Startup Toolkit.

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 kool-aid for me. Maybe I'm judging too harshly after the Rubicon Atlassian experience, which was soured more by the lack of system and sysadmin resources to upgrade/install/approve the tools than by the tools themselves.

Some options I'm considering now:

• Issue Tracking
  • Trac
  • bugzilla
  • redmine
  • github issue tracker
• Source control
  • git, shared via github private account
• Continuous Integration
  • hudson/jenkins
  • buildbot
  • cruise-control / cruise-control-rb
• Code Review
  • mondrian (hosted by google appengine)
• Configuration management and bootstrapping onto ec2
  • chef (pretty far down the chef road at this point)
  • puppet
  • cfengine
• Monigoring (using all of these for different aspects:
  • nagios
  • ylastic
  • aws console
• statistics and graphs
  • ganglia
• log aggregation
  • splunk -- hadn't considered this, but was suggested by friends at GumGum, to monitor logs across a cloud of app-servers

This should be enough to get a scalable environment for developing, testing and deploying an application. After that, it's time to pick the additional infrastructure pieces needed by the application (data persistance, caching, logging, ... )

TODO(andrew): add links for the projects.

using git-flow with github

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 production. I've gone a step further and done away with master. I want my branches to be develop, qa, and production.

First, how to initialize this in a new repo:

% mkdir fakerepo
% cd fakerepo
% git init fakerepo
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/andrew/src/fakerepo/.git/

% git flow init
No branches exist yet. Base branches must be created now.
Branch name for production releases: [master] production
Branch name for "next release" development: [develop] 

How to name your supporting branch prefixes?
Feature branches? [feature/] 
Release branches? [release/] qa
Hotfix branches? [hotfix/] 
Support branches? [support/] 
Version tag prefix? [] 

% git branch
* develop
  production

#git flow saves elements to the local repo configuration, .git/config
% git config -l | grep gitflow
gitflow.branch.master=production
gitflow.branch.develop=develop
gitflow.prefix.feature=feature/
gitflow.prefix.release=qa
gitflow.prefix.hotfix=hotfix/
gitflow.prefix.support=support/
gitflow.prefix.versiontag=

Now, how to push to the matching github repository, spazm/fakerepo? Normally I'd use:

 git remote add origin git@github.com:spazm/fakerepo.git
 git push -u origin master

But now I don't have a local master. Should I be using the publish features? #Add manually, rather than via git flow * publish

%  git remote add origin git@github.com:spazm/fakerepo.git

% git push --set-upstream origin develop
Counting objects: 2, done.
Writing objects: 100% (2/2), 173 bytes, done.
Total 2 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:/spazm/fakerepo.git
 * [new branch]      develop -> develop
Branch develop set up to track remote branch develop from origin.

% git push --set-upstream origin production
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:/spazm/fakerepo.git
 * [new branch]      production -> production
Branch production set up to track remote branch production from origin.

% git branch
* develop
  production

% git branch -r
  origin/develop
  origin/production

Now, what does the next user need to do after he clones the remote repo?

% git clone git@github.com:spazm/fakerepo.git
% cd fakerepo
% git status
# On branch develop
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

% git branch
* develop

% git branch -r 
  origin/HEAD -> origin/develop
  origin/develop
  origin/production

% git config -l | grep gitflow

#blank, the gitflow configuration items aren't present in the checkout.
% git flow init

Which branch should be used for bringing forth production releases?
   - develop
Branch name for production releases: [] production
Local branch 'production' does not exist.

#manually bring over tracking branches
% git branch --track production origin/production
Branch production set up to track remote branch production from origin.

% git flow init
Which branch should be used for bringing forth production releases?
   - develop
   - production
Branch name for production releases: [production] 

Which branch should be used for integration of the "next release"?
   - develop
Branch name for "next release" development: [develop] 

How to name your supporting branch prefixes?
Feature branches? [feature/] 
Release branches? [release/] qa
Hotfix branches? [hotfix/] 
Support branches? [support/] 
Version tag prefix? [] 

% git config -l |grep gitflow
gitflow.branch.master=production
gitflow.branch.develop=develop
gitflow.prefix.feature=feature/
gitflow.prefix.release=qa
gitflow.prefix.hotfix=hotfix/
gitflow.prefix.support=support/
gitflow.prefix.versiontag=

Question: Do I really have to manually set up the tracking branches when I clone, prior to running git-init? That seems messy. I'll keep digging and let you know.

