Dave's Articles and Stuff

perl hacks: Yet More Modern Perl in Linux Format

2012-01-30T14:37:11Z

Over the weekend the postman bought me my subscribption copy of Linux Format issue 155. This contains the third (and final) part of my Modern Perl tutorial. In this part we’re adding features to the Dancer web application that we started in issue 153.

This series has concentrated on web applications (with Dancer) and database access (with DBIx::Class). I’ve already got provisional agreement for another short series later in the year – where I plan to cover OO programming using Moose.

The new issue will be in the shops later this week.

davblog: Week Notes 3

2012-01-22T08:49:15Z

Finally I actually managed to write a blog post that wasn’t week notes. That may well be my biggest achievement of the week.

Health

Still hobbling around in a cast and on crutches. Getting a bit better at it, but my upper body strength is still almost non-existent so I’m not going very far.

I went back to the hospital on Friday. On my previous visit it took about three hours. This time I did pretty much the same things and it took about half an hour. The doctor says everything seems to be going ok. They don’t want to see me for another four weeks. At that point they hope to remove the cast and replace it with a plastic boot.

Speaking and Training

Not much going on here. Still slowly building up to the courses I’ll be running at the end of February – which it now looks like I’ll be running with a plastic boot on, so there will probably be a fair bit of sitting down involved.

A couple of enquiries came in for training sessions later in the year. Looks like it could be a good year for my training business.

General Business Stuff

I host most of my domains on servers rented from 1 and 1. They’re not the best option by some distance, but they’re really cheap. At the end of last year I noticed that they had servers available running Centos 6. I rented a new server and have been slowly moving my domains over. This is a long and rather dull process. But I expect to be finished by next weekend.

Gigs

Anther gig that I couldn’t get to this week. This time it was Ed Sheeran at the Brixton Academy. Put the ticket on Gumtree and within hours I had a huge number of replies. Guess I set the price too low.

TV Highlights

Sherlock, of course. For the record, here’s my theory.

Moriarty had a Sherlock mask that he used when he kidnapped the children (which is why the young girl screamed when she saw Sherlock). Sherlock jumped into the back of the lorry that we saw, but at the same time threw off Moriarty’s body with the mask on. The cyclist that bumped into Watson also gave him a quick squirt of the H.O.U.N.D. gas so he saw what he feared most. Molly arranged to have the body collected and misindentified as Sherlock.

Of course, this is just a synthesis of many theories that have been going round on the web this week. And Stephen Moffat says there’s a clue that no-one has spotted.

Finished series two of Lost on DVD and made a start on series three. And we’ve started to watch Mad Men against from the start. Hope to watched it all before series five starts in April.

Hmm… doesn’t sound like I’ve achieved that much this week. But that’s probably an accurate reflection of how I feel.

davblog: Nadine Dorries: Just Say No

2012-01-20T14:32:57Z

Today was the day that parliament had a rather long list of private members bills to debate. Originally there were sixty-four on the list. As this informative post from Kerry McCarthy tells us, they’d normally expect to get through about three of them. The MPs sponsoring the rest of the bills were pretty much wasting their time.

Number eight on the original list was Nadine Dorries bill to teach girls between 13 and 16 how to say no to sex. The Guardian’s headline was MPs to debate sexual abstinence lessons bill, which was slightly disingenuous as the chance of the debate reaching that far down the list was tiny.

But this morning, when the order of business for today in parliament was published Dorries bill was missing from the list. Everyone assumed that Dorries was responsible for this removal. As a spokeswoman for the Commons information office told the Guardian “No one would be able to remove a private members’ bill without the permission of a member”. The assumption seemed to be that Dorries had realised the futility of being so far down the list and had removed the bill. She wouldn’t have been the only one – the published list only contains forty-nine of the expected sixty-four bills.

At lunchtime, things got even more interesting. A new Twitter account called @NadineDorriesMP appeared with this tweet (in reply to a joke by John Prescott):

@johnprescott My bill has not ‘jumped off at Edge Hill’ if you care to read the order paper, it’s number eight on the list!!

