kentcowgill.org/blog

Wikipedia vandals are awesome. I took a peek at the page for the iPod Touch (recently released by Apple Computer) and just happened to see that a vandal had added a new image in place of the fancy product shot that used to be there.

A few minutes later, it was gone.

However, I couldn't resist making a copy of the picture, posted here for your amusement. Be sure to check out a screen shot of the vandalized wikipedia page.

For more on wikipedia vandalism, check out their page on wikipedia vandalism, which hasn't (at the time of writing) been updated yet to include the iPod Touch vandal.

There are some more funny screenshots of wikipedia vandalism.

Perhaps my favorite is Stephen Colbert's repeated urges to continue vandalism.

I'm going through a lot of legacy code lately, and got tired of manually opening up the first legacy file I documented (to make sure I was following the same standard I had implemented - it's not quite in my long term memory just yet), scrolling through the tedious documentation, copying (or retyping(!)) the text into the file I was working on, etc.

So, I decided to write a quick little mapping for that menial task.

First step is to create a template for the POD I want to insert:

__END__

=NAME

=SYNOPSIS

=DESCRIPTION

...

And then this helpful mapping in my ~/.vimrc

" Automatically add a POD template
" to the end of a file
noremap ,ap maG:r ~/podtemplate<cr>'a

Mnemonic: Add Pod.

... which is at least smart enough to set a mark at your current position, move to the end of the file, insert the contents of ~/podtemplate, and return to your saved position. Caveats: It's NOT smart enough to know if you've already set an 'a' mark, and it's NOT smart enough to NOT insert the template if there's already POD in the file.

Ok, to be fair - it's really not a problem I have with CPAN.

A month or so ago, I won a copy of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook as a 'door prize' at a Chicago Perl Mongers meeting. I devoured it within a few days, reading it during my daily commute.

Of special interest was the section on creating a test harness (or custom status report) for testing output by making use of Test::Harness::Straps . This was very cool because I had tried to get Test::TAP::HTMLMatrix to install on my Mac earlier this year only to be met with failing tests, or failing tests of dependencies. I don't recall, but I was really bummed. Figuring out the issue was beyond me at the time - I looked into it, but didn't have a ton of time, and I couldn't quickly see the issue.

Anyhow, today I had a bit a inspiration to make use of the example code from the book and see if I couldn't use it to produce some fancy HTML output of my own to give an at-a-glance status of tests I had run, similar in nature to the cool Pugs Smoke Reports . So, I whipped open my copy of Perl Testing , typed in the example code, ran it against some tests I had recently written at work, fixed the bits that were broken (by consulting the documentation for Test::Harness::Results )... run, view, tweak, repeat ad nauseum.

I finally got something fairly close to approximating those cool Pugs reports. But there were some big differences - which I couldn't figure out how to implement quickly (after all - the rest of the development of this parser was really quick and easy) - and I was running short on supplemental time. I actually thought it might be beneficial to take another look at HTMLMatrix and see if I could tweak that a bit.

I took a look in my .cpan cache directory, but it wasn't still there. So I fire up my CPAN shell and try to install it (knowing full well it will fail, but my fingers are trained to type install MODULE).

And before I know it, it's successfully installed.

Just a quick post claiming my blog by posting a link to my Technorati Profile.

Please drive through.

Have you heard?

I just heard that perlbuzz.com just launched. From the announcement:

“ Introducing a new Perl news site with a difference. Via three blogs, Perlbuzz.com brings you the best of the world of Perl. Perl Buzz reports on the interesting software, websites and users of Perl. Project Hum tracks what's happening in projects around the net. CPAN Watch keeps an eye on CPAN uploads and reports on what's worth your notice. ”

I just hope Andy remembers that he said he'd post up something about my perl testing vim plugin :-)

I don't know how to put this, but I'm kind of a big deal. People know me. I'm very important. I have many O'Reilly books, and my house smells of computers.

Every once in a while, you just have to google yourself. I tend to do it while I'm alone - but sometimes I do it at work. I just finished googling myself a few minutes ago, and was happy to find that I am 10 out of the first 10 google hits for "kent cowgill" (without the quotes, even).

Even better, I am 39 of the first 50 google hits.

The other three Kent Cowgill's've got nothin' on me, even though one's a marginally popular medievalist author, one doesn't even have Kent as his first name and has written (or reviewed, it's not clear) a journal article or two, and the last is (or has been) apparently an english professor at WSU.

Don't be fooled, though. Even though meetup.com makes it look I'm from Lombard, I'm not. (I'm still in Chicago).

I also didn't attend the Chicago Hackathon in 11-06. I wanted to, but I was out of town that weekend :(

If any CPAN links show up, make sure you're looking at the most recent version of a module.

That's really my wishlist on page two. Feel free to get my anythingon that list. Or an iPhone. It's not on the list, but I won't mind if you go "off-list" for that.

I do have helpful advice about out-of-towners sharing cabs from O'Hare to one location, specifically when a bunch of perl geeks converge on Chicago for YAPC::NA::2006.

I was linked to from Sun's BigAdmin portal for my article about chrooting sftp on Solaris 8. I was really proud about that. Even though at this point it's completely out of date. UNLESS you happen to be nursing along an old Solaris 8 box.

I'm starting to give talks at my local perl mongers meetings. I'll probably post more of those types of things.

That's me at UniForm Chicago. My first meeting I'm presenting at, too.

I gave a lightning talk a year or so ago golfing perl, and David Romano wants to see it sometime. Now anyone can.

