The Lair

So I step outside into the glorious 30c sunshine and I am as happy as a puppy. So what if it’s a heatwave? This is the age of global warming, of greenhouse gases, extreme sunshine and other things most unYorkish (not to mention unEnglish). Get used it, ya pasty faced Northerners.

I really do try not to leak the radiant beams of happiness leak out at the most uncustomary Northern European sensation of sunshine on skin. I also think people huffing and puffing and saying it’s too hot to work get a trifle annoyed when I display this much happiness. The cheery smile and automatic “nice weather, innit?” also seems to get to them, but I cannot imagine why. *innocence*. But anyway, onwards to the city to buy train tickets and the first leg of my journey towards a much hotter place. (No, not down there. Well, I hope not anyway. It’s warm enough here, thanks very much).

The visit to the city reminded me of why I avoid the place like an ancient Roman plague. It’s crowded, absolutely teeming with people and there is lots of traffic. Funny, I don’t mind traffic and crowds in Colombo but get all shirty and worked up when people numbers on Yorkish streets reaches oh .. about the same levels as a small sidestreet on a normal Colombo weekday. There is also (mentioned casually, in passing) much flesh on display. The fact that most of the exposed flesh is sported by teenagers and *shudder* even younger detracts considerably from the spectacle. That’s a high falutin’ way of describing my reaction; which really goes something like “*blink blink* Hmmm, not bad.” … pause while the probable age is determined. “Oh, gawd. She’s just a kid, dammit!”. Disappointment and a hasty aversion of eyes follows.

Anyway, a minor digression - the curse (or blessing, if you want to call it that) of Colombo strikes again. Nuptial photos (I didn’t know the people involved, so I wasn’t all that interested) appeared on a local aggregator site recently. Various people also posted photos to Flickr and sundry other quarters. I was happily oblivious to it all. Then Chickenbutt noticed that two of the photos had inadvertently caught someone we both knew in the background - near the steps of a church. So, during a social “how are you doing” IM conversation yesterday; I brought up the topic of a recent wedding. Yes, this person we both know did go to the wedding. And it also turns out that I also know the sister of the groom. Ye gods. 4 degrees of separation to anyone in Colombo. It’s still holding true.

And finally to the point, The Apprentice hasn’t started screening the latest seasons in the UK yet. Pity. I could have used a few tips; but the beloved tellybox has let me down, so I’m resorting to Dilbert instead.

No Les, no Moore. Can’t remember where I saw that either, probably read it in some book a while ago.

Slashdot has a new discussion and commenting system. It’s called Discussion2. I’ve been a bit too busy to keep up with even Slashdot the past month (a sure sign of things not being quite right in the drac universe); but poking around today - I got a surprise peek at the new commenting system.

In short, I’m sold on the concept already; even though it’s a very early preview. For now, a small floating control box with the comment numbers and how many comments belong to one of either full (the entire comment is displayed), abbreviated (just the first sentence or so, ala Gmail previews) or hidden. Clicking on the arrows can toggle the numbers of comment in any category either up or down. The threaded view changes to reflect those comment viewing preferences. Nifty.

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I’ve been reading some code recently which is akin to a Dyson vacuum cleaner crossed with a blackhole. In short, a vortex of suckage. Perhaps shockingly, I had little part in releasing this code to the wild; but I have been stuck with the unfortunate task of reviewing it.

I need to start a slush fund for the therapy I’ll need in a few years after looking at that code. I’ve written code that looks like your ugly cousin’s face through a convex mirror (admittedly, this was at the tail end of a 48 hour continuous coding bender), but this surpasses my best (or worst) efforts by a country mile. Umm. Yeah. It’s not been the best of weeks. Anyway, moving swiftly past that traumatic experience …

Actually, no… instead of moving swiftly on, I’m going to wallow in my misery a bit longer. But only till I see this Pearls before Swine classic.

