More photos

 

Mon, 18 Aug 2008

YAPC Followup (preliminary)

YAPC Europe 2008 was very cool. Awesome, even. Copenhagen.pm put a really great conference together. There were so many interesting topics discussed, it was hard to chose which talks to attend. I also seem to have made some new friends, from Slovakia and Australia and other places.

My talk went pretty well after an initial problem that my new friend Jozef was able to help me solve. I actually cut several of my slides from my talk to make sure I'd be under the time limit, so my official talk slides actually have a bit more information about Helios than what I presented. In future I'll be blogging more about Helios, so stay tuned and if you have any questions, e-mail them to me at the address mentioned in the Helios documentation or use my CPAN address (lajandy at cpan dot org).

I'll be touring Poland for the rest of this week. Unfortunately, that means any more info on Helios and YAPC will have to wait until next week. But I'll have more photos and experiences to share when I get back!

Posted at 08:50 [/tech/perl] (0 comments) permalink

Tue, 13 Nov 2007

Cool Toys

What cool toys popped up in my web browser this morning!

ACCESS Garnet VM Beta for Nokia Nseries Tablets: Run Palm apps on your Nokia Internet Tablet. I admit I was against this idea originally, and having Palm apps sit in the middle of the screen does indeed look bad, but then again, I've got tons of Palm stuff--I have to try this out.

Jaiku invite: Jaiku has been closed to new users since Google bought them, but if you know someone who's already a member, you can get an invite from them. Now I can try out Mauku even though I missed the launch party last week.

Posted at 09:27 [/tech] (0 comments) permalink

Fri, 31 Aug 2007

HOWTO: Nokia N800 + Treo 680 + T-Mobile USA

The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet is a great bit of kit, but it isn't a phone. In many ways that's unfortunate since the massive majority of the US is not covered by WiFi. For those times you're not in the heights of civilization, the N800 supports connecting to the 'Net via a Bluetooth-capable phone. However, even though the N800's somewhat cryptic connection setup dialog boxes say they know how to connect to T-Mobile USA (my mobile carrier), in reality they don't always get things right. This appears to be mostly a combination of T-Mobile's inconsistency and the differences between mobile phones.

For this to work, in addition to the N800 and T-Mobile Internet service, you need a Bluetooth-enabled phone with Dial-Up Networking (DUN) support. The "standard" or "T-zones" service doesn't provide full Internet access and requires setting up a proxy server (I think). As usual, the Bluetooth-capable phone in question is my trusty Palm Treo 680.

1. Pair the N800 and the Treo via Bluetooth as normal. You can do this at the initial N800 setup or use the Phone applet in the Control Panel. This really shouldn't cause any problems. If you're using the N800 initial setup, you can attempt to define a connection, but it probably won't work.
2. After you've paired the phone, open the Control Panel and double-click the Connectivity icon. In the dialog box that appears, press the Connections button, which will open the Connections dialog box. Click the New button to start the Connection Setup process.
3. In the Connection Setup dialog box, click the Next button. On the "Name and type" page, type a name for your new connection, make sure GPRS is selected, and click Next.
4. The "Select cellular network type" dialog box will pop up; make sure the Cellular network is set to "GSM/UMTS" and click OK. This dialog box will close, and you'll be taken to the GPRS page of the Connection Setup dialog.
5. On the GPRS page, you'll have to make a couple of changes for the T-Mobile connection to work. The default Dial-up Number is wrong for T-Mobile USA; change it to: *99***1#
6. The Access point name is also wrong, but this depends somewhat on your service plan and area. Try internet2.voicestream.com first, as this is apparently the most "correct" and works most widely in the T-Mobile network. If this ultimately doesn't work, try internet3.voicestream.com or internet.voicestream.com. Click Next.
7. The final page of this dialog box is the Complete page. You shouldn't need to change any Advanced settings with a Treo 680, but if you're using another phone, you may have to (some Treo 650 owners have reported having to do this). Click the Finish button to return to the Connections dialog, then click Done to exit to the Connectivity dialog, and finally click OK to complete the setup process and return to the Control Panel.

Now it's time to see if your new connection works. Make sure Bluetooth is still enabled on your mobile phone. Click the connection icon in the N800's tray area, choose your new connection, and click the Connect button. The N800 should attempt to make a data call to connect the Treo (and itself) to the Internet. Sometimes this takes awhile; remember that Bluetooth is significantly slower than 802.11g WiFi, and T-Mobile USA is limited to EDGE (that's 2.75G) speeds. If everything worked, eventually the N800's connection icon will stop blinking and a "Connected to <connection name>" information box will flash onscreen. Now you're ready to check your e-mail or do some (limited) web surfing. Remember EDGE is at best around twice as fast as old dial-up modem speeds, so while light mail reading and surfing mobile-formatted sites will be OK, you won't want to do heavy web surfing or listen to a whole lot of music (don't even try YouTube). But it may just fill in the gaps here and there until you can get back to civilization.

