tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60197417175557517372012-01-17T13:58:33.779-08:00Management, Coding and Life.Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.comBlogger1931100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-33715312844221805572012-01-17T13:53:00.000-08:002012-01-17T13:58:33.810-08:00

Premature optimization is the root of all evil ... most of the time. You're only going to know that it's time to optimize after you've built. This doesn't get us off the hook for building slow systems nor for adding nonessential complexity into our solutions. Build it first, then measure, then improve. And PS. you're bad at guessing what's wrong. I like this longer version of knuth's

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-73605116275745965842012-01-11T11:57:00.000-08:002012-01-11T12:17:16.609-08:00

Big Data: Principle and best practices of scalable realtime data systems by Nathan Marz and Samuel E. Ritchie is now available in MEAP/Roughcut edition from Manning. The early access edition of my book "Big Data" is now available. Use code bd50 for 50% off http://www.manning.com/marz/ ---- @nathanmarz on twitter (link) Questions about the book? Ask me here: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-14662115911328977482012-01-10T12:27:00.000-08:002012-01-10T13:02:14.659-08:00

There are many ways to write a (jabber/xmpp) chat bot. A quick search for "Jabber Bot" turns up Net::Jabber::Bot, Bot::JabberBot, Bot::Backbone::Service::JabberChat, Bot::Jabbot, IM::Engine, AnyEvent::XMPP and more. You'll see even more if you search for XMPP instead. How to choose? I started with Net::Jabber::Bot, but ran into problems connecting to google-talk based chat. Jabber modules

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-5327848676486486232012-01-02T13:45:00.000-08:002012-01-02T19:14:34.782-08:00

A storm (from Proto-Germanic *sturmaz "noise, tumult") is any disturbed state of an astronomical body's atmosphere, especially affecting its surface, and strongly implying severe weather. -- wikipedia:storm Storm is open-source: distributed and fault-tolerant realtime computation -- Nathan Marz via twitter Twitter has open sourced Storm, a distributed real-time processing engine (

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-10250236293435732282011-12-31T22:57:00.000-08:002011-12-31T22:58:08.801-08:00

Synopsis Hour long presentation from the C3 security conference, on hash collision based attacks against web apps. The idea being that most web stacks automatically grab the query params and stick them into a hash of key-value pairs and by exploiting hash collisions an attacker can waste huge amounts of CPU time by a simple HTTP POST. In languages that don't randomly perturb their hashing

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-39688215168587319212011-12-30T15:13:00.000-08:002011-12-30T15:19:23.262-08:00

Inc.com has a nice article on talent: You Can't Predict Talent; Foster It . His tips for fostering talent: open atmosphere, extravagant diversity, time didn't matter, stretch goals were just the start. The article leads off with this quote: In his recent book Thinking Fast and Slow, behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman tells the story of observing army recruits out on exercises and his belief

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-47720140391198068922011-12-01T15:17:00.000-08:002011-12-01T15:20:42.147-08:00

It's Advent Calendar time in the perl ecosystem! Start each day with a delicious treat of knowledge. I've found a half dozen english language perl advent calendars, starting with the original perl advent calendar. For extra fun I've included another half dozen Japanese language calendars -- I can still read the perl it's just the prose that is lost in translation. Ricardo (RJBS) has taken

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-33580633187247606842011-11-12T22:18:00.000-08:002011-11-12T22:18:27.273-08:00

Just saw an announcement of Git::CPAN::Patch over at Yanick's blog. This is an awesome tool to create patches for other people's modules (OPM(tm)). It will create a git repo from current sources so you can get straight to patching. New in v0.7.0, if the module has a public repo, it'll pull directly from that. Rockstar! Git::CPAN::Patch could already seed a local repository with the latest

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-3190725179327312262011-11-12T16:12:00.000-08:002011-11-12T16:42:51.553-08:00

David (DDubs!) came over for a HACKDAY today. Fun times! He's in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. He's installing SVN on localhost, with the full webDAV thing. Why? So he can practice migrating SVN to git. Yes, crazy land. I'm more looking forward to the actual project, a Bayesian Classifier to practice with Moose. I've updated my App::PM::Website tool for maintaining the

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-69563952646279507932011-10-26T14:28:00.000-07:002011-10-26T14:28:11.549-07:00

I've heard the tutorials at Perl-Begin.org are a good way to get started with perl. Current, modern perl. Not some 15-year-old script kiddie intro. Speaking of, it might be interesting to make a learnperlthehardway book, ala Write your own LxTHW and the companion site LearnCodeTheHardWay.org.

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-21461323122925505572011-10-16T18:16:00.000-07:002011-10-16T18:16:54.426-07:00

It's been a long time since I've had schoolwork. Some habits die hard -- here I am 1 week in and rushing/procrastinating/just-plain-late with my first assignments! I'm taking two courses at Stanford this fall. Maybe you know someone else in one of them? There are one hundred thousand people in my AI class. 100,000. Even our largest freshman intro courses at Caltech had fewer than 215 people,

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-52523551587777075672011-10-15T20:56:00.000-07:002011-10-15T20:56:03.868-07:00

Wanna edit/tweak/build/play-with a Dist::Zilla based perl module you've checked out? Seems daunting because "the module installer isn't included" or "what if I don't have the same helper modules that the author uses?" ? Worry Not! It's easy to get the minimal pieces installed, so let's get to it. Basic steps for building/using a Dist::Zilla based module from raw source: Check out module