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Help. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

I’ve been reading trashy pulp fiction from Vince Flynn recently; since Clancy seems to have thrown in the towel somewhat. One story perpetuated by both Clancy and Flynn (among others) is that successful assassins, airline pilots with a penchant for driving into the Capitol Building and other heroes of note have one thing in common. A checklist. Pragmatic Programmers, a bunch of guys making a living writing books stating the utterly obvious (and very well at that) call this technique The List. Always obey The List. Imagine deific thunderous overtones on that phrase and you’ll about get it right.

Now, how successful I am at assassination is yet to be seen. I may not have needed to dispense killing blows yet in this lifetime; but I do happen to share one thing with these Clancy/Flynn heroes. I have a list. Whenever I start doing something, I try to keep track of all the fiddly little details. It’s a visualization technique which works well for me; in perhaps obvious (and not quite so obvious) ways.

Another weird thing about this list is that I sort it by a specific order. Which is excellent for a development task (committing something to a source repository is rather pointless if you haven’t done any work, right?); but can lead to some weird stares when my shopping list memorization leads me through a specific (read: bull in a china shop like) route through the supermarket aisles. But anyway, enough digression about my supermarket trolley antics - the main point here: I have a list. And I use it to bring order to the otherwise endless chaos of my existence.

Except, you see… yesterday, I was rather stressed out about several things and I forgot the list. I can only blame my relative lack of youth for this, because stress isn’t anything new to a software developer. I forgot the list. And what followed, obviously enough, was pure chaos.

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Now playing: the Coldplay discography. Because I can. Also because some of the tracks are ok and I had it on my hard disk anyway. Yes, I’m hastily back pedalling from my previously defiant sounding stand, but if it makes it any better; there is also some Travis in there. I’ve listened to Sing half a dozen times thus far, but that might just be Winamp’s dodgy random track math rather than a conscious preference on my part.

Wait. It can’t be the discography because I don’t have the entire Parachutes album. Never mind then. I’m sure some preference model can be built up based on what’s on my Winamp playlist these days - not so much of the usual trance, house stuff since I’m (*sob*) not doing a lot of coding. These days it’s all about the jangly guitars and pianos of Travis, Coldplay and U2. Regrettably, there’s also some James Blunt in there. And some Level 42. And some other stuff like that. Yeah. I just said that on the tubes. I fully expect a Googling in 10 years will come back to haunt me like an old archived political flamewar or four.

I’d bitch more about Kottu’s feed breaking yet again; yet I can’t be bothered. Er. Well, actually considering that I spent about 10 minutes of my life thinking about how to route around the damage of an invalid XML feed yet again, I suppose I can rant a bit. I’m not entirely sure why dodgy chars like & and < aren’t escaped in the feed though. Whenever Kottu encounters one of said dodgy chars, it just seems to crumble like Eddo Brandes crumbles biscuits. (Do I get points for obscurity? I hope not).That’s … as a certain well built character in a TV serial would say … messed up, dude.

I have two more documents to produce and then I can do something fun for a change. Not entirely sure what constitutes my current idea of fun yet, but maybe I’ll chance the Charlie on a Saturday night or something. That should be eventful, if not entirely fun in the conventional sense. Maybe watching neighbourhood farmers pour vast quantities of beer down their necks will amuse me.

Meh. Fix this.

I’ve mentioned this before (no, I’m not very self referential about these things), but one of my favourite historical factoids. July 14th is Bastille day.

I just like it because of the story mentioned here. July 14th, writes King Louis XVI, “nothing”.

Update: Oh crap. I have three machines under my desk. One of those hasn’t been booted up in a long long time. I just tried to do so and there was a loud bang and then a smell of sizzling plastic. Unsurprisingly, the PC refused to boot thereafter. Ummm. Does this mean my NLP cluster has been reduced by one? I rather think it has.

July 14th: Nothing happened. Honest. I swear. It wasn’t me, guvnor.

