Re: [Boston.pm] Data::Dumper formatted for linked lists?
I'd advise reading this: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/01/31/what-the-rails-security-issue-means-for-your-startup/ Then think real hard about if YAML is the way to go for *anything* right now. The current problem is with Ruby, but it seems plausible that other languages could be affected as well. -- Chris Devers On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Jordan Adler jordan.m.ad...@gmail.comwrote: Not sure what you mean by linked lists -- the traditional concept of that data structure doesn't really exist in Perl. Generally, though, I would recommend YAML for more human-readable data serialization. It has excellent features for pointers/references without being verbose. It also has the advantage of being extremely easy to read back in as data. Hope this helps, Jordan M. Adler On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:48 AM, Greg London em...@greglondon.com wrote: Is there a module out there for dumping linked lists in a legible manner? I like that Data::Dumper gives you an output that can be evaled back in, but when you give it a linked list, it gives you an output that's totally unreadable. ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm -- -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Tuesdays or other for Tech Meetings ?
On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 9:47 AM, john saylor js0...@gmail.com wrote: On 1/8/13 22:28 , Bill Ricker wrote: Wondering why so few (2 and two maybes) RSVP tonight. it ain't like it used to be ... i don't know that this would help, but is it worth looking into maybe broadcasting the meeting over the web ... ? boston ruby does something with google+ and i've watched a few and it's ok. Also, if anyone else wants the keys to the @BostonPM account on Twitter, I'm happy to share them. I'm bad about remembering to broadcast Bill's meeting announcements. Maybe there's a better way to automate this, with, I dunno, a program or something. Maybe? Anyway, personally, I'm still interested in Boston.pm, but with work, kids, school, etc, it's tough to get out on a weeknight, regardless of what day of the week it is. I can't remember the last time I was able to make it out to a Perl mongers meeting, but it was years ago at this point. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] announcements via Twitter
On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 5:35 PM, Tom Metro tmetro+boston...@gmail.comwrote: Chris Devers wrote: I'm bad about remembering to broadcast Bill's meeting announcements. Maybe there's a better way to automate this, with, I dunno, a program or something. Maybe? One way to do this would be to create a bot that retweets on @BostonPM anything it sees with the #Boston.pm hashtag tweeted by a list of Boston.pm regulars. You might be able to make the list dynamic and have it be anyone who is a follower of @BostonPM. That might be enough to avoid spammers. Build it as a group project? Now there's an interesting suggestion… :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] underused perl feature
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Uri Guttman u...@stemsystems.com wrote:
assign = sub { my $x = 'abc' ; $x = qwerty/$x },
substr = sub { my $x = 'abc' ; substr( $x, 0, 0, 'qwerty/') },
The substr version doesn't look very readable or maintainable.
You're teaching *beginners* to do things this way?
Really?
Again??
:-)
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Re: [Boston.pm] emergency social - tues 7pm, sunset grill and tap
From a hotel near Faneuil Hall to Sunset in Allston, I'd say just take a cab. There isn't really a train that goes quite the right way. You can take the Green Line (B branch?) and have a pretty long walk up less-sketchy-than-it-looks Harvard Ave, or the bus which won't necessarily be any faster, but at least would be a shorter walk. (Nb. this is coming from a car driver. I like the *idea* of taking public transportation around Boston, but the network isn't quite fleshed out like it should be ― all spokes, no hubs ― so in practice a lot of routes like this are more complicated than they should be. Others may have a higher tolerance for this and just suggest taking a bus anyway.) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] davis sq meters tonight
Ah, gotcha. (Shows how much I pay attention -- just enough to confuse, in this case. If you have a resident parking sticker, that's free on the side streets, this I'm sure of :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Social Meeting Tuesday, Nov 9, 7pm
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Uri Guttman u...@stemsystems.com wrote: this month's tech meeting has been converted to a social meeting. it will be tomorrow night, tuesday nov 9 at 7pm at the flatbread company in davis sq. this is a great wood fired pizza place inside a bowling (candlepins) alley (sacco bowl). it is on day st opposite the large parking lot. note that somerville meters run to 8pm and are $1/hr so bring quarters and meter up! it is also on the red line. Actually, I think in Davis Square the meters run until 10pm, as of last year: http://www.wickedlocal.com/somerville/town_info/government/x726818056/Start-saving-Parking-meter-rates-and-hours-to-increase-permit-parking-to-expand-citywide If you can go, you should, this place is great. (I can't, unfortunately, but you should.) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Mac scripting questions
On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Richard Morse remo...@partners.org wrote: One caveat; it is not necessarily the case that an application will reload its defaults while running. iCal may; I don't know. However, in general you need to restart an application after modifying defaults -- sometimes you need to quit the application first! It's like editing /etc/ttys; you need to tell init about the changes by `kill -HUP 1`. That or use Applescript / System Events, which can be a friendlier shutdown than a kill command, as the application will get a chance to properly save buffers, preferences, etc: `osascript -e 'tell application iCal to quit'` -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Mac scripting questions
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Federico Lucifredi flucifr...@acm.org wrote: The defaults are programmatically accessible from the shell default command, for example: $ defaults read com.apple.iCal and the one I was after turns put to be simply: $ #check box -- 0 for uncheck $ defaults write com.apple.iCal 'Disable all alarms' 1 Right, this is the straightforward way to do these things, when you can get away with it. Each invocation of the `defaults` command ends up poking a .plist file, which will typically be in one of (in order of increasing generality): • ~/Library/Preferences/ • /Library/Preferences/ • /System/Library/Preferences/ • /Network/Library/Preferences/ The problem is that a simple .plist file is a simple list of key/value pairs, for which `defaults` is a perfectly good approach. But in the format supports arbitrarily complex nesting of keys, dicts (hashes), arrays, etc, and the syntax for driving these from `detaults` can get really hairy, really fast. Enter PlistBuddy, found outside the standard path in /usr/libexec on recent OSX versions. Prior to 10.5, Apple frequently distributed it with package installers, so you'd typically end up with multiple copies of it buried somewhere under /Library/Receipts; starting with 10.5 though, it's part of the base system, albeit not in the default shell path for some reason. PlistBuddy lets you do arbitrarily complex XPath style queries on plist files. If you grow beyond `defaults` -- and for anything non-trivial, you will -- PlistBuddy is the tool to use: Man page: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/DOCUMENTATION/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/PlistBuddy.8.html Using it to add items to the Dock: http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/cli/adding_items_to_login_items_from_the_cli Convoluted examples of calling it from Applescript: http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=18380 Or, if you want to use Perl, use PerlObjCBridge (aka Foundation), which should be built in to recent Mac versions, and gives Perl programs full access to the Cocoa object library, including the methods for interacting with plist data: http://macdevcenter.com/lpt/a/6080 http://data.scl.utah.edu/fmi/xsl/stream/details.xsl?-recid=423a::v=Ey12iE2EO2 Or it looks like there's a Data::Plist on CPAN now; I didn't notice it the last time I was looking into this, and don't know much about it. http://search.cpan.org/~KYOKI/Data-Plist-0.1/lib/Data/Plist.pm -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Boston.PM facebook group/page
On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Chris Devers cdev...@pobox.com wrote: As Rob notes, a Page makes sense too -- more sense, perhaps -- but a Group was slightly simpler to stub out, so I went with that for now. Done. Ugly, but done. http://facebook.com/pages/Boston-Perl-Mongers/134089120681 Seems like Pages with less than 1000 members can't currently request a custom name, and this is the shortest version of the URL I can come up with that works. Not sure what we'd do with these, or what else we'd want to do, but I figured I'd stake out the real estate in case anyone is being more imaginative than I am. I note that you can link a Facebook Page to a Twitter account, so that updates to the former would get automatically published to the latter. I've stubbed that out too, if people would be interested, but I don't really have the time or patience to maintain a Twitter account as well. http://twitter.com/BostonPM -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Boston.PM facebook group/page
JFDI. Nevermind, I just did for you: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=131595281237 (And nevermind the fact that it's been years since I've been to a meeting, eh? :-) I'm completely happy to share admin access to the group, I just wanted to get it stubbed out so that people could sign up for it, meetings could be posted, etc. -- Chris Devers just might go to another meeting again someday maybe after the kids go off to college perhaps ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] I didn't realize that some of Git is conceptually based on early work by Sean Quinlan!
On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 10:53 PM, Bob Clancybob.cla...@verizon.net wrote: As I'm reading the beginning of the OReilly Git book ( http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780596158187/pre-Preface#X2ludGVybmFsX1NlY3Rpb25Db250ZW50P3htbGlkPTk3ODA1OTYxNTgxODcvc2VjLWludHJvLVByZWNlZGVudHM=) I see a link to a paper with a familiar name: The Venti Filesystem, (Plan 9), Bell Labs, http://www.usenix.org/events/fast02/quinlan/quinlan_html/index.html The Bell Labs / Google Sean Quinlan is not the same as Our Sean Quinlan: http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2008/public/schedule/speaker/26232 Different resume; seems to be a decade or more older. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] larry's mit talk
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 2:37 PM, Martin Owens docto...@gmail.com wrote: Larry Wall? Yeah, you know -- the guy that first wrote Perl and (highly suspiciously, I think) has never been seen in the same room with Weird Al Yankovich? http://domm.plix.at/talks/2004_vienna_perl_culture/larry_wall.jpg http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B0HZYE/sr=8-1/qid=1238094213/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8n=5174s=musicqid=1238094213sr=8-1 If he brings an accordian to his talks ...be suspicious. Be very suspicious. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] larry's mit talk
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 3:16 PM, rob levy r.p.l...@gmail.com wrote: If I remember correctly, in one of his songs he refer to Javascript, but no mention of Perl that I am aware of. Of course not. That would be telling, wouldn't it? BCNU. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Is set a perl keyword?