Something about this timeline didn’t seem right to me. That tweet was posted at 12:47, which is almost two hours since I first saw the order of business without her bill. I assume the order of business was published some time earlier. The first hint I had that the bill had been withdrawn was this blog post by Kerry McCarthy which was published just after 10am.

On the basis that the real Nadine Dorries would have known by 12:47 that her bill was not on the order paper, I called the new Twitter account as a fake. But it seems I was wrong. People like Iain Dale confirmed that it really was her (and, yes, this is one of the few things I’d trust Iain Dale on).

All of which leaves us with a bit of a mystery. Either Dorries withdrew her bill or she didn’t. If she did then the first tweet on her new Twitter account is a complete lie. If she didn’t then we need to ask who did withdraw her bill – given that it’s only her who is supposed to be able to do that.

And even if someone else managed to withdraw her bill without her knowledge, something still doesn’t ring true. If she was expecting to debate her bill (no matter how tiny the chance) then surely she would have been hanging around in parliament all morning and I can’t believe that she didn’t see the order paper and notice her bill was missing. Or that one of her friends saw that it was missing and asked her what happened.

All in all I find it incredible that she could have got to 12:47 without knowing that her bill was not on the list. So how do you explain that tweet?

This is, I think, the third time that Dorries has joined Twitter. And with her first tweet she has already started people thinking that this time is going to be no different to the previous occasions. She will be ineptly trying to use it to promote her strange view of the world. And she will quickly make herself a laughing stock once more.

Update: At 16:37 this afternoon, @NadineDorriesMP tweeted the following:

Just to make it absolutely clear and leave no doubt whatsoever, my Bill was NOT withdrawn

Curiouser and curiouser. So, now we are left with two questions. 1/ Why wasn’t Dorries’ bill on the order paper? And 2/ At what point did she realise it wasn’t on the order paper?

Update 2: Welshracer may have got to the heart of the matter here. He points out what it says on the official parliamentary web page for Dorries’ bill.

The Bill was not printed and so was not moved for debate on 20 January 2012.

What do we make of this? One interpretation would be that Dorries didn’t withdraw the bill for debate, but that someone in her office forgot to get the bill printed so that it could be included in the debate.

But even in those circumstances you’d think that she’d get a phone call from the people who were planning the day’s business telling her what had (or hadn’t) happened. I still can’t believe that she didn’t know the bill wasn’t on the order paper when she sent her first tweet at quarter to one.

Update 3: Couple more pieces of information came in overnight.

Firstly, it seems that the new @NadineDorriesMP Twitter account was set up two weeks ago. It seems she resisted using it until goaded into it by John Prescott yesterday.

Secondly, the Independent managed to speak to Dorries about this confusion. She says:

The Bill is still live, but there was more chance of being struck by a meteor than getting it debated, so we told the Commons office not to bother printing a hard copy. What I didn’t realise was that if you don’t order it to be printed, it automatically comes off the agenda.

Of course I wouldn’t withdraw it … a lot of people had paid train fares to come and protest. It would have been churlish.

So we finally have the truth (or, at least, Dorries’ version of it). She knew it wouldn’t be debated so she decided not to have the bill printed. She didn’t know that would automatically remove it from the order paper. She didn’t withdraw the bill out of respect for the people who were coming to protest against it.

It’s also not clear to me in what sense the bill is still live. This was the final opportunity to debate private members bills before the end of this parliamentary session. Any unfinished business from this parliamentary session doesn’t get passed on to the next one, so anything that wasn’t approved is, as far as I can see, effectively dead.

You couldn’t make this up!

davblog: Week Notes 2

2012-01-15T11:32:06Z

When I said I was going to experiment with week notes on this blog, I didn’t intend that the blog would only consist of week notes. But as we’ll see below, other things have been taking my attention this week and I haven’t felt much like blogging. Hopefully normal service will resume very soon.