Posted at 03:09 [/tech] (0 comments) permalink

Thu, 02 Aug 2007

Nokia N800

Posted at 12:52 [/tech] (0 comments) permalink

Wed, 21 Mar 2007

2GB Memory Upgrade

I finally put together enough time and money to upgrade my Mac Mini from the stock, anemic 512MB of RAM to 2GB. This upgrade has transformed the Mini from a machine that quickly runs out of steam to a relative desktop powerhouse. When I first bought the Mini, I was mainly using it for Internet access and light programming and photo editing duties. As my interest in photography increased though, it became obvious that 512MB of RAM just wasn't enough. Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom would only run (like molasses) if I shut down everything else except the operating system itself. Finally this became so frustrating I finally gave up and bought two Kingston 1GB PC2 5300 DIMMs.

Installing memory in a Mac Mini (especially an Intel one) is not for the faint of heart. I found the Mac Mini RAM Upgrade Tutorial at MethodShop.com to be an invaluable resource; their photos, video, and descriptions of the Mini internals were first-rate and their steps were easy to follow. I don't, however, think there is any way you can avoid scratching the Mini's case, however. Even with a plastic putty knife, I still ended up having to use a screwdriver to force the outer casing away from the plastic lower shell. The good news is any scratches you do inflict only show on the bottom of case, so under normal circumstances no one will see the hack job you did trying to install memory into your system. Before you put the case back on, do make sure your memory modules are firmly in place and that the Mac is working properly. One of my DIMMs was loose the first time through, and I had to lift up the drive assembly again and reseat the RAM. If I would have had to remove the case a second time, I probably would have pulled my hair out.

After the memory upgrade, I noticed the difference immediately. Mac OS X booted much more quickly. Not only is Photoshop and Lightroom faster, but I can now run them simultaenously with other apps (ah, multitasking!). When I first bought the Mac Mini I really had no idea just how memory-hungry Mac OS X is. FreeBSD (on which Mac OS X is ultimately based) and Linux distributions are not nearly as needy in the RAM department. Once you give it enough memory, though, Mac OS X is a powerful environment, even running on a slightly underpowered machine like a Core Solo Mac Mini.

Posted at 19:20 [/tech/mac] (0 comments) permalink

Thu, 05 Oct 2006

Switcher

Giles Turnbull's post about Linux users switching to Mac OS X started me thinking about how I myself had become a "Switcher" to the Mac. My original intention in buying the Mac Mini was just to get a decent computer running because it had been nearly 6 weeks (two of which found me traveling on business) since my Linux-powered primary computer had crashed. I figured I would build a new primary computer to run Linux, then either relegate the Mini to a secondary computer or sell it on eBay. That didn't happen. The more I've used the Mini the more I like it. It's stable, it's reasonably fast, and it runs most of my *nix programs just fine. Plus, the Mac has a lot of interesting programs in its own right (Ecto and Flickr Uploadr come to mind).

I have one complaint against the Mac Mini: memory. Both the low end and high end Minis only come with 512MB of RAM, and Apple charges huge sums of money for more. Buying memory from third parties is a solution, but Apple made it a real chore to install. If you're just an occasional web surfer, or want to hook up a Mac in your living room for a movie/music server, 512MB is fine. But the power user wanting to run Parallels or load thousands of photos into iPhoto will need 1GB or more. That detail aside, the Mac Mini is great. Though I'm a bit surprised, it's definitely turned me into a Switcher.

Posted at 03:48 [/tech/mac] (3 comments) permalink

Wed, 02 Aug 2006

DBD::Oracle 1.18

The news that DBD::Oracle now supports the Oracle native Array Interface means that there potentially could be some performance gains for Perl/Oracle applications. I really wanted to run some tests today at $DayJob, but I didn't get a chance. We are still in the initial implementation phases of our project at work, and there is still not much data with which to test. Plus, the Array Interface would seem to give a performance boost to network-intensive operations, which really aren't in the code I've written so far. I fully intend to test the new execute_array() capabilities at my earliest convenience. More discussion of DBD::Oracle 1.18 is here. For more on Oracle's OCI Array Interface, consult your local OCI Programmer's Guide (though this page will give you the basics as of 9iR2)