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-35825894321771533692011-09-16T14:34:00.000-07:002011-09-16T14:34:14.788-07:00

B.L.U.F.: Microsoft uses .local as the recommended root of internal domains, and serves them via unicast dns. Linux uses .local as the root of multicast dns. If you're stuck on a broken MS network like this, reconfigure your linux multicast DNS to use a different domain like .alocal. To do this, add a "domain-name=.alocal" line to the "[server]" section of "/etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf",

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-73469324604209470702011-08-09T14:15:00.000-07:002011-08-09T14:16:40.584-07:00

Demand Media is announcing today their purchase of RSS Graffiti. This is the last week of our El Segundo office. Next monday I'll be working in Santa Monica again. Super exciting. "Demand Media Acquires RSS Graffiti RSS Graffiti's Talented Engineering Team and Popular Facebook Application to Help Accelerate Demand Media's Social Publishing Strategy" -- http://www.marketwatch.com/story

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-73479411096472460192011-08-05T12:17:00.000-07:002011-08-05T12:19:21.863-07:00

Two quotes to ponder from economist John Maynard Keynes. I searched this morning and found this first one, a variant of which I've been saying for years. I really wanted to think it was my own creation. I'm glad I looked it up, as I found this second quotation updating opinions to follow facts rather than updating "facts" to follow opinions. Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-88955762768251558672011-07-17T21:34:00.000-07:002011-07-17T21:45:35.534-07:00

My latest Dancer project is up at SweetieBeast.us, a website for my pending wedding. T-minus-13 days and counting! The source is up at github. Look in the wedding-dancer directory for the dancer project. The dancer code is very short, because I'm not really using any dancer bits. I'm using dancer to provide an interface around templating code and page layout wrapping. As such, the pages

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-69113724645361533292011-06-27T15:08:00.000-07:002011-06-28T10:28:32.072-07:00

Random failures on my macbook air today. Oh I see, fork failures. The default maxproc setting is ridiculously low (512). Let's double that: % sudo sysctl -w kern.maxproc=1024 kern.maxproc: 532 -> 1024 % sudo sysctl -w kern.maxprocperuid=1024 kern.maxprocperuid: 512 -> 1024 Now let's check the ulimits, now that only my shells are affected. % ulimit -a -t: cpu time (seconds) unlimited

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-11456160228503025552011-06-17T13:48:00.000-07:002011-06-17T13:50:10.068-07:00

I'm looking forward to my trip to Asheville, NC for YAPC::na. June 26-30. Yet Another Perl Conference, North America. I was supposed to go last year while I was at Rubicon Project, but my trip got canceled (some mix of busy, crunch time, and politics). I haven't been to a focused perl conference since the short lived "O'Reilly University" circa 2000 in nyc. MJD was the bomb! It'll be

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-27355485373578361342011-06-17T13:33:00.000-07:002011-06-17T13:34:49.577-07:00

I got bit by this when I upgraded "mini", my 11" acer to ubuntu 11.04. Rebooting left me at a grub prompt. The exercise has left me with an improved feel for the grub2 interface and boot prompt -- it's actually pretty slick with the TAB completion. Improved in-grub help would have been nifty, instead I found myself doing research on my phone. Using information from aaron kelleys blog[1] and

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-69989698609176203812011-06-04T12:52:00.000-07:002011-06-04T13:00:06.984-07:00

A simple and complete method for migrating from subersion to git, bringing over past tags and branches. I migrated a work repository from Subversion to Git last week. It went surprisingly smoothly. There were a more steps than I expected after reading various, selected, sources. My repository was in "standard layout" containing only a single tree/project. I was sent a dump of the repository

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-27818328067318895352011-06-04T11:22:00.000-07:002011-06-04T11:23:57.216-07:00

Wow, I crashed my kindle3-3G today. I tried to use the "back page" button after jumping forward a chapter and it wedged. The screen froze, and didn't change when I power cycled. A soft-reset (hold on-switch for "15" seconds) caused the screen to clear (all black then all clear). I could only tell if it was on by checking the light in my case. The reboot key-combo is "shift-alt-r". After a

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-15547440587604229002011-04-29T20:18:00.000-07:002011-04-29T20:18:16.098-07:00

The ctags plugin for vim shows the function name containing the current line. This is helpful when you're refactoring down functions that are longer than a screenful. I've been using this (exuberant) ctags based approach for years. It's quite handy and works across more languages than I use: 41 languages from ant to YACC. I've tested with perl, python, C, java and ruby. The plugin has

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-21567249437365899132011-04-27T15:25:00.000-07:002011-04-27T15:25:46.379-07:00

LWP::UserAgent is returning a 500 level error in the case of a self-signed site key. This is similar to my previous post on this topic, ( Fixed 500 can't verify SSL peers ): For https://... default to verified connections with require IO::Socket::SSL and Mozilla::CA modules to be installed. Old behaviour can be requested by setting the PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME environment variable to 0. The

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-77186409466878703192011-04-22T20:35:00.000-07:002011-04-22T20:35:53.935-07:00

Having problems using LWP::UserAgent with SSL hosts? Try installing Mozilla::CA. 500 Can't verify SSL peers without knowning which Certificate Authorities to trust Props to Corion for posting this tip to perlmonks. 2011-03-08 Release 6.00 Unbundled all modules not in the LWP:: namespace from the libwww-perl distribution. The new broken out CPAN distribtions are File-Listing,