Work. Stress. More work. More BS IMing when I could be wresting stuff out of people’s hands and coding it myself.

…

Calm down, drac, old boy. It’s called delegation. We all need to do it, at one point or another.

Comic relief.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor has been found dead in a hotel room in Portugal. It was believed she was seen out last night being wined and dined by one of the stars of the French Football Team. This morning, a cleaning lady, who works at the hotel where the French players are staying, found her mutilated body and quickly alerted the local police.
A full investigation is still ongoing although the chief of police has already given a press conference. When asked what he thought of the situation, the police officer replied: “It’s murder on Zidane’s floor!”

One source from many. Yes, I like Sophie and her works of art (*cough*, sorta), so bite me.

If anyone asks (and you’d be surprised at how many people do, really), I’m a Redhat man. Not because I have a particular affinity to what is, after all, a commercial entity; but more because that’s the first distribution that made me really get Linux. I had some of my finest Linux moments - you know, when this proverbial lightbulb goes off in your head and you think - “Aaah, that’s how you get a daemon working on startup” - working with Redhat in the bad old days.

But I’ve been running Ubuntu, Mandrake and a weirdly customized version of Slack on occasion for years now, so my experiences with Redhat have been minimal recently. And I installed Fedora on an almost-PC; but got rather annoyed with it after a while. My point: I’m not generally bound up with distribution mania. If it works for me, I use it. I started using Ubuntu for no less (and no more) a reason than the local ylug meetup had someone offering ShipIt installer CDs of Warty Warthog. Took one (hey, it’s free!), pursed my lips, thought “hmm, why not? Everyone else is doing it.” and installed it. It worked, it did what I wanted (as most Linuxes do) so it stayed.

From time to time, I need to remember that not everyone else is as distribution agnostic as I am. Some people hop onto distributions (and indeed, Linux in general) through ideology, not necessarily through a desire to get the job done their way. For the past week, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with SATA support in mainstream distros. Yeah, so there are workarounds and patches and updates. Unfortunately, those options weren’t really available to us at the time (not connected to the net, not a fastish connection etc etc… the excuses, they just keep piling up). What’s worse, I wasn’t physically there - but just providing assistance over IM.

I proposed a radical idea. We needed to get this server done soon. Let’s install Windows.

Yes, really. If the distros we have at our disposal are giving us this much grief over a fiddly SATA disk or three, it’s not worth the pain anymore.

This seriously got me thinking. Windows and Linux both need to be secured before they can run on an internet facing server. There is no “secure by default” mantra toting distro developer I’d trust as much as doing my own audit. Ok, so maybe running OpenBSD might provide a modicum more comfort; but that’s not one of our options. At some point, I need to make the call between futzing around for SATA support on the distros we had at our disposal and just installing Windows and getting started on patching the box.

The jury is still out - but I’m definitely advocating going with Windows on Friday. I swear to $hypothetical_patron_saint_of_linux_distros. Now I just need to convince the other guy I’m working with not to go out and shoot himself because I caved in to the Borg.

It’s hardly a surprise that the real world caught up with me in one huge hurry after my extended (ultra ultra extended) holiday away from work. Yes, I had been doing work before; but that was more like bruising the corners (woo, semi pretentious quote source for the day) than full on, pedal to the metal stuff.

I’ve been using a notebook for more than a month now, and I’ve yet to actually do any serious development work on it. It’s yet another indication that I’ve turned into that most dreaded of beasts; a suit. My life these days consists of high level specs, papers and lots of other activities which have little or no requirement to stare at an IDE for hours on end. No, the LaTex environment does not count. Yeah, we all need to realize that you can’t do the same thing forever and I’ve been late to that particular party. I relish the tangible sense of accomplishment that comes from building something, even something as seemingly ephemereal to outsiders as software. But sooner or later you need to move up the food chain and let other people do some of those coding jobs.