[Undisclosed Startup], my new gig

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 ... awesomeness.

I'm definitely getting to "wear a lot of hats," ranging from code reviews to company goal planning. I'm now much more familiar with amazon ec2. I've lead the push to switch to git (so far, so awesome) and an SVN layout cleanup. I'm doing a bunch of sysadmin-ish tasks (oh how I loathe the term dev-ops, yet here we are) -- dear opscode/Chef, your documentation is all over the place, but the product is neat. Leveraging my dearly earned hadoop knowledge from Rubicon. Maintaining and extending the perl web ui. Picking up python. testing testing testing! Maybe I'll even use my low-level-manager hat?!

Apologies in advance for my dearth of future entries: startup-land takes a lot of time and energy. I do hope I at least write about some of the multitude of research topics I'm digging into.

patching github projects

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:

1. fork the project (via UI on github)
2. clone locally
   git clone git@github.com/spazm/vim-space.git
3. make change to plugin.vim in my working directory, test:
   vim plugin.vim ...
4. create an issue for the original project (via UI on github)
5. commit change locally:
git add plugin.vim
git commit plugin.vim -m "[issue 7] ..."
6. push change to my cloned repo on github:
   git push origin master
7. create the patch file:
   git format-patch HEAD^..HEAD
8. upload the patch file to the issue. Nope, can't upload files to the issue tracker at github.
9. create pull request:
   git request-pull HEAD^ origin HEAD

   The following changes since commit 9640d4d1ee980e352abd96e2c0ef13372d1c14cd:
   
     Merge remote branch 'remotes/origin/master' (2010-04-13 16:22:27 +0200)
   
   are available in the git repository at:
     git@github.com:spazm/vim-space.git master
   
   Andrew Grangaard (1):
         [issue 8] correct loaded_space to space_loaded in plugin
   
    plugin/space.vim |    4 ++--
    1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

10. Copy and paste this pull request into issue 7.

This was close to the correct flow. While the issue tracker on github doesn't allow uploaded files in the comments, it does track pull requests. So the flow should look like:

Correct Flow

1. Clone Repo (github UI)
2. clone locally:
   git clone git@github.com/spazm/space-vim
3. Make Changes, test
   vim plugin.vim ...
4. commit locally:
git add plugin.vim
git commit -m "loaded_space fix"
5. push to github:
   git push origin master
6. issue pull request(github UI)
7. done. bask in the warm glow of improving an open source project.

The issue pull request stage will create a tracking issue. Slickness. The Clone and Pull Request are handled in the github UI. Check the Pull Requests as Github UI documentation for pretty pictures.

Proper form would be to create a topic branch in the cloned repository, this becomes more useful if you plan to make any further changes or modifications to the project. Make the upstream girl's job as easy as possible to enhance the likelihood of your changes being accepted.

[LA.pm] March Los Angeles Perl Mongers

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 forward to seeing my fellow mongers in 11 days.

RSVP at facebook

Vroom - vim overrides and mapping for presentation remote

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 vimrc bindings. Space.vim rebinds space in a variety of ways to repeat the previous movement commands (search, movement, etc).

Disabling the plugin took a couple of iterations because the documentation was incorrect -- it references loaded_space while the code was checking space_loaded. Actually, the documentation was correct, but the comments in the plugin code are incorrect. I opened a ticket, cloned the github repo, pushed the changes, and updated the ticket with a pull request via git request-pull. Not bad for 5 minutes.

This encouraged me to expand my Vroom knowledge. First, I found the syntax for adding a vimrc override to my presentation. Today, I created a user specific vroom vimrc override in $HOME/.vroom/vimrc to disable magic space when I'm running Vroom presentations.

Since I was already adding custom configuration, I dug out my nerdnite presentation remote and found that the buttons are mapped to PageUp, PageDown and b. These are what powerpoint use for previous page, next page and blank screen. They aren't particularly useful while presenting in vim, so I remapped them in the vroom override to previous and next file.

You think people are shocked by a presentation in vim? Wait until you pull out your laser pointer remote to advance the slides. priceless.