On Wed, 15 Oct 2008, Greg London wrote: Odd question, and me without any perl books nearby: Is set a perl command or key word or reserved word or whatever? They let you have perldoc, right? $ perldoc -f set No documentation for perl function `set' found That implies no. They let you have Google, right? http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/pod/perlfunc.html#Alphabetical_Listing_of_Perl_Fun That also implies no. :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Force browser rendering of a partial dataset?
On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Christopher Schmidt wrote: On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 06:31:43AM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Boston Mongers, I have a perl app sending a large data set ( 1000 lines rendered) out thru apache and mod perl. I want to force the browser to begin rendering the data table before receiving the last row so that the user doesn't have to wait. HTTP books and Googling seem to turn up snippets of related info here and there but I'd like to find a succint, precise summary of how to do this. Anyone know of one that you can point me to? If your data is in a single table element, you're generally out of luck: Browsers tend to wait to render tables until the entire table is available. Right, and this is all client driven. Different versions of different browsers will all decide how to respond to this differently. Compounding things, the'll also respond differently based on the HTML encoding: on a modern browser, with strict XHTML, it *might* be possible to get better results (because maybe the browser will try to assume that the syntax is valid, and so it can start rendering early), but no guarantees there. Some possible ways out, maybe: * break up the data into 100-row table chunks * see if maybe pseudo-tables with CSS could work (???) * skip the table and offer a CSV / XLS download link -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] job postings
On Sun, 29 Jun 2008, Uri Guttman wrote: if someone else really wants to do it, fine with me but no one has piped up about it. Oh fer cryin' out loud, how hard can it be? The conflict of interest here is obvious. Sorry, Uri, but there's no getting around it. Fox guarding the henhouse and all that. I'd like to know a little more about what's involved, but if it's just doing a quick sanity check on incoming job posting requests, I don't have a problem taking that role. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] quiz questions
On Jun 9, 2008, at 11:52 PM, Uri Guttman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: what is the opposite of spaghetti code? Some candidates: Lasagne: Well organized layers. Ravioli: Self-contained objects in, err, a message-passing sauce. Pizza: Everything arranged for the maintainer in one glance. Tiramisù: Lasagne code, but with chocolate Kahlua for the maintainer. Birra: Beer. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] quiz questions
On Tue, 10 Jun 2008, Uri Guttman wrote: can any of you listen to instructions??! please NO POSTING of answers until after the talk. Sorry, got your message after sending my suggestions. In any case, I doubt I can make it tonight to begin with... -- Chris Devers DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] merging lists that are ordered but not sorted
On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Tolkin, Steve wrote: I want to reconstruct the underlying list. In other words the order of the elements agrees in all the lists, but there is no sort condition. Example: List 1: dog, cat, mouse List 2: dog, shark, mouse, elephant There are 2 possible outputs, and I do not care which one I get. Out of curiosity, does it have to handle something like this? List 1: dog, cat, mouse List 2: dog, shark, mouse, elephant List 3: apple, pear, orange That is, outliers, I guess. Or this? List 1: dog, cat, mouse List 2: dog, shark, mouse, elephant List 3: elephant, dog That is, loops, I guess. Seems like edge cases like that could make this non-determistic. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Edward Tufte in Boston this March
On Fri, 25 Jan 2008, Bob Rogers wrote: Edward Tufte is coming to Boston on March 3, 4, and 5 to give his famous one-day course [1]. I've never been to one myself, but I've heard (including at Boston.PM meetings) that's it's really good -- and the books speak for themselves. When I showed the brochure to the CEO, his eyes lit up. So not only is our entire software development team going to attend, plus maybe some of the scientists, but the CEO may come too. E I have the first three books, and I *really* like them. (I only found out recently that there's a fourth one now, which I don't have yet, but I imagine I'll like it too once I get a copy.) I went to the seminar he gave in Boston a few years ago (2003?), and was underwhelmed. I really wanted to like it. It was impressive to see the actual physical examples he cites in the books (text from Galileo, etc). But he also spent most of the time just reading the books to us, with kind of a gee aren't these great air. Which they are, I'll grant, but I was hoping for a bit more than that. Then he spent an hour or so showing us piles of metal in his yard. Great glorious photos of pillars of twisted gleaming steel. Don't ask why. If you haven't read the books, you'll get a lot out of the seminar. If you've read them, you'll get the re-read to you. Oh and you'll get another copy of the books. So there's that, too. I'm glad I went, once, but was underwhelmed overall :-/ -- Chris Devers DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Linux Magazine survey: Are you still using Perl?
On Jul 13, 2007, at 4:05 PM, Tom Metro wrote: Personally, I was annoyed by one of the pages that required me to rank my interest in technologies that I may not have heard of. It didn't permit leaving the row blank, and there was no don't know column. Saying you have no interest in something you haven't heard of is not the correct answer. I had to do one a little like that recently, being asked to rank 10 current used or potentially useful diagnostic software tools. The comparison was difficult though, because, for example, one of the options was for the sort of thing that very seldom comes up to begin with, but when it does come up, it's exactly the right tool for the job, and so indispensable in that situation. Another question cited the command line -- which is of course a broad, general class of useful tools in lots of contexts -- but then cited as examples a couple of diagnostics that are nearly useless in all contexts, like uptime, while leaving out others like, say, fsck or ping. Oh well, what can you do... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
[Boston.pm] Too clever by half, or, Look ma, no hands!
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/07/vistas-advanced-speech- recognition.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyLqUf4cdwc -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] (void) Too clever by half, or, Look ma, no hands!
Sorry if you got that more last one than once, I changed my mind about cross-posting it but then, err, hit send before remembering to delete the extraneous addresses. Still though, it's funny stuff. Really. *ahem* -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Extract text from html preserving newlines
On Wed, 2 May 2007, Tolkin, Steve wrote:
Q1. Is there a way to automate IE or Mozilla Firefox to save 100's of
files as text?
Probably, but might it be easier to automate using `lynx -dump` (or
better still, `links -dump`) ?
If those produce output the way you want them, automating it should be a
snap to do, even with just a simple shell script.
$ for f in *.html; do links -dump $f ${f}.txt; done
Etc.
--
Chris Devers
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Re: [Boston.pm] Program wanted to recover text that has spaces inserted or deleted
On Apr 5, 2007, at 6:42 PM, Tolkin, Steve wrote: Also, this is somewhat more complicated because sometimes spaces can be removed, although occasionally with much lower frequency. For example Arti factrefers ought to be Artifact refers How is the program supposed to select from variants such as Artifact refers Art I fact refers documents and document sand ? It almost seems like you can't trust the spaces at all, so you might as well just throw them all out and then look for valid word chains in the remaining text. If nothing else, that would also solve the ancillary problem of a space before punctuation marks... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] teaching kids Perl
On Dec 1, 2006, at 10:30 AM, Kate Wood wrote: So... say you were going to teach a child (or several children) of about ten, reasonable technical aptitude, to program using Perl. How would you go about it? I'm doing some lessons for my daughter and her friends for the spring,and need some further input. They're not quite of an age where handing them the camel book and saying go for it is realistic, but they're pretty self-motivated. As much as I like Perl, is it really a good first language for anyone, and kids in particular? I seem to remember that there was some good Python for kids tutorials out there, as well as Scheme/Logo. Maybe I'm biased because my first exposure to programming was turtle graphics in Logo at about the age you're describing, and I know there are some good modern implementations of turtle / Logo / Scheme for Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. that would be good for kids to learn on. Perl as a first language though seems like a risky idea though, almost along the lines of that old (Knuth?) line about people who learned on Basic being irrepairably damaged programmers :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] teaching kids Perl
On Dec 1, 2006, at 2:15 PM, Ann Barcomb wrote: I think Perl is probably a nice language to learn as a kid, because you don't have to worry about things like strict typing or memory allocation. Right, but then that's true for more or less any scripting language. And a simpler, more structured language like Python or Scheme might have advantages for kids over a language as freeform as Perl. Then again, if the goal is for them to do a web site, and they're already comfortable with HTML markup, then maybe one of Perl's template frameworks might be a good next step... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] damian meeting recap
On Tue, 26 Sep 2006, Dan Boger wrote: On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 09:40:03AM -0400, Uri Guttman wrote: as for bandwidth, i dunno what our wiki can handle. we share hosting with the main pm servers which mostly do web and email. dunno any pm groups that do video. but youtube would work as long as no one cared about their dignity. :) I can easily host anything we need - which can then be linked to from the wiki. Contact me off list, we'll set up something. I can just host it from home for now, but my bandwidth is pitiful and wouldn't take well to hosting video. So. Here's the URL, but if you can mirror it and link that in turn to the wiki, that would work well :-) http://devers.homeip.net:8080/images/Damian_talk_-_tinfoil_hat_contest.mov (And, yes, Damian gave his okay for this off-list, and no, the rest of the talks will not be made available, in spite of the advice to go forth and download. That bit was actually mistranslated from Australian into English. Silly furriners. Sorry about any confusion.) -- Chris Devers DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Short time in Boston