The control freak in me stares aghast and shivers in horror at the prospect. Let other people do what is probably the most fun part of a project? Ye gods. Still, there are a few things that I can do (to maintain technical involvement if nothing else). So it turns out that I need not one, not two but three separate editors in order to be completely productive on this machine.

IntelliJ. Yeah, Eclipse has made great strides and some people actually prefer it as a development environment - but it just seems unwieldy to me. I’ve had numerous flirtations with Eclipse (which is, as yet, the only other real contender for the Java IDE stakes) but each time, some feature or the other that was just plain easier on IntelliJ sent me back. It’s expensive and recent releases haven’t been perfect; but it’s still what I use for Java. And considering how much of my programming (when I get to do it) is still in Java, the choice of editor matters.

Komodo. Java is for large projects. For everything else, I end up using either Perl or PHP. Yeah, I dabble in other languages; most often Python but I’d rarely pick Python by choice. Everyone has their own little preferences and mine happens to be Perl. For now. Because like most other things, programming language preferences are partially dictated by necessity (what you need, what you know etc) but also partly by fad. Much cooler kids (Ruby, Lisp) have taken over some of Perl’s niches but it’s still what I use when I need any sort of problem solved. Why Komodo? Because it get Perl better than a generic editor. With the possible exception of Vim 7, maybe. Syntax highlighting, yeah. Everyone does that. But Komodo also does clever things like debugging, completion of subs, autocompletion of variables and a few other nifty little touches which save some typing.

For everything else, there’s Editplus. Relatively lightweight, syntax highlights most of the niche languages that I use and has a few cute features. Oh, and doesn’t choke and die a horrible death when encountering large files, which is rather important.

Several other installations (and hours) later, my notebook is finally ready.

And I haven’t written a line of code yet. Ugh.

Did anyone know that tired and emotional actually means drunk? No? Well, there you go then. It can, however, also mean emotionally drained and that was my state after watching the WC final last night.

Fortunately, it’s just a sporting event and I was taking it all way too seriously so my sense of perspective has been restored. Nice job, Azzurri. Hopefully, the state prosecutors will remember the vague promises made beforehand about forgetting the match fixing relegation punishments, provided Italy won the final. Also, the theories are swirling around the net as to why Zidane lost his head… a racial slur, maybe?. Anyway, more about the French, here’s one Frenchwoman who can headbutt anyone anytime, I think… For all the neophytes among you, let me introduce Melissa Theuriau - singlehandedly driving up news viewership numbers in her neck of the woods.

In other acts of randomness, sage, chickenbutt and I are speculating on how many headbutt posts will end up on the local news aggregator by the end of today (sage says 7 - 3 so far) and I tried to make poutine yesterday - with grated cheese though, not with cheese curds. Woo.

Oh, and Fed won.

Update: The headbutt on Youtube. I need to remember that technique, although I’m pretty sure my head will like.. break or something if I try it. Also, oh $deity the irony: Zidane wins the Golden ball.

So I’ve been stuck in the department in the last weekend of Wimbledon. This would be almost unbearable if it weren’t for the fact that high comedy prevails in a random IRC channel with Sage and Chickenbutt providing live commentary.

Yeah, I had a frequently updating scoreboard on; and sage was providing commentary from the TV. This may sound boring, but is actually mad fun. Even more so when she and I don’t root for the same person to win… Actually, most of the commentary reproduced below is only funny if you follow tennis. Don’t I sound elitist?

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I was alternately whistling and humming La Marseillaise on my walk into the department this morning, much to the annoyance of some partisan sparrows, hedgehogs and rabbits. Wheeee. France won.

So it was a fairly boring, lacklustre game, compared to the other semifinal… But I don’t think anyone supporting the French will be unhappy. Unfortunately, I also think that France are the underdogs in the final, Zidane looked tired and fell over his feet fairly often (except when he took the penalty), France kept giving the ball away to the Portuguese like it was “give free gifts to the Porgies day” or something, but all in all, they held on.

