mad professor leo

Wow, I just learned there’s a quick label out there that sums up some of what I do.. LAMP.. Linux, Apache, Mysql, Perl (or php… phhhfffttt… ).
I’m so tickled happy, those are all my favorite little creatures.. :-)

I would be willing to change mysql to sqlite, depending on the problem at hand-Or perl for python or lisp say.. depending on job- again.
But Linux and Apache are no argument.

That reminds me how much I hate it when people ask me to make my cpan shit work on other platforms. The bastards!
Am I going ape or is perl being embraced more and more by the lost children?
Either that or only the lost children are using my shit, which would just be one more heartbreak in my life.. Or.. maybe the unixy people don’t have problems so I hear nothing. Sheesh.

I’m all about speeding things up. Letting the computer do what I don’t want to have to do.
I think that little things can add up.
In linux, the command line is king. You can add commands to your system by creating scripts.

A script in this case is just a text file that has code, and gets treated as a program- just as find and ls and cd are available to you, you can create as many new commands as you want.

You can use various languages to code a script to do something.
One of the most powerful aspects of living with linux is that you can add these scripts and customize the system to your liking. In fact, various people can on the same system without conflict! But that is another matter…
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So I had Mark Stosberg note that HTML::Template::Default had no Changes file.

I keep everything in cvs because .. Because otherwise I think I would be in a mental instituion.

So, cvs records changes if you tell it something- as you commit changes.

There is a specific gnu format for a changes file. You will see changefiles in distros like CGI, CGI::Application.. most good distros. And it makes sense, to keep track of stuff. People might want to know what’s up and why. And often I do add comments to my commits.
But, do I have to write this tedious file by hand? Maybe there’s an automatic way to generate this…
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THE ANSWER TO ALL YOUR EMAIL PROBLEMS

Gmail is da bomb.

I have a lot of experience with email- not just as a unixy h4×0r- but as an actual user.
I have a 13 year old hotmail account. That should say something. And no; I do not use it.

I’ve used yahoo mail, mail through websites- squirrelmail, the outlooks, netscape mail client, command line sendmail, qmail.. etc.

And I have stopped using all of those in favor of Gmail. Gmail is the answer to all email.
Yes. No? Well as far as academia and development- of course not. But as far as a user is concerned- and by the way
I am a user! I don’t develop email- I use email. I could write my own client with perl - sure.. But… Really.

Yes, Gmail. Why??

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I’ve noticed I’ve been getting more fail reports from CPAN on some basic modules.
Things like File::PathInfo and LEOCHARRE::CLI, things I clearly intended for POSIX only portability. You see- most of these fail reports are from mswin32 platforms. M$ land.
I have zero interest in porting anything to windows. I resent that perl was ported.. or whatever did happen.. to m$ platforms.

I have gone back and made sure to place some hacks to stop my modules from even intalling on mswin32 platforms.
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I have a working release of pdfmerge.

My goodness! Why another pdf merging thingie!!!!

This one counts how many pages are in all docs, then compares to output, etc.. Anyhow, it’s somewhat safe.
And it’s a simple call. Instead of looking up how to use xpdf or something to merge pdfs, you can use pdfmerge via the command line. Yes, there *is* another pdfmerge out there. In fact like 2. One requires extra moolah for the ‘full’ version.. pleeezzz…
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I bought a camera I researched through and through.

It’s a canon powershot s70.

I fired up gphoto2 but got this error:

[root@localhost caps_canon]# gphoto2 -P

*** Error ***
An error occurred in the io-library ('Could not lock the device'): Camera is already in use.
*** Error (-60: 'Could not lock the device') ***


So.. what’s up??

After much pain.. I tried running udevsettle as root.. and voila.. it works.

gphoto2 -P

update

No, it doesn’t work. It was a freak incident, that it did.
Boy oh boy.. this is troubleshome. After MUCH reading, I think it’s a udev permissions problem.
Messed with /etc/udev/rules.d/ files and hmm…. it’s iffy.
More to come…

I look up things on cpan pretty often. I seem to be using firefox a lot. So.. I would like to have a dropdown entry to CPAN in the search plugins toolbox.
Doing so is pretty easy.

Look for your firefox installation searchplugins dir.. it may be something like /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.12/searchplugins

Place this file (CPAN.xml) in /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.12/searchplugins/CPAN.xml and restart firefox.

I’ve been reading Hackers and Painters. Amazing.
This guy Paul Graham has some inspiring ideas about the computer industry and the future of code.
Incredible reading material.

Some of the things that stand out for me- so far..

Software is moving away from the Desktop, to the server.
It’s becoming less relevant to code in the fashion of the day languages.. It will become more acceptable to choose a language by its usefulness to the project at hand instead of for portability and miscellaneous reasons.

A way to make money with software is to offer services online. Forget distribution.
When a project is assigned value (sponsored by a parent company), the count of users is a worthy meter.

Languages that will evolve and survive will likely do so for convenience, not speed.
The speed of processors is exponentially evolving, (see moore’s law). It will be more useful to save the programmer time then to save computer time.

Valuable languages are python, perl, ruby.. High level languages.
Graham makes a compelling sell for Lisp. Personally, I’m sold- that this is the next language I will become profficient in.

What should you work on?
Pick a hard problem that affects many people. Offer ways to solve it. It can be a hack at first- get the damn thing running. Don’t take shortcuts, solve things the right way- use your judgement.
Work yourself to the bone. After that comes the soul.

Oh, and.. fuck microsoft. Did I mention that?

Paul Graham worked on Viaweb, which was one f the first 3 online applications online (browser independent, and nothing to install). Yahoo bought this ecommerce tool a long time ago.
He’s also responsible for something called the Bayesian spam filtering method.

Paul Graham is an incredible inspirational figure. His writing makes me feel like taking on the problems of the world and kissing babies.
I see a parallel between him and Richard Stallman. Who by the way- touts Lisp as the preferred language of the GNU.

There really are a ton of messy ways to tinker with adding runmodes to CGI::Application.

I tried a lot of different things, succesfully, strangely, even ‘cleverly’.

If you have a plugin that is being ‘use’d, you should have an import function.

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