dasman’s World

Anyone who knows me will know thats it not such a good idea to try and set your watch by the regularity of my blog postings… My enthusiasm (and spare time!) kind of comes and goes…

Nontheless, I spend at least a couple of minutes a day on my blog. Why? *&^*&^Y&*&^ Spam comments! Even though 99% of the comments go to moderation (depriving them of their valuable link count for search rankings), I still need to go in and clean them up. What seems to happen is their automated tools post an innocuous comment like “test” (which gets through the comment spam filter), and when they see that postings go online, they hammer away adding link after link (which goes straight into limbo, awaiting moderation).

When I have an infinite amount of spare time, I might try and get some captchas working. In the meantime, comments are now turned off.

I’ve just spent the last half-hour downloading yet more tools I need onto my main workstation. My workstation is around 1 month old – consequently, it doesn’t yet have that “wealth” of utilities, tools and must have “thinggies” (its a technical term ). So, when I find a project that I’d like to explore, I find that I need to satisfy a zillion dependencies!

(The cases in point tonight are CVSNT and the J2ME toolkit. Those who know me may have a clue as to what the project of interest is…. )

I have a utopian solution to this problem, based on Perl (as all good utopian solutions are!). Perl has the famous CPAN repository – full of indispensable modules to expand the library. Too many indespensable libraries, in fact. So there exist a range of “bundles” – metapackages that simply point to other packages. So, you can pull down the Bugzilla package which in turn pulls down all the Perl packages required by Bugzilla.

Be cool if you could do this for something like “Developer-0.6″, right? Automatically brings down GCC, CVS, MYSQL, etc. Well, it’d be nice…..

Been on my TO DO list for some time, but I finally got round to downloading Google Earth. Wow! Those crazy Google guys have done it again! They’ve taken a way-cool app, jazzed it up, and put it in the public domain.

Now, I’m not going to get into the whole “Do No Evil” Google motto, or whether they are the great saviours of the Net, or a well disguised evil corporation. But as the hours have dripped away, flying over the globe with this software, I couldn’t help but notice that I was learning “stuff”. And enjoying it!

Geography was always a subject that bored me to tears in High School. Who cares where the capital of So-And-So is? Even when my sister went overseas, knowing the name of the city she was spending the next 6 months in was enough. But now, I have to “fly” there, check it out. Zoom in to ridiculous levels of detail. There’s something almost intangible – a kind of “zing” – to the whole experience that makes you want to check this stuff out.

When they talk about computer-aided education, this is what it should be about. Not some textbook transcribed onto a computer screen with a few hyperlinks for good measure, but something a little bit outside-of-the-square that makes people want to explore.

You know?

Now, the geek in me is sitting back and waiting for them to upload the maps of Mars into that baby – that will be incredible.! Can’t wait to be flying around the surface of mars, tracking down where the little NASA rovers are currently trekking…

So, I’m now running on WordPress 1.5.

Not to much to report. I’m personally a big fan of the new theme – nice and clean, and looks uniformly good across the different browsers I use. The upgrade process was also a snap – copy in the new files, point my browser to upgrade.php and that was that!

Yet to see much in the way of new functionality – I’m particularly keen to see how good this version is at fending off comment spam. Stay tuned….

Never one to be on the bleeding edge (not through lack of trying – its just the edges I keep picking turn out not to be the bleeding ones ), I dabbled into the wonderful world of podcasting today.

Neat – very neat.

The catalyst was JJJ (the OZ national, indie-yet-government-run radio station) advertising that they were getting into podcasting, including a “best of the week” 30 minute podcast. Now, I’m thinking these things are a “killer app” for the commuter set. Some of my Sydney friends tell me of a 70 minute commute each way – loading up on a few 30 minute podcasts would while that otherwise useless time away.

Now I a) live in a much smaller town where commutes of more than 30 minutes are almost unheard of, and b) live pretty close to all my current clients. But, what it does let me do is have some more relevant background noise going when I’m doing some telecommuting. Its targeted, so less irritating than, say, the radio. But it doesn’t demand my attention either (well, at least the podcasts I’ve downloaded to date) so it doesn’t interfere with my concentration when I’m working on a problem.

