Re: from across the pond...
On 30 May 2014 10:33, Andrew Solomon and...@illywhacker.net wrote: Jeffrey Thalhammer's San Francisco PM talk on Pinto - something like git for CPAN repos: https://archive.org/download/jeffthalhammerivegot99problemsbutcpanaintone/thaljef.mp4 https://archive.org/download/jeffthalhammerivegot99problemsbutcpanaintone/thaljef.ogv We've been using pinto in anger for about 6 months now at work - been pretty happy with it :) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: PDF to CSV?
Hi David, http://search.cpan.org/~audreyt/Template-Extract-0.41/lib/Template/Extract.pm could work better for extracting formatted text like this maybe A
Re: London Perl Conference 2013 photos
I've also got some pics up at https://plus.google.com/photos/102381504977265553584/albums/5952417348817549217 (including some from the trip to and from LPW) - not as good as Chris's - again, mail me off list if you want your face (even more) pixelated/blurred for privacy :) A
I have a bikeshed, colour suggestions appreciated
So.. some of you might know I quite like bikes.. I now have a proper bikeshed (or at least I will once I've built and attached the doors tonight) - and I was hoping you nice people could give me some helpful suggestions. Thanks in advance, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On 18 September 2013 17:01, Paul LeoNerd leon...@leonerd.org.uk wrote: On Wed, 18 Sep 2013 16:45:10 +0100 Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: If you don't agree, do feel free to give the titles of a few hypothetical Perl books that you would be prepared to pay £30 for. Asynchronous Perl - Achieving large-scale parallel concurrency without paying large costs in shared memory or fine-grained locking. I would be prepared to pay £30 to write such a book. +1 me too /AOL -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
[off topic] Any londoners know a good 'puter repair place near the city/bishopsgate or docklands?
Hi L.pmers, My sister in law (trained dancer and personal trainer with almost 0 IT expertise ) has a laptop that won't boot and no backups of her important info on the hard disk - any recommendations of somewhere that can give a good honest appraisal of what's wrong with the laptop and back up the data for her would be much appreciated Somewhere near Spitalfields would probably be especially helpful Cheers, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: [off topic] Any londoners know a good 'puter repair place near the city/bishopsgate or docklands?
On 24 May 2013 15:03, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 01:57:09PM +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote: My sister in law (trained dancer and personal trainer with almost 0 IT expertise ) has a laptop that won't boot and no backups of her important info on the hard disk - any recommendations of somewhere that can give a good honest appraisal of what's wrong with the laptop and back up the data for her would be much appreciated Somewhere near Spitalfields would probably be especially helpful If it's a Mac then go to the shop on Cheshire St. Afraid it's 'doze on a 5 year old samsung laptop :( A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: npm, PyPi overtake CPAN
On 24 May 2013 01:31, Paul Makepeace pa...@paulm.com wrote: http://modulecounts.com/ ... with Rubygems screaming ahead since overtaking CPAN a couple of years ago. And the hugeness of Maven Central. I'm sure there's plenty of caveats etc but the gradients is probably what's most interesting here; CPAN is relatively static compared with, well, all the others. I had a deeper look at thisin a bit more depth before I got snowed under at work http://blogs.perl.org/users/hashbangperl/2013/03/comparing-apples-and-oranges---rubygems-vs-cpan-part-2.html - I'll try and finish writing it up in some upcoming time I have sitting in airports next month. A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: npm, PyPi overtake CPAN
On 24 May 2013 05:43, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: On 24 May 2013 01:31, Paul Makepeace pa...@paulm.com wrote: http://modulecounts.com/ ... with Rubygems screaming ahead since overtaking CPAN a couple of years ago. And the hugeness of Maven Central. I had a deeper look at thisin a bit more depth before I got snowed under at work http://blogs.perl.org/users/hashbangperl/2013/03/comparing-apples-and-oranges---rubygems-vs-cpan-part-2.html A couple of things worth mentioning are firstly that several issues mentioned in that blog and elsewhere are being addressed http://www.dagolden.com/index.php/2098/the-annotated-lancaster-consensus/ and also if you look at rubygems uploads it's an astonishingly high proportion of undocumented version 0.001 abandonware. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Hi Duncan, On 15 May 2013 22:37, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: I didn't mention the company because I was (and still am) using my personal email and it didn't seem appropriate. Anyway, the company is Motortrak (www.motortrak.com). I visited the site, the jobs page renders really badly in my old brower so I can't read it (FF 3.6). I searched for motortrak in jobs.perl.org - do you have open job posting on there you can link to? Thames Ditton is a bit difficult to reach from certain directions because of the way the Thames loops. However, the upside of that is that it doesn't feel like the big city. Plenty of greenery, nice riverside pubs etc. Generally a good working environment. Not as difficult to reach as 280 miles west of zone 1 in Cornwall, we still manage to recruit people tho ;) The CMS and the inventory management system (IMS) are written in PHP and doing very well. The CMS serves thousands of dealers and we have contracts in place which guarantee that the IMS will do at least a thousand. There are other PHP projects in the offing. Any idea that PHP is a toy or that Perl programmers are automatically worth more than the better PHP programmers has to be justified. Better programmers cost more, experienced people cost more. The demographics of PHP programmers lean heavily towards novices, the perl ones towards older experts, Java covers both but is still more expensive than either (and according to another list I'm subscribed to, also hard to find decent java developers.. so there you go) We haven't been passive in our search. We saw it coming. Perl programmers have been rare for a while. It took some time to find our last Perl programmer whom we picked up from the BBC. We try to be visible in the Perl community. No - perl programmers haven't been rare, they just haven't been queueing up at your door : The economy has picked up, many employers have got wiser about hiring and recruiting their staff which means if you want to get the right people you have to up your game, the same applies to ruby, python and even java - only PHP really has an abundance of CVs (but probably no more developers that you want to actually hire than any other language) [ .. long list of good community involvement .. ] I attend Southampton PM meetings. I contacted Portsmouth University and there is a possibility that we may be going in for beer and sandwiches with their computer club in the autumn. (It's only a possibility because I'm not sure the other mongers are as keen to do it as I am.) Wow! That really is a lot of community involvement and you definately deserve to have that pay off. I've also tried to contact Kingston University. I didn't get a reply and I confess that I haven't tried again yet. Yes, universities can be really pretty crap about actually talking to industry despite all their hot air. In spite of all that, I've only had five CVs across my desk this time. None were strong candidates. One we rejected outright. A second told me at the end of his telephone interview that he had just started a contract. Numbers three and four weren't present at the appointed times for their telephone interviews and the agency couldn't trace them either. We skipped the telephone interview for number five and rushed him in for a face-to-face with a view to hiring him if he was half-decent. He wasn't. He just wasn't. I think you might be getting the basics wrong, you're certainly doing a lot that others aren't and that should help. There's nothing on jobs.perl.org about this role, nor blogs.perl.org (or any blog picked up by the ironman aggregator), and I haven't seen any mention of it on twitter under the #perl hashtag, and I can't read the jobs page on the website in some browsers. Have you posted to the london.pm jobs list? Hopefully you can fix the basic stuff on advertising the jobs and then your hard work on other stuff will pay off, failing that get one of the tame recruiters london.pm seems to have recently befriended and give them your company's impressive CV. One small thing, I don't think I've yet seen any company that complains about it being hard to recruit perl devs who aren't struggling because they've messed something up, it's not very endearing to any potential candidates, and even acts as a big red flag discouraging them from talking to you. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 15 May 2013 18:28, Uri Guttman u...@stemsystems.com wrote: the real problem is getting shops to PAY for any sort of training. i was producing damian classes successfully for 3 or so years. then the economy bottomed out (this was before the great recession) and training budgets dried up. they still haven't come back yet from what i have seen. i would love to pull together damian training and client sponsorship but that didn't work when i tried it. You mean people are complaining about how hard it is to hire just the right people but nobody ponies up the cash to train anybody? Surely you jest sir! ;) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 13 May 2013 22:22, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. That's a good start but not much to go on... Where and how are you advertising? What sort of role is it, and how does the salary (presumably you're advertising a salary range) stack up against the market for your industry/area? I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. The agent is talking bollocks, find another - some actually specialise in Perl so they must be confident that there are both enough candidates and vacancies to make a living from. The number of perl vacancies and developers are both increasing based on all the data available. What are other companies doing about this? Lots of different things, telecommute, offering salaries that match or beat what you'd get with the same experience with Java, offering flexitime and other decent benefit packages that make it worth taking the job and sticking with it. We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? I've never found that a problem myself - both my current and previous employers have recruited developers from eastern europe, they're not 10 a penny, but good developers aren't 10 a penny for any tech in any country. A second possibility is to cross-train experienced programmers from other languages into Perl. However, Perl has got itself such a reputation for being difficult to learn that the CTO winces whenever I suggest the idea. At headforwards we've cross-trained maybe a quarter of the development team from C++ and other tech, it was very successful, to the point where some have been promoted into very senior roles within 2 years. That was without formal perl training - of which there is plenty available like Dave Cross' courses and perl academy. How have other companies got on when they've said that they will take experience in Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or whatever in lieu of experience in Perl/Catalyst? Was anybody interested and did they succeed? That should work fine, the only problem I can forsee is the problem widely seen with python developers with a big chip on their shoulders about perl, they can and should be weeded out at interviews tho. I don't believe you've linked to the ad yet, I'm guessing you've already advertised on jobs.perl.org, and your local LUG. Other places you can use social networking to advertise are twitter (I got my current job via a twitter tip), coderwall (which is a really nice way to showcase your company and team), by sending your team to conferences and workshops to talk about your projects (a 5 second oh, and we're hiring at the end is usually acceptable, at least from what I've seen). You can also look at your recruitment process and advertising copy itself - does your ad stand out, does it meet the basic criteria of what a developer needs or wants to know (pay, location, will this company be in business in 18 months or fold, will I learn or work with new things, is there a career path/training/etc, is there a package as a whole including benefits, working hours, holiday, etc that will give me a better quality of life, etc) Hiring perl developers isn't *that* difficult, we've managed to recruit a large number over the last 2 years - despite our office location in Cornwall (which is also a selling point but to a much smaller pool of people), and despite all roles being on-site. Cheers, A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 13 May 2013 23:18, Lyle webmas...