Health

This is the big one. A few hours after posting my last week notes I slipped down a small flight of stairs in my house and fell badly. Something went ping in my ankle and it hurt like hell. I shuffled onto my bed where I lay for twenty minutes or so before deciding it wasn’t getting any better and I should probably take myself to A&E.

Four or five hours later I left A&E with a diagnosis of a spiral fracture in my fibula, a temporary cast, crutches and an appointment to go to the fracture clinic on Friday.

I spent the week hobbling about the house on crutches and went back to the hospital on Friday. They replaced the temporary cast with a more permanent one in sexy black fibreglass which I’ll be sporting for the next five weeks or so. They also took another x-ray and confirmed that although there’s definitely a fracture, everything is still in the right place so there’s no need for surgery, pins of any of that nonsense.

Going back to see them again next Friday.

Speaking and Training

The downside of having your leg in a cast is the doctors don’t like you flying – the pressure in the cabin can lead to blood clots. So I’ve had to postpone the trip to Romania. It hasn’t been rescheduled yet, but I hope to get there later in the year.

Counting the weeks, it looks like the cast will be coming off just before my other currently scheduled classes – the public courses for FlossUK and O’Reilly at the end of February. If I don’t heal on schedule then I expect I’ll be giving the classes sitting down.

Incidentally, those lovely people at O’Reilly have arranged to give away one free ticket to each of the two courses. Full details on how to enter are in an advert in the new issue of Linux Format. There are also runners-up prizes of copies of the new camel book.

Writing

Having spent the week sitting around at home, you’d think I would have had time to do plenty of writing. But, to be honest, I just haven’t been in the mood. The most I can report here is that I’ve got an agreement write four more articles for Linux Format over the next few months. I hope to finish the first of these (which isn’t about Perl!) today.

Reading

I have at least managed some reading. I’ve picked up Bruce Tate’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks which I started reading in August but never quite got to the end of. And I’ve started reading Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes because I can see myself getting deeper and deeper into WordPress this year.

Gigs

I had a ticket to see Ani DiFranco at the Union Chapel on Tuesday. But my limited mobility mean that I couldn’t get there. I sold my ticket to the very lovely (and talented) Kal Lavelle. Luckily there are lots of videos of the gig on YouTube so I’ve been able to at least see some of the show.

Film

I had a ticket to see The Iron Lady last Sunday afternoon, but I was in A&E at the time. Later in the week I finally got to see In Bruges, which I’ve been planning to watch for ages. Oh, and one morning when I was sitting on the sofa feeling a bit sorry for myself I watched Sixteen Candles. Can’t beat a bit of Molly Ringwald to cheer youself up.

Sherlock was another ninety minutes of delight, of course. And I was pleased to see that The Good Wife returned to More 4. VirginMedia have half of the fourth series of Big Bang Theory on their video on demand service, so I’ve worked through that and am waiting for them to add the rest. We’re working our way through a DVD boxset of Lost – we’re currently close to the end of series two.

But the big surprise has been American Horror Story. We’ve watched all of the first series. Sure, it’s a clichéd in places, but part of the fun is spotting all the references to horror films. We love it.

davblog: Week Notes

2012-01-08T08:29:33Z

A new experiment on the blog this year. I’m planning to write a weekly report on what I’ve been doing. No idea how useful or interesting it will be or how long I’ll feel like keeping it going. So here’s what I did this week.

Speaking and Training

Didn’t give any talks this week, but there are a couple of things in the pipeline. I’m running four days of public Perl training courses in London at the end of next month and I’m starting to get into the marketing for that. O’Reilly have offered two free places on these courses as prizes for a competition that has been advertised in Linux Format.

As part of my marketing campaign I’ve been working on a new web site about my training business. Currently I’m working on the content. The look will come later.

Probably the most exciting thing to happen in this area is that I’ve been invited to give a talk about Perl in Transylvania. I’ve been doing some work with some Romanian Perl programmers and they’ve asked me to go over and talk to their new Perl Mongers group in Cluj. I’m going over for a couple of days at the start of February.