Thus the title – its Radio Next Generation. I’ve picked exactly the sort of programming I want to hear – and I’ll pick when I hear it.

So, my setup is iPodder as the podcasting software, and iTunes as the player. I plan to get some of these on my iPod and see how it fits into life in general – I’m not a fan of people plugging in and tuning out in the office environment, but there are other periods in my day when I have some potential iPod time. I’ll see how I go…..

Have been using SKype recently, and am finding myself getting more and more into it.

This app (found at www.skype.com) provides VoIP, Instant Messaging and File Transfer. The IM side is pretty standard (although at least I don’t have to go thru the whole Passport signup that MSN insists on!), but its the VoIP thats the most exciting.

I’ve had conversations with coworkers (in the same city) which sound better than a mobile phone (I’m using a $19.95 headset/mike from Dick Smith). And tonight I got a call from a mate in Ireland (I’m in Oz) which sounded as good (and equivalent lag) to a normal land line call. We chatted for 30 minutes, and during the conversation swapped photos. Total cost – $0.00.

Well worth a look if you haven’t already. The more tech oriented will find a whole SDK available for people who want to leverage off the platform, and they offer a paid service which allows bridging between normal phones and Skype.

A quick note for people who may find themselves in a similar bind….

In setting up a firewall, I needed to obtain a DSL modem. I didn’t need a fancy router with wireless, masquerading and inbuilt ice-cube maker – I just needed to transform an ADSL line into Ethernet.

So, I went into a “major chain” (who shall remain nameless) and was sold a DLink DSL-502T. I told them the requirements and was a little taken aback when the box they fetched me had “DSL Router” written all over it. “No worries” they assured me – apparently a labelling error at the factory, and it really was a modem….

Not so! After it didn’t work by just plugging it in, a quick scan through the manual showed that it was a router, and a capable one at that. As is standard with the other DLink kit I’ve played with, a cute little web interface, including a wizard for initial setup. Awesome for most, but completely useless for my requirements.

Luckily, a quick web search revealed a reference to some promo material mentioning “can be used as a modem”. No more information than that, but after playing around with the device it turns out if you cancel out of the “initial setup wizard”, there is in fact a configuration option to make the device operate as a “Bridge”. In this configuration, the device is essentially an ADSL modem.

So, anyone else out there finds themselves in this situation – its all good!

I tend to play in two programming worlds. Java, and Perl.

Cause the two languages have such similar features and cultures, right?

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of Java stuff. Whilst the formality can seem a little “stifling” compared to the more anarchic feel of Perl, I’ve grown to love some of the rigour, structure and engineering that you seem to find in Java. And in turn, I’ve discovered that this stuff exists in the Perl world as well – you just have to look for it. Javadoc = Perldoc. JUnit = Test::Harness. And so on.

But one of the things that I was really looking for in Perl was a good IDE. Once you’ve had Eclipse, my old Perl platform of Vim on Windows with Perl syntax highlighting just feels a little passe! So now, I’m using EPIC (http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net) – an Eclipse plugin that provides Perl support.

I’ve only dipped my toe in, but it looks good. Don’t go in expecting the same level of integration and support that Eclipse gives Java, but its still nice. The syntax highlighting seems pretty solid. The on-the-fly syntax checking is great. And the auto-complete (whilst not as comprehensive as the Java equivalent) is pretty neat.

There are other features that I haven’t had a chance to play with – a regular expression debugger that looks like it’d be great for those new to Perl (and regexps), a source-code formatter, and a few other things. I’m currently working on a reasonably sizable Perl script so hope to get to play with some of this over the coming weeks.

But, summary – big step up over a simple text editor with colourisation, and at a price thats hard to beat – free! I’ll be sticking with it as my Perl development environment for the forseeable future.

And big kudos to the developers – I’m looking forward to seeing where this plugin goes over the coming months!