I'm orff

[Aaron Trevena]

as some of you might already know I'm orff to the west country. I plan to
move to bradford-on-avon this week.

so i'll unsub for a couple of weeks and see you next time i come back.

thanks for all the good times and stuff,

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty";> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: old pictures

[Aaron Trevena]

On Sun, 3 Jun 2001, Greg McCarroll wrote:

> 
> just looking at some old pictures of london.pm meetings and YAPC::Europe
> and i came across the classic, London.pm drinking in a hair dressing salon,
> 
>   http://217.34.97.146/~gem/pics/london.pm/2000/july/DSCF0036.JPG
> 

Toilet seats don't make as good props as skateboards - we need to somehow
smuggle an inflatable dinghy into a pub.

A.


-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty";> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: SQL statements to DB Schema (dia ?)

[Aaron Trevena]

On Wed, 30 May 2001, Leo Lapworth wrote:

> You might want to check out:
> 
> Arron's Autodia - http://autodia.cuckoo.org/
> 
> It's not quite at the stage I think you are after
> but I've lost track of what it can and can't do.
> Last I heard they were putting it up to be
> an candidate in the elections (actually, it's probably
> more intelligent than one of them!).
> 
> Though the DB stuff might have been a conversation
> about GraphViz.. woo.. so many choices :)
> 

hmm... SQL to Dia. Shouldn't be too hard to add the only issue would be
which shapes to use, I've never drawn a database scheme in Dia - anybody
care to reccomend some shapes and how they shoudl map to stuff - then I'll
code some DB handling magic into autodia.

btw - the current version of autodia (0.9) now handles c++ (if its very
simple) and perl (extracts *most* info) and has lots of lovelly commad
line options.

A.


-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty";> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: bad greg

[Aaron Trevena]

On Wed, 30 May 2001, Chris Ball wrote:

> On Wed, May 30, 2001 at 08:27:19AM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote:
> > i'm sorry about asking this, but i've purged too many old archives
> > of london.pm to find this one - someone one once mentioned a domain
> > name registry with a neat web based management system for handling
> > the dns wizardry afterwards - could they please remind me of the
> > url?
> 
> 123-reg.co.uk is my favourite at the moment..
> 

I found gandi.net to be the nicest for TLDs, most of my IRL friends use
them.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty";> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Python beats perl to dia plugin..

[Aaron Trevena]

*grump*

There is a python plugin to Gnome Dia allowing you to write scripts for
dia. I don't know if it is like GIMPS scripting or more of a macro type
thing but its a little disapointing there isn't a perl one.

Dia 0.88 has an experiemental pyhton plugin capability. I would be
interested in finding out hpw hard it would be to do the equivilent for
perl - a la The Gimp. Anyone know much about how the GIMP script -fu stuff
works on the inside, or shall I hunt through the gimp dev list which I
have a feeling could be mentally scarring.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty";> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: re-release of autodial

[Aaron Trevena]

On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, David Cantrell wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 02:03:59PM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote:
> 
> > Q: Why is AutoDIAL so rubbish.
> > A: Because Trelane told me to 'just release it' although blame is
> > automatically deferred to Muttley because everything is his fault.
> > 
> > HEY!
> 
> Actually I think it was me who told him to "release early, release often".
> But he's right, it is muttley's fault.

yes but trelane told me to just release it, but then i was drunk and it
seemed like a good idea at the time, m'lord.

A. 

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

re-release of autodial

[Aaron Trevena]

the new version of autodial  - codenamed  DiaKiller,

is available at http://droogs.org/autodial/

it no longer kills dia, in fact it works quite well with a few caveats -
it is much easier to test with Dia, rather than parsing the xml in my
head. :)

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

RE: Disclaimer

[Aaron Trevena]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:

> On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, dcross - David Cross wrote:
> [broken quoting snipped]
> > You want the GPL for that. Which means that you can't use my copyright
> > message as it includes the Artisitc License - which doesn't disallow your
> > point 2.
> 
> The GPL doesn't stop you selling the derived work. What it *does* do,
> however is to say that the derived work must be under a GPL-compatible
> license, which makes it, in general, uneconomical to sell the work.

The common mis-perception about the GPL is that you can't sell or profit
from selling GPL software.

You can sell at any price you like, the software with or without nice
pakcaging and manuals, you can sell the support at any price you like and
you can sell the manuals at any price you like. All you have to do is
publish it under the GPL and make the source available at cost price or
reasonabley close.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Dia diagrams from your perl!

[Aaron Trevena]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Jonathan Stowe wrote:

> On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Aaron Trevena wrote:
> 
> > and it can be found at http://droogs.org/autodial/
> 
> The download link is b0rked though 
> 

fixed

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Dia diagrams from your perl!

[Aaron Trevena]

I have uploaded AutoDIAL to my site where it can now be downloaed. 

It creates UML class diagrams showing relationshiops, methods, attributes,
etc for a bunch of scripts/modules and lays them out ready for autodial to
use, although I think the relationship line plotting is a little
broken.

It requires template toolkit and perl base, it doesn't need dia. It might
not work on windows.

Hopefully it should be easy to modify to handle other languages such as C,
or python, or god forbid, Java.

and it can be found at http://droogs.org/autodial/

yeay!

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Disclaimer

[Aaron Trevena]

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Robert Shiels wrote:

> A lot of you write and distribute free perl code. What do you do about
> copyright and disclaimers in the code itself. I've had a look at a few
> examples and it seems you don't really bother.
> 
> I think it is probably worth doing, and we will need one for the
> NotMattsScripts project, so does anyone have a good concise copyright and
> disclaimer notice for free Perl code? I've googled around and can't find
> anything I like.

The simplist would be 
# Name - brief description. (c) Copyright 2001 A Nother #
# This is free software available under the same license as perl itself 
# This sofwate comes with NO WARRANTY. For more information see URL or
FILE.