My Intro to Git vroom presentation

https://github.com/spazm/presentations/tree/master/open42-git-intro

Vroom vimrc override file:

https://github.com/spazm/config/blob/master/vroom/vimrc

vim-space

https://github.com/spiiph/vim-space

my fork with fix for issue 8

Issue 8

"" Custom .vimrc overrides for Vroom
"" These will be automatically added to all 
"" vroom autogenerated .vimrc files

" disable space.vim during Vroom presentations.
" in my version of space.vim the docs refer to
" g:loaded_space, but the code checks g:space_loaded
let g:space_loaded = 1

" My presentation remote has three buttons
" forward: sends PageDown
" back:    sends PageUp
" blank:   sends b
" Bind PageUp to previous doc and PageDown to next doc
map  :N:gg
map  :n:gg
" map b ???

Thrift!

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 provides faster versions of Thrift::BinaryProtocol and Thrift::MemoryBuffer. On average it is about 4-6 times faster.

Thrift compact protocol support is also available, just replace Thrift::XS::BinaryProtocol with Thrift::XS::CompactProtocol.

To use, simply replace your Thrift initialization code with the appropriate Thrift::XS version.

Scale9x: Take Advantage of Modern Perl

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 amazing tools that you too can use today.

This talk explains the philosophy of language design apparent in Perl 5 along the two fundamental axes of the language: lexical scoping and pervasive value and amount contexts. It also discusses several important pragmas and language extensions to improve Perl 5's defaults, to reduce the chance of errors, to allow better abstractions, and to encourage the writing of great code.

Speaker: chromatic x
-- http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale9x/presentations/take-advantage-modern-perl

Mining of Massive Datasets textbook.

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

new business opportunities

[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

LA Hadoop

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 multi-tenancy with auth and authz, more tools built on top of hadoop, and less need to roll-your-own scripts for everything.

Props to Shopzilla for hosting.

This was a much shyer crowd than we see at LA Perl Mongers (LA.PM). Only one other person asked a question at the end. At PM, we tend to pepper questions and feedback all along the presentation making everything a group production.

Cpanm 1.1 -- now with mirror support!

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 offline or at work was the lack of the proper mirror index querying support.

cpanm always has required an internet connection to resolve module name and dependencies, and always relies on CPAN Meta DB and search.cpan.org to query package index.

It's been a fair requirement for 95% of the usage, but again, for an experienced hacker who spends their most of airplane's time hacking code on their laptops, the offline support to fallback to local minicpan would be really nice. (Even though many airlines nowadays provide in-flight Wi-Fi :))

So I opened a bug to support `--mirror-only` option to bypass these internet queries and parse mirror's own 02packages.txt.gz file for module resolution a while ago, and a couple of people have tried implementing it in their own branches. (Thank you!)

Today I merged one of those implementations, and improved a little bit to make it run even faster and more network efficient. The way to use it is really simple, just run cpanm with options such as:

cpanm --mirror ~/minicpan --mirror-only Plack

and it will use your minicpan local mirror as the only place to resolve module names and download tarballs from. (TIP: you can alias this like `minicpanm` to save typing)

---- http://bulknews.typepad.com/blog/2010/11/cpanm-11-hearts-minicpan-and-darkpan.html

Recover Iphone contacts from raw backup

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 connector died after 14 months. so I had no other option to make backups. I was able to charge from a wall adapter but not from any USB hosts. This crippled setup worked long enough for me to escape my AT&T contract.

Useful tidbits:

1. contacts are stored in AddressBook.sqlitedb
   
2. file is stored in /private/var/mobile/Library/AddressBook/AddressBook.sqlitedb
   
3. There is a second, bare-schema database in /private/var/root/Library/AddressBook/
   
4. The database is in sqlite3 format.
   
5. Person entries are stored in ABPerson table
   
6. Phone number/email/etc entries are stored in ABMultiValue table

We can open this file in sqlite3 and export it into a usable comma-separated-file without any other external tools. The person entries are stored in ABPerson, but the phone number entries are stored in ABMultiValue. We join the two tables together in our CSV output.

The following snippet will copy the database to /tmp,open it in sqlite3 and export to contacts.csv. # copy the db to /tmp, then open it cp /private/var/mobile/Library/AddressBook/AddressBook.sqlitedb /tmp cd /tmp sqlite3 AddressBook.sqlitedb sqlite> .mode csv sqlite> .output contacts.csv sqlite> select ROWID, first, last, identifier, value, record_id from ABPerson p join ABMultiValue mv on (ROWID=record_id) sqlite > .quit

The file locations and names was surprisingly hard to find. On the bright side, I didn't need to decode any plist files.