Programming

Over the last few months, Linux Format have been publishing a series of articles I’ve written about Modern Perl. The third and final article in the series will be published next month. The articles are about writing a web application to track a reading list. This was to replace a bodged together system or Perl programs that I’ve been using to track my reading for the last few years. This week I finally put the replacement system live at books.dave.org.uk. If you’re interested, the code is on GitHub. At some point I should probably write an article about it on my Perl blog.

General Business Stuff

About a month ago I realised that I was tired of dealing with Nat West for my business banking. It seemed that they made everything far more complex than it needed to be. I asked for advice on Twitter and most people seemed to recommend using HSBC instead. So I applied for an account with them through their web site.

Well, it wasn’t anywhere near as easy as it could have been, but last Saturday I finally opened my new business account. With a new bank account and a new accountant a few months ago it really feels like the business has started a new era.

People ask why I carried on with the HSBC application when it was all so painful. That’s because I still think they’re more efficient than Nat West were. It crystallised for me when I was thinking about the computer systems that they use. In recent months I’ve spent far too much time in Nat West branches watching the screen as an assistant tries to sort out a problem. Their internal systems are all running on what seems to be CICS-based software from the 1980s. When I was watching the chap opening my account in HSBC last weekend it looked like they were running an old version of Windows from the 1990s.

So HSBC’s software seems to be about a decade more up to date than Nat West’s. But still twenty years behind the rest of the world. Surely banking doesn’t need to be so tortuous?

House Stuff

I spent a lot of last week finishing a decluttering exercise that I started after Christmas. I’ve shredded a huge mountain of old paperwork and for the first time ever I have every piece of paper in my study filed in the right place.

Our back garden backs onto a railway embankment and there are a lot of trees there. So we get a lot of leaves covering the back garden. Yesterday I went out and swept up several months worth of fallen leaves. One of the tree has nasty small leaves which get through the grills over drains and block them. So I lifted a lot of drain covers and pulled out a lot of muddy leaves. It wasn’t fun.

TV Highlights

I’ve been watching a lot of TV. The new series of Sherlock was an obvious highlight. But I’m also enjoying the Sky version of Treasure Island and the BBC’s Public Enemies. One thing I didn’t enjoy was Eternal Law. Despite being written by the same people as Life on Mars, the premise of lawyer angels proved to be just as silly as it sounds.

Health

The scales just told me that I’m almost three pounds lighter than I was a week ago.

perl hacks: Free Training Competition in Linux Format

2012-01-06T15:03:22Z

I’ve mentioned before that I’m running some public training courses in London next month. But how do you fancy coming along to those courses for free?

Those lovely people at O’Reilly have put an advert for the courses in the new issue of Linux Format which hits the shops about now. That’s issue 154 and the advert is on page 54. The advert contains details of a competition where two people can win free places on the two courses – one person on each course.

There are also four runner-up prizes which are copies of the new edition of the Camel book.

All you need to do is… well to find that out you’ll need to buy the magazine. Ok, so entry isn’t 100% free – you’ll need to pay £6.49 for the magazine.

perl hacks: The Perl Community – A Modest Proposal

2012-01-04T09:48:29Z

Here’s a video of the lightning talk that I gave at the London Perl Workshop in November last year.

This video (along with many other videos from the workshop) is also available at Presenting Perl.

davblog: Review of 2011: Favourite Posts

2012-01-02T06:37:33Z

And here’s the second post in my review of 2011. This is a list of my favourite posts from the year. In 2010 I said it was harder to choose posts from that year as I had blogged less than in previous years. Well, I actually blogged even less in 2011 so it was even harder this year.

As usual I’ve tried to pick one post from each month, but because of the scarcity of posts I’ve had to bend the rules at times. Usually I don’t include posts that have already been mentioned in the list of most popular posts, but that has proved impossible this year so there is a small amount of repetition.