@cosmicperl.com wrote: Have you considered training graduates? I hear there are a lot of them out of work. I see a lot of Perl jobs wanting and expecting nothing less than very experienced Perl programmers. If there aren't enough companies willing to give fresh programmers the experience, how are they supposed to get there? If you cut the roots off an apple tree, don't expect to harvest many apples. +1 There are lots of companies complaining of a skills gap (not just within perl, look at newspaper or magazine article about it and you'll hear the same old lines trotted out), they all seem to expect somebody else to foot the bill for training and developing staff so they can reap the benefits. It's as if they expect a magic skills fairy to somehow sprinkle developers with 5 years of perl experience, on the ground before them, obviously that doesn't happen any industry or with any language, but there is a lot of training available out there if you actually want to grow a team and train or cross-train them, rather than just poach them from somebody else. You don't even need to train them youselves to start with - there are plenty of training courses available to get them started, or you could get a trainer onsite. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 14:10, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Quoting Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: or you could get a trainer onsite. That sounds like a *fabulous* idea :-) bbcOther perl trainers are available/bbc ;) A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 15:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:02, Dominic Humphries d...@thermeon.com wrote: 50 miles? Luxury! I have to do sixty! :) Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) 223? Pah! my last contracting gig was 682 miles each way (Threemilestone, Cornwall to Groningen, Netherlands) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 09:23, Graham Feegan graham.fee...@it-executive.com wrote: The candidate market is very tough. Over the last 3-6 months there hasn't been many new candidates making themselves available or open to new opportunities, therefore I can probably understand why your agent might be struggling. Your agent needs to think outside the box a little, just advertising and searching Job boards, just doesn't work at the moment. Indeed that's why you have headhunters like perlhunter and shoeless who know how to reach perl talent. I disagree with your agent about there aren't many Perl vacancies. There are plenty of Perl roles out there; they are just slightly tricky to fill. From the new hires I've seen in both London and in Cornwall at my current and new employer, I wouldn't it's that tricky. Finding PHP Developers is fairly straight forward and offering to cross-train would be appealing to many candidates. However if depends on timescales, can you afford to spend time training someone? Compared to how long it takes to recruit somebody with just the right skills and years of experience - sometimes training is both quicker and cheaper, and the right person is more important than the right skill set - we've found C++ developers with a few years commercial experience can transition to perl pretty quickly. Don't just rely on the recruitment agency to find you people. Direct advertising and networking can work just as well. +1 ..but -10 for top posting without trimming ;p A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: PDF creation?
On 21 April 2013 20:06, Leo Lapworth l...@cuckoo.org wrote: On 21 April 2013 12:51, Roger Bell_West ro...@firedrake.org wrote: On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 07:43:11AM -0400, Mark Fowler wrote: I know I'm going to want to create the document from scratch, not fill in a template, and I'm probably going to want multi-line text and basic drawing (a horizontal line or two) I tend to use PDF::API2: now unmaintained, but gets the job done. PDF::API2++ # if you want lots of control I've got some code at work we'd really like to open source - just takes someone extracting the work specific bits from it - which wraps it in moosey goodness with a bit of a layout framework added in. Nice. I've been using PDF::Report (which wraps PDF::API2, and allows you to jump down to PDF::API2 directly if needed) for work projects which was unmaintained but I now have PAUSE COMAINT on it, and have some fixes and updates in github for it. The code I've been working on at work isn't Moosey, but is OO and uses styles and makes layout fairly easy, I don't know if it's likely to be open sourced, but I'd be interested in collaborating with Leo or anybody else with an eye for moving from an internal API to a more standard CPAN module. Cheers, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: PDF creation?
On 22 April 2013 11:51, Jérôme Étévé jerome.et...@gmail.com wrote: If you want full support for unicode strings and a good control of layout, I found that the simpliest solution is to use xelatex. I didn't find PDF::API2 fits in a multilingual environment. What problem did you have on this score then? I've been using PDF::Report on top of PDF::API2 and not had any problem with german, spanish, etc We have an internal library that handles layout for, admittedly fairly boring business documents / reports ( using a simplistic naive styling and positioning set of attributes ) pretty well. After investing some time working on it and the styling attributes for the parts of the page, we're getting better results than the proprietary off the shelf java product it replaces. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: cpan you have to see
On 12 December 2012 21:45, DAVID HODGKINSON daveh...@gmail.com wrote: Do we still have automated kwalitee on CPAN? There is CPANTS (http://cpants.charsbar.org/index.html) which checks Kwalitee Would hurling a PBP test at the whole of CPAN to get a metric be of any benefit? As already mentioned Perl Critic could be done, but perhaps with a very high tolerence level and focus more on big mistakes and risks than good style - certainly feasible (McCabe score in 3 digits, much more useful than whether bare, explicit or implicit return used). There are plenty of useful tools for skimming the cream of CPAN : * CPAN Ra(n)tings which is already integrated into metacpan * metacpan recommendation/endorsements ( https://metacpan.org/favorite/leaderboard, not linked from front page, which is a shame as it's a really nice feature) * http://cpan-u.sysd.org/ which is an amazon/netflix style recommendation system * https://www.socialtext.net/perl5/ There is a LOT on CPAN, but it's not about the size, it's about what you do with it, and the eco-system and tools around it continue to improve and set the bar higher for similar code repos :) Cheers, A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Agents part CCXXXIV
On 3 December 2012 12:05, James Laver james.la...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 Dec 2012, at 06:38, Uri Guttman u...@stemsystems.com wrote: one reason i ask my candidates where else they are being submitted is to avoid those duplications. Bullshit. You ask because you want to try and muscle in on those positions. If you really asked permission before submitting every time (as you claim later in your email) you'd never be in a position of double submission. Pimp standard trick #4. Belt and braces - if you ask somebody This cool role at X, do you want me to send your CV they'll not always remember or mention that they've already applied for a role there, if you ask where, you're more likely to avoid. I really can't see Uri pulling a trick like that, nor some of the other decent recruiters I've worked with (double submissions are bad for them both in immediate lost commision, and loss of reputation, where they're worked to establish some) There are probably plenty of recruiters who don't care and would try a trick like that but certainly not all, and certainly not a premium head-hunter like Uri. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Perl outreach
On 27 November 2012 07:00, Abigail abig...@abigail.be wrote: Or to put it yet another way: cross learning a different language in the same class as perl (wide field) is clearly trivial for a competent perl programmer (for some value of trivial that implies an initial discount on productivity or billable hours). s/perl programmer/programmer/ At Booking.com, we've stop focussing on finding new Perl programmers a long time ago. We're looking for good *programmers* who are willing to learn Perl. Of course, knowing Perl is an advantage, but we've found that for a good and willing programmer, learning a new language isn't the biggest hurdle. A language, after all, is just syntax. And most of the coding work means building upon something existing, making it easier to pick up a language than if you have to start from scratch. So maybe what we should be promoting is that good perl people are valuable in any dynamic language situation where doing things the cheapest possible way isn't the primary goal. (not that perl's expensive - just a focus on cheap at all costs tends to be a sign of very bad management or a toxic industry segment). I would even be more generic. We've succesfully turned C programmers to the dark side, and C isn't a dynamic language. +1 We've had a lot of success at headforwards recruiting people from non-Perl roles or even without any perl but with C and C++ backgrounds and found them very productive very quickly, give a good programmer with a familiarity with C/C++ family syntax perl and they'll give good results in a couple of weeks. I think we're probably between 60/40 and 70/30 ratio of perl to non-perl backgrounds in our dev headcount, we've also managed to recruit about 20 developers (as well as additional QA, Tech writers and Project managers) to a non-London location at less than London salaries (but competitive nationally, and even with some London roles I've seen advertised), that's without doing any VISA sponsership, graduate milk-rounds or any other extra efforts, so it's not that hard to recruit for perl development (heck we've even been able to be picky enough to be able to choose from local developers with perl skills, even this far out in Cornwall) I should also mention that like others here, we're working on some fairly interesting stuff (along with some old legacy code) that includes cloud services, web services, ajax, and pretty much every buzzword or hyped tech aside from android at the moment. Oh.. and we're still recruiting : http://www.headforwards.com/careers/ - you might have seen a few of our people at LPW :) Cheers, A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Available...