The NO WARRANTY bit is fairly important, as is specifiying uunder what
license it is made availab.e - common are Public Doman (not teh default,
default is all rights reserved), BSD & artistic license (fairly
similar) and the GNU GPL and LGPL.

I habitually use the GPL, I have only recently realised how much of a pig
it can be to keep a derived work compliant. It will now take as long to
audit the changes made to mny derived work of mwforum as it did to do some
of the debugging. This is a good thing and a bad thing - It does mean you
keep more control over your work, but at the same time it means that there
is little reward for doing a major piece of work on somebody elses code,
even if you replace 99% of it, its still entirely their copyright and not
yours, so you essentially hand over your moral rights to waht you have
done.

I could be wrong of course - buit that is how it seems.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

pix of legend?

[Aaron Trevena]

do we still have the pictures from the night of award winning drunkeness?

I'sd d certainly be interested at having another look.

Also the website has a few gaps picture wise.. did nobody bring a camera
on that many times?

btw the trophy cabinet will get done once I have a job again.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: from ntk

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Leon Brocard wrote:

> Aaron Trevena sent the following bits through the ether:
> 
> > thats a bit slow for ntk
> 
> Indeed. Thankfully I've removed all pimb talk from my mail
> archives. Ten months is pretty slow for meme transfer. I declare NTK
> too slow and hence dead. What's next? ;-)


I think the jamie olover link has saved them - it is mighty fine.

oh the confectionary is rather worth keeping.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: from ntk

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, James Powell wrote:

> RANDAL SCHWARTZ slams London.pm's "Perl is my bitch"
> T-Shirt - odd, considering:
> http://www.stonehenge.com/perl/amihooternot/ ... 

thats a bit slow for ntk or is squackers lagging behind (void) where all
the action happened yonks ago.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Buffycode (was Re: "That book")

[Aaron Trevena]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Dave Cross wrote:

> At Wed, 28 Mar 2001 17:44:07 +0100, Robin Houston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
>wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 11:35:33AM -0500, Dave Cross wrote:
> > > 
> > > Would this be an appropriate time to point out that my TPC talk 
> > > proposes the creation of a Parse::Perl::Approx module :)
> > 
> > What does it do?
> 
> It, er... parses Perl.

ooh! I though only perl parsed perl.. how exactly does it parse perl... no
its okay I'll look at the pod.. /me cpan's.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Job: I'm looking for one..

[Aaron Trevena]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Robin Houston wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 01:23:01PM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote:
> >
> > I concur.  There is simply too much of the important stuff missing from
> > Java to make it useable for web content delivery as far as I can tell. 
> > 
> > I just couldn't do half of what I do without regexes
> 
> Since excellent regex libraries are freely available, this
> is akin to claiming that Perl is useless for writing HTTP
> clients because LWP isn't in the core ;-)

any regex that requires 8 lines to do what perl does in 1 is hardly
excellent.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Job: I'm looking for one..

[Aaron Trevena]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Greg McCarroll wrote:

> * Aaron Trevena ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> > 
> > I think its partially the vendors fault - they are pushing java as a
> > solution for things it clearly isn't right for.
> > 
> 
> out of curiousity - such as (i.e. which vendors are pushing java for
> inappropriate problem sapces)? 

Plain and simply I don't think java is the right technology for
e-commerce, plain and simple.

Accounting, some business processes map well to java but not all and
certainly not anything involving parsing and suchlike of any kind.

I don't think java is suitable for client/server systems either - having
both written and used java client/server apps, the networking classes in
1.2 and 1.3 suck badly and make the code long, slow and unclear.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Job: I'm looking for one..

[Aaron Trevena]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Mark Fowler wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Aaron Trevena wrote:
> 
> > I think java is likely to be associated with a load of spectacular
> > failures. 
> 
> To be fair, most of these won't be Java's fault.  It's just that Java is
> the first choice of someone who is going on buzzwords, and hasn't really
> thought about the technical issues involved.

I think its partially the vendors fault - they are pushing java as a
solution for things it clearly isn't right for.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Job: I'm looking for one..

[Aaron Trevena]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, alex wrote:

> 
> easier said than done - it's a lot easier to hire good people than
> convince clients that perl is the way forward - i may be wrong but i think
> there are less and less big Perl projects out there available to perl
> consultancies.  once you get to a particular price bracket (necessary to
> afford and retain uber perl hackers) people start wanting to hear the
> corporate technology buzzwords - j2ee, open market, bea, sap, siebel etc

This does appear to be true, mind you many companies are recruiting perl
developers for themselves. This is healthy. I think a lot of companies see
j2ee, weblogic, etc as 'safe' despite quite catastrophic failures and the
high cost (the price of a consultant or contractor for any of these buzz
technologies is 2 or 3 times the price for less trendy technologies).

I think java is likely to be associated with a load of spectacular
failures. I don't think any project has failed because of cost or flaws in
perl, and major companies are migrating towards perl and oss in
general. many vendors like weblogic are claiming sites liek amazon use
technology when they have migrated to perl.

perhaps its time to beat these vendors at their own game with a list of
their clients who have migrated.
 
A.


-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: white wine

[Aaron Trevena]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, David Cantrell wrote:
> Because we didn't acquire a taste for lager but rather had it shoved down
> our throats by marketroids who saw an opportunity to mass-produce fizzy
> crap instead of brewing properly.
> 
> Anyway, Shurely you're forgetting about the Netherlands, Belgium and the
> Czech Republic, all of whom manufacture some fine lagers.

/me only drinks belgian beers/lagers.. or ales/bitter esp not any of that
american crap.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Job: I'm looking for one..

[Aaron Trevena]

On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Roger Burton West wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 05:19:12PM +0100, Leo Lapworth wrote:
> >Just to let you all know I'm on the market again.
> 
> Me too. Looking for senior developer/senior unix admin (ideally a blend
> of the two), permanent, London, no Windows. CV on request.

er.. and me. intermediate/senior perl developer, perm, london, no windows,
no suits, no 9am starts. will hack c/c++ (poorly) for bandwidth and
competitive salary. not jinxed, not at all.

