Source Guru

So, for most of the last week, I’ve been at EuroPython 2009. The conference was amazing, even if I am still completely shattered.

A lot of people who know me have asked why I went to EuroPython. I know at least one person made the comment “But you’re a PHP Hacker (hiss)”. Yes. I’m a PHP hacker by trade, but I’ve been trying to teach myself Python over the last few months, and I’ve really been enjoying it. I’ve not done much of great interest, but I’ve found that Django is a pretty awesome tool, and lets me build stuff like my Video Site with minimal effort.

Anyway, back to the conference. I got involved pretty simply because I’m a local, and know most of the organisers from my Local LUG. I’m glad I did get involved in it though. I enjoyed it (though, until I got home from it, I hadn’t had time to realise I’d enjoyed it!).

Day 1

I arrived at the conservatoire at about 7:30 am. I was half asleep, and didn’t really know what was going on. I found the registration desk, got my badge, and buggered off to the crew room to get changed into my lovely blue shirt, and then I started off helping set some stuff up (projectors and such)

Knowing that I’d previously lost my Bank Card, and that I’d need cash, I scarpered pretty quickly to the bank, to go get some money for the week. I headed back to the conference for about 10, and then wandered aimlessly around looking at the different stalls. I hadn’t volunteered to do anything till 11:30.

At about 11:15, I headed to the Adrian Boult hall to get ready and Mic up the first speaker I had to work with. This was Simon Willison, talking about CrowdSourcing with Django. A pretty cool talk, which was kind of interesting to me after listening to Matthew Somerville’s talk at my local LUG the month before.

Next up was the talk that had been advertised in all the toilets around the venue. I’ve no idea why it was advertised in the toilets, and I didn’t really watch that much of the talk. The speaker had wanted a screen with IRC in for the talk, and this was where the first major fail came in. Chris Swift’s laptop didn’t like the projector, so I had to dash up and replace it with mine. Unfortunately, for some reason, my laptop didn’t want to work with the projector under Ubuntu, but happily worked with it under vista, so I loaded that up, loaded up putty, and SSH’d into my irssi session. Anyone who saw this will probably agree that I need to be in less IRC channels!

Lunchtime next. I quickly ran off to McDonalds to grab some food (not wanting to have to stand in the long queue!) and headed back to set my laptop up with the projector for the big Twitter screen, which people seemed to enjoy (espescially Fiona!).

After lunch was the first Keynote from Cory Doctorow, who I’ve already mentioned before, is one of my favourite authors. Cory managed to give us a dark perspective on where life in the digital age could be going, and a rallying cry for us to fight against that (though surely,this is reminiscent of M1k3y?? I wonder if the DHS will be after Cory now!). I also managed to snag a copy of “Little Brother”, which Cory asked that we email a copy of the ebook to people after we’d read it. I’ll one up that, and tell you that you should go read it (espescially if you saw his talk!) If you want to be emailed a copy, please leave a comment and I’ll add you to the list I’ll be sending it to!

It was about this point that I started wanting to get onto IRC and chat to people. Unfortunately, my laptop is a right dodgy thing, and doesn’t like using wireless of any kind. Luckily, I had my E71 to hand, and so managed to get online with that (and it shocked me how easy it was to set up in Ubuntu). I ended up using this as my primary means to access the net throughout the conference. I just wish I’d had my E71 Desktop Charger with me, as I’d then have been able to charge my phone via USB at the same time! Unfortunately, it meant that I had to spend my time at the hotel flicking and changing between the charger for my phone and my laptop to try and keep them both going (why a hotel room only has one plug socket, I don’t know!)

Next up was “Mashing up the Guardian” and “Flickr for Formulas”. .. the second talk I don’t actually remember any of. But the first one was pretty interesting. I thought during it “Oh, I could link that up to twitter and generate a personal news feed based upon what they were twittering about. Unfortunately, the last few slides was showing someone who’d done exactly that. I guess my ideas aren’t that original!