There are some more interesting fields in ABPerson and ABMultiValue, feel free to update the select to grab more fields.

sqlite> .tables ABGroup ABPersonMultiValueDeletes ABGroupChanges ABPersonSearchKey ABGroupMembers ABPhoneLastFour ABMultiValue ABRecent ABMultiValueEntry ABStore ABMultiValueEntryKey FirstSortSectionCount ABMultiValueLabel LastSortSectionCount ABPerson _SqliteDatabaseProperties ABPersonChanges sqlite> .schema ABPerson CREATE TABLE ABPerson (ROWID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, First TEXT, Last TEXT, Middle TEXT, FirstPhonetic TEXT, MiddlePhonetic TEXT, LastPhonetic TEXT, Organization TEXT, Department TEXT, Note TEXT, Kind INTEGER, Birthday TEXT, JobTitle TEXT, Nickname TEXT, Prefix TEXT, Suffix TEXT, FirstSort TEXT, LastSort TEXT, CreationDate INTEGER, ModificationDate INTEGER, CompositeNameFallback TEXT, ExternalIdentifier TEXT, StoreID INTEGER, DisplayName TEXT, ExternalRepresentation BLOB, FirstSortSection TEXT, LastSortSection TEXT, FirstSortLanguageIndex INTEGER DEFAULT 2147483647, LastSortLanguageIndex INTEGER DEFAULT 2147483647); sqlite> .schema ABMultiValue CREATE TABLE ABMultiValue (UID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, record_id INTEGER, property INTEGER, identifier INTEGER, label INTEGER, value TEXT);

"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!

Day one with R, head first data analysis

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 flow nicely. I look forward to comparing it to my other new O'Reilly book, Data Analysis with Open Source Tools (released in Nov 2010).

On page 291, we see this "Ready Bake Code," to pull a csv from their website, load it into R and print a scatter plot of a subset of the data.

employees <- read.csv( "http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfda/hfda_ch10_employees.csv", header=TRUE)
head( employees, n=30 )
plot ( employees$requested[employees$negotiated==TRUE], employees$received[employees$negotiated==TRUE] )

Boom, I have a scatter plot of the subset of employees where the NEGOTIATED field is TRUE, comparing the requested to the received.

I did a full install onto my ubuntu laptop by adding the official r-project aptitude repository, which gave me a slightly newer version than what was available in the default Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) repositories. Cran asks you to manually pick a cran mirror, I chose my local UCLA mirror.
# Create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/r.list
deb http://cran.stat.ucla.edu/bin/linux/ubuntu maverick/
# add key (optional,but preferred)
gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key E2A11821
gpg -a --export E2A11821 | sudo apt-key add -
# update aptitude
sudo aptitude update
# install r
aptitude install r-base
# launch R (not 'r' -- that's a shell built-in)
R

LA Tech Events -- getting busy again.

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 11:11am on 1/11/11)

Tonight also features a round of Lightning talks at ScaleLA: Los Angeles High Scalability Meetup (formerly Hadoop Meetup) Meetup, hosted by the wonderful folks at Mahalo in Santa Monica.

Tomorrow is the Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers, TO is a bit of a drive from down here, but I try to make it every couple of months to visit my ValueClick peeps. Not gonna happen this month, though.

Friday is TED x Caltech : Feynman's Vision (50 years later). Tilly and I will be volunteering. I'm still unsure if I can make volunteer dinner on Thursday night, for volunteers to mingle with presenters.

Next Tuesday, Steven Hawking returns for a presentation at Caltech. One wonders how much longer he'll be out in public. Caltech Alumni can register for a lottery drawing for tickets (deadline noon on 1/13), everyone else can show up and wait in line.

Wednesday the 19th brings back Los Angeles Perl Mongers, it feel like forever since our November meeting. January finds us visiting our friends at Rent.com -- thanks for hosting! My presentation is still TBD, but I hope to have the directions and presentations squared away this week. Thanks for coming!

Thursday the 20th is another wonderful Mindshare, back in the comfortable digs of The Independent theater downtown. Now with complimentary pre-event Happy Hour! Their schedule is also TBD, good to know I'm not alone on that front.