Boothill Foot-Tappers. The Boothill Foot-Tappers were one of my favourite band from twenty-five years ago. I thought I’d never see them play again, so it was great that they got together for a one-off reunion gig.
Leaving LoveFilm. I cancelled my LoveFilm subscription early in the year. This post explained why.
Genealogy Primer. A friend on Facebook asked for help starting his family tree. I wrote a quick braindump in reply. Later I thought that other people might find it useful so I turned it into a blog post.
Daily Mail on Google and Adele. One of the most ridiculous articles ever from the Daily Mail, debunked easily with the aid of Google.
Watching the Press – Notes. In May I gave a talk at Opentech about the nonsense published by the British tabloid press and how a group of us try to bring this to the public’s attention by blogging about it. This post contains the notes from that talk.
Free Web Advice: TalkTalk. TalkTalk really annoyed me by phoning me despite my phone number being registered with the TPS. They then annoyed me even more by making it next to impossible to discuss the matter with them. This post enumerated the many ways that their web site made this hard. I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I finally just gave up.
Reading the News. A post about how I read the news these days and why a Kindle subscription to a newspaper doesn’t really fit into my life.
Hating Gnome 3. My favourite Linux distribution switched its default interface to Gnome 3. This made me very sad.
The Birth of a Meme. Some people writing in the Daily Mail claimed that the BBC had banned the use of the terms BC and AD and had forced broadcasters into using BCE and CE instead. This was completely untrue but that didn’t stop it repeated all over the media. Even now I suspect that a large proportion of the public think that it’s true.
Dorries on Humanism. Nadine Dorries was nominated for the New Humanist’s annual Bad Faith Award. She responded with a trademark closely-argued explanation of why Humanism is an extreme belief that no-one should admit to holding. Her reasoning obviously impressed New Humanist’s readers as she went on to win by a huge majority.
Winterval. More nonsense from the Daily Mail. But this time they’re admitting that it’s nonsense. When they started to publish a “Corrections and Clarifications” column I don’t think that anyone would have predicted that it would be used to undermine their core beliefs so quickly.
The War on Christmas Cards. Another Mail article to close with. They claimed that there was an atheist plot to keep religious Christmas cards out of the shops. They also complained about the increased numbers of “obscene” cards – whilst, in another article, praising the work of Donald Gill from a hundred years ago.

It was only while writing this review that I noticed that four of these twelve articles are about the Daily Mail. Looks like the blog might, finally, be developing a theme.

Last year was my lightest year for blogging. In fact every year has seen fewer post since I joined Twitter. Tweets are, of course, far less effort than blog posts. But nevertheless I shall, once again, endeavour to blog more often in 2012.

Thanks for reading in 2011.

perl hacks: Public Training Courses in February

2011-12-20T14:08:11Z

I’ll be running some public training courses in London in February. There will be two two-day courses (which include practical sessions). The intermediate course will be on Feb 21/22 and the advanced course will be running on Feb 23/24. The courses will be held at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square.

For more details (including the syllabus and prices) please see my training page.

There are plenty of unfilled Perl jobs in London currently. I’m constantly getting recruiters phoning or emailing me asking for help finding suitable candidates. If you’ve done a bit of Perl in the past, but left it for other technologies, now would be a good time to rekindle your interest and these would be good courses to take (but, of course, I would say that, wouldn’t I!)

perl hacks: More Modern Perl in Linux Format

2011-12-04T10:24:13Z

Yesterday’s post bought my subscription copy of Linux Format issue 153. This issue contains the second article in my short series about Modern Perl. In this article we take the simple DBIx::Class application that we wrote last time and put a web front end on it using Dancer.

Over the next few days I’ll be writing the third (and final) article in the series. This will involve adding more features to the web app.

If the series is successful (and please let LXF know if you liked it) then perhaps I’ll be asked back to write more next year.

LXF 153 should be appearing in all good newsagents next week.

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