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-62753554899901197972011-04-18T18:38:00.000-07:002011-04-18T18:44:55.069-07:00

I tried to pull up a report on CPANTS (cpants.perl.org) today (The CPAN Testing Service) and was greeted by the sad message quoted below. Is this because CPANTS.perl.org wasn't getting used in favor of www.cpantesters.org? I was afraid we'd lost the awesome CPAN testing infrastructure. According to the CPAN::Testers documentation, CPANTS was a project to track "Kwalitee" & metadata of modules

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-86935352820332486842011-04-16T12:46:00.000-07:002011-04-16T12:46:38.580-07:00

I know the etsy engineers like to graph, graph, graph, but I hadn't heard too much about the rest of their release cycle. They have taken specific steps to attempt to "Stay a Startup as we grow larger." Watch as they expound on the benefits of "one button deployment", empowering releases, branching-in-code, A-B testing and configurable features. Warning, the video is a couple of hours long.

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-5139316558715977422011-04-02T11:34:00.000-07:002011-04-02T12:47:41.213-07:00

How to become a better programmer in 90 days -- a lightning talk. http://www.foraker.com/how-to-become-a-better-programmer-in-90-days/ I stumbled upon this lighting talk by Neal Enssle. In it he recommends three books to improve our craft. I admit to not having read any of them, but I have heard of some of the authors. The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler Love what you do, your

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-85462637647685654792011-03-31T10:40:00.000-07:002011-03-31T10:40:58.748-07:00

My new MacBook Air 13" froze twice last week. (full lockup, requiring reboot), both times as I was launching a fresh install of iTunes. There is an update out this morning to fix that, w00t. Those lock-ups were my only complaint about my new Air. Let's hope this fixes it. "This update addresses an issue that makes the system unresponsive when using iTunes. It is recommended for all 13"

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-13583073353513196222011-03-30T17:50:00.000-07:002011-03-30T17:51:55.439-07:00

I'd like to see a project of a "startup kit," a collection of opensource tools that are known to work well-enough together: revision control + code review + continuous integration + issue tracking + deployment&configuration. I don't need perfect, but I would like good-enough. I suppose this is close to what Atlassian provides, but that's a little too much corporate proprietary synergistic

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-11274798132465475892011-03-30T14:46:00.000-07:002011-03-30T15:49:22.354-07:00

We've decided to use nvie's "Git Branching Model" for a work project using github as a "central" repository (by convention). The gitflow documentation is aimed at people running their own local repositories and using the default git-flow settings for branch names. I want to make some branch naming changes from the original model. First I was going to swap develop and master with master and

Andrew Grangaardnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-83936235811356374232011-03-30T11:03:00.001-07:002011-08-08T11:41:54.340-07:00

I started working for [Undisclosed Startup] in December, after leaving leaving The Rubicon Project in September. These four months have flown by. I'm having a blast getting back into Startup mode. Rubicon is doing great but has grown to hundreds of engineers. [Undisclosed Startup] has a single digit number of employees and ~4 engineers. At some point we'll de-stealth and show the world ..

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-4681269750026611412011-03-12T13:18:00.000-08:002011-03-12T13:21:36.849-08:00

Wow, adding changes to projects on github is surprisingly easy, once you figure out the steps. I made a patch for vim-space earlier today, after I found an error in a comment that cost me an hour yesterday. I nearly got the github flow correct on the first pass. Here's what I did: fork the project (via UI on github) clone locally git clone git@github.com/spazm/vim-space.git make change to

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-81698349526260096972011-03-12T12:09:00.000-08:002011-03-12T12:10:09.982-08:00

LA.pm.org will be back at Rent.com this month. Thanks for hosting again! What: Los Angeles Perl Mongers Meeting When: 7-9pm Date: Wednesday, March 23, 2011 Where: Rent.com - 2425 Olympic Blvd Suite 400 E, Santa Monica, CA 90404 Theme: Perl! RSVP: Responses always appreciated. As always, I'm looking for presenters. What are you doing in the greater perl infrastructure? Looking

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-80327004657637474452011-03-12T11:56:00.000-08:002011-08-04T14:57:50.092-07:00

The second best thing about using Vroom (Formerly Vroom::Vroom ) for presentations is hearing, "I've never seen a presentation in vim before." The best thing is using vim as both the editing and display platform. I realized yesterday while cramming to finish my "intro to git" presentation for work that my recently added vim plugin "magic space" (space.vim) interferes with the default Vroom

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-72328490504922700842011-02-27T15:05:00.000-08:002011-02-27T15:05:18.835-08:00

Sweet, a new module popped onto the CPAN this weekend, Thrift::XS, an XS version of Thrift. This is doubly nice -- one, it's a faster XS version. two, it's available directly on cpan. The current module from the Apache Thrift project requires finding and downloading the package. Thrift is a streaming serialization format. See also Protocol Buffers and Avro. DESCRIPTION Thrift::XS

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-53131045921738599412011-02-27T10:19:00.000-08:002011-02-27T11:02:31.706-08:00

Chromatic's talk on Modern Perl at Scale9x is in about an hour -- 11:30am, Sun Feb 27, 2011. If you can't make it, at least check out the live stream. I really shouldn't have gone to scale yesterday, since I'm so sick and it wiped me out. Yet here I am contemplating going again today. I do want to get my copy of Modern Perl autographed, afterall. Perl's recent renaissance has produced

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-65503966105573898332011-02-25T13:40:00.000-08:002011-02-25T13:41:14.050-08:00