On 2 October 2012 12:06, Denny 2...@denny.me wrote: On Tue, 2012-10-02 at 10:59 +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: I'd assumed -discuss was for talking about the jobs posted on jobs and attempting to unpick who the company was. Short memory. Citing your own response is cheating, maybe he was hoping for a more authoritive answer ;) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Current State of Auntie Beeb
On 25 September 2012 22:40, Simon Wistow si...@thegestalt.org wrote: Out of interest which bits of the Beeb are still Perl? Are l.pm-ers still there? And where does http://news.bbc.co.uk fit into everything these days? We've poached a couple of people from the beeb here, they still have a LOT of perl developers though, pretty sure there are still plenty of people on the list still there or have contracted there recently. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: [OT] Are there any Contracts roles open at the moment
On 3 May 2012 12:31, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:00:27PM +0100, Dominic Thoreau wrote: On 2 May 2012 21:19, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Speaking of which - both my employer and Dominic's are recruiting perl people (we're in cornwall, they're in london overlooking Tower Bridge and the Shard) He gets a much better referral bonus than I do, but I'm only 15 mins from some of the nicest beaches in the country ;p And no hosepipe ban? Yup - no hosepipe ban, and it was hot and sunny yesterday (and I forgot a drink when I went for a lunchtime run so that made it less fun). One colleague had the sense to go for a nice bike ride through tehidy woods (shade, blue bells, lake, rivers and ponds) up to the coastal path atop the cliffs and beaches, while I was being grilled in an oven-like valley with no nice cool breeze. Wasn't sure we were still looking, but when I look on the intranet apparently we are. Still, the signing bonus is balanced by the fact that to the best of my knowledge no one in this department actually knows anyone with perl skills who's actually looking for work. Has your glorious employer actually mailed the job spec to the jobs list? Nope, I've mentioned it to people tho so they'll probably get around to it soon. (I've lost track. Base don what Aaron said, I think it might be a yes, else how did he know when you did not?) I just know things ;) A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: [OT] Are there any Contracts roles open at the moment
On 3 May 2012 14:48, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote: Dragging this back on topic, are either of these jobs contract? I believe at least a couple of the London ones will be, yes. They should be on jobs.perl and the london jobs list soonish A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: [OT] Are there any Contracts roles open at the moment
On 1 May 2012 11:44, Dominic Thoreau domi...@thoreau-online.net wrote: On 1 May 2012 11:28, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote: I have heard agents complaining that they interview contractors then make permie offers, but this is hearsay. My current gig, I was told by the recruiter that of three identical positions, two were permanent and one was a fixed-term contract, but in practice it seemed to be the other way around. Still, the contract was renewed for another year. Apparently this is an attempt to bypass corporate accounting controls somewhat, as is the outsourced team... *waves* Speaking of which - both my employer and Dominic's are recruiting perl people (we're in cornwall, they're in london overlooking Tower Bridge and the Shard) He gets a much better referral bonus than I do, but I'm only 15 mins from some of the nicest beaches in the country ;p A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Programming Heresy
On 1 April 2012 11:24, Piers Cawley pdcawley-london.0dd...@bofh.org.uk wrote: On 1 April 2012 01:14, Travis Basevi tra...@cricinfo.com wrote: On 31/03/2012 11:44, Aaron Trevena wrote: Ummm this is london.pm. People in London don't have sheds. I have a shed, also a nice garden and a 15 min commute to the office (and 20 min drive to selection of best beaches in the country).. but then I don't actually live in London :) Congratulations. What Aaron neglected to mention was that we're still hiring. At least, I think we are. Yes - pretty sure we are : http://www.headforwards.com/perl-jobs.html A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Programming Heresy
On 30 March 2012 15:08, Steve Mynott st...@gruntling.com wrote: On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 11:23:02AM +0100, Dirk Koopman typed: On 30/03/12 10:24, Steve Mynott wrote: Has anyone tried programming outside? E-ink (like on the Kindle) works well in sunlight and I wondered if any such device would be useable (ideally with a decent keyboard). Get yourself a decent man shed with some decent windows that you can open. Ummm this is london.pm. People in London don't have sheds. I have a shed, also a nice garden and a 15 min commute to the office (and 20 min drive to selection of best beaches in the country).. but then I don't actually live in London :) -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Emacs as a perl IDE
On 25 January 2012 22:17, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote: Pulled together some links and thoughts, and actually learned stuff: http://www.davehodgkinson.com/blog/2012/01/using-emacs-as-an-ide/ I had a look at the .emacs I posted on g+ for hints on how I'm using it.. https://plus.google.com/u/0/102381504977265553584/posts/XYFoqp1oNNv Main things from that were using tramps for remote files (thus auto-save is disabled), magit for version control, and the uniqifying of buffer filename completion/display, the paren highlighting is nice too. Like you I've never used it as a IDE, usually because codebases I tend to work on are often on remote servers and have complex environments and a simple perl -I path -cw won't cut it, and partly because I like tools to DoOneThingWell, so I make heavy use of dozens of terminals for any non-editing tasks Any other comments? Piers? Dave suggested Padre, comments on features and stuff welcome. Padre is quite nice to work with, but I never got emacs keybindings working with it so ended up spending more time writing plugins and code for it, rather than with it (yes, I was writing padre code in emacs) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Testing databases with DBIx::Class
On 10 January 2012 17:07, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 04:01:23PM +, the hatter wrote: On Tue, 10 Jan 2012, Leo Lapworth wrote: A full dump of live is imported to dev every sunday, when we're running on a dev server Except that if this includes personal data, and your customers didn't sign up to agree to be test subjects, then it's a breach of data protection laws to reuse data gathered for another purpose. A lot of companies do this (either a full copy or some subset to make processing lighter) but few have the right words in their statement. And even if you *do* have the right words, it's a Bad Idea. You don't want your tests to accidentally email your customers, for example or auto-tweet from a random user, that happens to be an investor in the company, that they had just watched a pretty lame film and suggest it to their friends on twitter.. yes really, this actually happened :) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: OT: Agile PM courses?