On Fri, 15 Sep 2006, Uri Guttman wrote: MV == Minh Vo [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: MV If you haven't seen Blueman Group, they have a show at 2pm MV on Oct. 22nd. Very interesting show... you may not realize that blue man started in nyc (where dave and mom live) and so they could see it there. also we still don't know the time window of the port visit. assuming mostly daytime, i doubt an evening show will work for them. Good thing he specified 2pm then :-) we just need to point them to boston stuff which doesn't have much of a counterpart in nyc. Vaguely moving from west to east (i.e. probably backwards...), here's some ideas: If the Red Sox are *not* playing, you can take a tour of Fenway Park (which I personally found more fun than a game, but then I'm not into baseball). You get to go to the press box, on top of the Green Monster, and behind home plate. Sadly, they don't let you go on the field though. http://boston.redsox.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/bos/ballpark/tour.jsp As a kid I really liked the Mapparium at the Christian Science center. The exhibit got renovated a few years ago, and when I went back to see it again a couple of years ago, I still liked the globe itself, but not so much the museum they had for the CS stuff. Oh well. http://www.marybakereddylibrary.org/exhibits/mapparium.jhtml The old/original wing of the Boston Public Library (the McKim Building, I've just learned) is cool. An art-student friend visited a few years ago and was content to just hang out there for several hours, looking at the building itself, the books, and the free exhibits upstairs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Public_Library Also on Copley Square is Trinity Church, which I keep meaning to go walk around some day. The outside is fantastic. Hm, maybe I'll go there today now that I think about it... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Church%2C_Boston Also on or near Copley Square are the John Hancock and Prudential towers. The John Hancock Tower was one of the first all-glass skyscrapers in the world, and took a few years post-construction to get right (huge panes of glass falling 60 stories onto the sidewalk, the slow realization that a good stong gust could knock the whole building over, etc -- the usual). It's the tallest building in the city and so used to have the best views of it, but the observation deck closed after Sept 11, so the Prudential Center's Skywalk Observatory is now the highest place to get views of the city. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hancock_Tower http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudential_Tower http://www.prudentialcenter.com/play/skywalk.html If you're going to do a Duck Tour, the tours start from the Prudential Center, the Museum of Science, or Faneuil Hall. http://www.bostonducktours.com/tickets_main.html http://www.prudentialcenter.com/play/ducktours.html I'm not sure what a good vantage point is to see it, but the new Zakim Bridge is impressive. You can see if fairly close from the Museum of Science and the USS Constitution, and closer still from the EF Building (which also has a big slab from the Berlin Wall on public display out front); if you take a Duck Boat tour, I think they go pretty close to the, as well as the Berlin Wall piece. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakim_Bunker_Hill_Bridge http://www.leonardpzakimbunkerhillbridge.org/ http://www.google.com/maps?q=ef+educationnear=Boston,+MAcid=42358333,-71060278,357515942939126501 (The Google map gets the EF spot slightly off -- across from the Museum of Science, on the other side of the Green Line causeway bridge, the EF Building is straight ahead on the right side of the street. Zoom the map all the way in and, though it isn't clear what you're looking at, the Berlin Wall segment is visible to the left of the cluster of trees and to the right of the patio in front of the building, casting a shadow onto the patio. http://www.google.com/maps?q=ef+educationnear=Boston,+MAcid=42358333,-71060278,357515942939126501ll=42.369438,-71.071064spn=0.00151,0.00239t=h http://karl.hiramoto.org/photo-album/2001/ed-jo-pictures-summer2001/2%20July%2001%20Boston-Kate/tn/Berlin%20Wall.jpg.html Ah, it looks like the Head of the Charles (rowing / sculling regatta) is that weekend, that might be worth checking out. You can see it from either side of the river, starting downstream near the BU Boathouse, upstream past Harvard to the finish line Herter Park. Alternately, if this isn't your cuppa tea, you may wish to avoid the race route and nearby areas (e.g. Harvard Square), as they'll probably be mobbed. http://www.hocr.org/home/default.asp http://www.hocr.org/pdf/shuttlen.pdf -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Impatient Perl, reboot
On Mon, 26 Jun 2006, Greg London wrote: That's the ideal solution, anyway. Anything like this exist? Pointers? URL's? Hints? Write it in POD? I'm not aware of any POD based Wikis, but it doesn't seem like it would be hard to merge the two approaches, with a traditional web-facing wiki front-end that stores things as a POD-like syntax on the back. This way, you get the collaborative editing and there are already tools out there to convert the POD source to PDF etc. Alternatively, pick an existing wiki engine (kwiki etc) and set up tools to export its source files as PDF. I'm not sure which of those would be easier, less labor intensive, etc., but neither of them seems that hard to manage... -- Chris Devers DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Perl Curses clarification
On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Bob Rogers wrote: Please note that this does not preclude using an SQL database. [...] Of if you're hell-bent on CSV, at least use DBD::CSV and write your application as if there's a real database engine on the other side. That way, when you come around and realize that a proper database of some kind -- even SQLite -- should be more robust easy to manage in the long run, you should be able to port your code to it without a total rewrite. Plan for growth. You'll be glad you did, someday. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Stock Quotes
On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, Joel Gwynn wrote: Thanks. That's just the kind of recommendation I was looking for. Question: is this just a collection of screen-scrapers? What happens if Yahoo or Motley Fool, for example, overhaul their web site, or just adds/removes somthing that breaks it? It depends on HTML::TableExtract, so it seems to be screen-scraping. Note though that the Sourceforge home page http://finance-quote.sf.net/ suggests that it is actively maintained, with releases from as recently as January and going back as early as 2000, so presumably the module is being patched as needed to keep it working with Yahoo's site. -- Chris Devers DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Pretty Graphs with Perl
On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, Alex Brelsfoard wrote: I've got a project coming up that's going to need me to make graphs. I do not yet know what kind of graph (dot, line, bar, etc.). But I am told that it needs to be pretty (and probably with multiple colors). The data needing to be displayed will be anywhere from 5 points, to many thousands of points. There will be some times where I will need to have multiple datasets (separated by color) set on the same graph, one over the next. I was thinking of a brute-force way of doing this with associative arrays. But I was wondering if you all had any better suggestions. Are there any good, friendly, tested modules for this sort of thing? Is this a time for Perl tk? Would this be better off in Java? Have you looked at SVG::Graph or SVG::TT::Graph ? http://search.cpan.org/~allenday/SVG-Graph/Graph.pm http://search.cpan.org/~llap/SVG-TT-Graph/lib/SVG/TT/Graph.pm http://sourceforge.net/projects/svg-graph http://leo.cuckoo.org/projects/SVG-TT-Graph/ http://use.perl.org/~davorg/journal/20979 Quoting from that last URL: At first I looked at GD::Graph as that's pretty much seen as the standard Perl graphing module. But, to be honest, the output really isn't up to the quality that you can get from Excel. Then someone suggested that I look at SVG::TT:Graph instead. And it's great. I got some very useable graphs up in about 15 minutes (then, of course, I spent two hours tweaking them). Of course, the catch is that you have to find a way to display SVG graphics for the project. If the goal is for this to be served over the web, most browsers still don't have SVG support by default, though there are good plugins that can be downloaded installed. These pages give a pretty good overview of SVG issues, including browser support: http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/samples/ http://sdx.archivesdefrance.culture.gouv.fr/gpl/navimages/en/svgViewer.html -- Chris Devers d»Ó¼urÆðekù ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] UNIX/LINUX/Windows Application Infrastructure Support Engineer - Central Illinois
On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Tal Cohen wrote: I currently have the following position available for immediate consideration in central Illinois: Ah. That explains why you're asking Boston[.Massachusetts].pm :-) No relocation or sponsorship is available for this position. Yep. Makes perfect sense now :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] brian d foy is in the neighborhood
On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Ricker, William wrote: How far he wants to travel would seem to be a question for brian to answer, not for us. Well, yes, but seeing as he isn't speaking up, *someone* should. Who shall we nominate to be the honorary brian? -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Quotes and such [was] RE: script to normalize output of Windows dir command
On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, John Macdonald wrote:
On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:48:08PM -0400, Ricker, William wrote:
Chris Devers was however obviously looking for this rather specific
elaboration of Santayana's, as it captures the inevitableness.
[ Any sufficiently complicated c or fortran program contains an ad hoc
informally-
[ specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
[ -Greenspun's 10th law of programming
[ http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000tgU
Note - there are no laws (1..9).
Actually, I think he was looking for Henry Spencer's old quote:
Those who do not understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it
- badly.
Either of those, actually :-)
AS I say, I'm sure there's some witty nugget of a reformulation of those
lines based around this thread and rsync -- the Unix variant is nice and
succinct, while the Lisp one gets more specific -- but I can't be
bothered to tease it out.