I started reading Mining of Massive Datasets on vacation. I didn't get very far into it, as it isn't exactly light beach reading. The first bit is a review covering things I mostly don't know, so that was a fun start. I now have a better feeling for IDF and TF.IDF, for instance. Infolab seems down at the moment. Mining of Massive Datasets. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-66258216694005547392011-02-25T13:31:00.000-08:002011-02-25T13:31:01.469-08:00

[This business opportunitiy] is a wide open space with lots of people jumping into the pool without knowing how to swim. We should be able to make a mint selling life preservers. --me

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-82918017364903564472011-02-10T14:33:00.000-08:002011-02-10T14:33:43.321-08:00

Great attendance at the Los Angeles Hadoop Users Group (LA Hug) meetup last night on "Productizing Hadoop." Cloudera provided a great speaker to discuss the do's and don't's of migrating hadoop from play/development to full enterprise mode ( from hunter gatherer to modern city). The Hadoop infrastructure has come a long way since my first LA hadoop meetup 1+ year ago -- better support for

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-50057466843782111612011-02-10T14:24:00.000-08:002011-02-10T14:26:49.331-08:00

There is a new version of cpanm (App-cpanminus) that supports --mirror and --mirror-only to allow offline usage. Kick ass! Thanks again miyagawa cpanm 1.1 is shipped, and with `--mirror-only` option, you can use it with your local minicpan mirror, or your own company's CPAN index (aka DarkPAN). The only reason for a few experienced perl programmers who loves cpanm but can't use cpanm

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-67496880767867638672011-01-23T17:41:00.000-08:002011-01-23T22:07:06.837-08:00

Just as I got my new phone ( t-mobile MyTouch4G -- love it!) my 23 month old iphone completely refused to charge from either the wall or computer. So how to get my contacts off? I have a full mirror of my iphone (3g) filesystem, created using rsync+ssh from within my jailbroken phone. It is way cooler to backup over wifi than through a tethered cable; I had no other choice as the data

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-37445271180370910772011-01-23T16:31:00.000-08:002011-01-23T16:33:56.687-08:00

"DBIX::Class::Deployment handler is awesome" is an article on using DBIx::Class::DeploymentHandler (along with SQL::Abstract ) to automatically produce database version upgrade and downgrade scripts from DBIX::Class schema documents and schema layout diagrams. awesome. This is why I follow the Perl Iron Man blogging feed. Great stuff in there!

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-40746249361224271772011-01-23T14:37:00.000-08:002011-01-23T14:44:23.296-08:00

Awesome. I installed R (r-project) about 10 minutes ago, and I just created my first scatterplot! This is a long ways from my days with p-fit and n-fit. I'm reading Head First Data Analysis, published by the fine folks at O'Reilly. I'm enjoying reading this Head First book. Going in, I always think the asides, cartoons and irreverent colloquial manner will be off-putting, but it really does

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-62058529172927732512011-01-11T12:03:00.000-08:002011-01-11T12:36:14.459-08:00

After the hibernation month of December, it seems like tech events are popping out of the woodwork here in January! Tonight (2011-01-11) is CloudCamp LA, an un-conference on all things "Cloud." It is hosted at MorphLabs in El Segundo. More than 200 people are pre-registered! All the in-person tickets are gone, but there are still 30 registrations to watch a streamed video from home. (as of 11:

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-30837200134195483712011-01-11T08:38:00.000-08:002011-01-11T08:40:49.427-08:00

Sigh, Neither of my modern perl SCALE proposals were accepted -- dev track proposals for hands on demonstrations of using Hadoop Streaming with Big Data and quickly building web applications with Dancer. I hope we get an perl mongers booth/table. I'm glad to hear there were so many presentation proposals. Sounds like we'll have some great talks! Dear Speaker, The SCALE committee has

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-44437972674931854572011-01-03T23:39:00.000-08:002011-01-04T00:26:47.801-08:00

I opened my cpan mail today and received a lovely email from a user of one of my CPAN modules, Hadoop::Streaming. Reading a nice comment was a wonderful way to start the first Monday of this New Year. Included with the praise was a bug report -- double plus good! You have absolutely no idea (or perhaps you do) how happy I was to see that there is a hadoop streaming module for perl

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-37706599059815751352010-12-22T21:32:00.000-08:002010-12-22T21:32:00.792-08:00

Included in the End-of-Year message from Caltech President Chameau is this quote from Einstein, delivered in December 1930, on his first visit to Caltech. "To you all, my American friends, I wish a happy 1931. You are well entitled to look confidently to the future, because you harmoniously combine the joy of life, the joy of work, and a

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-63410855269519026232010-12-19T16:01:00.000-08:002010-12-19T16:33:17.576-08:00

I've just learned of DBIx::Class::CDBICompat, a Class::DBI compatibility layer for DBIx::Class. Awesome. DESCRIPTION DBIx::Class features a fully featured compatibility layer with Class::DBI and some common plugins to ease transition for existing CDBI users. This is not a wrapper or subclass of DBIx::Class but rather a series of plugins. The result being that even though you're using the

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-74118151008410214062010-12-19T15:35:00.000-08:002010-12-19T15:40:15.775-08:00

Piers Cawley wrote an excellent forward looking piece The Perl Future in January 2009. As we approach the two year mark, how have we fared? He talks about perl 6, perl 5.10.0, aka "perl5 version 10," Perl Enlightenment & the rise of Moose, and "on frameworks and the future." Where are we now? Perl 5.12 is out, as scheduled, on time -- two years of work representing 750,000 lines of changes

