Blog entries from October, 2004

Mark Jason Dominus, the author of Conference Presentation Judo, also has the slides for a number of his other talks available.

Some of the more interesting ones (to me at least) are:

• “Design Patterns” Aren’t
• Writing Automated Tests
• The Identity Function
• The Perl Hardware Store
• Return To The Perl Hardware Store
• Dirty Secrets of the Perl Regex Engine

Tonight was the October meeting of Melbourne Perl Mongers where two things happened:

• I became an ‘Ordinary Member’ of the committee. This doesn’t really mean much in the scheme of things…
• My practice presentation of my talk for the Open Source Developers Conference at the end of the went a lot better than I expected and I got some constructive feedback.

Then afterwards I ended up having almost twenty minutes of waiting at Flinders Street. I wandered around for a bit looking at the differing track configurations between the platforms and looking off down the tracks under Federation Square. I could have taken photos if I have just had a camera…

A few months ago when I started to write up my paper for the ODSC conference in December I used google to find information about how to do it. Since I’m planning on doing a practice run at perl mongers this Wednesday I thought I might as well procrastinate in a productive way by reading through some of them again.

One specific one I was looking for was a slightly tongue-in-cheek presentation about how to make a presentation. Unfortunately since I couldn’t remember exactly what it was called (or had bookmarked it) I spent around about an hour looking through the results of various google searches with little luck.

Fortunately I recalled that it might have been linked from and article on perl.com which narrowed my search significantly. The article I then found was Giving Lightning Talks which includes a link at the end to Conference Presentation Judo….

Thanks to my Squeezebox from Slim Devices I now have a convenient method of playing my MP3 collection.

There was a bit of a glitch at the start but now after downloading the lastest version of the server and then performing a firmware upgrade (it was automatic) it is all good…

A long while ago I decided that maintaining the details of my computer collection would be easiest if I generalised each page into a set number of fields which I could store in the database and modify through a web interface. I pretty quickly wrote up some PHP to read the information from the database and present it. However I soon lost interest while creating the interface to modify the information which meant that it has sat half done for at least eighteen months now.

Tonight I decided that if I was ever get around to entering all the information that I have sitting around in various text files I will go back to basics and make each page essentially static. I’ll keep a few functions to handle such things as presenting the image thumnail in a nice way but these will be called manually from the index files in each directory. It will also mean that the canonical source for the information will be in the CVS repository on gromit. Not in a database that resides on a server in America with only version control that I implement, ie none…

I need to start seriously looking for a new bike and the time is good now as the 2005 models are coming in which means that I should be able to get a better deal on a 2004 model.

I’m fairly set on a hardtail with the highest quality componetry for the price range. The big question relates to brakes. Do I go for discs? If I did then the other components would have to be lower than if I just went for V-brakes…

It seems that time has come again at work where a number of people all leave around about the same time. Two are for clear reasons – one is moving back overseas to be with family and the other is off to have a baby – while it could be inferred that the other four are related to job statisfaction…

It does make me start wondering what my plans for the future are. How long should I stay working at Monash?

Today I jumped at the chance to get my hands on a complete SGI Indy system that was being disposed of at work. It is identical to the system that I already have (collected from various sources) except for one small difference, it has the remote control for adjusting the settings on the display…