On 10 January 2012 12:37, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote: This whole Scrum thing smells of life coach. There are a lot of charlatans about, but I'm pretty happy with how we're doing it here - our scrum master has plenty of real world experience both in development and agile project management and applies it scientifically - we're even running Kanban for one team and SCRUM for another as they better suit the projects, there are a lot of buzzwords flying around and sometimes at a morning standup a couple of people will go through the motions while chewing other some coding detail rather than stepping back and thinking about they day in terms of tasks, goals, etc. On the whole it's working pretty well, the client(s) are happy, the developers are pretty happy and it feels like making progress and being mostly in control - even if it's only because sticking to a methodology means that we're thinking about how we're doing things more than if we weren't. Cheers, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Testing databases with DBIx::Class
On 10 January 2012 09:56, Ian Knopke ian.kno...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I need to test some DBIx::Class code where the database may not be available. I can set up something to generate a small, temporary SQlite db, but I was wondering what approaches others are currently using for this. DBD::Mock seems ok but not especially well suited for use with DBIx. What does the rest of the community currently do? I'd have a look at DBIx::Class:Fixtures, I've also manually created fixture data in scripts in the past (and present) too. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: OT: Agile PM courses?
On 9 January 2012 23:38, Peter Edwards pe...@dragonstaff.co.uk wrote: I interviewed three PMs last week. One of them claimed to be a qualified PRINCE2 practitioner but couldn't answer what parts of PRINCE are used to manage risk. When pressed, he claimed that he had done it 5 years ago and maybe it was added since then (funny how it was there 20 years ago in original). He also claimed to be a certified Scrum Master and when asked what methodology to use for new product development with uncertain requirements: PRINCE, because it handles it better than Agile *cough* So you see. I wish I could make it up, but I'm not. Presumably shortly after he qualified, he spent the next 5 years sailing around the world and not doing any actual project management and thus was a bit rusty ;) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: OT: Agile PM courses?
On 27 December 2011 21:29, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote: Oddly, google was my first stop. Was looking for actual experiences. I'll ask the scrum-master at work when we return, but iirc he didn't rate any of them much and places a lot more weight on experience. You should have come down to Agile On The Beach in september, it's on again next september :) Cheers, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: [Commercial]Looking for Perl Telecommuting work - How to approach
On 16 December 2011 18:21, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote: Paging Aaron... Sorry - we're full at HeadForwards - managed to find all 10 developers we had budget for ;) I've telecommuted for most of the last 5 or 6 years but it's pretty rare at the moment (wierdly as now we have all the broadband availability, collaboration software and videoconferencing etc you can want for next to nothing) - I'm currently working in my employers office 5 days a week (but mostly communicate, as I did when telecommuting by IM/IRC/Email - good documentation, note taking and communicatons habits from working between 200 and 800 miles from your co-workers) Cheers, A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Telecommuting
On 10 December 2011 23:06, ian dochert i...@docherty.me wrote: If you don't have everyone remote then these comments happen... at the physical water cooler, if everyone is remote then you can create your virtual water cooler (IRC or what ever). Interestingly the converse of this can be useful too. Developers can be annoyed when interrupted when they are 'in the zone'. For this reason several of us have instigated the policy that if you want to ask a question of another developer, even the one sitting next to you, you do so initially through an IRC request. The small 'ping' of an IRC is less disruptive than a tap on the shoulder and you can complete your current work before giving it, and your co-developer, your full attention. So very very true - nothing worse than people who will ignore the subtle hint of a large pair of overhead headphones and come and wave at you to get your attention rather than ask a quick question on irc/skype that you could answer in 5 or 10 minutes without affecting them. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Beware: NET-A-PORTER
On 9 December 2011 08:10, Rudolf Lippan rlip...@remotelinux.com wrote: Your recruitment agent could well be telling porky pies NaP, are a Perhaps, but she seemed pretty willing to back it up... Hmm.. When at LOVEFiLM we had lots of recruiters telling fibs - we had an exclusive partnership with BlueGlue, and it was made clear on the website and where the job was advertised, yet recruiters were telling candidates all sorts of things about why we weren't hiring them and it was very fraustrating when meeting people who apparently got turned down when nobody had even seen their CV. I wouldn't put much faith in anything I didn't hear directly from a N-a-P employee on this matter. pretty reputable outfit - anything you didnt hear directly from them I'd take with a pinch of salt, and I'd never turn down another offer without a written offer or signed contract, certainly not on the word of a recruiter. I think it is all about fit. NaP looked to be a perfect fit in terms in terms of community and environment for me, so I think it was worth the risk, but I did not expect a reputable company to pull something like this... Could be worth re-applying directly to that ad, if you haven't just marked your own card by your posts about them to perl lists Are you serious? Did you get an offer from NaP themselves, from a NaP email or verbally from an actual NaP employee? That's the key thing, if so then you're right to feel let down. I noticed at the end of that new post they explicityly state no recruiters, there's probably a good reason for that. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Beware: NET-A-PORTER
On 9 December 2011 06:54, Rudolf Lippan rlip...@remotelinux.com wrote: On Thursday, December 08, 2011 at 11:23:35 PM, Kieren Diment wrote: I suspect this is a symptom of the GFC rather than anything more sinister. I'm sorry you and your not-to-be colleagues appear to be friendly fire in this circumstance. I don't know if I buy that: 6 December 2011: ...Net-a-porte[sic] has decided not to build a team here in the US. Apparently it's half the cost for them to build a team in the UK vs. here in the US... 7 December 2011: http://jobs.perl.org/job/14442 Posted: December 7, 2011 Company name: Net-a-porter Internal ID: Junior Perl Developer - New Jersey Location: New York, NY, USA Your recruitment agent could well be telling porky pies NaP, are a pretty reputable outfit - anything you didnt hear directly from them I'd take with a pinch of salt, and I'd never turn down another offer without a written offer or signed contract, certainly not on the word of a recruiter. Could be worth re-applying directly to that ad, if you haven't just marked your own card by your posts about them to perl lists cheers, A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Perl Skills Test
On 28 September 2011 13:54, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 01:27:41PM +0100, Victoria Conlan wrote: Auntie is ALWAYS looking for perl people. ALWAYS. Really? I've been shunted into a non-programming job for the last year precisely because they aren't. We are. We had someone start just a coupla days ago, and we're still looking for MOAR PEEPUL. We're still looking for 3 more perl devs at headforwards btw - to join our 2 teams of 3 and 4 devs. not in london, but very nice location ;) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Perl Skills Test
On 29 September 2011 10:48, Victoria Conlan vi...@comps.org wrote: not in london, but very nice location ;) Not that I don't think everywhere is nicer than London, but ... could you be more specific? Sunny Cornwall : http://www.headforwards.com/perl-jobs.html A couple of us just went for a nice run through some woods and along the stream along one of the mineral trails here. A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Perl Skills Test
On 26 September 2011 09:18, Peter Edwards pe...@dragonstaff.co.uk wrote: More recently I did a good test which was basically a pair programming exercise where you are given a spec, some partial code, and a unit test you could run but not inspect. Then using your editor of choice go and make the code pass the test and discuss with the technical director your thought processes and why and what you are doing. That seems to me a very reliable way of working out whether someone can deliver the goods. And also whether they can work in a team. I had a go at code dojo at the recent Agile on the Beach conference and thought to myself - this would be a handy technical test tool : http://jonjagger.blogspot.com/p/cyberdojo.html (and yes, it does come in perl flavour) A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Perl e-commerce?
On 21 September 2011 00:52, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes sthoe...@gmail.com wrote: I looked at Handel a few years ago; does anyone have any current experience with it? I had a look at it about 16 months ago and neither it nor mango (which is a fork of it) have been updated or can be dropped in as e-commerce application - otoh Mango is very comprehensive and would make a very good starting point (perhaps simplifying it a bit) I was looking at cherry picking a lot of parts of mango and handel and creating a simple e-commerce app like dennys shinycms, but ran out of time. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Croyden.pm
On 19 July 2011 16:39, Dirk Koopman d...@tobit.co.uk wrote: On 19/07/11 16:22, Chisel wrote: On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 5:02 PM, David Cantrellda...@cantrell.org.ukwrote: There will be a Gathering of Croyden.pm at the Royal Standard in Croydon on Wednesday the 20th of July. I have to ask ... Croyd*e*n.pm? Don't, Please don't. It's just like that OK? Is this my fault again? Like that toilet seat incident.. I have vague drunken memories involving going out of london on a tram line, Yours merlotly, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: CFT?
