January 2005 Archives

Must say I'm quite liking Battlestar Galactica. Just watched Act Of Contrition because I missed it on Friday. Good stuff.

The new episode of LugRadio is out. Good stuff as always. Their discussion of the National Lottery browser detection is quite amusing.

Call me crazy but I'm a firm believer that when I'm writing a Perl program, I'm in the best position to determine when and if and how my program should die. Apparently Net::FTP thinks otherwise. Over the weekend a cron job starting mysteriously failing. According to the logs, it didn't get any further than this:

unless ($ftp->get($filename)) {
   $log->error("Couldn't get $filename - " . $ftp->message());
}

After some poking around it seems that Net::FTP::A has this little gem nicely hidden away:

$data->can_read($timeout) or croak "Timeout";

Yipes, why croak? Return undef and set an error message but don't croak. I could have at least wrapped my code in an eval had this behaviour been mentioned in the documentation. But no.

So I'll have to file this one away for when I'm 90 and I'm attacked on the streets: Self-defence with a Walking-stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions.

Via Boing Boing.

Who would have thought beer would save your life? Got to give credit to this bloke.

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.

Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains.

Man peed way out of avalanche

I'm liking some of the Flash demos I've seen in the last few days. First up Nat Friedman with his Beagle and Mono demos and then Andrew Overholt with his Eclipse & Java-GNOME demo.

Cool stuff.

I've been playing with Picassa on my wife's WinXP box today. Very slick. Best photo management tool I've used to date. If you have a winders box - run, don't walk and download a copy.

Gather round kiddies for Uncle Kev is going to give you your tip of the day. If you place a can of coke in the freezer to get it cold quickly, you'll want to actually take it out again. Failure to do this will cause it to explode and you'll have chunks of frozen coke covering your food.

Well, so they tell me anyway. I mean, it didn't just happen to me or anything :-)

My desktop machine at work is now running ubuntu. I'd heard some positive things about it and thought I'd give it a try for myself.

Initially I was surprised by the fact that you download a single iso. Almost every other distro I've installed over the years had at least three or four. SUSE 9.1 was a six disk extravaganza in fact. So right away it's obvious that the vanilla install of ubuntu is going to be missing a couple of things. Ubuntu is strictly GNOME based which is fine by me as I've never really liked the KDE look-n-feel anyway.

Now while the install was painless, there are a couple of things that I thought were odd. I specified that I wanted to set my IP address manually but it chose DHCP regardless. I had to manually fix that after install. I was also a little surprised that you don't choose a root password. The root account is disabled by default and they preach sudo. Because of that I thought it was odd that I was asked for the root password when I was fixing my network configuration after the install had finished. You mean the root password that I haven't been able to set yet? You have to go and reset the password yourself. I thought that was a little bizarre.

Now while a lot of software is absent because there's only one iso, you can easily install anything that's missing. Because ubuntu is based on Debian, you have the power of apt-get and I must say that the GUI synaptic package manager is really nice. Ximian's Red Carpet used to be the bees knees of package managers but synaptic is really really nice.

So, will I actually stick with this distro? Dunno. In the past year I've had Mandrake and SUSE on that box and I still haven't tried Fedora Core 3 yet so time will tell :-)

The Daily Show's take on the Bush Inauguration. Funny? Let's put it like this, I narrowly missed covering my laptop in milk as I was choking :-)

You'd have thought I would've remembered from the last time my, ahem, mad Oracle DBA skillz were dusted off. But no. Sat there like a moron wondering why shutdown immediate was hanging. Mental note to self. Remember that Apache::DBI maintains that persistent connection. Oracle will not shutdown if there is a connection. There's an hour and a half of my life I'm never getting back :-)

I must be missing something *really* bloody obvious. I'm trying to figure out why nofollow is going to put an end to comment spam. So the spammer doesn't get listed on google. Remind me why he wont just continue spamming in the hope that someone will click the link he leaves? It's the same theory as email spam. Spam filters have not stopped the email spammers . It costs them next to nothing to send out 2 million emails in the hope that 1% of those result in a click through. Why will comment spam be any different now that we've got nofollow?

Update:A quick perusal of my aggregator indicates that Mr Hammersley has managed to sum up the issue far more eloquently than I managed to. Bravo that man.

So today is day five of the great caffeine experiment of 2005. No coffee, no diet coke, nothing. So far so good.

Lets see if this lasts any longer than the great caffiene experiment of 2004 or, er the one in 2003.