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-60226998739744696542010-12-15T11:19:00.000-08:002010-12-15T11:19:48.965-08:00

A story of one man's journey to Vim Nirvana (Vimvana). For those of you stuck on Monday, keep trying you'll make it. I was watching a violinist bow intensely and I had this thought: I probably have as many brain cells devoted to my text editor as he does to playing his chosen instrument. Is it outlandish to imagine that an MRI of his brain during a difficult solo wouldn’t look much different

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-79074945936082872622010-12-14T00:01:00.000-08:002010-12-24T12:25:15.772-08:00

It's Advent Calendar time in the perl ecosystem! Start each day with a delicious treat of knowledge. I've found a half dozen english language perl advent calendars, starting with the original perl advent calendar. For extra fun I've included another half dozen Japanese language calendars -- I can still read the perl it's just the prose that is lost in translation. Perl Mongers Perl

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-89954432901089515412010-12-13T10:41:00.000-08:002010-12-13T13:05:36.054-08:00

VIMANA! The Vim script manager. A cpan module for downloading and installing vim plugins! It works with .vim files, archive files (zip, rar), and vimball formats. By c9s / cornelius / Yo-An Lin. caveat: the "installed" command only recognizes plugins installed via vimana. Cornelius's perl hacks on vim presentation has been on slideshare for two years. It covers "why you should improve your

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-14911267383983409592010-12-13T09:07:00.000-08:002010-12-13T09:08:21.024-08:00

"Feynman's Vision -- The next 50 years" TEDx, the independent TED event series is coming to Caltech in January. TEDx events are inspired by TED and use the same plans and speaking formats. I'm surprised I haven't heard more buzz about this event. I wasn't able to get into TEDxUSC, the first of the TEDx events. I'll be volunteering for the event and hope to see you there! Will we see

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-52129482601476492772010-12-09T13:14:00.000-08:002010-12-09T18:47:39.523-08:00

Adding a tags file to vim makes for an effective code browser for perl. I've just started a new job, so I have a large new repository of perl code and modules to familiarize myself with. I've taken this as an opportunity to refresh my tag-fu in vim. After creating a tag file with ctags [exhuberant ctags], I can now jump around my whole perl repo from within my vim session. The -t command-line

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-16087623261577780862010-11-29T06:57:00.001-08:002010-11-29T06:57:54.431-08:00

Seems I have just said "no," to blogging in November.  I have not been off writing the great American novel. This drops me back to  paperman status for perl ironman blog competition.  Time to start back up?

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-17448569306122176142010-10-29T14:14:00.000-07:002010-10-29T14:16:04.386-07:00

Siesta! Nap time! Plenty of studies show that people who nap are more productive and more creative. We all napped in kindergarten. Why is it that adult naps are dismissed by corporate and polite society? Rather, we feed the endless caffeine addiction that powers the modern factory mentality. Drucker shows us that knowledge workers are paid for their thought, insight and productivity not for

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-75452019207084577332010-10-27T21:17:00.000-07:002010-10-27T21:27:44.079-07:00

Factual hosts community editable data on a variety of topics, and hopes to be your one-stop-shop for wiki-data. They provide an element of "truthiness" for rows to show if the data is verified and some other interesting ideas. They hosted a contest at Startup weekend LA last week, with the top team winning kindles for each member. I didn't win the contest[*], since I got pulled onto a

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-11390676743512770392010-10-27T21:05:00.000-07:002010-10-27T21:07:14.335-07:00

Dearest Mongers, See you in a few weeks at the November meeting, generously hosted by Media Temple. With our early October meeting it feels like it's such a long time in between, I'm missing you all. I hope you can make it! What: Los Angeles Perl Mongers meeting Date: Wednesday, November 17 Time: 7-9pm. Location: Media Temple. topics and directions will be posted at la.pm.org

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-51072658330838196022010-10-27T21:02:00.000-07:002010-10-27T21:22:48.533-07:00

Much more often, strategic breakthrough will come from redoing the representation of the data or tables. This is where the heart of a program lies. Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchargs; they'll be obvious. --The Mythical Man-Month In theory, I read The Mythical Man-Month almost

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-70335506641681083272010-10-08T12:15:00.000-07:002010-10-08T12:20:59.577-07:00

The Guttman-Rosler Transform is a technique from Uri Guttman and Larry Rosler for improving sort speed in perl. The Guttman-Rosler transform runs faster than the orcish or Schwartzian transforms by avoiding the use of custom search subroutines. This is accomplished via pre and post transformation of the list. This allows the native optimizations of the perl sort function to shine. Sort::

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-68868402776319579402010-10-07T12:24:00.000-07:002010-10-07T12:24:29.693-07:00

From: Andrew Grangaard To: Rubicon Project Subject: Aloha Rubicon Dearest Rubicon Coworkers, I have moved on from the Rubicon Project, saddened that opening new doors requires closing old ones. A closing of two wonderful years at tRP -- challenges bested, bonds forged and friends earned. I will miss you all and our shared sense of wonder and excitement at preparing to attack the

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-9665023405864063042010-10-07T10:07:00.000-07:002010-10-07T10:08:28.821-07:00

I am currently reading three CS books. The differences in styles and approaches are striking, but they are all effective in teaching. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs aka SICP. Classic text computer science and functional programming using Scheme as the implementation language. Used in 6.001 at MIT. Related links: official mitpress site with html edition pdf version found