No, this is less :) We're trying to bootstrap something cool and have already spent a bunch of money getting where we are. We are close to money and it'll be paid when we get it. freelancers.net is --- *that* way ;) -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Part-time Perl Developer Position based Reading, UK
On 23 May 2011 10:03, Denny 2...@denny.me wrote: Also; salary ranges are really very useful to everyone involved in the recruitment process. Not specifying even a vague/wide one is incredibly frustrating and occasionally off-putting to potential applicants. If your company is generous (as both the advert and Arife's email suggest), then it'd be to your advantage to include some numbers here. I don't know the salary range for this role, but websense made an me offer less than a year ago that beat anything in London (except perhaps some banking stuff) for a senior perl dev, more than my recent team leader role even - they were also very accomodating in arranging interviews and generally seemed a sound bunch. My only gripe was that the coffee machines in the office weren't up to much (Lovefilmers take their coffee considerably more seriously), and I don't dig 40 hour weeks, but that almost seems the norm in any blue-chip or corporate now. Just my tuppence-worth. regards, Aaron -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Jobs in London
On 23 March 2011 12:43, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 12:32:11PM +, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: On 23 Mar 2011, at 11:16, David Cantrell wrote: IME it's the norm for large employers. Even at smaller employers my experience is that that's generally what it says in the contract, although in practice they either go bankrupt or I choose to quit. Or you bankrupt them? You're confusing me with Aaron. Pah! I'm pretty sure I've passed that jinx onto somebody else.. don't know who though. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Spam filters
On 25 November 2010 14:10, Chris Jack chris_j...@msn.com wrote: Mr.G mrg9...@gmail.com wrote: whole lot of spam which I've deleted Just out of curiousity - this list has been very good at not propagating spam. I was therefore wondering why certain things manage to sneak past and, if we have a spam filter: why it didn't pick this up. Gmail didn't spot it was spam either, and I can't mark the list as spam. Bah. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Running your own mini-cpan or other repos
Hi GLLUGers I'm working on a smart mirror catalyst web application and was wondering how many people use their own repos, mirrors and mini-cpans to get an idea of usage etc and if people would pay for somebody else to provide something like that for them? .. yes it'll be all or mostly open sourced, if it's successful I'd like to be able to provide some commercial services to cover the project development costs and/or subsidise my other open source coding. Cheers, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Running your own mini-cpan or other repos
On 29 August 2010 22:00, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: I'm working on a smart mirror catalyst web application and was wondering how many people use their own repos, mirrors and mini-cpans to get an idea of usage etc and if people would pay for somebody else to provide something like that for them? .. yes it'll be all or mostly open sourced, if it's successful I'd like to be able to provide some commercial services to cover the project development costs and/or subsidise my other open source coding. Bah, london.pmer's I mean.. sigh.. now I'll get grief for apostrophe abuse too I'll get me coat.. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
learning / training in java perl programmer?
hi all, can anybody recommend some good online/offline java introductions? I'm rather hoping I can get a scjp in my spare time over a couple of weeks on my own and then make a start on a proper trainging course after that. A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: learning / training in java perl programmer?
On 31 July 2010 19:05, Philip Newton philip.new...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: can anybody recommend some good online/offline java introductions? I'm rather hoping I can get a scjp in my spare time over a couple of weeks on my own and then make a start on a proper trainging course after that. So, basically saying, SCJP can be a good thing to have, especially as a stepping-stone towards SCJD, but learning for SCJP won't necessarily be a good introduction to *developing with Java* (as opposed to learning about the Java compiler and the runtime environment, for which is probably *is* a good introdcution). That's about it, I was thinking I can bootstrap myself through the SCJP, and then invest serious time and money on the SCJD, possibly as part pof a new job (which is why I'm learning Java - lots of jobs using both or asking for at least 2 languages) I'm ordering head first java, mr bunny and effective java books in a minute and reading online tutorials and getting familiar with eclipse this weekend. A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
a good tool for planning projects/resources/holidays at high level rather than per task?
Help? Anybody know a good tool for planning projects/resources/holidays at high level rather than per task? we're using basecamp for tasks, and as Rallydev or any other basecamp rival is politically unviable, is there something that just/primarily focusses on roadmap / calendar level ? Cheers, A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: a good tool for planning projects/resources/holidays at high level rather than per task?
On 17 June 2010 10:05, Bob MacCallum uncool...@gmail.com wrote: You could roll your own in Semantic Mediawiki...? On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Help? Anybody know a good tool for planning projects/resources/holidays at high level rather than per task? we're using basecamp for tasks, and as Rallydev or any other basecamp rival is politically unviable, is there something that just/primarily focusses on roadmap / calendar level ? Ugh. Not sure how that would be any nicer than current spreadsheet I'm using :( A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: a good tool for planning projects/resources/holidays at high level rather than per task?
On 17 June 2010 11:00, Simon Wilcox es...@ourshack.com wrote: On 17/06/2010 09:19, Aaron Trevena wrote: Anybody know a good tool for planning projects/resources/holidays at high level rather than per task? we're using basecamp for tasks, and as Rallydev or any other basecamp rival is politically unviable, is there something that just/primarily focusses on roadmap / calendar level ? If you're already using Basecamp, perhaps one of the 3rd party products that integrates with it will meet your needs? http://basecamphq.com/extras Yeah, I've looked at that. I tried AgileAgenda Basecamp edition, and it mangled the project I tried it with - deleting and recreating tasks, losing the comments and time tracking to put them into new todo lists that didn't have time tracking enabled. That was fun to sort out for a good hour or more, matching time and other info back to tasks, re-organising them, etc. None of the others offer anything like a roadmap / resource view so I can see who is assigned to which project when, or the project start/end dates :( A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: a good tool for planning projects/resources/holidays at high level rather than per task?
On 17 June 2010 11:22, Gareth Kirwan g...@thermeon.com wrote: Fogbugz has holidays built into it's evidence based scheduling, which you can enter for users or sites, as well as working schedules, velocity, etc. Cool - I didn't see/notice that when we tried it out, as an issue/bug tracker I was totally underwhelmed by it after all the hype surrounding it and Joel. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: baby friendly places in/around Farringdon / Holborn
Thanks, Steff Caroline, After a very long day yesterday (got up 5am, got home midnight, up again to feed baby at 2am, 5am.. uuurgh), it looks like we'll be staying near GOSH for a week with a 3.75 yr old and a 1 yr old in november then again, in the summer. If the weather is good, go to Coram Fields. Big spaces, nice cafe, extremely child-friendly, very near where you are going. http://maps.google.com/places/gb/london/guilford-st/93/-coram-fields-sports-area Looks just what we need for the oldest. Also nearby is the Brunswick Shopping Centre which has several restaurants - Carluccios has highchairs and baby-changing, Strada and Nandos has highchairs, Yo Sushi has neither - and there's a Waitrose and a Crussh bar if you want to grab some food and eat elsewhere. We found Pizza express, but their highchairs aren't baby friendly (no back support, or close fitting table) and they (along with most of london, it seems) keep the disabled loo/baby changing locked to prevent tramps/terrorists/addicts or something. If the weather is bad, I'd recommend British Museum for a nice place nearby to do stuff. I wouldn't recommend the food though - far too overpriced and poor selection. British Museum looked a great idea yesterday but we had our bags and sleeping baby in pushchair and really couldn't be bothered messing about with cloakrooms and carrying feed/bottles/dummys/nappies in our bare hands lest we try and steal some priceless artifact using a screaming baby as a distraction. Steff: If you can make it out to Bethnal Green, try E Pellicci, feeding the east end since 1900. Excellent, reassuring food and they're warmly welcoming to children as Italians tend to be. Also right next to Weavers Fields, a pleasant park, and close to the Museum of Childhood which is a good place to take small people. All sounds good, just a bit of a walk and all the scary poor people ;) I like it round there, but I'm not sure my other half would like taking the little ones to somewhere that rough - I've seen the posters in the policestation, much as I liked working and socialising there, and was even surprised to have my wallet and it's full contents handed in there ;) Cheers, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
baby friendly places in/around Farringdon / Holborn
Hi L.pmers, My wife, youngest child and myself will be in your fine city tomorrow from about 1000-1700 ish for an appointment at a certain well known childrens hospital (blood disorders and surgery aren't a good combination), and was wondering if anybody had any suggestions where we can grab food, put our feet up or entertain our 7 month old boy? Might be able to convince Sam and Luca to come along and meet some people for lunch, but once bitten twice shy (I think Evil Dave has scared her off perl mongers ;) Cheers, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Perl on the BBC
On 25 March 2010 17:22, Smylers smyl...@stripey.com wrote: My quest to get Perl mentioned in a BBC TV programme succeeded -- this was on BBC4 on Monday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rm4j1 The bit with Perl is from 21:05 (or start at 17:30 for an explanation). It's repeated tonight at 19:30 for anybody who prefers watching on an actual television. Highlight was nobody had heard of python ;) A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: [Fwd: Betonmarkets CTO position]
On 12 February 2010 00:23, Simon Wistow si...@thegestalt.org wrote:
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 10:13:39PM +, Tom Hukins said:
Has anyone made a self referential TV show yet where they follow a
group of people trying to make a TV show?