Off to the Australian bar for the social, where I got rather tipsy, and chatted to some very cool people (thanks for the link to the Biltong seller Brad!)

Day 2

Bruce Eckel started the day off with the keynote. I was half asleep during this, having been out for most of the day, but I do remember that there were some pretty amusing pictures, and some good commentary. I also enjoyed the talk about unconferences, which led me to thoughts about possibly doing something similar for FizzPOP.

The day dwindled away with me running round until Bea’s talk “We need to fail, and we need to fail fast” – a very good insight into Agile Methodology (some of which we should probably adopt at work!). First barefoot presentation I’ve seen. Bea’s a very good speaker though, you can tell she has a lot of passion about what she’s talking about.

Next was a caged deathmatch. I didn’t really know much about Unit Testing in Python, being a bit of a n00b and all, but the talk was interesting nontheless. Even if I did end up running up and down the stairs like a trained monkey (ah well, I needed the exercise anyway!)

Next Keynote: Bletchley Park. I found this talk had some interesting content, but it’s delivery was a bit dry.

Then it was time for the GPG Keysigning. I’d left my ID in the hotel. What an idiot!

Lightning talks were next, followed by another keynote, followed by a spectacular fail trying to get Guido up on the big screen (10 second delays, him not hearing anything, and then the laptop battery running out). Alex took it in his stride though, the bow with a flourish was certainly amusing!

Off to the conference dinner. Good food, good conversation, good talk.

Day 3

I’m surprised I made it in. I was tired. Too much running around.

Tobias started off the day with a short talk on OSS, BSS, and Python, and then I went to the “Clean Code Challenge” talk, which was interesting, though I’m not too sure about the actual coding bit of it. There were a few things in the talk that I wish has been delivered to my bosses, but I’m not too sure the example “Clean Code” that was meant to be pythonised was the best code to work with.

Another Keynote, lots more lightning talks, and then a prize draw. I didn’t win anything, but I enjoyed myself.

After that, there was a “secret” organisers meal at the Hyatt Hotel. Good food and good conversation again.

And that was it, I headed home, and slept for 16 hours!

Thanks to everyone who made EuroPython a success. All the organisers, all the speakers, and all the delegates.

Though hopefully more people will help out next time. I don’t think Ciaran got to sit down for more than 5 seconds during the day!

So, this morning (or yesterday morning, as it is now!), my attention got drawn to Wolfgang’s post regarding VB.Net. While I understand his point, I’m not too sure whether I agree with it in it’s entirity.

When I first started programming, I learnt how to write Basic. I don’t mean Basic as it stands nowadays, but Basic as it was back then (or should that be BASIC?). I learnt to code while I was wheelchair bound, as my father thought it’d be something interesting for me to do. It taught me the basics of programming, and I stemmed from there, moving on to learn Perl, then PHP, then C, etc etc etc.

The first time I ever wrote an application for a Modern computer, I wrote it in Visual Basic. I loved it. It was so simple to use, and I could use everything I’d learnt (apart from stuff like Music Envelopes etc etc) with ease in it.

Since then however, the world of programming has moved on. People have discovered Object Oriented programming, and found new and better ways of describing the data structures and logic behind an application. I have also moved on, I no longer write my own code in Visual Basic. I’ll generally use a tool more suited to the task.

I do, however, have to maintain some VB.Net code. In fact, it’s the code that Wolfgang mentions in his article. I can fully understand why the original subject’s response was “Urgh!” – the code is horrid.

I don’t neccesarily, however, think that this is because of the coders themselves. While this may have contributed (I’ve had many a “WTF” moment) – I think that the main problem behind it is the fact that it’s an Object Oriented design written in a language that’s tried to shoehorn Object Orientation into it’s core functionality, where the core functionality should probably never have had something like that done to it. It sits in my mind like some bad genetic experience resulting in some sort of mutated behemoth.