A. 

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: "That book"

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Dave Cross wrote:

> Here's an extract from an email I've just got from Elizabeth Castro,
> the author of "Perl & CGI for the WWW - Visual Quickstrt Guide".
> She's talking about the second edition which should be out in a couple
> of months.
> 
> "I am using many of your suggestions, including use strict, -w, and 
> CGI.pm. I think they're going to make the book much stronger."
> 
> So I think we can score that one up as a success.

cool.

The plan to improve the worldwide standard of perl is working.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: London.pm List Weekly Summary 2001-03-19

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, James Powell wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 07:45:54PM +, Leon Brocard wrote:
> > 
> > And finally, it appears that Schwern, Michael is an Alien Drag Queen:
> > http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg03105.html
> > http://us.imdb.com/Title?0103645
> > 
> 
> Excellent, Trevor McDonald style "And finally" wrap-up to the news!
> 

I think you will find that John Craven (of whom I have asigned
photo) started that idea. so nerr!

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Matt's Scripts Projects

[Aaron Trevena]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, David Cantrell wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 05:48:25PM +, Michael Stevens wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 05:38:09PM +, David Cantrell wrote:
> > > Then they deserve to be hurt.  Really.  We can't possibly support
> > > dribbling idiots, and frankly, I have no wish to do so.  If someone is
> > > scared by a .tar.gz extension then they have no business installing
> > > software.  Even if just for their own use.
> > 
> > I thought one of the goals of this project was to support "dribbling
> > idiots"?
> 
> Idiots maybe, but not those who are sooo lacking in necessary skills that
> they are scared by gzipped tarballs.  Don't forget, these morons are
> going to have to know how to get the files to their server, do the
> appropriate chmodding, tweak config variables in the script - if you're
> clueless enough to be scared off by .tar.gz then you're guaranteed to
> fail anyway.

I don't know - maybe in your inexperience you have a windowsy perl book
(there are some out there) or a poor cgi book to work from that never
mentions tgz or .tar.gz - its an additional obstacle - they'd only go an
use MSA.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: wasn't someone looking for some diagramming -> SQL stuff recently?

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Mark Fowler wrote:

> On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, James Powell wrote:
> 
> > http://freshmeat.net/projects/dia2sql/
> 
> I was looking for some tools to create diagrams with but Ooooh! Anyhow,
> now all we need is a GraphViz to dia tool ;-).  Which reminds me, how's
> things going with your Perl->UML Aaron?

Ah!

It is going rather well - I've just cme back from my holiday in stratford
upon avon and should have a nice OO perl module working by midweek, then I
will get back to work on what i was working on before I got sidetracked
(I have an excuse)..

My TT'd mwforum is stalled atm due to a sudden realisation that repeating
the dull but quite hairy job of replacing all the intermangled html/sql in
mwforum needs to be repeated several more times before I would dare show
it to anybody, other than mstevens who hopefully will receive a less
godawful version before he looks at the current hack I mailed him.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Strange Request

[Aaron Trevena]

### warning - creature feep ###

On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Aaron Trevena wrote:
> > 
> > this question defines the archive of scripts a little. is the
> > collection of scripts specifically aimed at the lowest commond
> > denominator and tackling the MW problem directly, or is that
> > just its core mission, and other scripts are welcome.
> 
> I don't think we actually need to lower to teh lowest common denominator -
> by applying the ROPE idea it should be possible to provide some easy
> bundles with their own namespace that the user can just unzip and ftp to
> their own local_modules/rope.
> 
> If you provide scripts that work with perl5.x base but also provide
> scripts that use rope::lite, or rope::intermediate bundles the user will
> still be interested in using the bundle and we can encourage them to use
> modules and set them on the path to rightesusness.
> 
> I think something like this would be the ultimate test of the ROPE
> concept.

Given that there will be idiot proof scripts replacing msa ones, these
will be limited greatly by not using modules, assuming a simple web based
layout you can hive nice icons saying that Script N is **ready to run**,
**requires rope::lite**, **requires rope::intermediate**, **requires quite
a lot**, **requires apache**, **requires a little know how**, etc.

A.


-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Strange Request

[Aaron Trevena]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Greg McCarroll wrote:

> * Dave Cross ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> > My opinion is that the only way this project could work is if the scripts 
> > worked on _any_ web server on _any_ platform with _no_ extra modules. Matt 
> > Wright can achieve that and we're all much cleverer than he is, so we 
> > should be able to do it too.
> > 
> 
> i originally shared your viewpoint on this, but what changed my
> mind is the following scenario,
> 
>   some random perl monger, lets call them dave for ease has
>   a really cool forums script. unfortunatly dave's script
>   uses TT and dave hasn't time to replace the TT elements.
> 
> do you exclude this script from the archive on the basis that it
> uses TT?
> 
> this question defines the archive of scripts a little. is the
> collection of scripts specifically aimed at the lowest commond
> denominator and tackling the MW problem directly, or is that
> just its core mission, and other scripts are welcome.

I don't think we actually need to lower to teh lowest common denominator -
by applying the ROPE idea it should be possible to provide some easy
bundles with their own namespace that the user can just unzip and ftp to
their own local_modules/rope.

If you provide scripts that work with perl5.x base but also provide
scripts that use rope::lite, or rope::intermediate bundles the user will
still be interested in using the bundle and we can encourage them to use
modules and set them on the path to rightesusness.

I think something like this would be the ultimate test of the ROPE
concept.

A. 