Sports Night ('98-'00) and Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip ('06-'07) both
from Aaron West Wing Sorkin. In a similar vein to the latter 30 Rock
with Tina Fey.
The wikipedia pages of those lead us to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Television_series_about_television
But only moving wallpaper was about an actual independant program
being broadcast.
For added win it was set in Cornwall and the name of the program they
were making was Echo Beach which is the best song ever written by a
canadian band in the late 20th century!
A.
--
Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons
http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk
LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Fun Friday afternoon topic: domain name disputes
On 5 February 2010 15:19, Elizabeth Mattijsen l...@dijkmat.nl wrote: If it would be a co.uk domain, she could probably go to a UK court. Since this is a .com domain, I think any UK judge will quickly dismiss on the grounds that it is an American domain, so that she should go to court in the U.S. of A. And *that* will prove to become very costly very quickly indeed. no .co.us would be an american domain, .com is a global TLD, so it's anybodies. OTOH, national businesses using an global TLD is hateful. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword solution and winner
2010/1/4 Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: We have a winner for the cryptic crossword! Congratulation to Smylers, who managed to get a 100% correct solution : 3a better not pout 4a winter 8a naughty 9a snowman 12a Boxing Day 14a not even a mouse 15a Jingle Bells 17a checking it twice 1d Be good for goodness' sake 4d Christmas 5d Advent 7d Santa Claus 10d making a list 11d better not cry 13d November 16d nice I will be speaking to Smylers later on to discuss his prize of an easter egg in one of my cpan modules, in the meantime everybody give him a well deserved round of applause! I suppose some explaination is in order.. as I've always said, it's mostly bad puns and plays on words. 3a/11d : Better not pout/cry is Improved, not, *pout emoticon* - from Vi Improved via substring 4a : Winter is an anagram disguised as perl with added punctuation 8a : Naughty is a phonetic joke : Nought E 9a : Snowman is unicode hidden behind perl and phonetic wordplay = U+2603 12a : Boxing day is 26 (oct oct hex fff) dec (december) 14a : Not even a mouse is NOT, any power of two - i.e. even, and Any Moose is mouse 15a : Jingle Bells is an anagram of jingle disguised in a regex with ^D being a Bell ASCII escape code 17a : Checking it twice is evaluating $_, i.e. it once and again if true 1d : Be good for goodness sake is a variation of a line in a version of santa claus is coming to town written in bash I saw in an email just before christmas, but I've made it more perly and less obvious by changing sake to leetspeak : $4ke, hiding Good in $something, Goodness' in $somethings but it still works if you read it outloud as be something for somethings sake which is obvious if you know the words to the song. 4d : Christmas terrible wordplay - xmas from x mass where $m is mass, m being the recognised symbol for mass, as in e=mc^2 5d : Advent - a Laptop by Asus, my wife has one, they are ace, although the battery has gone from a few hours to a half an hour 7d : Santa Claus - reverse esrever hints that you need to reverse 73%6c%61%75%43%61%6e%74%61%20%53% which then spells out santa claus 10d: Making a list - Build is the new Make, and of course still means the same thing, and of course the context we're looking for is list 13d: November is the month before christmas, and a Perl 6 wiki - of course Perl 6 delivery date is christmas and the perl 6 wiki has already arrived, I particularly like this clue as it works on several levels. 16d : Nice - It's nice to be nice, and nice children get presents, nice makes a process nice when you give it a positive value, as opposed to greedy when you give it a negative value -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting oops.. I missed the one that Smyler didn't include in his answer : 2 down: Antlers - from horny Class::Accessor - use Class::Accessor qw(Antlers) enables Moose style API in Class Accessor. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword solution and winner
2010/1/4 Hakim Cassimally hakim.cassima...@gmail.com: 2010/1/4 Smylers smyl...@stripey.com: Aaron Trevena writes: Which is definitely the _letters_ of Santa Claus, but not exactly in the right order ... who did your proof-reading?! I attempted... and pointed the slight disordering out (it being, admittedly, one of the few questions that I understood ;-) osf' Bah, I was sure I checked that on the command line and sorted it. my bad. A few comments and queries on specific crossword answers follow. Also, what is 2d? The question was: horny Class::Accessor Antlers! in the SYNOPSIS of http://search.cpan.org/~kasei/Class-Accessor-0.34/lib/Class/Accessor.pm :) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword solution and winner
2010/1/4 Smylers smyl...@stripey.com: Aaron Trevena writes: We have a winner for the cryptic crossword! Congratulation to Smylers, who managed to get a 100% correct solution : Wow, thanks! Though actually I didn't provide an answer for 2d, so possibly I only drew with anybody else who was missing just one? umm.. 100 people (ish) downloaded the PDF - I checked the web logs, I only got one entry in response :( Fortunately it was a damned good one and made my morning. At this point I think I can clearly state that I'm not cut out for compiling crosswords and propose that Smylers writes next years :) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
Actually I never got python. It is as opaque to me as mud. Language differences in mostly subjective shocker. On 1/1/10, Avleen Vig avl...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 12:22 AM, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Python is cryptic enough. If by that you mean we're used to doing some weird crazy things, and real OO is too cryptic now, then I agree ;-) -- Sent from my mobile device Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
Python is cryptic enough. On 12/31/09, Avleen Vig avl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Still no answers in my inbox. Most complete will win if nobody completes it. Maybe I should have posted to a java or python group - they would have finished it by now. Can you do a python one for s's and g's? I'd give that a crack :) -- Sent from my mobile device Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
You only need to know what it stands for. As I keep on saying its not very clever. Mostly bad puns and silly geeky word play On 12/31/09, James Laver james.la...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Still no answers in my inbox. Most complete will win if nobody completes it. Maybe I should have posted to a java or python group - they would have finished it by now. Perhaps something to do with the fact that two of the clues reference vim, which the more sensible of us have no wish to use other than to configure emacs where necessary?* --James * And frankly I'd rather use nano -- Sent from my mobile device Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
Ok. Some worked examples to follow this evening On 12/31/09, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Ok. Will try and post some worked examples this evening. Thought a couple up. Hopefully enough to show how (little) my mind works. On 12/31/09, Richard Foley richard.fo...@rfi.net wrote: Hi Aaron, How's about hosting a partially started crossword, with say four representative answers filled in correctly, such that people get the kind of thinking behind your clues. I know the Araucuria and Custos crosswords from the Guardian (showing my age here) had particular styles which took a little getting used to. Consequently one recognised the style and (hopefully) enjoyed getting into the particular mind set to solve the puzzle. Just a thought. -- Richard Foley Ciao - shorter than aufwiedersehen http://www.rfi.net/ On Thursday 31 December 2009 13:02:16 Aaron Trevena wrote: You only need to know what it stands for. As I keep on saying its not very clever. Mostly bad puns and silly geeky word play On 12/31/09, James Laver james.la...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Still no answers in my inbox. Most complete will win if nobody completes it. Maybe I should have posted to a java or python group - they would have finished it by now. Perhaps something to do with the fact that two of the clues reference vim, which the more sensible of us have no wish to use other than to configure emacs where necessary?* --James * And frankly I'd rather use nano -- Sent from my mobile device Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting -- Sent from my mobile device Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
As requested some examples and how they work. 1) alt.binaries.northpole.help 3 letters. Elf. Play on usenet, linux executable format, helps santa at north pole. 2) sigma(err) if (tz eq Gmt - 12) . Summer. Sum er which is when xmas is down under. 3) s/em-($hyphen)/$1er/ Answer dasher. The reindeer. Sorry my phone has made it a bit hard to read. On 12/31/09, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Ok. Some worked examples to follow this evening On 12/31/09, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Ok. Will try and post some worked examples this evening. Thought a couple up. Hopefully enough to show how (little) my mind works. On 12/31/09, Richard Foley richard.fo...@rfi.net wrote: Hi Aaron, How's about hosting a partially started crossword, with say four representative answers filled in correctly, such that people get the kind of thinking behind your clues. I know the Araucuria and Custos crosswords from the Guardian (showing my age here) had particular styles which took a little getting used to. Consequently one recognised the style and (hopefully) enjoyed getting into the particular mind set to solve the puzzle. Just a thought. -- Richard Foley Ciao - shorter than aufwiedersehen http://www.rfi.net/ On Thursday 31 December 2009 13:02:16 Aaron Trevena wrote: You only need to know what it stands for. As I keep on saying its not very clever. Mostly bad puns and silly geeky word play On 12/31/09, James Laver james.la...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Still no answers in my inbox. Most complete will win if nobody completes it. Maybe I should have posted to a java or python group - they would have finished it by now. Perhaps something to do with the fact that two of the clues reference vim, which the more sensible of us have no wish to use other than to configure emacs where necessary?* --James * And frankly I'd rather use nano -- Sent from my mobile device Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting -- Sent from my mobile device Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting -- Sent from my mobile device Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