VB.Net, to me, just seems like a poorly made implementation of something it was never originally designed for. Wolfgang mentions that the ease of use of the Basic Language allows a user to start working without having to dive straight into OO programming, as would be forced onto you using something like C#, and in a way, I agree. The thing is, that Basic, as Wolfgang rightly said, is meant for beginners, after all, it was originally an acronym. “Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”. This, in my opinion, is where it should stay. Basic is great for beginners, and VB6 was amazing. But, the advent of VB.Net means that programmers are going to start writing OO code in Basic, something it was never designed for, and to that end, fall into pitfalls and misconceptions where they have been led to believe that the VB.Net way of doing something is the de-facto standard. When they come to start working in another language, they have to re-learn things from scratch. If their experience is in a corporate environment, then their skills are only transferrable to something also written in VB.Net, and rarely anything else.

Basic is for beginners, it was never designed for the more complex stuff, which should probably be left to languages that were designed to handle it.

So, fanatical readers of my blog (are there any?) may remember a long time back that I got bored and wrote a little script that amused me.

While testing something out yesterday, I needed to find a domain that I wasn’t using in production so I could test on it. I stumbled across Cheese Nibbles which had a lovely “We’ll be back with something cool soon” message on it.

So, I did my tests, and they worked. Everything’s good. I’d actually forgotten what was on Cheese Nibbles in the first place, so I started rooting round in the code. I found the old site, and I decided to resurrect it.

I posted in a couple of IRC channels, to see if other people found the site amusing, and got the following back in response

<Daviey> neat
<Daviey> Mez: rss feed needed
<Mez> Daviey: *chuckles*
<Mez> but then it’d be twitter
<Daviey> sure, but a shared account
<Daviey> Or.. make it twitter when changed

So, well, thanks to Dave Walker’s suggestion, I did a quick google, and within 6 minutes, had it working. You can find the twitter feed at http://twitter.com/cheesenibbles

Also, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with Zeth from my local LUG (and the tech, who shall remain anonymous, like “The Stig“) on a podcast, which we are, for now calling “The Podcast” (imaginative I know).

I was interviewed in the first podcast (which Zeth did alone, and I (apparently) provided the comedy element for) and presented with Zeth for the second one. Also, as the second one was recorded during the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam, of which I was running one of the venues, I actually allowed myself to be interviewed for it aswell. The podcast is very rough around the edges at the moment, and well, we haven’t got a website, or an RSS feed yet, but you can find the show notes here, and download the podcast episode in either MP3 Format, or OGG Format

All comments/thoughts/suggestions welcome!

A site I use quite regularly is Stack Overflow – a great, community driven site for programmers.

At this site, you get rep when you post good answers, or good questions, which are voted up by the others on the site.

Imagine my dismay, when, this morning, I tried to login using the normal URL that I use for OpenID logins, only to find that the URL that it is delegated to has changed.

“What does this mean?” I might hear you asking.

Well, it means that anyone who’s using Launchpad as their OpenID Provider (OP) doesn’t have their openID assosciated to them anymore. For me, this means I can no longer access my stackoverflow account and my reputation starts at 1 again.

*sigh* – while I can understand that LP’s OpenID implementation is still in Beta, I don’t expect changes that completely change the way the system works. It’s paramount to going through the system and changing everyone’s username….

I’m pretty annoyed at this, and have filed a bug about it.

Edit: It seems they’ve removed the delegation on the pages for users, and This is why it’s happening…

So, I’m sure most of you are aware of Facebook – if not, where have you been?

Anyway, I run a site that promotes local events and gigs for a specific group of people, and a lot of the work for the site is in keeping it up to date – going and grabbing the info from various different websites, and plonking it into the format that’s used by the website. (which could consume hours)

This morning I noticed that I kept getting invites to events on Facebook that I should be adding to the website. I also noticed that the emails I got from Facebook were all in the same form.