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-11362958957907873272010-10-01T21:25:00.000-07:002010-10-07T09:42:00.956-07:00

Los Angeles Perl Mongers meeting for October will be held downtown hosted by Oversee.net. Randall Schwartz is gathering speakers and handling the Oversee details. We are meeting early too, second Wednesday. see you October 13th! send email to the list if you are interested in carpooling from the westside. la.pm.org

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-23516136649465977172010-09-22T19:27:00.000-07:002010-09-22T19:27:33.491-07:00

Game on! I'm too sick to be here, but I came into the office tonight to run the meeting. Mad props to Tommy for driving down from Westlake to present tonight. Aran is also sick, so he's bailing on presenting. His presentation "12 cpan modules in 12 penta minutes" may well be cursed. Big crowd tonight, 20+.

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-84688967261471666202010-09-20T13:52:00.000-07:002010-09-20T13:58:21.325-07:00

I woke up to find a bevy of "Mail Delivery Failure" messages in my inbox. Seems the cpan-test reports I emailed in bounced back because cpan tester 2.0 dropped support of incoming email reports in favor of http. I'm excited to hear about this http switch, as I hated not being able to send test reports from machines that lacked email configurations. This message was created automatically by the

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-64943068753179764732010-09-07T09:22:00.000-07:002010-09-15T12:07:06.191-07:00

Submitted a PAUSE (Perl Authors Upload SErver) request to register Hadoop::Streamingin the User Interface tree at CPAN. I wasn't really sure which top-level category to put it in, but settled on UI as it provides a simple adaption of the Streaming interface of Hadoop. Woo, my first registered module space. Update: oooh, brian d foy! On Wed, Sep 08, 2010 at 06:50:34AM +0200, Perl Authors

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-50262095014746226362010-09-06T09:51:00.000-07:002010-09-06T09:53:01.352-07:00

I've pushed a new release of Hadoop::Streaming to CPAN. It should be available in a couple of hours, depending on how long it takes your CPAN mirror to do the mirror update dance. The release includes expanded documentation in the base Hadoop::Streaming placeholder file. Also included is a Hadoop::Streaming::Combiner role, for creating combiners. Combiners are like reducers that run post-map,

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-67384358134484995362010-09-02T10:44:00.000-07:002010-09-02T10:45:34.332-07:00

Gitpan is a clone of all the modules on cpan in git form, nearly twenty-two thousand public repositories. This is not a place for development of modules. Instead it is a place to easily pull the current source for a module to make a patch and send to the maintainer, without having to find where she maintains her golden copy. I read about gitpan a while ago, but then when I wanted to find it

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-10895218447376084732010-08-26T08:11:00.000-07:002010-08-26T08:11:18.594-07:00

"Uh oh, an email from Aran, one of my presenters for tonight," I thought as I opened it with terpidation. Tommy said to me yesterday "So, you're presenting tomorrow?" And I was like "I am?" And he was like "Ya." And then I was like "Dude, I gotta make my presentation!" And he was like "Burn!" And I was like "Its cool, should be an easy one to prep for." And he was like "Cool." And I was

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-47352243718143006632010-08-19T19:00:00.000-07:002010-08-26T07:51:26.047-07:00

Just a quick reminder: next los angeles perl mongers meeting is Wednesday, August 25 The september meeting will be on Sep 22. la.pm.org

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-21714302907696440432010-08-12T11:59:00.000-07:002010-08-26T07:48:59.738-07:00

I've noticed my posts not making it into the iron man blog aggregator. I haven't been able to ascertain why they are being excluded. I've emailed the organizers and attempted to sign-up a second time. No dice. Any ideas?

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-30498187366913984062010-08-05T10:32:00.000-07:002010-08-05T10:32:26.575-07:00

I just saw a link to a bash perldoc completion script: http://github.com/ap/perldoc-complete. I was confused by his need to write it and then realized that bash hadn't cribbed the awesome completion for perldoc that zsh has. I thought there was pretty good parity after bash improved their system to (nearly) match zsh, apparently I was incorrect. Checking out the git source for zsh and running

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-48611622150191765172010-08-05T10:02:00.000-07:002010-08-05T10:06:03.221-07:00

While trawling the Ironman perl aggregation[1], I found this lovely snippet linking to App::MisEnPlace [2]. It is an example of "using source control to manage a homedir" and serves as an example of an App::Cmd[3] application -- specifically MooseX::App::Cmd[4]. Tommy, this one is for you! PS. It has a nice set of tests[5] as well! Finishing my project/file/repository management tool.[2]

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-64591158953114480012010-08-03T17:49:00.000-07:002010-08-03T17:50:31.071-07:00

Woohoo! Iron man badges have returned. My badge listing page is listing all the images as the same. I'm in the system as both "First Last" and "FirstLast", I wonder which is up-to-date? I haven't seen my posts in the iron man stream for a while. AndrewGrangaard: Andrew Grangaard: Sign up now for the Perl Iron Man blogging Challenge!