Still no answers in my inbox. Most complete will win if nobody completes it. Maybe I should have posted to a java or python group - they would have finished it by now. On 12/24/09, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/12/23 Smylers smyl...@stripey.com: Aaron Trevena writes: 90 downloads of the PDF and Nobody has sent me the correct answers yet.. only a few days to go.. to boxing day. Shall I extend it to new year ? Yes, please! I had a quick look (and got a few answers) when I downloaded it, but haven't had time yet to really look at it. OK : Winning entry by new year, answers and results on New Years Day (or as soon after as I can get to a puter and sober up) First prize still stands - an easter egg in my next CPAN release, An actual Easter egg (with chocolate) would be better! I may consider stretching to some fine cornish fudge and/or fairings if there is enough interest. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting -- Sent from my mobile device Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
2009/12/23 Smylers smyl...@stripey.com: Aaron Trevena writes: 90 downloads of the PDF and Nobody has sent me the correct answers yet.. only a few days to go.. to boxing day. Shall I extend it to new year ? Yes, please! I had a quick look (and got a few answers) when I downloaded it, but haven't had time yet to really look at it. OK : Winning entry by new year, answers and results on New Years Day (or as soon after as I can get to a puter and sober up) First prize still stands - an easter egg in my next CPAN release, An actual Easter egg (with chocolate) would be better! I may consider stretching to some fine cornish fudge and/or fairings if there is enough interest. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
2009/12/18 Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: 2009/12/17 Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: As promised.. I've put together a crossword. Download the PDF, print and ponder over the holiday : http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk/news.html To make it interesting, as well as the glory of bing proclaimed winner on the website and this list the winner will get an easter egg message in the next release of one of my CPAN modules. Answers will be pubished boxing day or the day after 90 downloads of the PDF and Nobody has sent me the correct answers yet.. only a few days to go.. to boxing day. Shall I extend it to new year ? First prize still stands - an easter egg in my next CPAN release, and the glory of being announced winner on this fine list. Come on, it's not that hard - some quick hints in case you're stuck : a) I'm not very clever, so the questions aren't : if it looks really hairy or scary you're barking up the wrong tree, if it looks like a stupid pun then you're probably heading in the right direction b) it may help to listen to christmas songs to find some answers.. not that you're likely to have much choice.. btw, I wrote it before RATM was xmas number one so I'm afraid that 'Killing In The Name Of' won't help. Cheers, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
2009/12/17 Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: As promised.. I've put together a crossword. Download the PDF, print and ponder over the holiday : http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk/news.html To make it interesting, as well as the glory of bing proclaimed winner on the website and this list the winner will get an easter egg message in the next release of one of my CPAN modules. Answers will be pubished boxing day or the day after A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
2009/12/18 Piers Cawley pdcawley-london.0dd...@bofh.org.uk: On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 8:31 AM, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/12/17 Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: As promised.. I've put together a crossword. Download the PDF, print and ponder over the holiday : http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk/news.html To make it interesting, as well as the glory of bing proclaimed winner 'the glory of bing'? Shilling for Microsoft, or a simple typo? Enquiring minds need to know. Perils of tyoing one handed holding a baby :) Of course I failed to define winner, the winner shall be deemed to be the person or other sentient object to first send me the correct answers. Judges decision is final, prize has no cash value, not transferrable, etc etc A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: london.pm xmas xword
2009/12/18 Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: 2009/12/18 Piers Cawley pdcawley-london.0dd...@bofh.org.uk: On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 8:31 AM, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/12/17 Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: As promised.. I've put together a crossword. Download the PDF, print and ponder over the holiday : http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk/news.html To make it interesting, as well as the glory of bing proclaimed winner 'the glory of bing'? Shilling for Microsoft, or a simple typo? Enquiring minds need to know. Perils of tyoing one handed holding a baby :) Of course I failed to define winner, the winner shall be deemed to be the person or other sentient object to first send me the correct answers. Judges decision is final, prize has no cash value, not transferrable, etc etc To clarify further, myself and the reviewers (even if they didn't see the answers) are disqualified - especially osfameron who had plenty of help and still didn't do very well ;p A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
london.pm xmas xword
As promised.. I've put together a crossword. Download the PDF, print and ponder over the holiday : http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk/news.html I've checked the clues/answers, hopefully I've fixed any mistakes.. if anybody spots any let me know and I'll fix and republish. If everybody is still stuck on christmas eve I'll try and publish some hints and extra clues. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Mini-LPM Crossword Warmup (Re: help - looking for a crossword compiler (human or computer))
2009/12/14 Andy Wardley a...@wardley.org: On 12/12/2009 20:24, Aaron Trevena wrote: for my xmas london.pm crossword.. also anybody to proof read and check it would be appreciated. I saw your message yesterday afternoon and my brane starting ticking. Then this morning I saw your other message saying that it's all now compiled and sent out for review, so it's a little late for me to offer to help. only done the first draft - I like the ones you've done - and could do with a few more words - only have 18 at the mo - would like at least 21 A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: help - looking for a crossword compiler (human or computer)
On 12/12/2009 20:24, Aaron Trevena wrote: for my xmas london.pm crossword.. also anybody to proof read and check it would be appreciated. I'd be happy to take a look. Cool - I have 3 volunteers to review - thanks all - still no joy with crossword creators.. I'm not doing it by hand bah! A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: help - looking for a crossword compiler (human or computer)
2009/12/13 Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: On 12/12/2009 20:24, Aaron Trevena wrote: for my xmas london.pm crossword.. also anybody to proof read and check it would be appreciated. I'd be happy to take a look. Cool - I have 3 volunteers to review - thanks all - still no joy with crossword creators.. I'm not doing it by hand bah! First draft sent to first 2 reviewers A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
help - looking for a crossword compiler (human or computer)
for my xmas london.pm crossword.. also anybody to proof read and check it would be appreciated. Cheers, A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Re[2]: Sleeping Arrangements
2009/12/7 Christopher Taranto christop...@tokpela.com: On Mon, December 7, 2009 4:35 am, Ovid wrote: A friend writes: We will be in London between January 1st 5th around a month from now. We were wondering if you had recommendations of reasonably priced accommodations within London proper or within an easy commute on the Tube. Frankly, the only hotel I've stayed at in London was Hotel 55, out in Hangar Lane. I think he wants something more central. Can anyone recommend anything? The Portland or Clarendon hotels are located in between Bloomsbury Square and Russell Square. I used to stay here for business all of the time and are comfortable and fairly inexpensive for their location. http://www.grangehotels.com/ We stayed in the Grange Holborn, and were pretty happy with it - bit of a walk into the west end (or hop onto central line, or a bus), but Holborn is nice, especially at weekends when most of the city workers are away, decent food, a reasonable central-style supermarket and close to covent garden too. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Help me become a Londoner!
2009/11/24 Mike Woods m...@geofront.co.uk: Jonathan Stowe wrote: On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 15:10 +, Roger Burton West wrote: All we have is a 2 deck gun in the yard of a hire shop. On the road between Wells and Glastonbury there is an architectural salvage place with a Bloodhound missile. Years ago there used to be a company called bulldog who sold odd salvage etc, at one point their catalog included cheiftan tank targeting lasers and some disarmed missiles, ah those where the days! We drive past this ( http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/172398 / http://www.helstongunsmiths.com/ ) to get to our friends' house in Helston, there are more tanks, etc than you can see in that picture, another 10 meters along the road in Shelterbox, a disaster response charity. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Help me become a Londoner!