Posted at 04:24 [/tech/perl] (0 comments) permalink

Fri, 28 Jul 2006

Settling in with Mac Mini

I'm still settling in with the Mac Mini. It really seems to be working out so far. The only problem I've encountered so far is that it starts to run out of steam when I try to load iPhoto. I've read online that iPhoto really needs 1GB of RAM to run, and I believe it; it is really slow to load (even before I imported my 4000+ photo collection), and it's difficult to switch to other applications while it's running. I'm not sure why it's so resource-hungry; Picasa and F-Spot run acceptably on much less hardware, albeit on different OSes. Kodak EasyShare is slightly faster, but ultimately I may just use the Image Capture utility and manage my photos myself. Image Capture works like the GNOME camera utility in Fedora Core, so I'm more comfortable with it anyway.

I am also searching for a text editor. Being a programmer, I need a good, solid, plain text editor for programming. My favorite Unix editor is NEdit, and there is a pre-compiled binary for Mac OS X, but the syntax coloring for Perl doesn't work. Since most of my work is in Perl, and syntax coloring is high on my short list of priorities, I decided to look elsewhere. SubEthaEdit is nice, and I've used it the past few days to good effect. However, its focus is group collaboration, not standalone work. Eclipse would work, but it is big, bloated, Carbonized, and I have learned to hate it at $DayJob. At the Phoenix Perl Mongers meeting tonight I met a long-time Mac user who extolled the virtues of BBEdit. BBEdit appears to be just what I'm looking for, but has one fatal flaw: its $199 price! I don't think I've ever paid that much for a piece of software for personal use, and I refuse to start now. BBEdit has a little, cheaper little brother, TextWrangler, but it feels too limited for my tastes. I ran across TextMate the other day, and have started working with it for awhile. So far it seems to be closest to what I want, but I still can't help but balk at the €39 (~$50) price.

Which brings me to another adjustment I guess I'll have to make: the percentage Mac OS X software that is open source is much less than on Linux. I guess that comes with switching to a proprietary OS. Though the Mac OS X core, Darwin, is open source and there are a lot of free/open *nix applications available for it, most graphical Mac software is shareware and appears bent on nickel-and-diming your wallet until it's empty. Even the SFTP clients charge a license fee, and most of them are just a thin skin over the command line utilities that came with Mac OS X. This is a huge change from the Linux world, where almost every application is open source and freely available.

But problems of software choice are minor. The Mac Mini is performing splendidly. It's reasonably quick (aforementioned iPhoto problems aside), stable, and is working well with all of my other stuff. I'm really glad I bought it.

Posted at 05:38 [/tech/mac] (2 comments) permalink

Sun, 16 Jul 2006

Mac Mini

Posted at 01:18 [/tech/mac] (0 comments) permalink

Wed, 05 Jul 2006

Plagger Installation Troubles

I've been trying for a couple of days to install Plagger, but circumstances are conspiring against me.

Plagger itself is difficult to install. As Tatsuhiko Miyagawa mentioned in his YAPC::NA presentation [PDF], Plagger has a slew of dependencies. The best way to install it is via CPAN::Shell, which should download and install all the dependencies automatically. Except, I can't seem to get CPAN::Shell to run. Since my server at home self-destructed, I don't have a suitable *nix computer with which to access CPAN. The CPAN::Shell either complains because I'm not root or my terminal is screwed up. There are ways to fix both, but I've just about decided to wait until I can get home and put together a proper development machine.

Posted at 23:03 [/tech/plagger] (0 comments) permalink

Mon, 03 Jul 2006

YAPC::NA 2006 Interesting Links

My list of interesting presentations, projects, and people at YAPC::NA 2006:

• Thoughtstream
  Damian Conway's site - if you want to hear him speak, the information is here.

• use Perl: Artistic License 2.0 Release
  Getting all the Perl/Parrot/Pugs legal ducks in a row.

• O'Reilly Radar: A Week in Chicago with Rails, Perl, and Django
  Someone at O'Reilly finally acknowledges YAPC::NA, but it's still not on perl.com.

• YAPC Presentation Slides
  The slides for all of the YAPC::NA presentations ultimately should be linked here.

• Jifty Web Application Framework
  This web application framework both easy to setup and powerful.

• www.jrock.us - Catalyst app for blogging
  Interesting presentation on a Catalyst app for blogging

• Get out of technical debt by Andy Lester
  

• Prototype.js Documentation List
  AJAX was a big focus at the conference; Prototype.js helps you deal with the 'J' part.