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: DJ jabbers on the O'Reilly Network

[Aaron Trevena]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Dean wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 10:39:43AM +0000, Aaron Trevena wrote:
> > suggestion for website:
> > 
> > How about a page of our acheivments? 
> > 
> > ie CPAN modules, Books, credits, talks and drinking feats?
> 
> If you were going to do this shouldn't they just go under the member pages on 
>london.pm.org?
> 

could do - but I like the idea of a trophy cabinet type thing.. people can
be proud to have added something to the london.pm trophy cabinet.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: DJ jabbers on the O'Reilly Network

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Dave Cross wrote:

> At Fri, 9 Mar 2001 09:24:10 -, "Robert Shiels" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > http://www.oreillynet.com/
> > 
> > DJ Adams,  yet another famous London Perl Monger!
> > 
> > With a photo as well no less.
> 
> Not just _any_ photo, but one of him drinking beer at a london.pm
> meeting. 
> 
> > Well done DJ.
> 
> Seconded.

suggestion for website:

How about a page of our acheivments? 

ie CPAN modules, Books, credits, talks and drinking feats?

A. 


-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Graphical Documentation

[Aaron Trevena]

On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Mark Fowler wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Marcel Grunauer wrote:
> 
> > > 1. Thingys showing SQL tables.
> > 
> > Have a look at http://www.codewerk.com. On the projects page, download
> > GraphViz::DBI and dbigraph.pl. See the sample database table graph linked
> > from that page. I'm working on making it more flexible and pretty.
> 
> Oooh, ahhh.  Looks really nice.  Now the only problem with this is
> that it requires me to actually have created the database.  We're not at
> this stage yet (though I will see if I can knock up a diagram of our
> current old database schema so we can have some reference.)

Gnome Dia has been quite good for designed classes and database
tables. Also worth a look is gnome-db which provides a nice UI to the
database. Only problem is that there doesn't appear to be anything that
offers Visio's reverse engineer database option.

I am looking for some dia scripts to generate dia xml from perl classes or
databases thru dbi/odbc. I might have to write an xml generator by reusing
code from GraphViz::DBI or just from scratch. Anyone else been working on
something like that before I start?
 
> Oh, there seems to be something odd with that server set up.  Because
> my copy of Gnome-Terminal does url catching I can Ctrl-Click on any url
> and it pops up in netscape.  However, being a good url catcher it matches
> the '.' at the end of the url (as it should do.)  Now this is really odd,
> as 'http://www.codewerk.com./' does not show the same thing as 
> 'http://www.codewerk.com/' (which it should do as
> 'www.codewerk.com.profero.com' or 'www.codewerk.com.loc0.profero.com'
> doesn't exist on our network.) This is most odd.  I've tried it from other
> locations (via the wonders of ssh tunnelling) and I get the same thing.

I had that problem - try http:://www.codewerk.com/projects.html 

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: good job there weren't any "base belongs to us" t-shirts printed

[Aaron Trevena]

On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, James Powell wrote:

> Might have ended up like the last programme here
> 
> (not for the easily offended)
> 
> http://www.tvgohome.com/


cafepress have some aybabtu tees. There is a nice page of reworked
cartoons and images with aybabtu worked in. Also totl.net has an aybabtu
style whelk in its whelk page.

A. 

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Amazon (was: RE: DMP Availability)

[Aaron Trevena]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, dcross - David Cross wrote:
> Since I gave up Amazon, I've found myself going into bookshops more.
> Browsing in a bookshop is still _by far_ the best way to buy books.


 
> And I end up buying more books. Because for each book that I got into the
> shop looking for, I find another two that seem really interesting. Amazon's
> "readers who bought this book..." feature really doesn't achieve the same
> thing.

/me spent 100 quid on books last weekend in skoob books, PC bookshop and
Books etc (walked from goswell road to charing cross street where I spent
another 30 quid on prints and postcard prints, via holborn - quite
pleseant walk as the city and its outskirts are nice and quiet at the
weekend).

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Alternative to bad perl resources

[Aaron Trevena]

On 19 Feb 2001, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:

> Aaron Trevena <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > It is indeed, but this tends to require a fair amount of rewriting or be a
> > horrible horrible kludge.
> 
> Hmmm...there was one subroutine that did all the sandwich things...oh,
> no two. &printHeader and &printFooter. 

I done those. easy. but for it to work you want to be able to design the
table layouts and stuff otherwise you are stuck with a horrid mix of mw's
embedded html and templates.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Alternative to bad perl resources

[Aaron Trevena]

On 19 Feb 2001, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:

> Aaron Trevena <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > On 19 Feb 2001, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:
> > 
> > > Aaron Trevena <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > > 
> > > > That would make the large assumption that my perl is a good example. I
> > > > hope that DragonForum (soon to be released, watch this space) will make a
> > > > good alternative to wwwthreads and ubbs, but although it is now cleaner
> > > > and template based it isn't really an example of good perl.
> > > 
> > > I'm using mwf, and someone hereabouts threatened to TTify it, I think.
> > 
> > yes - that were me.
> > 
> > It is a quiet horrid job. I am splitting the thing into 3 layers and the
> > templates. so far I have managed to greatly simplify things like
> > forum_show.pl and make it much cleaner by removing a lot of presentation
> > related code that really should be in the templates rather than embedded
> > in perl code.
> 
> Balls to that, sounds like too much work. I can live with the inner
> sucky stuff, but Stage 1 surely is to have an outer template you can
> stick all your site-wide branding and stuff in?

It is indeed, but this tends to require a fair amount of rewriting or be a
horrible horrible kludge.
 
A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Alternative to bad perl resources

[Aaron Trevena]

On 19 Feb 2001, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:

> Aaron Trevena <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > That would make the large assumption that my perl is a good example. I
> > hope that DragonForum (soon to be released, watch this space) will make a
> > good alternative to wwwthreads and ubbs, but although it is now cleaner
> > and template based it isn't really an example of good perl.
> 
> I'm using mwf, and someone hereabouts threatened to TTify it, I think.

yes - that were me.

