kentcowgill.org/blog

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 Even though at this point it's completely out of date.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.

So, I'm sitting here in the lobby for one of the dorms at the University of Houston.

I arrived around 1:30pm or so, got my luggage, arranged for a shuttle, but had no idea of the address. So I had to find the University of Houston on a map to try to figure out an address to tell the shuttle company.

Finally arrived on campus, but the shuttle van just dropped me off by the front of the University. Oh, and it was raining.

Wandered around a bit, got my bearing, checked a campus map or two, found the building I'm supposed to check in at, checked in, get to my cell - wait, I mean drom room - unpack, and then I'm bored.

No ethernet cable, so I figured I'd go back to the main lobby of the other dorm building, and meet R. Geoffrey Avery.

Not much else to do since there's just the two of us, and he's busy downloading Apple's Developer Tools.

So, I'm officially an old codger now.

I busted a bunch of kids a few nights ago for hanging out way after curfew, way after the park was closed, and sounding like they were causing trouble.

It started simply enough - I was walking Spike at the end of the night. I got in late after the Perl Mongers meeting, so I was out at around 1:00am - right as the timed park lights shut off. I get to the park, I see a few kids walking towards me. Sorta. Seeing kids at night generally puts me a bit on the defensive - who knows what kind of dumb things get into kids' heads at night, so I proceeded cautiously until I saw that they weren't walking directly towards me any more. They were walking toward the now very poorly lit playground.

Spike does his business, I get busy bagging it. All the sudden I hear something behind me - it's a third kid. As I stand up and turn around, I realize he's just shuffling his way towards the same poorly lit playground. Ugh. I guess I was young once, so I understand.

However, at this point I no longer feel like it's a good idea to walk around the far side of the park, since I now know there are at least three kids most likely up to no good. So I turn back, walking slowly, making sure Spike has everything out of his system that he needs to get out. I keep an eye towards the playground, just in case anyone comes charging towards me. I see a few more than three silhouettes.

Then I hear noises which make me think someone has decided to empty the garbage cans by the playground and generally start vandalizing the playground. My mind is made up - I'm calling the cops. I have enough of a problem as it is walking Spike around the park because there tends to be broken bottles on the sidewalks. Not a big deal for me with my shoes, but poor Spike has no such protection.

I decided to test the timeliness of the cops' response - turns out it was pretty good. I decided I'd just walk back and forth on the far side of the park, but across the street. Not more than 5-7 minutes and I see the comforting blue and white cruising slowly past the park. They turn on the search light. Once the cops zeroed in on where the kids were all laying down (by now, they were trying to hide), they started to run. There must have been at least 15.

They made a beeline for the houses under construction across the street - the police tried to speed around the side of the park I was standing on to try to intercept the kids. Also I noticed another patrol car gunning it up the alley behind the houses the kids ran towards. A few minutes pass, the cops couldn't find them, but I watched them slowly walk out of the alley the cop car had zoomed up - they must have been hiding pretty good and let the alley cop pass them. I watched where they went. I was about to head home when the patrol car came by again, this time with his lights off. Good strategy, but it didn't pay off for him. I was going to flag him down to tell him which way they ran, but he turned up that street anyhow.

Again I started walking towards home, but then the cop made another pass. This time, determined to get some of those little stinkers in trouble, I flagged the cop down and told them where they went. I think he determined they had already completely dispersed, so he pulled away in the other direction.

No sooner than the cop is 15-20 feet away from me, and one of the little stinkers hurled a rock at me.

A rock.

A ROCK.

AT ME.

I heard it tear through some leaves, heard it bounce on the ground.

"OFFICER!"

He executes a quick 3 point turn, guns it towards me, stops long enough to hear me report the attempted assault, and he takes off after 'em.

VERY NEARLY A BOULDER.

At this point, I've had enough. It's 1:30am, the cop can't be watching everything, and the kids might come down another street and attempt to inflict more damage to me for calling the cops on them.

I walked back to my house, keeping an eye behind me, down the side streets, down the alley. I'm pretty sure they couldn't have been around to watch me go into my house. After all, they seemed to live in the other direction, and they have to worry about being spotted by a cop.

So what does this mean?

I might as well sit on my porch and yell at kids to get off my lawn and turn down the music.

Oh. I've already yelled out the door at people in cars with their music too loud.

:(

I've been tasked with setting up new QA and staging environments at work.

With a twist.

We have several teams working on several sections of our main website. One team migrates code from development to production on a regular basis. I believe I have mentioned this before. In case I haven't, they push files several times an hour. I honestly think they use the production cluster as their QA environment, but that's the subject of another rant.

Also, we are making fairly large changes to our backend. The front-end changes for the backend changes are to initially be carried out on this new QA server.

Do you see the problem?

While developer A makes changes on QA, they don't get reflected on dev, staging, or production.

Developer B makes changes on dev, and they go straight to production. QA and staging fall out of sync.

Hence the suboptimal code migration path:

Life would be much better if we just started using version control. :(