Entries tagged with perl

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Blerp

Big reshuffling of office space in progress at ITA this week. I've been upgraded to a nicer cube on the 7th floor, though sadly am surrounded by strangers. On the third hand, it's pretty quiet here, as I'm no longer sitting next to company-knowledge gurus and their attendant conversation vortices.

Something's messed up with my network drop; they did a good job transferring random crap I had on my desk, but I think someone pocketed my internets. I have asked Dan to put in a requisition for some new ones. If I don't get any by 4 or so I'm goin home. Yes, I am billing for this.

At least I'm getting some self-improvement in, reading Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices in the meantime.

daerr bought a couple copies for the office last year and I've always meant to get into it. I'm about halfway through now, and am finding it brilliant.

I think that Conway may be my favorite technical author. It was another of his books taught me object-oriented programming many years ago. His presentations have a reputation for being especially wacky, but his writing sublimates his sense of humor into subtlety, making the text uniformly informative and engaging. Contrast this with the lame, chunky-style humor perpetrated by way too many tech book authors who think that they're the next Larry Wall. Including, sometimes, Larry Wall. (Also including myself; I'm a little embarrassed now by the excesses of "humor" in Perl & XML).

I may go to an MIT entrepreneur workshop thing with Jared tonight. I haven't been to one since before Origins, and all the adventures that Volity Games has had in the meantime would give me a real change in perspective. I dunno though.

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Google Checkout on Perl (not)

Ask Bjørn Hansen wonders why there isn't a Google Checkout module on the CPAN. And now it's a month later and there still isn't one!

Besides that post, googling for ["google checkout" perl] reveals a handful of mailing lists with about five posts each on them since the summer.

I am reading the API docs today.

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About that cunning plan

Before I could figure out how to properly address the issue of going broke, I had to see when our latest fundraising schedule predicted that I would be able to write myself a paycheck.

daerr and I played with the spreadsheet some more tonight, making two different, new versions that are based around a schedule of small, gradual investments rather than one really big one up front.

I now am confident that the best choice for me involves picking up a short-term, low-stress programming contract, something telecommutey. I have done these before, even relatively recently (crunching up voter-reg records for 2004 Ohio, sigh), and know that I can complete such work without giving up everything else that I'm doing. It's still enough of a time sacrifice that I wouldn't want to make a habit out of it, but that's the whole point; if Volity's cunning plan works - and I think it will - then I shouldn't have to do more than one or two of these.

So, it's http://jobs.perl.org for me. And updating my resume. (And if any of you have work that an expert Perl and web hacker can accomplish, given a deadline but a completely flexible schedule, please let me know.)

I'm going to have to make a more detailed post in the devblog about this: we also had a great conversation about some concerns I have been having with how we're doing things vis-a-vis Gamut, based on both user and developer feedback, and my own observations about how the webby world has been working lately.

Upshot the first: I am suddenly keenly interested in making an variation of Gamut that runs as a Java applet, within the Web browser. The applet would really only need to be the SVG pane; everything else can be accomplished with AJAXified HTML. We can do this using tech and know-how we have now; it will just take time, and it will be so worth it.

I am increasingly convinced that, wherever reasonable, (things that run in a Web browser) > (things that you have to download, install, and run separately).

Upshot the second: Actually, nothing new, but we really need to press ahead with SVG UI development libraries now. And by now I mean now.

Entry tags:

perl,
volity

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The use Perl interview is up.

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My post about Volity to

perl is now sandwiched by two threads of drama.

Entry tags:

perl,
volity

Frivolity on CPAN

To my sudden surprise, I see that the Perl Volity software is available on the CPAN. After that email that says they rejected it? I have no idea.

Anyway, that link includes some lovely HTML docs, hyperlinked where appropriate into the rest of the Perl world. (Start with the first page.) This is half the reason I wanted to put this stuff on the CPAN and I'm glad it finally came around, two days later.

(Zarf's docs for the Python side of Volity are on the web too.)

Entry tags:

perl,
volity

Volity Developer Beta is Go

I released version 0.6.0 of Frivolity today. These are Perl libraries and programs for creating and running Volity game parlors.

For the first time, they contain what I consider to be complete documentation and examples. Included in the package is an entire Tic Tac Toe example, including Game and Bot modules, UI files, and a ruleset document.

With this release, I am declaring the Volity developer beta period launched; between the quality (I hope!) of these libraries and docs, and the maturity of the Javolin client software, I consider the Volity system found at volity.net finally complete enough to allow developers to quickly get started making and testing games. And after registering them with our central bookkeeper, poof, you'll have an immediate audience.

This last statement, incidentally, is not me blowing smoke: while we still have a tiny userbase, it grows larger every time we spread the beta-trawling circle a little wider. Most recently Zarf and I have been spreading the message on Looney Labs' mailing lists, and we've had people playing Fluxx continually since then. (This is mostly due to the fact that we make bots available. Note to self: make bots available for the other games!)

