Just A Summary

I just got mail to let me know that my copies of Perl Best Practices and Perl Testing: A Developer’s Notebook are in the post. Yay!

Best Practices runs to 500+ pages, so there’s unlikely to be a review up here really quickly, but I just thought I’d give you a heads up. If it’s anywhere near as good as Damian’s last book¹ it’ll be essential.

The testing book should be good too, but I would say that, if only because one of the authors, chromatic, is my editor at perl.com. That might get read and reviewed faster; it’s a good deal shorter.

I’m off to Glasgow and the World SF Convention for a couple of days, so unless there’s wireless goodness, don’t expect any posts ‘til at least next Monday.

Enjoy your weekend.

¹ Object Oriented Perl

I can’t remember when Adam Turoff pointed me at Ruby On Rails, but I’m still grateful. Blame Adam for the fact that this weblog is no longer running on Movable Type, but on Typo. My initial plan was to roll my own blogging software on top of Rails, but by the time I got my act together it just made sense to grab an existing package and extend it as required.

I first heard about Ruby when I read Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas’s excellent book The Pragmatic Programmer. I thought, “that looks interesting”, so I read the first edition of Programming Ruby aka the Pickaxe Book, learned the syntax and some of the idioms and then sort of forget about it. As a programming language Ruby pushes a lot of my buttons: it has closures, objects all the way down, dynamic typing and its refreshingly concise. However, I never quite got round to writing anything in it (not the language’s fault, I wasn’t writing anything in anything at the time).

Then along came Ruby on Rails and it’s lovely. I saw the first version of the Rails Video and it knocked me out. Rails does so much right. Here was a web development tool that did most of the heavy lifting for you, and makes it easy to do things Right. David Heinemeier Hansson was obviously getting a great deal of leverage from Ruby’s dynamic nature and I wanted some of that.

However, I found that Ruby had moved on since I skimmed the first Pickaxe so I got hold of a copy of the second edition of Programming Ruby. What a cracking book it is. My personal benchmark of quality when it comes to a language reference is the first edition of Programming Perl which, as well as being a language reference was an introduction to a programming ethos. Whilst I don’t think the Pickaxe is quite that good, it’s definitely up there. The chapter on ‘Duck Typing’, for instance, is wonderful. It’s a well made argument for dynamic typing and it deserves to be widely read. I sometimes think that there are two sorts of programmers in the world, those who think typed values are essential, and those who think typed variables are essential. I’m definitely a typed values kind of guy. Typed variables have their place, but that place is in the optimization toolbox next to the profiler.

Ruby’s a great language. I don’t think it’ll ever be my primary language—I still have high hopes for Perl 6, which will have all the things I like about Ruby whilst addressing some of the things about it that make me uncomfortable. But in the unlikely event that Perl 6 crashes and burns, Perl 5 finally has a competitor that I enjoy using if only because I’m sick of typing:

sub foo {
  my $self = shift;
  my($arg1, $arg2) = @_;

at the start of every method.

def foo(arg1, arg2)

is just so much shorter. And until I can do

method foo($arg1, $arg2) {

Ruby will entice me. Maybe I should just get Emacs to fill in the Perl 5 boiler plate…

Ooh look. Google ads. The mercenary git. Next thing you know he’ll be doctoring the RSS feeds so they don’t carry whole articles.

So, I just read the latest phishing attempt. Someone purporting to be Paypal tells me that someone else has sent me £12. Which would be lovely, if true.

However, a cursory inspection of the HTML source shows that it’s a scam site. Lovely.

Interestingly, the mail refers to images served by Paypal. If I were paypal, or any of the other online money handlers come to that, I’d be seriously considering tweaking my image servers to return “The page you are currently looking at is probably a scam” type images to any request that doesn’t come with the appropriate referer and/or cookie. Sure, it uses up processor cycles, but I’m guessing that processor cycles are cheaper than fraud.

Just a thought.

Remind me. How long has Nina Simone been dead?

Long enough for the advertisers to start dancing on her grave apparently. At the moment there’s a Muller Lite advert on heavy rotation that uses I Aint Got No – I Got Life. Except, as is the common operating practice of advertisers, they’ve taken a part of the song and farmed it out for a cover version with – god help us – whistling, and all the ‘crunchiness’ removed.

Now, when a living artist takes the avertising dollar and, in the immortal words of Bill Hicks, starts “sucking Satan’s penis” it’s distressing but, hey, at least it’s the artist’s choice. But waving the fecal wand of muzak over someone’s work once they’re safely dead is, extending Bill’s metaphor somewhat, akin to inviting Satan to sodomise the corpse.

Ahem.

You know what I really hate? The fact that even after the song’s been fucked about with by the ‘creatives’ the tune still hits the spot.

Do your ears a favour, seek out the real thing. Accept no substitutes.

So, in my quest to get Amazon links working I’ve been spending time hanging out on the #rubyonrails irc channel asking dumb questions and generally liking the place, when someone¹ asked “Are you the famous Perl Programmer, Piers Cawley?”

What’s the right answer? Sadly, I wasn’t shameless enough to simply answer “Yes.”

Coincidence is good isn’t it? A couple of hours earlier, I’d been reading Mary Branscombe on the talk Danny O’Brien gave at this year’s OpenTech about ‘geek micro celebrity’ or some such topic. How very odd.

¹ I don’t log my IRC, so I can’t remember who. Sorry.

After much poring over The Truck Wheels pdf¹ and the Pickaxe book, accompanied by a certain amount of waving of dead chickens², I’m pleased to direct your attention to the sidebar where you will find a selection of relevant links to Amazon. If your interest is piqued, maybe you’d like to toddle over there and spend your hard earned cash on these and other fine books, enabling me to live in the lap of luxury on kickbacks from everyone’s favourite book pimp.

In the future I hope to have slightly prettier links, but I’m still finding my way around the code, and Amazon Web Services, and…

Still, I’m pleased with it so far.

¹ The Pragmatic Programmers are fine people. Rails is a well thought out and documented framework. However, I’m really struggling to come up with a pithy description of the picture on the cover of Agile Web Development with Rails. So, do I lack the word power or have Dave and David dropped the ball on cover design?

² No goats or virgins were harmed in the making of the sidebar. I think it’s important that you know that. Besides, this is Gateshead, where am I going to find a Virgin?

So, typo, the tool this runs on is undergoing some major (and good) changes. The only catch is, my deployment script consists of ‘doing it by hand and forgetting stuff’, which isn’t ideal.

Hopefully, next time there’s a change I’ll have a sensible deployment scheme in place (it won’t have to be very sensible to be more sensible than the one I have at the moment).

I remember, from about the age of 9, setting out from our tall Georgian terraced house with the green door and the brass lion knocker to walk the mile or so to choir practice. Through the park in the middle of the square, past the Gaumont Cinema (the last of its chain to bear the name—it became the Odeon only when the headed paper ran out) and on down Hall Gate past Barker & Wigfall with its bewildering window display of bicycles, televisions and furniture. Past the godawful concrete arcade that still contained the Pilgrim Bookshop, Doncaster’s only specialist bookshop. Past the Odeon arcade and right into Silver Street passing the High Class Butchers and Dad’s tailor, then through Bowers Fold, the little pedestrianized snicket that leads through to the market place with a little toy shop in the middle.

It’s two in the morning, I can’t sleep and someone’s attempting to commit an outrage upon my ears. According to the BBC’s website, I have been watching

Myth and Music

Open University. Composer Judith Weir explains why she wrote a series of works based on Scottish folktales about people who have disappeared mysteriously.

Which sounds like it might be interesting. And it is interesting—people slow down to look at traffic accidents don’t they?