Just over the horizon to February brings SCALE -- the Southern California Linux Expo., Feb 25-27, 2011. Make your plans now!

L.A. Nerdnite also took off the month of December, as our beloved venue, the Air Conditioned Supper Club, closed or took on new management. Look for an announcement soon of a new hip venue. Who is up for a hollywood BYOB picnic experience?

SCALE presentation proposals : denied.

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 reviewed your proposal(s). Unfortunately, your proposal, while excellent, was not accepted. SCALE again had many high quality submissions, so we could only accept a small fraction of those submitted (47 out of 160 submissions).

We thank you for your interest in SCALE and we appreciate your submittal! We hope you'll participate in future SCALE events. The latest updates for the conference are available at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org

New Year, New Releases

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. So I thank you for making this available! I wonder if you are still working on it or have plans to continue working on it? Are there many users to your knowledge? Finally, I've tried to run the example code myself under perl 5.12.2 and receive bareword errors when running the mapper locally.

---- Frank S Fejes III

Looking at the package and the error output in his email I realized that my hastily pushed out synopsis example had not been code reviewed -- it wouldn't compile as I wasn't quoting the arguments to the Moose keyword 'with.'

It was a small matter to fix and a breeze to push to cpan via the magic of Dist::Zilla. Thanks Ricardo!

1. clone code from github repo : git clone git@github.com:spazm/hadoop-streaming-frontend.git
2. edit lib/Hadoop/Streaming.pm to fix the Synopsis pod
3. add comment to Changes file
4. commit the change locally and back to github: git commit && git push origin master
5. magic Dist::Zilla command, dzil release, which took care of:
   1. checking for file modified files not checked in to git
   2. running pod weaver,
   3. running tests,
   4. updating the release version in Changes file,
   5. git commit Changes,
   6. git push origin master,
   7. git branch,
   8. tar+gz release,
   9. push release to CPAN

While checking my CPAN mail, I also found a CPANTS fail notice for Net::HTTP::Factual which is built on Net::HTTP::Spore. Spore v0.3 came out and changed the spec format again from v0.2 which was in turn different from v0.1.

I tweaked my factual .spec to work with Sport v0.2 or v0.3 and pushed it up to cpan. Same magic Dist::Zilla command.

Freshly available on CPAN:

• Hadoop Steaming v0.110030
• Net::HTTP::Factual v0.110030

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 carefree, enterprising spirit which pervades your very being, and seems to make the day's work like blessed play to a child."
---- Albert Einstein, December 1930

May the spirit of joy pervade your life and your work in the coming year! Let us all look confidently and move boldly into the future. Happy Solstice! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

ORM -- database abstractions

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 Class::DBI emulation layer you are still getting DBIx::Class objects. You can use all DBIx::Class features and methods via CDBICompat. This allows you to take advantage of DBIx::Class features without having to rewrite your CDBI code.

I have inherited an app based on Class::DBI, but I'm not terribly familiar with Class::DBI. So far, the SQL snippet approach is annoying. There are lurking bugs (in our code, not Class::DBI), but mocking and fixing with CDBI is proving to be a pain. It's good to know that if I rewrite all the DB layer in DBIxClass over the holidays, that I'll be able to shim some of the old code onto it through a compatibility layer.

Related topics:

DBIx::Class vs Class::DBI vs Rose::DB::Object vs Fey::ORM by fRew

http://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/archives/822

PerlMonks discussion

Class:DBI vs DBIx::Class vs Rose::DB::Object

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=700283

DBIx::DataModel

http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?DBIx::DataModel

"DBIxDM is very interesting and Laurent Dami helps the DBIC team maintain SQL::Abstract – but he also doesn’t manage to market it to save his life so very few people have heard of it." -- Matt Trout

Rose::DB -- hand coded to be fastest of the 4?

Marlon suggested looking more deeply into the DB benchmarks.

"You really should run the benchmarks of Rose::DB vs DBIC. Your database layer is usually your slowest in your entire application, so that’s important. RDBO is also the ORM we use at CBSSPORTS.com because speed is important at this level. I’ll be interested in looking at what the new revision of DBIC with Moose does in that arena. On a side note, I agree that the generative queries are excellent on DBIC."

_Marlon_

2006 discussion of Rose vs DBIx, by the Rose Author.

http://osdir.com/ml/lang.perl.modules.dbi.rose-db-object/2006-06/msg00021.html