So, what does this mean? This means you! If you've been following my Volity jabber (ho ho) for some time and have been waiting for the right moment to sink your toes in, I'm here to tell you: friend, this is your lucky day. If you are willing to hack up your game logic in either Perl or Python, and know (or can learn) your way around the DOM well enough to make some SVG-based UI files, there has never been a better time to start.

(What was that about Python? Oh, right, that would be Zarf's stuff.)

I have also uploaded the whole thing to the CPAN for the first time, meaning that HTML docs should be forthcoming. I'll shout some more here when that happens.

Next up: I'm going go make the website look nice, and

daerr's gonna hack us up some blogs and fora. This should keep us occupied for the next three weeks or so.

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OK, I joined Orkut. I hesitated because the BoingBoing people have been making fun of it, and apparently I must do everything Cory and Xeni tell me to do. So

dougo invited me to it, and I said "meh". Then

jjohn invited me to it, and... I still said "meh", but I clicked on the link in his invitation email and saw all these familiar and friendly ORA faces smiling back at me. Yes, sigh, OK. It's all for research, right? Finger on the pulse! The sacrifices we make.

You can go join if you want, and add me as a friend, if appropriate (I'm there under my real name and email address and so on). I dunno if I will ever send out any email invitations because, yes, "meh". Dunno if I'll ever fill out that personals-style information, either. Meanwhile, have been adding myself to 9,999,999 communities, which in some cases seem to have hundreds more members than their LiveJournal counterparts. The Perl community, for example, has 458 members.

But if you search for "perl", an earlier hit is for "I Hate Perl", with 2 members. And the first hit for "board games" is for a community called "bi poly kinky pagan gamer geek", which is almost exactly a local friend's summary description of the typical member of a certain local social circle, so I had to say har-d-har. (Friend is going nameless here to prevent incorrect association by proximity, ho ho.)

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(no subject)

And now you know what today's project was.

Went ahead and wrote my own Perl script, though I'm sure plenty of these exist already. CPAN Modules used:

Mime::Parser
LJ::Simple
Image::Magick::Thumbnail

I may post it somewhere if I get around to fixing an embarrassing hack (based on my apparent nongrokking of umask()). If you want to see it before then, go ahead and ask.

Observations:

Image quality is, offically, shitty. Of course it's kinda what I was expecting (it's a phone that can take pictures, not a dedicated camera), but to actually see it: eh. Not convinced that there aren't better models in the same price range, but this was an utterly unresearched purchase, so them's my cookies, ma.
Typing is easier than I thought it'd be. The default mode for typing text messages lets you just key in the numeric pattern for each word, and the phone's internal dictionary guesses what word is the one you most likely wanted, from the possible combinations. If it guesses wrong, you can see the whole list of possible words, and select the correct one (or define a new word). It looks like it doesn't do this contextually, or does so imperfectly, hence "where I an" (which I didn't notice at the time).
Another reason to regret not thinking this purchase through: no GPS! I mean, really; these posts need to have attached global coordinates. Maybe next year.

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Just like old times

I spent the morning finishing up this little contract job, creating a Minti tag for Johnny's Selected Seeds. Minti is the system I helped create back at MINT for building Apache/MySQL/Perl-based dynamic websites, and JSS is one of the many companies that absorbed pieces of MINT's human resources.

It sure took me back to work with all my old, kooky method names again, and see that Minti is still broken (or, rather, very easy to break) in the same ways it was when I last worked with it, a year and a half ago, despite the fact that Arcus has continued to develop it over this time. I got to talk to Alisa, our old webmaster, again after I accidentally blew away her test site's config by forgetting about one of the many chicken-waving ceremonies one must perform when updating some server information. So that was nice.

Now I am grappling with SourceForge's kooky UI again, as I attempt to update one of my bits of software there, a shopping cart Perl module that I wrote at MINT in 2000, and to which Andy has made a few bugfixes since I left. Once I figured out what he did, I declared it the new version. It's still almost completely undocumented, but after functioning for about two years in a production envrionment, it's stable enough to deserve a link from my homepage or something... yet another thing to throw on the "Stuff that I worked on a lot when I was paid to be interested in them but then I left that job so I don't care that much about them anymore: enjoy!" pile.

Geek geek geek Oh yeah, yesterday I turned my whole personal website, hosted on a PC at Arcus, into a CVS module, which I then checked out onto my iBook. In theory, I now have a fully-functional test platform. Pretty good! Maybe I'll actually do something about updating that silly site now.