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-326190429585185492010-08-03T17:43:00.000-07:002010-08-03T17:43:18.112-07:00

Writing Modular Commandline Apps with App::Cmd RJBS looked into writing command line apps and didn't find many options. (Just one?!). What happened to TMTWWTDOI? So he wrote App::Cmd. I've been looking at this for a few weeks and finally got a chance to dig into it today. I'm happy to see that there is a ::Simple version for writing 'single command' commands, which seems a nice way to get

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-55716710079060651532010-07-29T16:40:00.000-07:002010-08-05T15:18:12.953-07:00

A new version of App::cpanoutdated was released yesterday which ads a new -l and -L option to the bundled binary,cpan-outdated. These flags work the same as -l and -L in cpanminus, pointing to a local::lib controlled directory. --compare-changes shows the difff to the changes file between releases. That's awesome. This code will update all of the out of date modules in /apps/perl5 which is

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-61489862253621585002010-07-28T20:51:00.000-07:002010-07-28T23:03:52.990-07:00

Los Angeles Perl Mongers meeting for July 28th, 2010. We had two speakers, Troy Will and Guy Shaw. This was Troy's first visit to LA.pm. Thank you both for presenting. Guy was a last minute fill to cover when Aran took ill. Troy talked about his weight tracking project Getfit, written in perl. He also talked about GNU Stow, a perl system for packaging. Guy is talking about pe-cpp, a

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-28555379443857840172010-07-20T10:02:00.000-07:002010-07-21T12:49:33.070-07:00

Verison 0.101881 of my Hadoop::Streaming module is released on CPAN. This is a bug fix release -- fixing bugs in my test suite! I had problems with errors from the smoke testers, even though it all "worked for me." To fix this I wrote my tests in a sane manner, so they weren't held together by "gravity and good luck." See Bug #59164 for the gory details.  I'm happy and proud to report that

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-30670448979881553002010-07-20T08:29:00.000-07:002010-07-20T08:44:51.740-07:00

"Getopt::Long::Descriptive - Getopt::Long, but simpler and more powerful" given a descriptive getopt argument, returns a usage summary and an object containing set options. I am a fan of this less is more approach of "simpler AND more powerful." Getopt::Long::Descriptive "App::Cmd - write command line apps with less suffering" Simplify writing command line apps by breaking functionality

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-19742617246841138272010-07-18T10:28:00.000-07:002010-07-18T10:30:19.360-07:00

At the July Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers [1] open-discussion meeting, we discussed both CPAN::Mini [2],[3] and App::cpanminus [4],[5]. They both work well individually, but can they be combined? I did an example install of CPAN::Mini[2] for the meeting. This was a learning experience for me, as I'd only briefly heard of it before and this was my first install. CPAN::Mini makes a minimal

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-21151964745201698662010-07-17T22:00:00.000-07:002010-07-18T09:07:25.622-07:00

I miss my smiling ironman badge. It is a beautiful thing. I know it's been months, but I still miss it. Am I the only one? It was so good at reminding me to write. And not just self referential ironman related posts. mmm skyscraper I love you. mmm skyscraper I love you. mmm skyscraper I love you. mmm skyscraper I love you. thirty thousand feet above the earth. it's a beautiful thing.

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-67084341284296040562010-07-08T13:43:00.000-07:002011-08-17T12:24:53.434-07:00

Goal: Get calendar and ldap-lookup working in thunderbird to my corporate hosted exchange service. Status: WORKING! Tools: DavMail DavMail provides a gateway from open protocols to MS Exchange davmail.sf.net Lightning Thunderbird plugin for calendaring, built on sunbird Current version requires Thunderbird 3.1. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/ Thunderbird Email

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-92174942742488158262010-07-06T23:40:00.000-07:002010-07-06T23:43:57.956-07:00

Do you have CPAN::Reporter installed? Did you maybe not know what it is, what it does, and why it's the easiest way to help the perl+cpan community? CPAN::Reporter sends back test results every time you download a module from CPAN. This gives module authors something tangible to know that people are using their modules and to automatically report errors. Now anyone with an up-to-date CPAN.pm

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-75887379284912138002010-06-29T08:53:00.000-07:002010-06-29T14:01:02.108-07:00

Hiya Mongers! See ya tomorrow, Wednesday June 30th for our next perl mongers meeting. All the details are at the la.pm.org website. Presentations are still "to be determined." Please let me know if you are coming and if you'd like to present! Tentative presentation ideas: CPAN author tools: care and maintenance of your cpan module, the rt queue, cpants. Scenario: "my module works great

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-85165444191620292252010-06-26T08:41:00.000-07:002010-06-29T08:44:45.755-07:00

Does anyone out there know the status of the "IronMan Status Images"? They disappeared when the code rewrite went out. I miss seeing mine, but I miss seeing them on random blogs even more. I don't have the tuits to rewrite that part of the system, but maybe if I knew where the blog meta info was kept, or even if the old csv list is being updated with each blog's posts listed by date( unsorted

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-44023135076062602952010-06-17T12:09:00.000-07:002010-06-17T12:17:17.667-07:00

I listened to the Manager Tools podcast on keeping a "Delta File" this morning [Career Tools]. A Delta File is where you list stuff that annoys you about your job and/or your manager that you promise that "I won't do that when I'm a manager. I'll fix it!" When you do become a manager, you can look back and get feedback from your previous self, lest you find yourself doing a scene-for-scene

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-78753539650754771472010-06-15T16:54:00.000-07:002010-06-15T17:16:10.246-07:00

g33k d1nner (Los Angeles Geek Dinner) is back for one last performance: tonight only. Come out to Cantor's deli in Midtown around 7:30 to meet and greet. Leave your sales pitches at home. WhatDinner with your fellow geeks WhenJun 15, 2010, 7:30pm WhereCanters Deli [ Canter's Fairfax Restaurant ] Address419 North Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036 WhoPeople who self-identify as geeks RSVPat

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-47418196872207066542010-06-11T08:41:00.000-07:002010-06-11T08:43:04.347-07:00

The personal .cpan directory for perl 5.10.1 under ubuntu 10.4 has moved from $HOME/.cpan to $HOME/.local/share/.cpan. I was very confused to get messages about not being able to write to /root/.cpan/build when I knew I had that overridden in my personal configuration file. Once I found this new location, I was able to delete the new .cpan directory and replace it with a symlink to my old ~/.