In any case, the point stands: the original poster was looking for a way
to solve a problem in Perl that rsync already has tackled. Perl is a
nice tool and suitable for many purposes, but there are limits beyond
which even the roundest of reinvented wheels can get no rounder, and
rsync is clearly the roundest wheel for this job :-)
--
Chris Devers
ÝSB½ÚF5{Dp
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Re: [Boston.pm] we can meet at mit
On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Uri Guttman wrote: i just got info about meeting at mit and it looks like we will be able to get a room there with no problems. Great! Thank you for organizing this. So, any idea how soon we could have another meeting? It's been a while... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] we can meet at mit
Waitaminute, if we're going to meet at MIT, which is in Cambridge, then do we need to set up some kind of arrangement with Cambridge.pm ? http://www.pm.org/groups/15.html http://cambridge.pm.org/ The contact is James Wm. Lewis [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Heh. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] we can meet at mit
On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Jeremy Muhlich wrote: cambridge.pm looks pretty defunct, based on their website... I was being facetious :-) I think they've come up on the list before. As I recall, no one here had ever had any contact with them, which is weird, considering how many Boston.pm members there must be who live /or work /or go to school across the river in Cambridge. From the web site, it looks to me more like a defunct MIT student group. In any case, they seem to have last been active in 1999. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Geo::Coder::US RE: GoogleGeoCoder
On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Joel Gwynn wrote: When you get right down to it, this Boston neighborhood thing is just confusing. I work in Dorchester but management likes to put Boston on the stationary, which is confusing because there's an identical address in Boston proper, just with a different zip code. Are there any other cities that have similar naming schizophrenia? Sure, I imagine it happens all over the place. As has been noted in other comments in this thread, big towns assimilate smaller towns all the time, so current neighborhood names are often the names of formerly independent political entities. But then, it's not even always assimilation. People all over the world know that Harvard Square is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it isn't, as far as I know, a formal geographic boundary in any useful sense -- it's just a district in that part of Cambridge. But then maybe I'm revealing some ignorance here, as I've lived in the Boston area since I was a kid and yet I still don't actually know what square is really meant by the trm Harvard Square -- I've always assumed that it's centered on the T station, but that's not actually on Harvard's campus, hence the ambiguity. At $past_job, some of my coworkers were working on a real estate site. For this, they had to be able to handle all kinds of random input from people that, whether or not it was on any formal map, did in fact denote a perfectly well understood geographic area. Harvard Square. Union Square. Mark Sandman Square. Financial District. Theatre District. Leather District. Back Bay. Fort Point. South End. World's End. Greenbush. Queen Anne's Corner. Four Corners. Assinippi. Minot. Humarock. Silver Lake. Cedarville. Just to name a few. All of these are definite places in or around Boston or southeastern Massachusetts, but none of them is an actual town or city. But if you put any of them on an envelope, the mail will very probably get to its intended destination, and if you put any of them into a search string on a real estate site, it has to return results for that area. My impression is that dealing with all these varying names for the same places was the main impetus for setting up the ZIP code system in the first place. As long as you have the right ZIP code on an envelope, you can call your neighborhood Fatty Arbuckle for all the post office cares. Heh. Come to think of it, I might start calling my street that... :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Empty radio and checkboxes not passed to perl scr ipt
On Fri, 27 May 2005, Uri Guttman wrote: JR == Jim Rose [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: JR I'm missing something here. Why can't you just test to see JR if the variable is defined or not on your script? because he doesn't know in the code what the list of fields is. This probably -- read, is -- insane, but why not force the form to have in it a hidden field with the URL from which the page was served? If that information is available, then the server script can grab its own copy of the HTML, compare what it has against what it received from the client, and then fill in any missing fields as needed. The performance would suck, the load on the server will go up, it would all be more complicated to write maintain, and there's probably at least half a dozen good reasons why it wouldn't be reliable under lots of circumstances. But, once you get past all that, it would, if nothing else, provide a reasonable shot at comparing what was in the original form to what was submitted by the client. That or figure out a way to submit the HTML itself as another field, but I suspect that wouldn't be possible without Javascript trickery, which we've already ruled out as being unviable. That or just don't allow page authors to put any old random crap into the form like this :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Empty radio and checkboxes not passed to perl scr ipt
On Thu, 26 May 2005, Alex Brelsfoard wrote: Picture a web form that is some sort of a survey. When that survey is submit the perl script writes out the answers onto a file. That file is tab delimited. Stop right there, doctor, I think we've found the problem. If you used a more robust storage format, this problem would go away, right? For simple, you could just do something like the Windows INI format, which is just blocks of key/value pairs, and can be driven from Perl -- provided you don't want to just roll your own code -- using a module like Config::IniFiles or Config::IniHash: http://search.cpan.org/~gcarls/Config-IniFiles/IniFiles.pm http://search.cpan.org/~jenda/Config-IniHash/IniHash.pm Or you could get fancy and use a tied hash, a BDB database, a SQLite database, or a proper database server. The key thing to keep in mind is that you're currently describing a brittle format for maintaining lists of key/value pairs, but there's lots of other ways to go about this. In other words, not terribly fun. Thankfully, these calamities are easily preventable :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Empty radio and checkboxes not passed to perl scr ipt
On Thu, 26 May 2005, Alex Brelsfoard wrote: Think of it this way: My perl script reads in all the data sent to it, creating a list of fields. Then I spit out the values associated with those fields (who cares how). But when a checkbox is NOT filled in, that field name is NOT sent to my script. So the list of fields is one field shorter than it should be. And with dynamic or otherwise changing field names. yeah I'm screwed. A little clearer? Not really. It still seems to me that you need to be preserving the data in a form that indicates what name/value pairs were received -- *especially* if that set of pairs is dynamic. A simple tied hash might be able to do this just fine, but the other ways mentioned in the last mail might be able to help even more. If the target format has to be CSV, you could then have a helper script that extracts the data from the BDB / SQLite / etc storage, lays it out in a useful CSV format (building up a set of all possible fields and filling in blanks for any missing ones, etc), then saves that to a file. I still think that by storing things as CSV in the first place, you're making this problem unnecessarily complicated. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Empty radio and checkboxes not passed to perl script
On Thu, 26 May 2005, Uri Guttman wrote: CD == Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: CD Properly done, validation should happen on *both* sides, CD but minimally it has to happen on your side. it doesn't ever have to be done on the client side. Right. Just like you don't ever have to use, say, legible fonts, or non-jarring color schemes, etc. It's perfectly okay to skip this and if you do you can still have proper data integrity if you check on the server. But... that is totally a 'user unfriendly' design choice Sorry, but I don't think that's true. *Badly done* javascript can be user unfriendly, but that's not what I'm sticking up for here. I said *properly done* client side Javascript code. It does exist, and it does make web applications Better. Reflexively dismissing the ways that Javascript can make web applications better is as bad as any other form of cargo culting. (Cf. tired chestnuts about obscurity security, etc.) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] social meeeting in June?
On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Ann Barcomb wrote: I'm planning to be in Boston around 14-18 June. I'd like to join a social meeting if there happens to be one then. Man, we haven't even figured out March^H^H^H^H^HApril yet. Planning three months ahead -- is that even possible? I don't think that's possible. I've heard of it, but I don't believe it. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] social meeeting in June?
On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Ann Barcomb wrote: Well, I've booked my flight, and that's not until June... Does that count as proof? ...I retain my doubts :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Controlling Windows with Perl?
On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The purpose of my search is that I want to automate certain responsibilities which necessitate using windows based programs, but not being a Windows programmer, I have no clue on how to do this. I don't know if it's possible, or if perl can do the trick. But I'm hoping someone else does. It's completely the wrong approach for this list, but the book __ spends time showing how to do exactly this sort of thing with Python on Win32. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pythonwin32/ A lot of the details are in chapter 12, which happens to be the one that is available on the book's web site: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pythonwin32/chapter/ch12.html Other chapters, e.g. chapter 9, Integration with Excel, might be a gentler approach to the topic, but you'll need a copy of the book to look over that material. Granted, this approach has nothing to do with Perl, but having toyed around with some of the examples from this book, they did more or lss work well, and it wasn't unpleasant to do, overall. Get your head around this and, if you have to write in Perl, you may then know how best to proceed -- or you can just leave it in Python and go do more interesting things. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ np: 'If I Should Lose You' by Ken Peplowski / Howard Alden from 'Concord Duo Series, Vol. 3: Ken Peplowski / Howard Alden, recorded live at Maybeck Recital Hall' ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: social-ism, was Re: [Boston.pm] why popularity matters
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Uri Guttman wrote: i will recruit general gao to lead my army! (nyc spells it tso ??). i will use the kung pao fist to beat on my enemy and the tao of programming as my guide. my soldiers will be the shaolin soccer team. your fortune cookie reads, you will lose badly (in bed). I've noticed that in bed isn't the only amusing fortune cookie suffix: with a certain crowd, using emacs works almost as well: you will lose badly (using emacs) Sounds about right to me :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] why popularity matters
On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, Greg London wrote: Adam Turoff said: On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 10:33:20AM -0500, Sean Quinlan wrote: If Perl per se matters to you that much, then you should find some way to make it your day job. Find a new employer, start your own business, whatever it takes. What the heck do you think we're trying to do? Discuss advocacy and popularity at the expense of building cool tools with Perl. You're bifurcating, again. And you're going ad hominem, again. Adam's point is a legitimate one. Advocacy *doesn't* work well. A lot of people don't like being preached at or sold to. I certainly don't like it, even though this is something I'd be receptive to. On the other hand, people CAN be impressed by effective solutions to tangible problems, and if you can do this in a visible way using Perl, then people that are interested in such things will get the hint and take a look at Perl for themselves. The Perl Success Stories site is great for this sort of thing: http://perl.oreilly.com/news/success_stories.html But beyond keeping sites like that prominent, there's not really a lot that can be done, pragmatically speaking, that seems likely to help. This isn't to say that advocacy is worthless. Obviously, some people think it's a big deal, and want to spend time on it. Fine. That's okay. Good luck with that. But you have to choose your fights wisely, and to me this doesn't look like an effective one, compared to how effective a more JFDI (just fucking do it) approach that sets about solving interesting problems -- like, say, finishing Perl 6, to pick something at random -- and using the success of that to reflect well on Perl. Adam's points are reasonable. I don't see why he's being attacked for voicing them. -- Chris Devers, who figures that if people want to keep mutilating the dead horse, he might as well get in a kick of his own, even though THE NAZIS ALSO KICKED DEAD HORSES AND ADVOCATED FOR MORE PERL USE, TOO. ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Anyone know of an alternative to perldoc.com?
On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, Grant M. wrote: Does anyone know of an alternative to the package listing for perl versions that used to be on perldoc.com? When this came up on the beginners list, someone suggested perlpod.com. I hadn't heard of it before, but it looks a lot like perldoc.com did... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
[Boston.pm] THE NAZIS HAD A CERTIFICATION FOR PERL
But then, you can't invoke Godwin deliberately, can you? Wasn't mentioning [implicitly, national] socialism close enough? No? Damn. -- Chris Devers, fascinated just how many thousands of words this thread has produced, and yet managed to clarify exactly nothing while doing so ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
RE: [WARNING: This message originated from outside of Fidelity] RE: [Boston.pm] Social Meeting Plans Tech Meeting Followup
On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Ricker, William wrote: Well, brian says that Cheesecake Factory (Cambridgeside Galleria) or No Name (South Boston / Seaport) work for him. Tonight or tomorrow night? I can make it tomorrow, but not tonight... If tomorrow, I vote for Cheesecake Factory. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
RE: [Boston.pm] Social Meeting Plans Tech Meeting Followup
On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Ricker, William wrote: Tonight. Tonight has rain (late), tomorrow has snow. Hm. Ronald originally wrote -- We'd like to have a social meeting tomorrow night while brian is still in town. Let's get suggestions for a location; somewhere convenient to the T. We're not going to let a little snow stop us from having a good time! -- which had me thinking tomorrow was not out of the question. Oh well. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Any incidence of cpan module closing the session?