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Circle JJ

Attended a poker night at Joe's house. I figured I'd show up just to be social, and maybe mess things up by bringing my copy of Cheapass Games' 'Unexploded Cow', a fine gambling game in its own right. But, after some needling, I bought a dollar's worth of chips, and lost it in three or four hands, along with fifty cents that Joe lent me. My first gambling debt! You all can now say that you were there when prog's downward spiral began. Cut to montage of prog stumbling down a dark street with neon signs, martini glasses, roulette wheels, etc. passing over his shoulder. And we never did play the Cow game.

I was turned off to gambling-for-keeps, even with weenie stakes, early in my career as a gamer, when, in 1994, a friend politely declined to give me back the White Knight card I lost to him as a Magic: The Gathering ante. How uncool, I thought to myself, and never played that way again. (I'd stop playing Magic altogether after a year, anyway, but for different reasons.)

The reason I showed up at all (sacrificing precious BookTime) involved the fact that Joe dangled before my widdle nose the fact that local Perl hackers of high reknown would attend. Since I was thinking earlier today about how conversation I've had with other hackers, even (maybe especially) informal and off-topic ones, have helped me a lot in my book-revision mission so far, I figured The Book would thank me for it. And also I was sick of working on the thing today.

So, I met a bunch of people whose names I won't drop because I hate to sound like I'm name-dropping even though probably nobody who reads this would recognize any of them. (This is a good reason to blog on my home site. So I can not-namedrop where namedropping would matter. Shooah.) But, it was all verra nice. I hit it off with everyone, as is my wont with most people of the non-(insane/boring) persuasion, did in fact talk about the book, and, of course, handed out summore of my silly non-business cards.

Speaking of: I asked Andy today what it takes to make a corporation. From his description, it sounds a lot like registering a domain: confirm that no corporation with this name already exists, pay some lawyer $50, badda-bing, there's your Inc. Now you can do whatever you want with this. Like building a business around it. Or you can just hold onto it and do nothing except have fun making vague plans. Since I'm already doing exactly this with 3 or 4 domain names, why not add a corporation name to the mix? Seriously.

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Bad day, good day, Pi for supper

Yesterday was a bad day. I became very sad, and shut down early. Two true facts about me: it's hard to emotionally unbalance me, but if I do lose balance, a good night's sleep always restores it. This is likely a good thing.

Why was I sad? I was thinking about what a wash A.D. 2001 seems to me. I don't feel as if I've done much this year, especially compared to 1999 and 2000. I thought about various decisions I had made poorly, or failed to make at all, and opportunities lost due to lack of strong communication. And this isn't even getting into the bigger stuff of the layoffs and 9-11. I wanted to cry, and wondered at what age I lost the ability to will myself into doing so, or if I ever really could.

Today was a good day. Worked for a couple hours in the 1369 on chapter 7, which is due tomorrow, enough to convince myself that I can turn it in before Monday's done. I should have had it done today, but I ended up sinking half the day into a visit to Joe's. In retrospect, I think of the scenes from the film "Pi" of Max visiting his mentor. Just like this, Joe is a cranky old man (two years older than me) who works in my field, except far more experienced and published, and who gives me lots of curmudgeonly advice, but who also abandoned his most ambitious project when it got too dangerous (actually he dropped his most recent book contract because it got too boring) and enjoys having me over to play our favorite game, Go. Er, I mean Fluxx. And Settlers of Catan Card Game.

However, even though I am, right according to script, working obsessively with my own project, I failed to ride around randomly on the T while staring at a Settlers black knight token in my hand, and then have dreams about finding my brain sitting on the stairs at the Central Square station. Which is good, because eventually I'd find Joe dead in his apartment, slumped over his keyboard while half-written treatise on Man Things Was Not Meant To Know About XML-RPC glowed on his monitor, and his whole Fluxx deck laid out along pseudo-Kabbalistic patterns (his copy of "The End Is Near" would be open next to it, for reference). So that's good.

If I make a movie about XML it will be called this: <:-/>

Stayed home from Rick's housewarming so I could play with the new*new*new XML::SAX Perl module. Since I'm not very experienced with SAX, and since further it doesn't actually come with the documentation packages it's supposed to (grumble... but forgiveable, since it's only at v0.03), it took some extra time to grok, but I think I got it. Emailed Erik and Nat, asking them to sanity check my summary of the module's magic. (Basically, it seems to be just a highly intelligent parser dispatcher, and its handlers work the same as PerlSAX always has.)

Worth noting: on my walk to the cafe, a very little boy was so ecstatic over seeing the snowfall, finally normal weather, that, ignoring his parents' directions to stay put, he raced down his front steps, picked up a double-mittenful of snow, ran up with a huge grin to a total stranger, and got him good, right on the leg.

"Ouch, I've been snowballed!" I said, only slowing my pace a little, to let him scoot past and dive into a whole yardful of new snow. "Oh! Did he get you?" said his mother. I could only shrug and laugh.