• Plagger: DIY RSS/Atom aggregation
  Application to aggregate RSS feeds into websites, e-mail, etc. Nat Torkington says: "genius."

Posted at 15:36 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

Perl Best Practices Master Class Day 2

I somehow forgot to talk about the final day of the conference! The only bad thing about Damian's presentations is that they end. Things got a little complicated for Damian when he realized his computer wouldn't connect to the projector anymore, but he handled it well. (Unfortunately, it did look like a trip to the Apple Store for a new computer.) I really wanted to hear his rationale behind inside-out objects, but that ended up being the one topic we didn't get to cover. He did mention a couple of new modules to help with that, however, so maybe I'll be able to learn more by looking at those.

The conference was awesome! I might try to write a whole summary later, but I learned so much and met so many people, that might take a while. But the list of YAPC links I set up should suffice for now.

Posted at 15:31 [/tech/yapcna2006] (1 comments) permalink

Fri, 30 Jun 2006

Perl Best Practices Master Class Day 1

Day 1 of the "Perl Best Practices" master class with Damian Conway was great. Though he is generally covering material in his book, not everything covered in class is in the book. And the opportunity to discuss the material with Damian himself? Priceless.

Posted at 01:35 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

Thu, 29 Jun 2006

YAPC::NA 2006 Day 3

So the final day of the main YAPC::NA conference comes to a close. I am really glad to be enrolled in the master classes for the next two days, because the last 3 days have been excellent. I've learned so much information about so many different Perl technologies. Plus, the fellowship amongst the community of Perl developers is nothing short of amazing. It is no wonder that the Perl community is capable of such amazing things with such a supportive community of volunteers behind it.

For me today's conference highlight was probably the Lightning Talks. Several presenters were informative (XML::Liberal [PDF]), many were hilarious (SSV: The Prison Years), a couple were somehow both.

Damian Conway's keynote was fascinating, as his presentations always are. Still, I don't think I'll be programming Perl in Latin for production work.

After all that, a couple of us were deciding what to do for food after the sessions today and ended up crashing the Speaker's Dinner. I met even more people I hadn't met earlier, and also caught up with a friend I hadn't talked to in awhile. I also played a couple of hands of Texas Hold 'Em (badly). A perfect cap to a great three days.

Posted at 05:56 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

Wed, 28 Jun 2006

YAPC::NA Day 2

YAPC::NA 2006 continues to be a great experience. I learned a lot of information and talked to many interesting people.

Larry Wall and Damian Conway's "Perl 6 Update" was, well, interesting doesn't quite describe it. There is definitely going to be some really great things in Perl 6. There will be a lot of syntactic sugar that will make a lot of mundane things really easy. I still think there will be some of what I've taken to calling syntactic saccharin because although it looks cool at first, in the long term it will give you cancer. The use of the "French quotes" is an example of this.

Web frameworks are all the rage these days, and there is no shortage of them written in Perl. I attended a couple of talks about Catalyst, an introduction to a new framework called Solstice, and Jesse Vincent's presentation on Jifty. Catalyst apparently remains difficult to install, though a couple of people are working on fixing that. After attending the different talks, my impression is that for ease of use, consistency, and coolness, Jifty gets the nod.

"Subversion Best Practices" with Ben Collins-Sussman was a great presentation and answered a lot of questions I had about deploying Subversion. I now feel confident that I can completely replace CVS with Subversion and not have any major problems.

Plagger is very cool piece of tech. I actually have written a couple of utilities to aggregate RSS feeds to create websites (like Transformed Planet), so I was surprised that there was a project like Plagger on the 'Net. Tatsuhiko Miyagawa explained that Plagger's English-language documentation was still a bit poor and it has had limited exposure as a result. I really enjoyed his presentation and was surprised at how far he had taken the concept of building websites from different RSS feeds (planet.yapcchicago.org is only one example). I want to know more about this project; the concept is very powerful and Tatsuhiko has several ideas for increasing functionality even more.

Posted at 12:26 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

The Lucky Winner

Posted at 01:06 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

The Man, the Myth, the Action Figure - Larry Wall

Posted at 01:05 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

Tue, 27 Jun 2006

YAPC::NA Day 1

The first day of the conference was excellent. I heard about a lot of interesting technology and met a lot of people. Unfortunately, the WiFi connections were a bit dodgy today, but that should be taken care of tomorrow.

Chia-Liang Kao's presentation was by far the best I saw yesterday. His presentation was succinct, informative, and yet entertaining. He presented the information in an engaging, personable style. He made use of several choice quotes:

• "People are busy; tools should save time."
• "CVS—the software you hate that hates you back."