On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Ranga Nathan wrote:
Many times today my putty sessions (to Linux on z/VM) logged of
automatically before the installation of a perl module finished.
If the session is getting terminated by the CPAN install, have you tried
running the installation from within a subshell?
% ssh host
$ sudo bash
Password:
# perl -MCPAN -e 'install MQSeries'
... stuff happens ...
... stuff breaks ...
$ # you're back to the initial remote shell
That way you at least shouldn't lose the whole connection.
You could probably also use an eval...
# perl -e 'eval{ use CPAN; install MQSeries}'
Or something along those lines...
--
Chris Devers
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Re: [Boston.pm] [OT] selling a widget online. Password required?
On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, Greg London wrote: Dan Boger said: - Register, and be able to track your package, Could you track an order with just a tracking number? Maybe an email address and a tracking number? I would think the tracking number could act as a one-time password, sort of. But maybe I'm missing something. If tracking numbers can be guessed, then random visitors can start constructing URLs that will let them see who bought what. This probably isn't what you want. You could maybe MD5 hash the numbers or something, which would at least make the space of numbers to be guessed a lot bigger, but you're still opening yourself up to privacy complaints if random visitors can get to other people's purchase records, especially if you have customers from countries with credible privacy laws (e.g. UK EU). -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] mind share
On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, Dan Boger wrote: I've been trying to be good, and seperate content from presentation. But since starting using Mason, I find that's much harder to do? That's because Mason makes the same mistake PHP does: it mixes your program logic in with your layout code. It shouldn't be any surprise that it's hard to be disciplined this way. Other Perl template frameworks like Template Toolkit HTML::Template don't make this mistake, and they're much easier to maintain. Am I missing something? Yes -- a template framework that lives up to the name. Mason is nice and all -- just as PHP is popular, I'm surprised that PHP isn't more popular than it seems to be -- but really it's going about the problem in the wrong way. A template framework that draws a clear distinction between the program logic, the interface, and the data (or to put it in design pattern terms, having separation between the Model, the View, and the Controller [MVC]) should be much better to work with. I didn't actually dislike Mason until 5 minutes ago, but now that I think about it, it's going about things all wrong. Use TT instead, or if you want something a little bit simpler, HTML::Template. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] search.cpan.org gone?
On Fri, 14 Jan 2005, Sean Quinlan wrote: I just tried to search cpan at search.cpan.org (looking to check out mod_parrot, which might not even _be_ on CPAN now that I think about it), and got 502 bad gateway? It was down for me as well: $ time lynx -head -dump http://search.cpan.org/ HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 16:10:02 GMT Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 224.11 real 0.17 user 0.07 sys $ But between getting that and hitting send, it seems to be back up ... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: Cameras Re: [Boston.pm] Tech/Social Meeting w/ Randal Schwartz
On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Randal L. Schwartz wrote: William == William Ricker [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: William Randal's 8MP Canon is *so* Yesterday. Well, 8MP at $1500 is *so* Today and tomorrow. :) Megapixels shmegapixels. Is the lens any good? It's this one, right? http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0001G6U5C It looks like just annother fancy point shoot (albeit one that takes images of unweildy size). Maybe next time you can get a nice SLR instead... :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: Cameras Re: [Boston.pm] Tech/Social Meeting w/ Randal Schwartz
On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, William Ricker wrote: no, both Randall's new almost affordable toy and the item I linked are DSLRs with classic glass. Oh, ok, I stand corrected. I didn't notice a link or a model name for the one he has now, so I put Canon 8mp digital camera into Google and got back a dozen or more pages about the camera I mentioned. If Randal has a proper SLR, that changes everything :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Inheriting documentation for inherited command-line options
On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Uri Guttman wrote: SQ == Sean Quinlan [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: SQ While making recommendations on style can be useful, particularly SQ in the cases where it can reduce the possibility of bugs, I would SQ agree that approaching the main request of the poster first might SQ be more appropriate. and i said i couldn't do that. Then why bother responding? You found the time to rip apart his coding style; surely a response that actually addressed the question couldn't have been that much more work. Why put so much effort into answering a question that was never asked? -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
[Boston.pm] a car talk puzzle
This seems like something that would be fun to solve with Perl: RAY: I have, written on a piece of paper in front of me, a word that is plural and also masculine. Now, I know we don't have masculine and feminine words in English the way we do in Italian or French. But, we do have words that connote masculinity. For example, the word boys is a plural word that connotes masculinity. The word I have written here is like boys. It's masculine, and ends in s. Not only that, but you change this word from plural to singular and from masculine to feminine, all by adding an s to it! I spent last night reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary, and I only found one example for which this works. Ok, so I've got a word list, how many words can there be that end in S? $ grep -ic 's$' /usr/share/dict/words 25998 Oy, way too many. But how many end in a double S? $ grep -ic 'ss$' /usr/share/dict/words 9552 Better, but not much better. If the word in question is in /usr/share/dict/words, then it should be one of the (hopefully) rare words that is a -ss word that, when the last -s is dropped, is also in the larger -s list. With luck, there will be only one; realistically, this should shorten the list enough that the answer can be found manually. Can anyone think of a clever way to do this ? -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
RE: [Boston.pm] a car talk puzzle
On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Tolkin, Steve wrote: If the word in question is in /usr/share/dict/words Big if, it turns out. I cheated, the answer is here. DON'T READ THIS IF YOU HATE SPOILERS: http://www.cartalk.com/content/puzzler/transcripts/200346/answer.html Looking back at my /usr/share/dict/words, the singular form of the word doesn't show up, which means that Kripa's approach, using inflection to pluralize singular nouns, is a better approach than I had considered. Clearly m**ss is feminine and singular and I think that m**s does have a masculine connotation. It's much less ambiguous than this. Also, the words are shorter, and probably more common. Though, in a way, the definition is basically along the same lines :) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] CMS/Website creation and management tool
On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Any useful recommendations would be appreciated. What kind of sites? What are you hoping to do with the CMS engine? Three that come to mind are Bricolage, MovableType, and Slash, but these systems have very significant differences, such that a site that might be easy to deploy with one of these tools would be cumbersome with the others, and vice versa, and vice versa again. What sort of site are you thinking this should be? Who are the publishers / authors / maintainers going to be? What is the audience going to expect? What capabilities for supporting authors audeicence are needed? This site might not be a bad place to make comparisons: http://www.cmsreview.com/cmslisting.html But apparently they don't think of MovableType as a CMS engine, so it doesn't have a listing. Anyway, it seems like you can fill out a form to get CMS suggestions: http://www.cmsreview.com/cmssearch.html I don't seem able to find a link that points to the Perl-only list, but if you fill in that field in the search form, you'll find it. These people also seem to have a local CMS user group: http://www.cmsboston.com/ They could be a good source of information... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
RE: [Boston.pm] a car talk puzzle
On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Jeremy Muhlich wrote: On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 15:43, Chris Devers wrote: Looking back at my /usr/share/dict/words, the singular form of the word doesn't show up I find that kind of hard to believe... That was a think-o -- the singular is there, the plural isn't. What unix are you running? OSX. Anyway, here's my submission (I initially envisioned some xargs/grep stuff at the end but the sort/uniq is certainly much faster): grep 'ss$' /usr/share/dict/words | sed -e s/ss// | \ cat - /usr/share/dict/words | sort | uniq -c | grep ' 2' For me (using OSX) this returns 179 hits, one of which is the answer. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
RE: [Boston.pm] a car talk puzzle
On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Cox, Mark wrote: Using your script Jeremy, my dictionary (Solaris 5.8) came up with one that I like Ogres-Ogress Ya know, Shrek and Fiona meet both of these solutions to the puzzle :-) heh... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] CMS/Website creation and management tool
On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, joe wrote: MovableType fails the Open Source test. Ahh, good point, I forgot about that. That still leaves at least Bricolage Slash though, and I know there are several others (Mason, etc). More info is needed to help figure out which one is appropriate. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
[Boston.pm] Re: several messages
WARNING: cross-posted, please watch replies... * On Tue, 10 Aug 2004, Armin Zendron wrote: [snip] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [snip] Has anyone attempted to use DBI with Red Brick and had success? Specifically DBD::Informix? I am going to be attempting this on a unix machine (hpux). * On Tue, 10 Aug 2004, Armin Zendron wrote: [snip] From: Armin Zendron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [snip] Has anyone attempted to use DBI with Red Brick and had success? Specifically DBD::Informix? I am going to be attempting this on a unix machine (hpux). * On Tue, 10 Aug 2004, Armin Zendron wrote: [snip] From: Armin Zendron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [snip] Has anyone attempted to use DBI with Red Brick and had success? Specifically DBD::Informix? I am going to be attempting this on a unix machine (hpux). * ...and that's just the PM groups I'm subscribed to. Did other Perl groups get spammed with this today? Is posting the same message all over the place considered ok now? For the sake of this message, I hope just once is forgivable :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Tech Meeting Followup