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-37389189341078027482010-06-08T08:55:00.000-07:002010-06-08T08:59:00.793-07:00

Steps to manually add an exception for SSL handling in Thunderbird. Open Preferences: Edit Menu -> Preferences View Certificates: Advanced Tab -> Certificates Sub Tab -> [View Certificates] button Servers Tab : [Add Exception] button Add domain : Enter domain in Server Location text field Get Certificate : [Get certificate] View Certificate (optional) : [View Certificate] then [Close] Check

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-81798817519900525772010-06-04T10:00:00.000-07:002010-06-08T08:29:51.203-07:00

I've updated my laptop to Ubuntu 10.4. The upgrade went very smoothly, and I'm pretty happy with it. I needed to upgrade to thunderbird3 as thunderbird2 was having trouble sending mail to my work email server -- 50 seconds of single thread blocking doing the AUTH calculation on each send had made it impossible to work with. The metacity window manager configuration has been changed

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-45518559569780018902010-05-28T10:05:00.000-07:002010-05-28T10:05:00.314-07:00

An easy way to get back into biking/walking and save your soul (and our planet). Pick a one (1) mile trip, once a week, and bike or walk it instead of driving. Your car is least efficient on those short routes and you need the exercise anyways. win-win! What a great idea. As you get into the hang of it, you can add more trips via bike and extend to a few miles. nearly half of all trips in

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-29841631698231663162010-05-26T09:24:00.000-07:002010-05-26T09:43:33.992-07:00

Another DB company from database guy Mike Stonebreaker (Postgres, Ingres, etc). Sounds fast and encourages the use of stored procedures and lets you write them in Java. Crazy. Anyone heard of this? tested it? using it? Under the leadership of Postgres and Ingres co-founder, Mike Stonebraker, VoltDB has been developed as a next-generation, open-source DBMS that has been shown to process

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-33560846141977580392010-05-20T08:59:00.000-07:002010-05-26T09:05:49.661-07:00

Perl: solving your problems since 1987 --me From: Kieren Diment The Perl Survey 2010 is now live. Its purpose is to better understand the demographics and opinions of the Perl community. You can complete the survey at http://survey.perlfoundation.org - it should take about 10 to 15 minutes. Once you've done that, please let your relevant friends and colleagues know about the survey so

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-16557454647607144872010-05-11T10:35:00.000-07:002010-05-11T10:37:06.154-07:00

Odds are, you didn't read about the 5.12 release outside of Ryan Paul's overview on Ars Technica. You see, Perl not being dead and just continuing business as usual doesn't make for compelling news. Also, let's admit, the Perl community has a great deal of competence in producing software, but couldn't market its way out of a soaking wet paper bag. --Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering,

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-62038776856882948022010-05-06T08:47:00.000-07:002010-05-06T09:08:14.296-07:00

Charlie Munger spoke for three hours at the Wesco financial meeting yesterday. Charlie is a wise old man. I played hooky from work yesterday to attend my third yearly meeting. The 1500 of us in the room don't get much in the way of money investment advice but instead lots of advice on time and wisdom investment. He is a big fan of mental models (of behavior) and checklists. He speaks in

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-29427968960366202982010-04-27T14:31:00.000-07:002010-04-27T14:31:44.304-07:00

Perl Mongers! I'm looking forward to seeing y'all tomorrow at 7pm and am excited for Aran's and Ralf's presentations. --Andrew Los Angeles Perl Mongers[1] The Perl Users Group of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area __________________________________________________________________ Upcoming Events LA.pm's next meeting What: Los Angeles Perl Mongers

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-30310651406797426852010-04-27T00:08:00.000-07:002010-04-30T13:11:11.683-07:00

Enemy Lurks in War Briefings - PowerPoint - NYTimes.com We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint Military commanders are concerned that computer-generated charts and bullet point lists stifle discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making, as well as take up too much time. [...] “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,”

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-21339633831460820392010-04-20T11:09:00.000-07:002010-04-20T11:31:05.659-07:00

This morning I finished reading Management Rewired ( website ). I like both management books and brain/mental model books. This book is both. The brain analysis is slightly filtered as the book is written by a experienced management guy who has done reading of the research rather than directly from the researchers. This is more than compensated for by the management insight provided by his

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-2182366462794180382010-04-16T08:16:00.001-07:002010-04-16T09:05:38.790-07:00

I spent the morning thinking about software interviewing. It's a been a couple of months and I have candidates to interview today and Monday. I was hoping to find a couple of nice topics for a non-trivial yet simple code project for an hour long pair session at the end of the day. But then I stumbled across this thread, again. And I realized that while I've actually studied up on most of

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6019741717555751737.post-30585541224697220292010-04-15T07:11:00.000-07:002010-04-15T08:07:25.629-07:00

Ideas are somewhat like babies--they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?" --- Peter Drucker I really love this quote

Andrew Grangaardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14818383405782029025noreply@blogger.com0