It is a quiet horrid job. I am splitting the thing into 3 layers and the
templates. so far I have managed to greatly simplify things like
forum_show.pl and make it much cleaner by removing a lot of presentation
related code that really should be in the templates rather than embedded
in perl code.

It will take more work to make it a good example of code, in fact that may
not even be possible if I want to keep it compatible (which I do) so that
you can use the same DB and plugins.

I estimate it will take 3 more weeks before I can release it. (because I
have very little spare time at the mo).

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Alternative to bad perl resources

[Aaron Trevena]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Greg McCarroll wrote:

> 
> the best way to get this started, is simply to do it and then
> others will lend in their support, just put up a webpage
> with the first few candidates and let others comment

That would make the large assumption that my perl is a good example. I
hope that DragonForum (soon to be released, watch this space) will make a
good alternative to wwwthreads and ubbs, but although it is now cleaner
and template based it isn't really an example of good perl.

Ditto the search engine based on the DDJ one. Hopefully I can bring it up
to scratch as it is fairly simple.

Of course I could put them up with a disclaimer saying that they aren't
GOOD perl but are cleaner and easier to understand than most of the
scripts on the web.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Alternative to bad perl resources

[Aaron Trevena]

Following the general feelings of the professional perl mongers on the
list towards certain authors and script archives, I thought the perl
mongers could build their own script recipebook on the net and provide
secure but clear and simple and well explained example and instant cgi
scripts as an alternative to Matt and other resources.

Given that there are quite a few scripts out there, we could concentrate
on having secure, well written and explain perl for key tasks like -
search engine, forum, shopping cart and checkout (alternatives for mason,
tt, etc).

This would be something good to point beginners at - particularly if ORA
give it some support.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Bad programming considered harmless

[Aaron Trevena]

> There is nothing wrong with bad programming. Sure, don't pay for it, sure
> don't use it for anything important or anything that will affect other
> people's lives. But lots of people get satisfaction and reward from making
> bad programs, just like they get satisfaction from singing badly in the
> shower, doing some bad gardening on a Sunday, and putting up a set of wonky
> shelves. Let's have more people programming badly!

That is beautiful. I may have to put it somewhere on a page and let the
meme spread freely..
 
> Expertism is a dangerous trend. A little knowledge is _not_ a dangerous
> thing. The only dangerous thing is not knowing the _extent_ of your (little)
> knowledge.

Definately.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Perl Books

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, David Cantrell wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 11:21:57AM -0600, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
> 
> > :) I think you are missing my point here. The plumber who is skilled in a
> > trade probably thinks you are an idiot when you manage to mangle your own
> > pipes and have to call him to fix it for you. 
> 
> However, I don't question the plumber's competence, or indeed pretend to
> anyone including myself that I can do a good job of it.  The same should
> apply to programming.  If I were to try my hand at re-plumbing my kitchen,
> I know I'd make a god-awful mess, and I am intelligent enough to not
> attempt it.  The great unwashed should approach programming the same way.

My old mans a catering lecture and pub landlord but just  did all teh
electrics and plumbing in the gutted cottage he bought in redruth in
conrwall. He did so well that the gasman was surprised with the negligable
drop in pressure when he tested.

Now he is going to learn dreamweaver and I talked him into learning perl
instead of java - because it would suit what he wants to do (mostly matts
script kind of stuff) and pointed him at ora. I wish more people are like
that, rather than people who believe that because they can write a word
macro they are a programmer.

I have been training at kung fu for 6 months and I still am not ready to
take the first grading, I know I'm not good at it yet but I also know that
I have a good instructor and that I can and will be good at it and I'll
get it right, not just learn a couple of 10 minute self defense class
rubbish.

bah! This is more (void) than (void) 

A. 

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Perl Books

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Greg Cope wrote:

> Aaron Trevena wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
> > > No, there wasn't even something I could buy for it sadly. It's a simple
> > > CGI, I would have paid $15 for a quickie 'here's your simple cgi just plug
> > > in your variables here' code.
> > 
> > Been there - more often than not, the cookbook fills any holes. I had a
> > particular problem with web forums - slashcode being a bit OTT and
> > wwwthreads cotsing money and then hundreds of PHP and java and asp forums,
> > then I found mwforum and now I am rewriting it big time to get back into
> > coding after sitting on my arse for weeks waiting for work or chasing
> > people up or editing html. If anybody is interested I hope to have a TT'd
> > version of mwforum on the web some time next week. After that I will
> > totally hack it apart and rework it to fit my own twisted needs.
> >
> 
> Are you going to send the patches back to the authors ?

Patches? they are big - essentially you replace most of most of the files
- not really worth patching. However yes it will be released and all
orginal copyright notices are left intact and whenever I think appropriate
I point out that it is derived from mwforum. and that all mwforum bits are
copyright mw although to be honest I don't think a single line of the
original will remain.

I plan to 'do the right thing' and email mw before I post it anywhere so
that I'm not stepping on his toes - I point out in the documenentaion how
much I learnt from his work and stuff and that it works very well for what
he designed it to do. Hopefully he will like it, that would make me very
happy.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Perl Books

[Aaron Trevena]

On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
> No, there wasn't even something I could buy for it sadly. It's a simple
> CGI, I would have paid $15 for a quickie 'here's your simple cgi just plug
> in your variables here' code. 

Been there - more often than not, the cookbook fills any holes. I had a
particular problem with web forums - slashcode being a bit OTT and
wwwthreads cotsing money and then hundreds of PHP and java and asp forums,
then I found mwforum and now I am rewriting it big time to get back into
coding after sitting on my arse for weeks waiting for work or chasing
people up or editing html. If anybody is interested I hope to have a TT'd
version of mwforum on the web some time next week. After that I will
totally hack it apart and rework it to fit my own twisted needs.
 
> If I wanted Java or PHP however, I could take my pick or reasonably
> quickly useful stuff. I didn't have the same results for Perl it is just
> not out there or my standards are too high and I was looking in the wrong
> place.