I helped Andy Lester a little with perl101.com. Just a little CSS if I recall correctly.

I also helped Andy with the name for his wiki, xoa. I just threw out a name or two, and one of 'em stuck.

I registered at the TWiki dev site. And gave some helful advice. And promptly lost all interest, as I no longer has a job requiring me to admin and/or work heavily with TWiki.

It appears Marcus Ramberg linked to my blog (this one!) on del.icio.us. A nod always feels nice from one of the core developers of the framework this very blog runs on.

I participated in a Catalyst BOF, and a Hackathon after YAPC::NA::2007 in Houston. I didn't do much other than help a lot with logistics - arriving early, procuring the room, finding network connectivity, hooking it up, figuring out why it didn't work, helping to rig up an intermediary solution... etc.. Did a little QA work with Marcus Ramberg and Jon Rockway on the mojomojo project - a catalyst based wiki.

I sought help trying to run linux on a handhelp ipaq (which I apparently posted shortly after I came back from my bike ride - having raised $7,080 for a worthy cause, and a heck of a physical challenge - hit the ride tag to the right for more info on that).

And the rest of the hits for kent cowgill either point to this blog, or variations on the themes above.

I recall the good old days (more like a year ago) where the primary things google turned up were 10-12 year old emails I sent to a MacPerl mailing list for a job many moons ago, about topics that frankly at this point, are a little embarrassing :)

So I've decided to spread my testing goodness throughout the world.

It started with a vim plugin to quickly go through some perl source and create stub test files for a given source code file.

Then I got the bright idea to create a perl module to do the same thing. Partially helped by a suggestion from Jon Rockway after a quick lightning talk about my plugin.

Available for your enjoyment is the original vim plugin as well as the perl module it evolved into, the current version of which is located in my CPAN directory

Hopefully these are of some use or helpfulness to someone. Possibly even you. :)

I just had the opportunity to learn two very important lessons in the ownership of an older home.

1. No matter how well you think you know how a circuit is laid out, you're almost certainly wrong.
2. So long as you have decent balance, getting zapped with house current at the top of a ladder won't actually kill you.

In retrospect, thinking that the entire garage's power was switched off with the solitary switch by the door was completely ridiculous. How else would the garage door opener work?

Naturally, the corollary is:
* Always locate and shut off a circuit before manhandling the wires connected to it.

This one is even later. I guess it just goes to show you that I've been a little busy :)

One thing I forgot to mention: Monday night was the BBQ BoF - a disjointed group of 50 or so of us took separate rides to Goode's BBQ. A few of the disjointed travelers wound up at either Goode's Seafood, Goode's Taquieria, or Goode's Coral - they were separate buildings within a few blocks of each other, and I guess some of us (well, them, really) weren't so good at reading the address indicators on the street signs.

Tuesday was a good day. I attended Cathartic Catalytic Conversion in the morning, and then went to Abigail's Perl 5.10 regular expressions talk. Wow. There's some really cool stuff coming in the next Perl5 release.

I skipped the next section where my choices were the first part of the Perl 6 update, a web framework called Gantry (or Bigtop?), and Perl Logging Practices. I've seen the Logging practices talk locally in Chicago, a new web framework didn't really interest me, and I really wanted to see Luke Closs' Agile Testing with Selenium, which gave me a lot better idea of how to go about using selenium.

Next was Perrin Harkins' Care and Feeding of Large Web Applications. I stayed in that room for a talk I was interested in - Casey West's MochiKit: Good Tools for the Web Developer. Unfortunately, about 15 minutes into the talk, I got an IM from work and had to help out an issue remotely. Which pretty much took my time for the rest of the day, keeping me from seeing any more talks. But that was OK, because there weren't any talks competing for my attention.

The official evening was capped off by the YAPC Dinner and TPF Auction - but after that, a few of us got together for the Beers of the World BoF. We first gathered in the basement "common room" of Oberholtzer Hall, but we got busted by the RA's - no drinking in common areas. So the 40 or so of us that were there crammed into one dorm suite. Very crowded, and I think I'm still amazed that we didn't encounter further resistance to our 'partying' efforts from the university staff.

So, it's a little late, but here it is anyhow.

Yesterday was not only my birthday, but it was also the first day of YAPC::NA 2007 in Houston.

The day got off to a nice start with a really good talk by cog, AKA JoséCastro about how to get the most out of a YAPC. Not much was news to me, but there were a bunch of first-timers in the audience, so it was well received.

Then a traditional keynote by Larry, a morale building talk by Richard Dice, and lunch.

After lunch, I went to Approximation Algorithms in Perl by Walt Mankowski. It was nice overview of coming up with approximate solutions to N-complete problems - travelling salesman, bin packing - unfortunately it was a little short.

After that, I stuck around for Making an AjAX GUI for GNU Screen - which was really pretty cool - essentially running a mini local HTTP server to build an AJAX-ified front end for finding out which of your 10+ screen sessions has what you're looking for.

After the small break, I went to Updating Your Testing Toolbox which covered a few tools that I already make use of - FireBug (ok, really it's just one, but it has so many different useful components) - and introduced a few that I had heard of, but not gotten around to using, like selenium. I'm going to give it a shot - I've already downloaded it and played around with the IDE, but this really seems like it's going to be a great way to do some functional testing of the websites I work on.

Finally I attended Abuse Perl which showed a few ways to inject your code into code that you're trying to debug without touching the original code.

Monday night was Game Night and we had a great time playing pool, air hockey, and all sorts of video games.

All in all, a pretty good time.