abstractwankery.com
taking it to the next level
Speaking at Frozen Perl 2010
Posted by Nick on 2010-02-06 at 3:43 PM
I just did my first talk -- ever -- at Frozen Perl 2010, on DBIx::Class in the Real World. Unfortunately, I realized after the talk was accepted just how much content I wanted to go over, so there's a lot of stuff left to talk about.

For those who were there, thank you for dealing with me, and here are the slides. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, and I'll try to help the best that I can.

For those who weren't there, carry on, there's nothing to see here.
Tags: perl dbix::class talk
0 comments
Things that are dumb: Android Emulator
Posted by Nick on 2009-11-06 at 5:35 PM
In today's episode of Things That Are Dumb:

I sat here fighting with the Android emulator, trying to get it to work in Snow Leopard. Every time I started it up, no matter if I started the Android 2.0 SDK or the 1.6 SDK, it would start, then force quit with a EXC_BAD_ACCESS error. Twenty minutes of this crap, no luck. I'm rebooting, moving things around, and finally pull everything from the machine.

It was my USB headset.

That's dumb.
Tags: android sdk dumb emulator
0 comments
Releasing Products
Posted by Nick on 2009-10-03 at 8:20 PM
It's such a rush to finally release a long-running project.

My primary full time work involves contracting to a large company in the healthcare field. After nearly twenty months of stop and start work, and then a few months of 100% work, we finally released a fully rewritten site this evening. Is it everything we wanted? No. Are there large pieces that I don't like about it? Sure.

Did we finally do it?

Yes.

Sweet.

(Yes, of course the site is written in Perl. We're using DBIx::Class, Template Toolkit and a custom mod_perl framework over Apache2 and MySQL.)
Tags: perl programming release
1 comment
Development on Maemo
Posted by Nick on 2009-09-28 at 12:29 PM
Is it just me, or is development on Maemo/Gnome 10x more annoying and difficult than Android or iPhone development? Seems you're stuck with C and GObject, and the scaffolding is terrible. I would like to think I can use Vala, but the bindings seem to be missing for Maemo 5, and there is always QT, but then you're just increasing the pain to C++.

Maybe I'm just turning into a lazy programmer, and feel that life is too short for C.

Maybe I just need to write some Objective-C bindings for Hildon.
Tags: programming mobile maemo linux hildon gnome
1 comment
Web Application Design Patterns
Posted by Nick on 2009-09-18 at 8:34 AM
I was speaking to a PHP developer recently on the architecture of their web applications, out of morbid curiosity. We were discussing templating systems, and found out that they created theirs in house. It was a coded document, with classes defined for each entity, and they'd load up an object with the proper properties, stream it out to the processor, and it would generate the page. They would then have the designers just write CSS to make the markup do what they wanted it to do.

I had never heard of this before, and to me, that sounds horrible. You have a huge cost for all of that object creation, and then you have to find a web developer who is willing to only use CSS.

Anyone else do something similar?
Tags: programming design php
1 comment
The greatest perl5 evangelism talk I've heard
Posted by Nick on 2009-09-15 at 7:19 AM
mst from Shadowcat Systems does a rant at the Nordic Perl Workshop about Perl5 and raising awareness. I'm not sure if I have the stamina to participate in the "Ironman" competition, but it certainly fires me up.
Tags: perl catalyst
1 comment
New design, new blog software
Posted by Nick on 2009-09-14 at 6:28 AM
Welcome to the first release of the Parchment Content Platform. It is not much right now, effectively a viewer for the entries on my old blog, but it is not bad for a few hours of work. I wanted a blog platform that I could run as a process through nginx, and I did not want to use WordPress.

Comments should be working, I would love to hear what you think.
3 comments
Lenovo, I love you.
Posted by Nick on 2009-07-30 at 9:42 AM
I just wanted to say that Lenovo is still one of the best computer manufacturers around today.

I know that the designs are polarizing, due to them looking virtually the same as they did years ago, but you cannot beat the performance for the money, the keyboard sent from heaven, or the customer service department that appears to bend over backwards to make sure you're happy.

This note comes kind of late, as it's been almost a month since my service call with them, but needless to say, I think I'm going to continue buying Lenovo products.
Tags: lenovo love letter
1 comment
More crappy IDEs
Posted by Nick on 2009-02-19 at 9:47 AM
Tried Bespin last night, a web-based IDE that seems to be geared toward web development.

The bad news? It's a web based IDE, and that isn't going to change.

The good news? It's still faster than Komodo.
1 comment
I hate you, Apple.
Posted by Nick on 2009-02-14 at 7:54 PM
So, I installed Apple's Security Update 2009-001 yesterday, and tried to work on one of my Catalyst sites tonight. I got this fantastic error:

IO object version 1.22 does not match bootstrap parameter 1.23 at /System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/XSLoader.pm line 94.


I head over to CPAN to update a few modules, and same error message with a stacktrace of doom. So, turns out, Apple distributed IO.bundle from way the hell back in 2005, which is what broke all of your other modules that you already updated if you use CPAN for anything at all. But hey, now CPAN is broken, so what now? You get to do a manual install, luckily, CPAN is an archive. Head over to the IO distribution over at CPAN, download the archive, and head into ye olde Terminal. Extract the archive if it hasn't already, enter the directory, and execute:
perl Makefile.PL && make && sudo make install


Ding, everything works again. Write an angry letter to Apple.

Edit: You may find more crap that doesn't work. For instance:

Weak references are not implemented in the version of perl at /Library/Perl/5.8.8/Catalyst.pm line 24


Well, just head into your now-functional CPAN and execute:

force install Scalar::Util


Bam, you made it spicy.
Tags: perl os x software update
3 comments