire to hack code in Perl and thinking about how I can sneak a little more of it into work... I wonder on the status of perljvm. Finally caught up with my email, nearly caught up with the missed work week, not anywhere near caught up on sleep. Surprised to find we have two consultants from a well-known certificate authority on-site to assist in integrating their product. Unsurprised that not much was done in preparation for their arrival.
Whoo! An article I wrote while working as an SA was published on freshmeat as an editorial. Fame (or infamy). Now I need to work on the fortune part.
Play:
Going to YAPC in Montreal next week.
I do not have Apprentice status, so I'll post this here...
Reaction to Organizational Announcements on
CMM and Six Sigma
After the initial from handwaving and the brandishing of buzzwords, I see the following:
Friends visited. Decided to occupy our friend's husband with
a trip to
to the Trenton Computer
Festival.
Really, it was a wholly self-less act. I had no
interest. Uh. Yeah.
Ran into a co-worker assisting at a vendor booth and another
buying some equipment. It was nice to see I'm not the only
one.
Picked up a new, in-box, buckling spring keyboard for $20.
A genuine, new, IBM buckling-spring type M keyboard with the
nice solid
*clickety-click* feedback like the ones they used to make
for the PS/2.
This IBM model has an integrated trackpoint similar to
those found on the Thinkpad but I'm not sure I like using it
instead of a mouse. For what it's worth,
PCKeyboard
(formerly Unicomp?) still makes, sells, and repairs those
great keyboards. They sell a similar full-size mechanical
keyboard
with the stick for $99 so I count myself lucky.
Our friend picked up an armload of untested, used equipment:
a case with power supply, P2-333, and a BX motherboard for
$45 total.
He figures he'll install RedHat if the parts are okay.
Nearly bought a pile of six clapped out and stripped Sun
IPC's
at the flea market for $50 when the rain started. I'd have
to sort through to make
what would probably be two working units. And what would I
do with
them? Buy AUI-10BT converters and scavenge extra 30-pin
SIMMS so I
could run... NetBSD... slowly. Pass.
I also have to wonder what some of the flea market guys were
smoking.
One guy wanted $55 for a SS10, 40MHz, no ram, 1GB HD, and GX
framebuffer.
Another wanted $75 for SS20, 50MHz, no ram, no HD. I read on
a list
this evening that one bright light was hawking a SS/20 with
96MB, 9GB HD,
and TGX for $575. Hello? Haven't these guys checked their
prices against Ebay?
Wrote a very brief article on adapting the BSF (Bean Scripting Framework) to use Jython which I put up on my site under the articles page. It's trivial but it might save someone some time.
Work:
Go, Webmonkey! Go! A corporate update is underway and my team is retrofitting
the new look-and-feel onto existing products. The old stuff was ugly and the
new design is beautiful and easier to use but rehabilitating the stuff built by
partly WYSIWYG editors is hell. The stuff violates the HTML 4 spec., renders differently
in each browser, and is peppered with unnecessary tags and attributes.
Facing fifty-odd static and dynamic pages myself, and knowing that there are a few hundred in total
distributed across the team, I reached for Perl (ask for it by name!) and
Sean Burke's updated HTML::Tree
module which I recalled reading about in The Perl Journal a few months ago
(Aside, does anyone at liberty to say know with certainy what is going with TPJ?).
A little preprocessing, a little post processing, a run through the parser and I had reduced by more
than half the amount of manual editing. Compare the below code snippets to running search and replace in your
favorite editor. Compare it for 50 files, or 100.
use HTML::TreeBuilder; my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new(); $tree->parse_file($filename); ... # deleting font elements @tags=$tree->look_down('_tag','font'); if (@tags) { foreach $tag (@tags) { $tag->replace_with_content()->delete(); } } ... @tags=$tree->look_down('_tag','b'); if (@tags) { foreach $tag (@tags) { if ($tag->is_inside('table')) { # apply style to <td> that holds this element $parent=$tag->parent(); $parent->attr('class','tblBold'); } $tag->replace_with_content()->delete(); } } ... # More madness... illegal WIDTH="%" attribute must be removed @tags=$tree->look_down('width','%'); if (@tags) { foreach $tag (@tags) { $tag->attr('width',undef); } } ...I'm going to have to buy him a beer sometime.
Meta:
A new advogato member recently certified me as Master.
That's damn funny.
Not only am I- in my opinion, even if not in the opinion of
the people who employ me- merely an adequate self-taught
programmer but I've made as yet no meaningful contribution
to Open Source projects.
The certification on Advogato is
based upon what you have done,
what can be downloaded and seen. Reread the
Certification Overview. At this point, I'm still in the
burgeoning category of those
who directly benefit from OS, but have not returned the
favor. With the
very thin exceptions of evangelism- demonstrating the value
at work, using OS as teaching
material, a couple of
articles that are unpublished, being a newsgroup and
listserv hanger-on - and a lot
of good intentions, I haven't given anything back.
That's not Master material, that's barely Apprentice.
I'm not flaming, but the fact that someone mistakenly
certified me stirs up a
few internal conflicts. I "get" it in the bigger post-60's
era sense, I just
haven't done anything with it and that gives me a niggling
guilt since I am (or, at least
, may be) in a position to do something and return the favor
to the community from
which I benefit.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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