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Web services, Axis and parts inbetween. It’s all work related, folks… But whenever one searches for Axis on the web, a certain entry by Hani Suleiman (ancient historical reference) emerges prominently.

Of course, in the grand yak shaving tradition, I was then diverted into reading some of the Bileblog archives and discovered the following gem.

I.like(bigButts) && I.canLie(false);
otherBrothers.canDeny(false);
when (girl.walksIn()){
  if (girl.hasIttyBittyWaist() && roundThing.getLocation()==your.FACE){
    you.getSprung();
  }
}

I’m sure Sir MixALot is proud. Yes, I laughed. I am unashamed.

Also, a recent research attempt (aided and abetted by Ed’s childhood memories and Sage) into discovering the existence of clown porn videos on various video sharing sites met with mixed results (although lots of weird stuff was unearthed). Then Google Images yielded the following message: Uh, clicky here. It’s safe for work, I promise.

Yeah. I should get back to work now, huh? The proxy log for my browser’s internet access should make for interesting reading, anyway.

Firefox has a problem with memory leaks. Stop whining, fanboys (and girls) it’s not a feature. Actually, it’s also unamusing that Firefox memory use climbs above 500 megs of memory when left unattended. My record for the moment is some 700 odd megs before I restarted Firefox to put it out of it’s misery. But help is at hand.

First, the Firefox Memory Usage FQA. Then the Firefox Leak Monitor extension if you want to do some debugging yourself. Neither of those are entirely useful, though.

Then I stumbled on a list of problematic Firefox extensions a couple of days ago. Looking through that list, it seems that I have one extension (Sessionsaver) which is a memory leak candidate. So, onto the suggested replacement, Session Manager. Three days of continuous Firefox operation (I rarely reboot the machine, and thus, Firefox stays on for days on end) and my memory usage is pegged at 102mb for about err.. 25-30 tabs. I think my memory leak problem may have been sorted out at last.

Becks quits as England captain. The less charitable among us (me? never!) would whisper that the last barrier to Beckham’s non-appearance in the McLaren era English team is now overcome. The same article notes that Gerrard and Terry are the frontrunners to be given the armband. I’d pick Gerrard for uh.. no apparent reason. Really.

Still on the topic of the WorldCup, I have my own (armchair critic) theory about Lampard’s mediocre showing. Quite simply, the Chelsea lineup is so good that he works much less to score goals in the Premiership. He squandered many a chance during the World cup performances that he would have normally put away; had he been wearing a blue shirt. He didn’t adapt fast enough to a more active midfield role (as opposed to just being fed the ball and punting it into the back of the net with the Blues). In contrast, Henry seemed to have adapted much better to being right slap bang in the center of the field (as opposed to wandering in from the wings as he usually would do for Arsenal). Urf. Anyway, it’s all over and done with now.

France versus Germany in the final, and Germany wins. No, I’m just dreaming again, don’t mind me… Say no to divers. Unsurprisingly, lots of US football (uh, soccer) supporters still retain some vestiges of bitterness towards the Italians.

And why is no one noticing that Murry pounded Andy Roddick? If you want rays of sunshine, you don’t need to look much further than your own backyard (or SW19, as the case is).

A corruption of sorts from the vino veritas schtick. Please do try to forgive my gratuitous use of Latin, more so because I meant Perl, but actually used PHP. PHPgata simply doesn’t seem to have the same ring to it, does it?

First the basics, what is Perligata? Well, Perligata (or more precisely, Lingua::Romana::Perligata) is another module from the incomparable Damian Conway; a rather nifty demonstration of how source code can be filtered in Perl… Essentially, one can write Latin and have it translated into valid Perl. There is a grammar defined, a rich lexicon and it’s all quite scary, more so if your knowledge of Latin is confined to such pithy phrases from history like veni, vidi etc. But, as usual, I digress …

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