A lot of programming is knowing where to look, If I hadn't been given a
good lowdown on where to get decent Notes information I would have spent
months getting anywhere but I was given the course notes for a notes
course, a stack of Notes Magazines and a list of urls. Also bought myself
the SAMs book on Notes Unleashed.

I told my old man he'd learn pretty much all he needed to know from
learning perl and perl & cgi by ORA. Its much better than wasting tiem
learning java or getting muddled with loads of crappy shareware or budget
perl software.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: ArsDigita working practices (was: Big Macs v The Naked Chef --)

[Aaron Trevena]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Roger Burton West wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 08:37:02PM +, Kieran Barry wrote:
> 
> >Yup. There isn't enough talent around, so people get promoted beyond
> >their competence. If you train your people they'll only leave.
> >
> >The only way out of that cycle is to train in-house,
> >and treat people so well that they stay.
> 
> Which implies that hassling them if they don't work 70-hour weeks is
> counterproductive. When I was looking for my current job, it took me
> a week from starting to search to getting two decent offers; so I know
> there's demand for people who can do what I do. 


On that subject my last 2 and my new employer all made an offer within 24
hours. Even allowing a couple of days to think about it and go through the
contract and stuff this leaves most of the rest without even contacting
me.


If I wanted a perl or c coder I would ensure 
a) the money was there and the board were prepered to stump up the cash.
b) the project that the programmers is needed on will last at least 6
months and that there are in house developers who can tutor.
c) A planned package and contract are already templated out and only teh
person and the salary need to be decided.
d) During the interview I put at least as much work into it as the
applicant, If  I know what I what I want and how the company works and can
talk about with ease because I have prepered I am more likely to get the
right information out of teh applicant. If I intimidate the applicant or
show off (certain webserver company) I don't find out enough about the
applicant to make a sound judgement. If I don't ask enough questions or
rely on the applicant to sell themselves then I won't be able to make a
good decision.
e) I keep in contact with all applicants during the whole process -
ackowledge applications quickly, inform applicants quickly of the results
and give feedback for all applicants who were interviewed.

of course that is a lot to ask but all the companies I have worked for
have managed most of if not all. And of course you can always rely on the
board to screw the first two up despite how much you try.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Perl/MySQL based forums

[Aaron Trevena]

On 21 Jan 2001, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:

> Aaron Trevena <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > I was in the process of converting it to TT when i lost a load of my work
> > at oven (forgot to follwo symlinks when I tar gzipped home).
> 
> Don't you hate it when that happens?
> 
> I've managed to hack in the requisite headers and footers (a
> containing, constraining table) so I'm in business.

Don't spose you could bang it on line once you've done a bit so I don't
have to reapeat both of our work?

A. 

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Perl/MySQL based forums

[Aaron Trevena]

On 21 Jan 2001, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:

> Dave Hodgkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > Michael Stevens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > 
> > > On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 01:33:09PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote:
> > > > * Dave Hodgkinson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> > > > > No, I'm not going to code a forum package by hand. 
> > > > go on dave, it cant be that hard 
> > > 
> > > Having done it a few times, it *isn't* that hard...
> > 
> > I'm playing with mwforum right now. Seems OK.
> 
> Aside from all the inline HTML.
> 
> ARGH! When will people learn!

I was in the process of converting it to TT when i lost a load of my work
at oven (forgot to follwo symlinks when I tar gzipped home).

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Perl/MySQL based forums

[Aaron Trevena]

On 21 Jan 2001, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:
 
> I know some people here had some experience with wwwthreads, but are
> there any alternatives?
> 
> No, I'm not going to code a forum package by hand. 
 
With a little work wmforum is quite nice (easy enough to understand and
therefore make more modular and port to templatetoolkit) also its GPL so
you can fork it into something decent and release/use how you like. If you
have used forum software before its pretty easy to bang a decent ofrum out
of it.

slashcode and kuro5hins code are fairly heavy and un-necessary (also
wmforu works fine with mod_perl).

http://www.mawic.de/mwforum/


A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: TPC5

[Aaron Trevena]

On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, Nathan Torkington wrote:
> (update on the OScon in Europe thing--London in August seems to be
> a bad idea, so we're looking elsewhere and elsewhen ...)

In case anybody is interested the Devon & Cornwall LUG will be helping
organise a S/West UK OSS Conference for local businesses and
academia. Anybody interested should contact myself and cc [EMAIL PROTECTED]
or subscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to join the discussion.

We are also taking part in the linuxday nationwide installfest and if
anybody is in the area they are more than welcome to come and join in
(same contact details as above)

rgds,

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Extreme Programming (was: Re: Consultancy company)

[Aaron Trevena]

On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, Dean S Wilson wrote:
> How did you establish who would make good pairings? Was it done by
> trying to place two equals or was it done more on a mentoring level of
> a very experienced coder and a less experienced one? (I've not read
> that much on XP)

We both were fairly experienced but from different backgrounds and I just
happened to be waiting for stuff to come thru on the project I was working
on and leo reckoned we should work on some stuff together, I think it
helped. From that I'd guess that pair programming can definately work.
 
A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Extreme Programming (was: Re: Consultancy company)

[Aaron Trevena]

On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, David Cantrell wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 12:24:24AM +, Piers Cawley wrote:
> 
> > Now, I freely admit that I have partaken of the Extreme Programming
> > Kool-Aid, and dammit I want to do it.
> 
> I want to try it too.  I'm not convinced by all of it - pair programming
> for example - but so much of the other stuff seems damned sensible that
> I want to give it a go.  Including pair programming.  I'm trying to keep
> an open mind on that fucking stupid idea.