Regex anyone?

preg_match("/^Event: (.*)\n.*\"(.*)\"\nWhat: (.*)\nHost: (.*)\nStart Time: (.*)\nEnd Time: (.*)\nWhere: (.*)\n\nTo see more details and RSVP, follow the link below:\n(.*)\n/m", $email, $matches);

So, yup, that’s what I did – I poked it all through a script, registered a new Facebook account, and now – through the magic of Regular Expressions, when someone invites the special user to an event, it automatically gets added to the site (through a bit of PHP + procmail magic! (with sanity checks!))

It was certainly interesting to get going, and well, quite fun… but I feel a bit dirty doing it

Anyway, now all I need to do is create screen scrapers for the different websites that I get the gig listings from, and well, hopefully, then, I’ll be able to have everything automated!

If only…

Just a note – if you’ve sent me any important email in the last 24 hours, then please re-send. I’ve had to wipe my mailboxes due to a 10,000 strong backscatter of bounced email…

Some of you may know that I’m looking for a new job.

Well, anyway, I had a Phonecall from Kalamazoo Reynolds earlier, who, 3 questions into the interview asked.

“Do you smoke?”

“Yes”

“Ok, then please feel free to re-apply if you ever give up, we have a company policy in place that we do not employ smokers”

Is this legal?

Is less than a week away

So, yes, am on crew, and am also on the Speakers List as I’m organising the Keysigning Party.

If you’ve got the weekend spare – and can make it to Wolverhampton – why not come along and meet some of the wonderful people that are the LugRadio community. It’s only £5 on the door (which is entry for both days) and well – Just look at the schedule to see the kind of talks that are going on.

Plus, It’s also going to be the LAST EVER LugRadio – so it’s really your last chance to see, plus you’ll be participating in a historic moment in FLOSS history (just wish it was the start of something rather than the end!)

So obligatory LRL advertising post over – hope to see you there!

Yes, that toything. Hehe.

Ok, so after one of my Flatmates decided to tread on my wireless dongle (which I had trailing on a long USB cable down the stairs outside my room so I could actually pick up the signal!) and break it, I haven’t used my Desktop machine in a good few months. It was pretty much of a case of without internet access, it was pretty useless other than for watching DVDs on (which is when I’d boot it up) – so I used my eeePC instead.

Anyway, I went out and bought a nice new PCI Wireless card today – no chance of it being trodden on. And I got a nice one with 2 aerials, for connectivity purposes (and I can say – it’s boosted my signal from what was on average 15% on the wireless dongle to on average 65%!)

I’m happy and actually surprised that Ubuntu picked it up straight away, and even used the settings from my old Wireless dongle to connect straight away!

Anyway, after a while, I hardlocked…. I hate hardlocking… tis so annoying. So I rebooted into the Hardy Installer CD (This still has Gutsy on) and tried an install… Another hardlock…

Uh-Oh I thought …. and ran memtest86+ – no problems… Try again.. another hardlock.

Ok, reopen PC to see if wiggling the wires does something…. OW! I burnt my hand…

My PC was seriously overheating.. So – I had a look – MY PSU and CPU fans were clogged up with orange dust. :’( damnit.

So I took a walk down to Maplin and went and got myself some compressed air… Something I’d learnt from my IT Technician days was a godsend for cleaning CPU Fans.

Anyway, My PC is now sparkly and shiny inside, and on a plus, I’ve gotten rid of the annoying rattle it’s had for the past year… I thought it was the CD drive… as it would always stop when I whacked the CD drive (another trick I learnt as an IT Technician!)

So yeah – I’d suggest that any geek out there goes and invests in a can of compressed air (or ‘airduster‘ as it seems to be branded these days) – It is the magic computer fixing tool… if it can’t be fixed with compressed air, (and/or wiggling the cables) you might as well replace it – it’ll save you time and stop you banging your head against the wall

I just wish I’d thought and taken photos of how dusty it was (It was orange dust too – which was strange… I think the dust puppy’s are becoming Ubuntu themed)

(Click to View)