On Fri, 6 Aug 2004, Andrew M. Langmead wrote: On Aug 5, 2004, at 10:01 PM, Ted Zlatanov wrote: I meant it in the sense of the Google cache, where you have an alternative in case the main one goes down, but the main link is prominent and obviously the one to follow. Have you ever noticed a google resultset entry that didn't have a cache link? I don't know if it is something that a publisher can set programatically or if it is a business arrangement. That, or something simpler like... meta http-equiv=Pragma content=no-cache The fact that it's a 'http-equiv' call suggests to me that if Apache (or whatever) was adjusted to emit a 'Pragma: no-cache' header with all responses then you'd get the same result at the server level. My assumption has always been that Google just honors this directive. Advertising based news sites will probably be even less appreciative of mirroring and caching as more and more of them turn into registration based sites. How about if the page content is cached by Slashdot, but the images -- and in particular, the advertising graphics -- are passed through to the original site? That way, Slashdot takes the bandwidth hit and the original site doesn't miss out on the advertising impressions. Of course, implementing this might be a pain. You'd probably want to cache the main graphics -- any photos with the article, any page furniture logos, etc -- while passing the ad graphics back to the original publisher. To do this, every site would have to be a special case -- NYT ads come from www.nytimes.com [and so filtering them from other links may be tricky for the caching site to capture], while Boston.com ads come from rmedia.boston.com [and so would be easy for caching sites to capture -- but you'd have to figure out this easy special case for every news site you'd want to link to...]. Also, for anyone with a browser set to reject images coming from an alternate server (I think Mozilla has had this for a while), this would break the whole scheme. So maybe that wouldn't work. But at least it tries to address the publisher's needs... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Wiki
On Thu, 5 Aug 2004, Bobbi Fox wrote: I think it's a great idea, modulo the ability to limit editing access per the comments that have come before, and the absolute committment *NOT* to have the theme be red and orange :-) Fine then, orange it is, and nothing but orange on orange on orange! But -- isn't the whole *point* of a wiki that *anyone* can edit it? Forcing some kind of you must be a member of Boston.pm scheme seems to be [a] against the spirit of wikis, [b] possibly hard to define (there must be people who go to meetings but aren't on the list, and vice versa), and [c] possibly a pain to maintain. If we're going to need some kind of registration system, I wouldn't want it to be any more cumbersome than create an account to edit, the way Twiki does. Signing up for such an account should ipso facto mean that the person signing up is now a Boston.pm member, and it should provide only enough overhead that we can track who is editing what. That way, if spammers sign up, we can clean up the mess more quickly. For the (much) more common case of people being honest, the burden isn't that bad. If making contributions is a pain in the ass, no one is going to do it. Forcing registration will make it be a pain in the ass. Ergo, I think registration should be done carefully with reluctance. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Keyboards
On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, Mark J. Dulcey wrote: Glen Peterson wrote: Last night there was brief moaning by people who wanted keybards without the Windows(tm) keys. For many users, the easiest and cheapest way to get one is probably to go to the MIT Flea and buy an old keyboard -- one made long enough ago not to have Windows keys. That won't help if you need a USB keyboard, though, since they're mostly too new. Of course, the even easier even cheaper thing for all the people that aren't aghast at the prospect of using Windows is to just *learn to use the Windows key*. It's tremendously useful, really -- * [win]+[e] -- launches Windows Explorer * [win]+[r] -- opens a Run dialog window * [win]+[f] -- opens a search window * [win]+[d] -- minimize everything, show the desktop * [win] -- bring up the system menu from the taskbar There's others too, that's just the ones I use all the time. I resisted using the win-key for years, but now that I've given in, I'd never want to go back to using Windows without having that key, and it bugs me that Linux OSX don't seem to have globally available system tools available with just a keystroke like that. Of course, if you use Linux, then you can't use these functions and you've got bigger problems anyway (e.g. you're stuck with Linux :). In that case, ok, maybe the key is dead weight, but then, for most people, there are lots of dead weight keys: [SysReq], [Pause/Break], [Scroll Lock], most or all of the F-keys, any internet keys on keyboards so equipped, etc. And yet, for whatever reason, no one ever complains about the useless [SysReq] key, or (the one that really bugs me) about the conspicuous absense of keys for basics [cut], [copy], and [paste]. And yet people have no trouble getting worked up over a perfectly useful key that just happens to be burdened with an annoying little advertising label on it. Man, life's rough... :-) -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ np: 'Theme From Hatari!' by Henry Mancini from 'The Best Of Mancini' ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Keyboards
On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, David Cantrell wrote: On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 08:48:19AM -0400, Mark J. Dulcey wrote: For many users, the easiest and cheapest way to get one is probably to go to the MIT Flea and buy an old keyboard -- one made long enough ago not to have Windows keys. That won't help if you need a USB keyboard. So get an Apple or Sun USB keyboard. But the bottom row of keys behaves funny when you plug an Apple keyboard into a PC (or, for that matter, a PC keyboard into a Mac). The same keys are all still there, but not in the same order, so you end up having to ignore the labels and any existing finger memory and get used to how the keyboard actually behaves. This is fun for a while, but gets old fast. What's the point? If you don't happen to have one laying around already, Mac-compatible keyboards are almost always more expensive than generic PC ones, so between the cost and the annoyance it hardly seems worth it to buy one for this. I still think the easiest way is to just get used to the Windows key -- anything that makes Windows a little more pleasant is worth it -- but who am I to talk -- I'm a Mac user anyway :-) -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ np: 'Mr. Lucky' by Henry Mancini from 'The Best Of Mancini' ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Keyboards
On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, John Abreau wrote: There's also the fact that SysRq actually does something, at least on Redhat and Fedora using the default Gnome desktop settings: it creates a screenshot. That sentence, in a nutshell, is why I'm ready to give up on Linux :) How amusingly lateral their thinking was in choosing that over the much too obviously labeled print screen key. I can just picture the devious little bastards now: where can we put this where NO ONE will think to look for it and no one will ever find it on purpose? Wait, I know! I still think hardware keys for cut / copy / paste would be infinitely more useful than any of these, but oh well, we're stuck with this now. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ np: 'Lujon' by Henry Mancini from 'The Best Of Mancini' ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] OT - Keyboards
On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, Mike Burns wrote: I'm looking at the keyboard I'm at now, and a few others, and I see: [ Print Screen / SysReq ] As one key. Am I missing something, or did the GNOME guys really choose the correct key? Ahh. Well then. Sorry, I'm a Mac user, I should have checked first :) But still, in that case they're using the first, sensible aspect of that key rather than sysreq, which would be ...really random. -- Chris Devers, who will try the think first, talk later rule for a while ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Dan and the Pie
On Tue, 3 Aug 2004, Steven W. Orr wrote: Probably the funniest of all pies is the kiwi pie. Of course, if Dan had been an adorable KDE hacker, it would have had to be a QT Pie. -- Chris Devers you may groan now ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] rakudo.org
On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, Dev Purkayastha wrote: Okay, wait a damn second. Who was the wiseguy who registered www.rakudo.org? Ask not who registers rakudo.org for you, ask whois about rakudo.org: $ whois rakudo.org # legal nonsense snipped Domain ID:D104545192-LROR Domain Name:RAKUDO.ORG Created On:18-Jun-2004 18:36:33 UTC Expiration Date:18-Jun-2005 18:36:33 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:R103-LROR Status:TRANSFER PROHIBITED Registrant ID:AL12240 Registrant Name:Andy Lester Registrant Organization:Petdance Industries Registrant Street1:PO Box 606 Registrant City:McHenry Registrant State/Province:IL Registrant Postal Code:60051-0606 Registrant Country:US Registrant Phone:+1.1234567890 Registrant Email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Admin ID:AL35923 Admin Name:Andy Lester Admin Organization:Petdance Industries Admin Street1:PO Box 606 Admin City:McHenry Admin State/Province:IL Admin Postal Code:60051-0606 Admin Country:US Admin Phone:+1.1234567890 Admin Email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Tech ID:AL35923 Tech Name:Andy Lester Tech Organization:Petdance Industries Tech Street1:PO Box 606 Tech City:McHenry Tech State/Province:IL Tech Postal Code:60051-0606 Tech Country:US Tech Phone:+1.1234567890 Tech Email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Name Server:NS2.PAIRNIC.COM Name Server:NS1.PAIRNIC.COM $ -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] small nagging question
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Timothy Kohl wrote: for example use CGI qw(:cgi-lib) I realize this is for grabbing a portion of a larger .pm file, but how does it differ from say use LWP::Simple; You mean aside from being completely different libraries? :-) You've basically got it: by specifying what parts of a module you want to import into your own code, you're explicitly using only the aspects of the library that are relevant to what you want to do. This can keep your runtime code a bit smaller, and by extension faster. It can also keep things cleaner, in that you're less likely to have conflicts between your own variables functions and the ones that came from parts of the module you aren't interested in. It's a funny question, now that you ask it -- isn't it just intuitively obvious that restricting specifying things this way is a good habit? -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Thanks Damian!
On Fri, 16 Jul 2004, Uri Guttman wrote: DT == Drew Taylor [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: DT Thanks again for your continuing presentations here in Boston. They DT are definitely appreciated (and even useful!). IIRC, I think I've seen DT you 3-4 times here, and I've missed 1 or 2 meetings as well. i don't think he is subscribed to this list so i cc'ed this to him. the others who wanted to thank damian should resend with him on the recipient list. That, or save everyone some trouble and send a URL to the archive: http://www.pm.org/pipermail/boston-pm/2004-July/thread.html#2052 :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] OFF TOPIC: Software Development Project
On Fri, 16 Jul 2004, Tal Cohen wrote: I know that this is way off topic, but I figured that someone in the group may be interested. I have a short term software development project currently open. It involves gathering information on memory usage and disk usage on Unix, Linux, Windows, and MAC systems, then transmitting the results across a TCP/IP network. If you are interested, email me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for details. Does it involve SNMP ? :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Is there a module to access memory usage?