I did a little pair programming at emap - I probably wasn't doing it right
tho'. even so we did get thru the hard bits quicker and could split up to
do the easy stuff. I think it made a difference but then I was mostly
being a backseat coder so either we did okay or stuart was very tolerant
indeed.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Consultancy company

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Greg McCarroll wrote:

> 
> As for working at home, i believe the optimal week is mon,tue in
> the office, wednesday at home, thu,fri in the office. YMMV
> 
> however - if you were building a company their are other concerns
> beyond productivity, the establishment of a team/company spirit
> and bonding for instance. also the discussion of strategy on
> non-IT matters in the company, building a company as has been
> discussed requires buy in to issues beyond perl hacking.

I don't see why you can't have a mix - it would be good to have a core
group of people who always (nearl) work in the office so that if you
usually work from home but need some face 2 face there will be people
there (or in a pub nearby). things like IRC and email provide good
communication about what is going on and can be used to acounce when and
where people are.

If you know what proportion of home/office people you have you can design
the office accordingly. For instance I quite simply do not aarive at work
before 10 am due to th physical impossibility of moving from a to b in
west london between 7 and 9 am.

Other important factors are eating your own dogfood - ie not only use our
own software but analys the needs of your own organisation and keep your
house in order - it gets you into a better habit and methodology - things
like document management, documentation, online admin, internet and stuff
most of which can be reused for clients, and keeping the work interesting
productivity is highest if the work is interesting - always make sure you
have enough people and time to develop more than you firefight - this
means your develop better software as you have more resources and aren't
sick of the project and you have to firefight less and less avoiding the
vicious circles that many companies fall into of firefighting all the time
and losing morale and inetrst and producing shit code which needs more
firefighting.

A.


-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: [Job] BOFH wanted was: Re: Red Hat worm discovered

[Aaron Trevena]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Marcel Grunauer wrote:

> 
> Michael Stevens writes:
> 
> >When I was working in cardiff the company I was working for would charge
> >clients 500ukp/day for technical development. And this was cardiff.
> 
> Ok, but that's for a company, with administrative overhead etc. For a
> single consultant/programmer/system analyst/whatever, IMO GBP 500/day is
> quite good; I never got above 50/hr with an agent and 60/hr without an
> agent (but jobs are easier to come by if you have a pimp).

If solicitors can have an office just for a few partners it can't be that
hard to do it as consultants.

Also many hackers have more business sense than their MDs - look at
success of projects started by hackers or engineers versus that of those
started by MBAs or middle managers..

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: [Job] BOFH wanted was: Re: Red Hat worm discovered

[Aaron Trevena]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Dave Cross wrote:

> At 18 Jan 2001 10:09:04 +, Dave Hodgkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> > And on the same lines...what with all these perlmongers on the market
> > right now, just bloody band together and start a consultancy. 
> 
> Sounds good to me. Anyone else up for it?

I would join but I appear to be jinxed at the moment. so it would be
unfair on the rest ;)

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: PIMB T-shirts

[Aaron Trevena]

On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, Robin Houston wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 04:25:26PM +0000, Aaron Trevena wrote:
> > 
> > ingestion has several downsides - lack of control of dosage (assuming you
> > eat it at a significant lump at a time), longer effects, stronger
> > effects (making it hard to get dosage right) and also slow absorbtion.
> 
> Though all of those could be advantages too :-)

yes - perfect for that ozrics or hawkwind gig. 

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: PIMB T-shirts

[Aaron Trevena]

On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, Redvers Davies wrote:

> > I thought it was about 'chasing the dragon' - ie heating a resinous
> > substance on tinfoil with a lighter and inhaling the fumes, this is
> > probably less bad for you than smoking stuff in a cigarette form. Although
> > hookah pipes with resin are probably healthier still.
> 
> Myself and a couple of friends of mine were talking about this before
> and someone suggested that ingestion in cakes was healthier still and
> more "effective".

ingestion has several downsides - lack of control of dosage (assuming you
eat it at a significant lump at a time), longer effects, stronger
effects (making it hard to get dosage right) and also slow absorbtion.

drug trvia: smoking or cooking magic mushrooms removes their psychoactive
effects.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: PIMB T-shirts

[Aaron Trevena]

> 
> On a tangentially related point - I've just overheard someone in the
> office mention the rumour that "Puff, the magic dragon" was "written
> by someone who was smoking a joint". I guess I'm just surprised that 
> there are people to whom this fact isn't obvious.

I thought it was about 'chasing the dragon' - ie heating a resinous
substance on tinfoil with a lighter and inhaling the fumes, this is
probably less bad for you than smoking stuff in a cigarette form. Although
hookah pipes with resin are probably healthier still.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Speaking Japanese (Re: Access Control Lists and Functions)

[Aaron Trevena]

On Tue, 16 Jan 2001, Simon Wistow wrote:

> Dave Cross wrote:
>  
> > The language spoken by the droogs in 'A Clockwork Orange'.
> 
> Isn't it a pidgin mix of Russian and English?

It is a mix of schoolboy slang (from soem school that Burgess went to, cos
I sure didn't speak like that at school, probably one of those public
shcools or summit), ryhming slang (not cockney), misc slang from all over
the place, malay & malay slang, olde english and pidgin russian.

see (the horribly laid out and currently being
redesigned) http://droogs.org/lit/ for some interesting links on ACO,
Nadsat and Artificial languages.

A.
-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Speaking Japanese (Re: Access Control Lists and Functions)

[Aaron Trevena]

On Mon, 15 Jan 2001, Andy Wardley wrote:

> On Jan 15,  4:24pm, Robin Houston wrote:
> > Lingua::Romana::Perligata   :-)
> 
> Conway-san, your programming challenge for this week is:
> 
>Lingua::Nihon::Perldes
> 
> (but with an English <-> Japanese translation interface for those of
> us who didn't last out the Japanese classes)
> 

does lingua::nadsat exist yet? or anything along those lines?

might work on it if doesn't already exist - along with all the other
stuff..

A.