I'm very excited about SVK. I only recently started using it, but this presentation clued me in to more of its capabilities and some really useful features coming soon. Forthcoming support for views—effectively virtual merges as I understand it—make me think SVK will just keep getting better. I hope the documentation gets better, too.

I enjoyed Joe McMahon's presentation "Design for Pluggability." My work at the $DayJob could benefit from his Module::Pluggable technology.

The worst miss I made today was not going to Cees Hek's "AJAX for Perl Programmers." The people I talked to continued to rave about it well after it was over. I'll definitely have to check out the presentation slides when they become available.

Day 1 of the conference was great. I'm looking forward to Day 2!

Posted at 04:25 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

YAPC::NA swag bag + contents

Posted at 01:05 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

Mon, 26 Jun 2006

Chicago Deep Dish Pizza

Posted at 23:05 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

Pizza Eaters

Posted at 23:05 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

At YAPC::NA 2006

Posted at 23:05 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

Arrived in Chicago

I've arrived safely in Chicago and have checked into my hotel. Unfortunately, I grossly underestimated how long it would take to get from O'Hare to the hotel, so I missed the ArrivalDinner. :-( But I'm sure there will be many opportunities to meet people over the next week. Looking forward to tomorrow!

Posted at 00:31 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

Sun, 25 Jun 2006

Off to the Conference

I'm waiting for a friend to pick me up and take me to Phoenix Sky Harbor airport and, ultimately, YAPC::NA in Chicago. I'm really looking forward to this trip; in addition to the conference itself and all the people I'll meet there, I'll also get to see Chicago for the first time. Hopefully I'll also be able to hook up with some Chicagoland friends I haven't seen for awhile.

In addition to general posts like this one I'll also be posting pictures on Flickr. Through the magic of a Blosxom plugin I wrote, my Flickr photos will show up here on Transformed Planet, so this site should have all the latest info about what I'm up to. (NSA, take note: I've just made your job easier.) Ironically, something like this Flickr-to-Blosxom plugin is just the sort of thing I could present at YAPC, except I didn't write it until Thursday and thus didn't get on the YAPC Lightning Talk schedule. But this is the first time I've been to a Perl conference, so it's probably good that I just sit back and see how things are done.

I've got my towel. Next stop: Chicago O'Hare and the Windy City!

Posted at 12:54 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink

Thu, 22 Jun 2006

Making Do

My main computer is still fried, and I don't have time before my Chicagoland travels to build a replacement. So I've had to fall back to my 7-year-old Power Macintosh G3 and IBM ThinkPad 600X for computing purposes.

The Mac has really impressed me. Except for some moderate sluggishness, I could use it as my primary computer all the time. With the help of the Mac OS X Ext2 Filesystem I was able to install the hard drive with all of my music and photos into the Mac. I've had some problems using newer software since the Mac only runs OS X 10.2, but it has done almost everything I've asked of it. Remarkable for a computer made in 1999.

The ThinkPad is less impressive, but can surf the Web and do stuff when necessary. If I try not to do more than one thing at a time, it works pretty well.

After this experience, I really want an updated Mac. It would be ideal to have a MacBook or MacBook Pro so I could have a laptop that could occasionally run Windows as well as Mac OS X. I don't have a great need to run Windows, but it would come in handy at times. <sigh> But MacBooks cost $$$. I guess I'll have to start saving up some money.

Posted at 06:18 [/tech/mac] (0 comments) permalink

Mon, 29 May 2006

YAPC::NA 2006

I'm still not sure how I managed it, but I convinced TheDayJob to send me to the YAPC::NA Perl conference. (It may have had something to do with them actually being a conference sponsor.) This will be a great opportunity to learn some new things and make connections with other people in my line of work. Plus, I'll get to see Chicago for the first time, so I'll be traveling to a new place as well as learning new things. I'll also be getting out of Phoenix for a week when it's at its hottest. I'm really looking forward to this trip; I'll be sure to post pictures and updates along the way!

Posted at 16:37 [/tech/yapcna2006] (4 comments) permalink

Sat, 27 May 2006

Crash

The power supply has died on my main computer, taking the RAM, and possibly the video card and motherboard with it. <groan> I think most of the data on my hard drives is OK, but without a reliable, reasonably new computer I can't safely fix the filesystems or offload the data. Why did I decide to make computers my hobby again?

Posted at 02:06 [/tech] (0 comments) permalink

Tue, 02 May 2006

New Mac Ads

Have you seen Apple's new Mac ads? "Viruses" and "Restarting" are especially funny.

Posted at 03:24 [/tech/mac] (0 comments) permalink