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Federico Lucifredi wrote: I could try to list the horrors of past versions of SNMP, but Chris seems much more of an expert in it so I will pass the honor and go to bed instead. z :-) Well, no, not an expert as such, I was mainly just summarizing examples from Appendix E of _Perl for System Administrators_, as people don't seem to have dashed out bought copies since I brought up SNMP in my first response to this thread so I figured I may as well belabor the point so that it wasn't misunderstood this time around :-) But we do use an awful lot of SNMP at work. I'm not the one that set any of it up, but I'm impressed at how with a few simple tools -- Mon, MRTG, and some not necessarily very sophisticated home-grown stuff -- you can automatically be on top of everything that is going on with every device on your network, in as much detail as you'd like. The hard part usually isn't extracting the data you need, but in managing the flood of it in the form of hundreds or thousands of emails per day. If you have such systems in place, adding in a hook to monitor memory usage on all these devices comes surprisingly close to trivial. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Is there a module to access memory usage?
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Dan Boger wrote: On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 11:33:10PM -0400, Federico Lucifredi wrote: LOL... hadn't thought of that one. Besides, would you really want to sshcache your password just for that? Don't need to cache your password, just create a key that executes this one command, and use that. Assuming, of course, that mem is not exploitable, which I admit isn't a sure thing. But then, it doesn't seem to be exploitable for the purpose of determining how much memory Windows (as opposed to DOS) has available, so why bother? It's a dead end anyway, unless you only care about the person that wants to run VisiCalc Lotus Agenda side by side :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Thanks Damian!
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Daniel Allen wrote: Here are some brief notes; I hope they're helpful to fill in gaps. Here are some notes from when the talk was given at YAPC: http://rjbs.manxome.org/yapc/2004/advtech.txt He got cut off by a dead laptop battery towards the end, but it fills in a few gaps up until that point anyway... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
RE: [Boston.pm] Is there a module to access memory usage?
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Tal Cohen wrote: Yeah, I thought of that. I was hoping for a platform independent mechanism. If not, then I can use this type of methodology, but how do I account for Windows based machines? Set up SNMP on each client and write generic, cross-platform scripts that can make SNMP queries to find out such things (or better still, install a package like Mon or MRTG that does such things for you). O'Reilly's _Perl for System Administration_ gives a quick overview of such things; chapter 10 appendix E have the material you need here. The _Essential SNMP_ book gets into much more detail, and has chapters on MRTG setup use and using Perl to script SNMP work. Setting up an SNMP architecture may be more overhead than you have in mind, but once you have it in place, monitoring all kinds of things, for all kinds of devices (computers with about any operating system, as well as things like printers, network hardware, etc) gets really easy. How does one brew a cup of tea? First one must create the universe... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Is there a module to access memory usage?
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, David Cantrell wrote: Tal Cohen wrote: I know, but that is what I am stuck with (besides, what is wrong with writing platform independent code?). I could use a Windows/DOS batch command...if I knew which one to use. mem, I think. Yes, this seems to work -- sort of: % ssh $windows_host_FOO_with_cygwin_ssh_set_up [EMAIL PROTECTED]'s password: Last login: Wed Jul 7 19:14:00 2004 from bar [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ $ mem /? Displays the amount of used and free memory in your system. MEM [/PROGRAM | /DEBUG | /CLASSIFY] /PROGRAM or /P Displays status of programs currently loaded in memory. /DEBUG or /D Displays status of programs, internal drivers, and other information. /CLASSIFY or /C Classifies programs by memory usage. Lists the size of programs, provides a summary of memory in use, and lists largest memory block available. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ $ mem 655360 bytes total conventional memory 655360 bytes available to MS-DOS 632720 largest executable program size 1048576 bytes total contiguous extended memory 0 bytes available contiguous extended memory 941056 bytes available XMS memory MS-DOS resident in High Memory Area [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ $ mem /classify Conventional Memory : NameSize in Decimal Size in Hex - - - MSDOS 12080 ( 11.8K) 2F30 KBD 3280 ( 3.2K)CD0 HIMEM 1248 ( 1.2K)4E0 COMMAND 4272 ( 4.2K) 10B0 FREE 112 ( 0.1K) 70 FREE 634192 (619.3K) 9AD50 Total FREE : 634304 (619.4K) Upper Memory : NameSize in Decimal Size in Hex - - - SYSTEM163824 (160.0K) 27FF0 MOUSE 12528 ( 12.2K) 30F0 MSCDEXNT 464 ( 0.5K)1D0 REDIR 2672 ( 2.6K)A70 DOSX 34848 ( 34.0K) 8820 FREE1456 ( 1.4K)5B0 FREE 46208 ( 45.1K) B480 Total FREE :47664 ( 46.5K) Total bytes available to programs (Conventional+Upper) : 681968 (666.0K) Largest executable program size : 632736 (617.9K) Largest available upper memory block : 46208 ( 45.1K) 1048576 bytes total contiguous extended memory 0 bytes available contiguous extended memory 941056 bytes available XMS memory MS-DOS resident in High Memory Area $ So, if you have ssh set up, and can use ssh-agent to cache the password, then it appears you can get a nicely parseable display of memory usage. As long as you're happy with memory available to DOS that is. :-/ But hey, 666.0K ought to be enough for anybody! :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Is there a module to access memory usage?
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Timothy Kohl wrote: Forwarded message: I need to write a script that will return how much memory (RAM) is on a system as well as how much of it is being used. Can anyone assist? If this is done under UNIX/Linux, it might be easier than you think: just poke around the proc filesystem and you might find that all you need is really there -Federico Under Linux: @array_of_information=split(`cat /proc/meminfo`); But of course, this isn't portable. It won't work on Windows -- which was specifically asked for -- and it also won't work on OSX or various other Unix variants. Back to square one? I still think SNMP is the most portable approach, even if it may be a lot of overhead to get started with... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Is there a module to access memory usage?
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Timothy Kohl wrote: But of course, this isn't portable. It won't work on Windows -- which was specifically asked for -- and it also won't work on OSX or various other Unix variants. Back to square one? The point is, there is obviously no portable way to do this except code a bunch of different variants and bundle them together in one monolithic module. Which, as I keep saying, is generally known as SNMP. And it's not just a Perl module, it's a big scary ISO standard that is already spoken today by gobs of hardware software all around you if you just know to look. And, as you seem suggest, that is probably the best approach here. SNMP is a formal, massively over-engineered spec for getting and setting information of just about any kind for just about any kind of network addressable host, including such things as computers, printers, routers, wireless access points, monitors, carrier pigeons, etc. The people that came up with SNMP developed this huge, overarching hierarchy of objects that you can get or set info about, and this hierarchy can be traversed or walked in useful ways. All of the elements in this hierarchy can be referred to by name (which is somewhat easier to remember, but there's so much hierarchy that no human is likely to bother) or by number (which is baffling, but if you bundle it all up in software you only have to look it up once). Therefore, if you have the SNMP command line tools installed, you can do commands such as these: % snmpget solarisbox public .iso.org.dod.internet.mgmt.mib-2.system.sysDescr.0 % snmpget solarisbox public .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1.0 And either way you get back output like this: system.sysDescr.0 = Sun SNMP Agent, Ultra-1 Luckily, because almost every query you're likely to be interested in is going to have the same prefix (note that we don't get to internet until the fourth level down), you can do abbreviated queries too, e.g.: % snmpget solarisbox public system.sysUpTime.0 system.sysUpTime.0 = Timeticks: (5126167) 14:14:21.67 So, in order to solve the problem being asked in this thread, all you have to do is look up the path to the objects that relate usefully to the available memory on the device you want to poll, and then write a five line Perl script to retrieve that value. This should be completely portable and, once the infrastructure is in place, more or less easy to manage. The tricky bit isn't portability, but in coping with the complexity of the spec -- I don't, for example, have the slightest clue where memory will be denoted, though it is probably nested in there somewhere (I've seen MRTG graphs that depict memory usage over time, so SNMP must be reporting it somehow). For example DBI has to be taught (more or less) how to handle different flavored databases. Right, but any device which supports SNMP has, by that very fact, already come up with the necessary handler; at the level we're dealing with, you never ever have to dirty your hands with such details. On the downside, there are completely different, filthy details, but at least they're portably filthy. :-) Really, don't do this from scratch, just set up some infrastructure (that is, make sure hosts you want info about are responding to SNMP queries properly) and then see if you can get a package like Mon to do the work for you. This may be overkill for a small project, but it makes whole classes of diagnostic problems into known quantities that you don't have to think about anymore, which is certainly appealing. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] damian topic?
On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Greg London wrote: Chris Devers said: On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Greg London wrote: I've set up a polling booth here: http://www.greglondon.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=7#7 ...maybe I'm being thick, but where is the vote button? as I said, you have to register to vote. if you aren't logged in, it won't show you the vote button. The register button is in the upper right of the page. Isn't this overkill? only if by overkill you mean the three minutes There, that's it! There's not that many of us that we can't accept a little bit of risk with ballot stuffing, eh? :) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
talk topic, was Re: [Boston.pm] Tech Meeting w/ Damian Conway [...]