I've said it before and I'll said it again. If there's one Perl module that I've found invaluable over the years it's Data::Dumper. (Another candidate for 'best module EVAR' methinks)

Today I had to modify some oldish code and came across the following:

my $tmpl_loop;
for (my $x = 0; $x < $self->repeatCount(); $x++) {
    push(@{$tmpl_loop->{$self->{data}{TrxType}[$x]}},
        {
            TrxDate => $self->{data}{TrxDate}[$x],
            TrxAmt => $self->{data}{TrxAmt}[$x]
        }
    );
}

Er, great. If you're like me, the data structures that made perfect sense to you at the time, make a little less sense a year or so later. My mental picture of what the $tmpl_loop data structure actually holds was flushed from my memory a loooong time ago. So, time to dump it then.

open(DEBUG, ">/tmp/debug");
print DEBUG Data::Dumper->Dump([$tmpl_loop]);
close(DEBUG);

Aha, so that's what I was thinking a year ago. Thanks Data::Dumper :-)

First up, Dan - the bloke across the street from my house. Dan is a really nice guy. Friendly and is a good laugh. But he's got one of those quad bike thingies. Fair enough - whatever blows your skirt up. The only thing I ask is please don't rev the engine at 9:00am on a Sunday. You know, there's that thing called sleep that some of us are still engaged in.

Secondly, mystery neighbors at the far end of our street who I've never seen let alone met. Seeing as it's January 16th, you can probably stop turning your Christmas lights on now. Just a thought.

That is all.

Seeing the output from the uptime command reminded me of one of my pet peeves. Programmers take the easy way out and use day(s) or item(s). To me, that's just bloody lazy. If it's 1 day, use 1 day don't use 1 day(s). Grrr.

print "up $uptime " . ($uptime == 1 ? 'day' : 'days'), "\n";

Last year I wrote about the old Solaris 5.6 box we have running here at work. Well, it's going to be rebooted next week and the great uptime from hell will be no more.

For posterity, here's today's uptime:

->uptime
12:21pm up 1182 day(s), 17:55, 2 users, load average: 1.11, 1.04, 1.03

So I've gone something like 3 years without even touching ebay. Then for some reason in the past month alone I've won 10 auctions. Not quite sure what sparked this sudden new interest again in all things ebay :-)

And proving once and for all that we went to war for no reason whatsoever.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - The White House confirmed today that the search in Iraq for the banned weapons it had cited as justifying the war that ousted Saddam Hussein has been quietly ended after nearly two years, with no evidence of their existence.

Search for Illicit Weapons in Iraq Ends

My sister was kind enough to send me The Cure's Trilogy DVD for Crimble. It's the 2002 Berlin concert where they play Pornography, Disintegration, and Bloodflowers in their entirety.

Needless to say the Pornography set has been played over and over and over. The version of 'One Hundred Years' is the best I've heard anywhere. That includes all "official" or bootleg (*cough*, not that I've got any of those - grin) live recordings. 'Short Term Effect' is one of my favorite songs on the album and it's great to hear a recent live version. Ditto 'Pornography' where Simon's bass work gives this version some extra life. NICE.

And then there's the filler at the end of disc 2. A word of advice to Robert. Don't let the others speak in an interview. Perry can hardly form coherent sentences (remember, don't do drugs kids). Simon manages to mumble his way through the odd question or two. Jason, well, is it just me or did you want to shake him? C'mon man, spit it out. Roger did quite a good job in hindsight. At least he spoke clearly and got to the point. Robert, as always, gives a good interview.

Andy Lester has been having a peek at the Apache logs from the CPAN mirror at pair.com and has come up with the top 100 Perl modules for the Phalanx project . Hmm interesting stuff:

10313 Net_SSLeay.pm
7848 DBD-mysql
7542 DBI
3649 perl-ldap
3371 Mail-SpamAssassin
2745 HTML-Parser
2704 GD
2474 libwww-perl
2261 Digest-SHA1
2258 MIME-Base64
2185 XML-Parser
1816 Compress-Zlib
1804 URI
1688 Digest-MD5
1616 DBD-Pg
1594 Digest
1588 Time-HiRes
1297 HTML-Tagset
1292 Tk
1276 MIME-tools
1193 Archive-Tar
1185 Net-DNS
1171 libnet
1163 Test-Simple
1143 Gtk-Perl
1088 Archive-Zip
1072 Digest-HMAC
1031 MailTools
1027 HTML-Template
994 DB_File
983 Apache-ASP
977 CGI.pm
969 DBD-Oracle
849 DateManip
833 IO-stringy
833 Storable
824 Msql-Mysql-modules
783 Net-Telnet
762 XML-Writer
747 CPAN
730 Template-Toolkit
649 AppConfig
643 Convert-ASN1
630 TimeDate
616 MIME-Lite
607 IO-String
586 MD5
574 Crypt-SSLeay
569 Date-Calc
566 dmake-4.1pl1-win32
547 IMAP-Admin
532 XML-Generator
525 GDGraph
511 mod_perl
503 File-Scan
501 Net-SNMP
501 Test-Harness
498 XML-Simple
487 TermReadKey
481 IO-Socket-SSL
475 PathTools
456 GDTextUtil
450 IO-Zlib
427 Spreadsheet-WriteExcel
426 Module-Build
426 SOAP-Lite
425 Data-Dumper
410 BerkeleyDB
376 PodParser
375 ExtUtils-MakeMaker
375 Mail-Sendmail
371 Parse-RecDescent
369 Authen-SASL
364 Crypt-DES
364 File-Tail
360 Authen-PAM
360 Bit-Vector
356 DBD-ODBC
353 Convert-TNEF
351 Unix-Syslog
337 Carp-Clan
329 Net-Server
325 OLE-Storage_Lite
325 PerlMagick
302 XML-SAX
299 Event
298 IPC-Run
296 Params-Validate
294 Unicode-String
294 XML-LibXML
292 Convert-UUlib
279 DBD-DB2
276 File-Temp
273 XML-DOM
264 Net-Daemon
264 XML-NamespaceSupport
258 Chart
258 Crypt-CBC
257 PlRPC
251 Gtk

And here, for your reading pleasure, are the albums I've been playing for the past couple of weeks (in no particular order of crapness nor anything approaching alphabetical order you understand...):

Bee Gees - Number Ones (I kid you not - don't take the piss)
New Order - Low-life
Tubeway Army - Replicas
Seabound - No Sleep Demon
Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle
Gary Numan - Telekon
The Cure - The Cure
Skinny Puppy - The Greater Wrong Of The Right
Adam and the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier
Adam and the Ants - Prince Charming
Yazoo - Upstairs At Eric's
The Smiths - Louder Than Bombs

In a haze of insomnia last night I polished off Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal. Good game. Really good game. I had all my weapons fully powered up and the baddies were no match for me and my level 5 instruments of destruction :-)

Now I'm playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. I've been looking forward to this game ever since I completed Prince of Persia: The Sands Of Time (which is prolly the best game I've ever played). So, after playing Warrior Within for a few hours I must say that I'm in two minds. On the whole I like it. I'm still trying to get my head around the new fighting system. Having to remember which buttons unleash the combo from hell is proving difficult. I'm sure that will come in time though.

There are a couple of things I don't like. For starters, why does the Prince have an American accent now? Why do heavy metal guitars start playing when I'm about to start fighting? And can we please stop the bloody annoying automatic "is that the best you can do" type insults when fighting a bad guy.

That is all.

Yet another reason I think I must have gone to sleep and woken up in the bizarro world.

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance, it shall be the woman's responsibility to report the death to the law-enforcement agency in the jurisdiction of which the delivery occurs within 12 hours after the delivery. A violation of this section shall be punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor.

HB1677 - Have Miscarriage, Go to Jail?

Next Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding hearings on the nomination of Condi Rice as Secretary of State. Please, please, please make her answer some questions this time around.

Last spring, Rice appeared before the 9/11 Commission after much resistance. Her performance was a lesson in filibustering. She never answered any questions, especially about the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing which warned that Al Qaeda was prepared to attack in America. In fact, the document was titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Condi never did explain why, with such a dire warning, Bush stayed on his ranch in Texas.

Senators: Please Make Condi answer some questions

Initially I wrote off The Killers as Pulp wannabes without the Jarvis Cocker swagger. I must say that I've grown to like them. Mr Brightside has found itself on heavy rotation in my car for the past couple of weeks

Yeah, been a bit quiet lately. Being busy at work coupled with an addiction to video games will do that :-)

So, good Crimble then? Yes, very good. Ate too much, drank too much. Lots of alka-seltzer - you know, the usual. Nice prezzies, watched some good DVDs, listened to some killer music. In short - nice.

What about New Year? Bit of a non-alcohol event because I was dog-sitting. Foster and I spent 3 and a half hours at the Vet on New Years Eve. Had to watch him closely for 24 hours after we got home. If something happened, I didn't want to be 3 sheets to the wind and unable to drive him to an emergency Vet. He's fine now thank goodness.

So, 2005 eh? I've said it before and I'll say it again. Time bloody flies by. Did it used to fly by this quickly or is it just me? I've been in the US for 7 years now. 7 bloody years. Where does the time go eh?