-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Kung Foo and PIMB

[Aaron Trevena]

On Sun, 14 Jan 2001, Mark Fowler wrote:
> On the back
> 
>  use Wutan::Style;
> 

This reminds me of the conversation Case, norm & I had after crouching
tiger.. we came to the conclusion that "no, neo, you **don't** know kung
fu.".

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

whens the kung fu night? and where?

[Aaron Trevena]

anyone?

mail me off list (or on if anybody else is interested)

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Mailman in Perl (Re: the list is dead, long live the list)

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Aaron Trevena wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 08:28:25PM +, David Cantrell wrote:
> > > lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh
> 
> that would rock.
> 
> also what would be very valuable would be the ability to install from one
> config for a cluster or synchronise config changes (using a version
> control system of course).


And some of the key API calls from NSAPI and ISAPI - as long as the I/O is
replciated or aproximated in such a way as to easily port code then that
would make a huge difference.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Mailman in Perl (Re: the list is dead, long live the list)

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Paul Makepeace wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 08:28:25PM +, David Cantrell wrote:
> > lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh

that would rock.

also what would be very valuable would be the ability to install from one
config for a cluster or synchronise config changes (using a version
control system of course).

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Mailman in Perl (Re: the list is dead, long live the list)

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Greg McCarroll wrote:
> what about the actual mechanics of putting rope together? i'm assuming
> we'd create a /usr/local/Rope, build the latest stable perl in there,
> then configure apache for mod_perl etc and install it under there as 
> well, the the other modules.

A directory structure that is documented and standardised accross
platforms would make life a little easier.
 
> finally is it enough to simply tar.gz /usr/local/Rope and tag it
> with the architecture details

we need *secure* skeleton / sample applications (preferably configureed
during installation or optionally not installed rather than use out of the
box p/words and users like every CMS on the market ).

> we would probably need some final install program to be run, that
> would handle the local details of the system - such as what user
> to run apache as

Configuration. Decent configuration to cope with multiple virtual domains,
specifying paths ffor core handlers, etc.

Also good guide and documentation. So that A moderately good developer
(not necessarily perl) can get the package and get started without
spending 100 quid on ora books. (of course they ought to do that anyway
but they shouldn't need to).

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Mailman in Perl (Re: the list is dead, long live the list)

[Aaron Trevena]

Following  the interest in rope/pope, etc perhaps it would be an idea for
some of the more perl / oss oriented companies in london (or wherever) to
agree to take part in the project on a semi official basis - much of what
the work that the london and UK companies do is replicated because of lack
of comunications and worry over company secrets and competition.

If a handful of london companies can put together a press release saying
that they are supporting or backing the project with time, money, services
in lieu, etc then it would be a publicity coup and get the ball rolling.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: one liner

[Aaron Trevena]

On Sat, 6 Jan 2001, Greg McCarroll wrote:
> 
> Ok, we are not (void) but we are pretty close so here is a one liner that
> hopefully will provote discussion 
> 
> the only thing that gives potential for the marketing of a language is the
> projects that are achieved using it and java has a hell of a lot more cool 
> projects than perl

I was wondering how hard it would be to put together a mini Application
server toolkit.

A pre-built apache with mod_perl, ssl, etc, template toolkit (or mason),
perl corba module for apache (assuming it doesn't already have one) kind
of like IBMs websphere but less massive and not proprietary. All the
necessary parts are there its just an issue of packaging and spinning it
to the punters.

I am fed up with seeing java/proprietary kudges when there are clean and
open ways to do the job better.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: neck

[Aaron Trevena]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Michael Stevens wrote:

> I can't remember who I was talking to about this, but
> 
> perl-necklace.com seems to be available, although most of the other
> variants are taken.

I have an image I did in gimp along those lines.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

irc again

[Aaron Trevena]

erm.. whats the irc channel for london.pm again.

I spose I'll have to download bitchx as well now.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: Fwd: SPUG: ActivePerl 623

[Aaron Trevena]

On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Simon Wistow wrote:

> Simon
> [who *lives* fro the 12 minute freebie of the Adult Channel at midnight]

Ah - Myself and a housemate once lived the 'free porn' episode of friends
- when we flicked thru he chennels and there was porn at 1am, I think we
got bored about 1:30am and from there flicked channels until we got sucked
into a painfully bad movie (apalling script, apalling dialogue) it was
truly awful (imagine red shoe diaries but much longer and without the
production script or acting quality)...

we a re both suckers for a bad film  we keep on telling ourselves it could
be realy good any minute now that really banal script will turn into a
beautifully crafted dialogue of wildesque prose but usually we are
bitterly disapointed. Beast of war was a pleasent surprise though.

A.

obPMRef: buffy

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: new years eve

[Aaron Trevena]

On Sun, 31 Dec 2000, David Cantrell wrote:

> DAV-U-CRO wrote:
> 
> > Twas me. But a) I'm already doing stuff tonight and b) as you point out, I 
> > couldn't organise it at such sort notice.
> 
> Yeah, and now that Greg's had to pull out as well it looks like it won't
> happen.  But let's sort out a date for some time in January.  Around the
> middle of the month.  How are Friday the 12th and/or 19th for people?

scuse the slow response but have been offline since dec 21st:

mid jan sound good for paranois sesh - haven't played it in a while. I
would offer to GM it but I'm not very good. Raining concrete slabs didn't
go down well nor did the slippery slimey slope of salamanders.

A.

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)

Re: The List

[Aaron Trevena]

gerg:
> and just as they drink glenfiddich and chivas regal if they are uneducated
> we drink JD and other foul blends. surely there must be some good bourbons 
> they could recommend to us that would give us an extra option in our drinking.


yukon jack!!!

canadian whiskey!!

mighty fine, sugary sweet..

A. (after drinking most of a bottle of fairly nice merlot - its my
graduation tomorow and I'm staying friends and they all have c/work due in
tomorrow.)

-- 
http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org 
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a 
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal 
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)