On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Ronald J Kimball wrote: If you'd like to help decide which talk we'll ask Damian to give, check out the list at http://damian.conway.org/Seminars/ and then post to the discussion list or send your choice to me. I recommend a vote for one of the following talks: Everyday Perl, Sufficiently Advanced Technologies, Time::Space::Continuum. Does anyone have any preferences, aside from everyone's obvious and deep affection for Ken's laptop? My preferences: 1. Sufficently Advanced Technologies 2. Everyday Perl 3. Time::Space::Continuum But I don't feel strongly about that, and would be happy to be talked into a different order. Weren't people saying that some of these might be presented at YAPC? If that's the case, and people have already seen some, then maybe something fresher to this audience would be better. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Tech Meeting w/ Damian Conway, Tuesday, July 13
On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Kenneth A Graves wrote: On Thu, 2004-07-01 at 23:03, Chris Devers wrote: On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Kenneth A Graves wrote: On Thu, 2004-07-01 at 17:16, Kenneth A Graves wrote: Yes. I'll plan on bringing my laptop. How did I hit reply-to-group? Stupid fingers. Pay no attention to the man hiding behind the laptop. Oh so it is that big? Good thing the group was warned. Well, it's big enough to block my view of other people. By the Ostrich Principle, it's big enough to block other people's view of me. Your wife / SO / etc must be delighted with this treasure... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Linux cluster and configuration management
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Ian Langworth wrote: I can't speak for web-based management, but I can tell you that we're using Radmind and FAI for to manage our Linux workstations. As for monitoring, we might use Big Sister, but look into Nagios as well. We were using FAI, and it was nice for quick, automated installs (we could have a functional Debian workstation up in about two or three minutes from the first boot this way). Then we switched to net-booting over NFS, and it's even easier faster. There's no longer any need to configure each machine, beyond going into the bios and making sure that PXE boot over the network is enabled. Everything else can be managed on the NFS server, and if a machine goes bad, we can just move the user over to a new one or rebuild the old one, but either way it's a trivial matter. I don't know if net-booting would be a problem for cluster computing though, where presumably you are working on distributed problems with lots of inter-machine communication. It shouldn't be bad though. What's Radmind like? I looked at it briefly, but not in depth. What sorts of things are you doing with it? -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] np: 'Bone Machine' by The Pixies from 'Surfer Rosa' ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Tech Meeting Followup
On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Uri Guttman wrote: CD == Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: CD Oh man, we already had one and the bleeding in my brain still hasn't CD stopped. Please be merciful and let us have a different talk... :-) and how will any of his talks improve your crainial health? Like a worn out rubber band, of course: they'll stretch until it breaks. CD* Everyday Perl CD http://damian.conway.org/Seminars//Everyday.html sounds intriguing. Yes, this one looked like it might be the most pragmatic -- which isn't a quality I usually associate with the talks I've seen so far :-) CD* Sufficiently Advanced Technologies CD http://damian.conway.org/Seminars//Technology.html sounds scary. The no interface remark has my interest piqued with this one. Shouldn't all good software aspire to this? You're right that it sounds scary, but this one could also be surprisingly pragmatic. CD* Time::Space::Continuum CD http://damian.conway.org/Seminars//TimeSpace.html i think i saw this at yapc::boca. Was it worth seeing again? Did many people from Boston.pm see it there? CD* Perl 6 Update CD http://damian.conway.org/Seminars//Perl6.html not sure how up to date (whatever that means with p6) this is. I was hoping that of all people, Damian could give an up-to-date version of this talk. The last Perl6 talk he gave was circa late 2000, iirc, so an update would be nice. Besides, someone has to explain why Perl hasn't evolved or had any events of note in nearly 3 years: http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html Last entry, 12 Jan 2002. Francis Fukuyama was right! History is over! Well, at least for Perl it is, but Fukuyama wasn't talking about Perl. Oh well, so much for historians. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Variable used only once warning
On Mon, 7 Jun 2004, Ranga Nathan wrote: But why should the compiler care if I used a variable only once? Because the rest of your program may have $foobar 42 times, but this one line has $foobaz, and the compiler can't be sure that that's a mistake, but chances aren't bad that that odd one out may be a typo. If you define a variable use it only once, the compiler will complain. If that's really, really what you meant, I suppose you could suppress the warning by including a second line that does a no-op ($foobaz;), but you'll probably get different errors in that case. Arguably, using a variable only once is less efficient at runtime than just inlining the original assignment, but one-off variable may make the code easier to read maintain, so any performance hit may be worth it. Warnings aren't the end of the world as long as you understand why they are happening; in this case that's clear, so it shouldn't be a big deal. -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Re: reply-to
On Wed, 2 Jun 2004, John Abreau wrote: On Wed, 2004-06-02 at 23:08, Uri Guttman wrote: BR This is not a good idea. See BR http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html for a thorough essay on BR why this is bad. and there are arguments on why it is good. just another religious war with no correct side as each ways has good and bad points. There are valid arguments for both positions, so the best approach is to pick one and stick with it. Actually, by far the most enlightened response to this debate is an approach that I've seen done with exactly one list: run two parallel lists, one with reply-to set, one without. Users can pick whether they want (list) for the evil reply-to version, or (list-pure) for the non-evil no-reply-to version. Amazingly, once this solution was found, the whole pointless debate simply never happened again. Isn't that nice? For whatever reason, this isn't how things are usually done though. I understand that the London.pm crackfueled Siesta list manager allows for per-subscriber reply-to settings, but I don't know if Siesta is yet in a state that would make it worth using. That would be even better than the forked list approach though if it comes to maturity... -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] np: 'Naima (Alternate Version 1)' by John Coltrane from 'Giant Steps' ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Need a regex :-)
On Tue, 18 May 2004, Steven W. Orr wrote: I have a string with (possibly) multiple colons in it, OH: If I was an Osc:ar Mayer Wiener, tha:t is what I:d Truly like to b:e I am looking for a single regex to turn all subsequent colons into \: So given the above input I'd like to end up with OH: If I was an Osc\:ar Mayer Wiener, tha\:t is what I\:d Truly like to b\:e I can do it in two lines but I'd like to see if it can be done with just one krafty regex. Any takers? My guess it that it would be one *nasty* regex. What's wrong with doing it in two passes? * prepend a backslash to all the colons * delete the backslash from the first one Unless the number of colons is fixed, it seems like you're have to do some kind of parsing of the line to find substitute all instances after the first one, which could get hairy fast. If you do the two-pass approach, the code will be simpler easier to maintain. Is that so bad? Then again, I never did get into Perl Golf... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Need a regex :-)
On Tue, 18 May 2004, Greg London wrote:
$string =~ s{:}{\\:}g;
That prefixes all colons.
He wants the first one to not have the prefix.
I think the solution is more complex than this.
--
Chris Devers
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Re: [Boston.pm] Looking for a web-based ftp client
On Wed, 12 May 2004, Ranga Nathan wrote: Instead of using the command line FTP or a proprietary windows GUI ftp, I was thinking of using an FTP client via the browser. However, I can not install anything on the server side. As you pointed out, I want to be able to reach any server, including the quirky mainframe FTP server. I prefer open source / GPL. Even something like 'filezilla' would work but it adds slahses to directory names causing problems at the OS/390 side which uses dots :-( I see, so you want to access remote FTP sites through the local web browser. That's a different matter entirely than running FTP through a web server. If IE can't do it, and you don't want to use ftp.exe, then you have to install some kind of FTP client anyway. And if that's the case, does it have to be through a web browser? Mozilla might be able to do it this way, but why not just use a free or shareware standalone FTP client? -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] next meeting vs redsox
On Fri, 7 May 2004, Uri Guttman wrote: also damian is scheduled to be in town the week of july 12th (private corporate training). that week is the all-star break so we won't have any sox conflicts. but could we get back to boston.com for that as it will be a larger meeting and boston.com is much more convenient for him (he will be teaching and staying downtown). Would it make sense to make requests like this directly to our hosts before advertising it broadly on the mailing list? The protocol used to be that Ronald would talk to people at Boston.com about dates for upcoming meetings, and when a date was found that would work for the hosts it would be announced to the list. That doesn't seem like such a bad way to do things. If Sean is going to help coordinate meetings at BU, I think it would be courteous to give him a heads up in advance. As for Boston.com, I don't know if we'll be able to meet there or not, but in general I don't think we should assume that they're going to be able to host meetings any more. If the BU classroom is a viable option and Sean is able to help us out, it sounds like that will be the more reliable venue on an ongoing basis. I didn't count, but didn't that classroom have something like 100 seats? It seemed plenty big for a Damian meeting, and as a bonus, the seats are already set up. If transportation is the problem, I'd be happy to offer Damian a ride from downtown to Kenmore Square. That is, of course, provided that Sean is okay with hosting a meeting at BU that week... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Graphing Packages
On Fri, 7 May 2004, Arun Nagarajan wrote: [] I wonder if the group has some favorites? GD and GD::Graph are pretty much the standards for this. You may want to have a look through _Perl Graphics Programming_: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlgp/ The author has sample code on his web site: http://shawn.apocabilly.org/PGP/ Let us know if you get stuck on anything :-) -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
[Boston.pm] list viruses
Okay, so two viruses have made it to the list today. In both cases, it looks like the mail came from Verizon customers: Received: from pm.org (pool-141-154-212-242.bos.east.verizon.net [141.154.212.242]) by mail.pm.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id i45Joc914994 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Wed, 5 May 2004 14:50:39 -0500 Received: from pm.org (pool-141-154-222-33.bos.east.verizon.net [141.154.222.33]) by mail.pm.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id i460aa919816 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Wed, 5 May 2004 19:36:36 -0500 Boston.pm's mail is served by Mailman, right? Does Mailman have a way to filter [presumably unsubscribed] incoming mail by network? Going to a purely moderated list might be annoying for whoever has to do it [maybe Ronald, maybe someone else]. Going to the pure Perl Siesta list manager software would be an interesting move, but I'm not sure if it's stable enough yet. I was going to suggest blocking Verizon, but then I'm a Verizon DSL customer, so that might backfire. But then, my mail goes through Pobox, so maybe I'd be okay, but it's still a draconian solution. Or we could just let it slide... -- Chris Devers ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Tech meeting?
On Tue, 13 Apr 2004, John Saylor wrote: ( 04.04.13 00:20 -0400 ) Uri Guttman: it's on the red line (kendall) and you can usually park near there at night. well, mit may be a nice place for meetings, but i don't think parking there is ever a cake walk ... Hint: parallel parking along Memorial Drive is generally unregulated -- it isn't metered, it isn't residential, and there's no n Hour Parking signs. As long as you can find a space that isn't blocking a hydrant, a driveway, or a crosswalk, you can park as long as you want for free. You can also have similar luck on Vassar St, parallel to Memorial Dr. Or you could end up driving around and around and around -- Chris Devers, who just takes the bus these days ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