2009/11/19 Dermot paik...@googlemail.com: 2009/11/19 Gianni Ceccarelli dak...@thenautilus.net: Hi all! Some questions I have: - can anyone recommend some agencies (or other methods) to search for the apartment? Another one to avoid : Felicity J Lord, I wouldn't deal with them again on pain of death. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Anyone hiring at the moment?
2009/9/22 Ovid publiustemp-londo...@yahoo.com: --- On Tue, 22/9/09, Richard Foley richard.fo...@rfi.net wrote: From: Richard Foley richard.fo...@rfi.net What, relocate to Amsterdam, whatever for? I'd be seriously tempted to move back there were it not for me seeking British citizenship (something the damned Labour party seems bound and determined to not let happen). I only lived there briefly, but it was a lovely city. Would have stayed were the circumstances right. That's the impression I had of Groningen and most of The Netherlands that I saw, being able to safely cycle to and from work, the abundance of decent trains and public transport gave the impression it would be quite nice to live there. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Anyone hiring at the moment?
2009/9/21 Raphael Mankin r...@mankin.org.uk: Well, I've been bumming about contracting for over 30 years, and the market seems to be picking up a bit. There are more jobs about and rates are also up. Yup.. it is looking that way - I was getting seriously worried that I may have to get a job or contract where I worked in an office rather than at home, but got two offers for teleworking jobs at a reasonably permie salary. Perl is in a funny state. On the one hand, people are saying that Perl is dead, everything has gone to Python or Java I've yet to see any succesful transition happen outside of say Amazon and Yahoo, there's always a lot of noise and office politics, but the actual instances of companies switching rather than adding new technology to the mix, and then Java or Python fanboyz labelling existing perl Legacy - one amusing example is Sift in bristol who've been moving to Java for about 8 years and are still looking for Perl coders with Java skills to do it. My recent experience has been working for and meeting fairly new companies and startups that have deployed large perl systems in the last couple of years - some less than that. or ... OTOH managers that I have spoken to say that it is extremely difficult to find half way decent Perl programmers. They eal problem is to get through the door in the first place. the pre-selection at the job agencies bears no relation to either skills or requirements. I don't buy this either - I've seen salaries for Java or .Net developers with the same level of experience and they cost considerably more, I've also seen companies turn down plenty of more than decent coders because they *aren't* having difficulty finding the right people. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Skype
2009/9/17 Smylers smyl...@stripey.com: Joel Bernstein writes: My main objection to Skype (which I do use) is that it doesn't interoperate with users of other VoIP systems. SIP and suchlike provide an open standard which Skype ignore. Mine is that you have to use Skype's software with it, because they don't publish the protocol. Their Linux client isn't terrible, but it doesn't integrate into Gnome as well as, say, Pidgin. But I keep wanting to hack small changes into it, then remembering that I can't. Yeah, the interface is pretty poor.. however the alternatives are worse. I've been using it heavily for the last couple of years, and although it's not perfect, it's workable. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Schema into diagrams
2009/3/28 Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com: I want something like Visio Enterprise that not only diagrams but also rummages in the database to do schema discovery. One mark agains SQL::Translator, unless anyone has a fix, it shows the tables alphabetically, which can make the arrow nest a bit messy. Being able to specify the order of tables output would be nice. Autodia does Graphviz and Dia output discovers db schemas. Layout is based on roughly on relationships and hiearchy in dia. It also read dbix-class metadata/definitions, cdbi and now Params::Validate (in svn) - hope to support Badger, Mouse and Moose soon. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: Schema into diagrams
2009/3/27 Paul Makepeace pa...@paulm.com: Do people have a favorite MySQL schema - (ER)diagram tool? Basically a quick way of visualising a database. Ideally one that sucks out the schema from the db itself, altho' I guess a mysqldump-driven one would be fine too. I believe that both autodia[1] and sql::translator will do that - both on cpan. A. 1] which I may be partisan towards -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: Recession rates
2009/3/10 Paul Makepeace pa...@paulm.com: Has anyone found the recession/depression affecting contracting rates? A bit, yes, although *touch wood* there does seem to be a slight increase in the availability of telework and part onsite jobs and contracts - whether this is a case of businesses finally catching up with the technology and cultural changes, or just a case of adding non-monetary incentives, I can't be sure - otoh, it *should* be cheaper in theory to have telecommuters than people working onsite if you have decent communications. I was surprised to have a recruiter recently suggest a bunch of candidates for £375/day (each :-)). This seems on the high side, even outside of the economic blues. I suppose - it depends what it's for. I'd want a decent premium on any short term contract (i.e. less than 3 months), or if it was an especially demanding job - whether through long hours, demanding management or high pressure / responsability. I guess what also tweaked me was that every single one of these guys was going for the exact same rate whereas without a doubt they are not all equally skilled. While I don't expect we have accurate programmer pricing models the obvious inefficiency of this market mildly irritated me... Probably what the recruiter specified in the ads or happened to pluck from the air when talking to them. I wouldn't expect 3 different contractors to give me the same rate unless they were clones or I specified a low ceiling in the advertisement. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: about your meetings
2009/1/28 Léon Brocard a...@astray.com: 2009/1/27 Frank Gutierrez dearfra...@gmail.com: Can you stream them or post a video online? Slides will be made available afterwards. Speaking of videos - does anybody have an ETA for the LPW videos being available. The nice people behind yapc.tv made it pretty easy for me to upload a couple of hundred meg or more video files, so it's not any trouble, and I don't think my poor handheld/balancing-on-stationary camera-work does the speakers, slides, talks or event any justice. Cheers, A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: Have at it
2009/1/27 Piers Cawley pdcawley-london.0dd...@bofh.org.uk: MOP is modern? The Art of The MetaObject Protocol was published in 1991. This is obviously some new usage of the word 'modern' with which I was hitherto unfamiliar. It's modern in perl terms, obviously, but it's not exactly new. It's just been ignored by almost everyone who wasn't a lisp hacker for years. Like, say MVC, Design Patterns, almost all Functional programming, oh and lisp. Heck object orientation is still a bit new fangled for some programmers. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: Have at it
2009/1/26 Denny london...@metamathics.org: Personally, I assumed he was referring to the strong 'use Moose' push which EPO seems to be on - would it be safe to say that Moose is a modern approach to OO? I've not used it personally, and am looking forward to the tech meet around the subject. I think MOP (meta object protocol) is a modern approach to OO, it's found in Perl 6, Badger, Mouse (and mouse? ferret ? I lose track..) Moose is the biggest, most used and most complete implementation, but badger looks pretty good and (according to the slides) delivers the 80% you're likely to actually use. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: LPW videos
2009/1/6 Mark Keating m...@shadowcatsystems.co.uk: Hopefully this month - though I am not sure where, I will most likely leave that decision to Leon :) Though some of them will be on the SC site (MST talks etc.) Cool. I thought I'd start the ball rolling by uploading to yapc.tv (2 talks, uploaded but not processed and posted yet) and the perl monger group on facebook. I don't have a professional account on flickr so can't upload there, but that would be a good place to put videos, as would youtube. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: LPW videos
2009/1/7 James Laver james.la...@gmail.com: Youtube is great for getting people interested in watching it, but if you aren't just after attracting more people then perhaps somewhere with higher quality video? yapc.tv provides high quality video, uploading to youtube and facebook is get a wider audience. I haven't seen any video on flickr, no idea if it's worth paying the pro subscription - although I am tempted. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: LPW videos
2009/1/7 Andrew Shitov a...@shitov.ru: I thought I'd start the ball rolling by uploading to yapc.tv (2 talks, The first one is available online: http://yapc.tv/2008/lpw/. Updated LPW wiki with the link A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
LPW videos
Hi, Anybody know when the LPW videos will be available online ? I have 2 talks on my own video camera, but that was perched on stationary or handheld rather than on a nice tripod in the middle of the room. If push comes to shove I can upload to youtube, or some other site - probably a total of about an hours footage, which is annoying for youtube. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: LPW videos
2009/1/6 Mark Keating m...@shadowcatsystems.co.uk: Anybody know when the LPW videos will be available online ? Hopefully this month - though I am not sure where, I will most likely leave that decision to Leon :) Though some of them will be on the SC site (MST talks etc.) I'm planning to upload my videos to yapc.tv this evening - that would be a good place. I have 2 talks on my own video camera, but that was perched on stationary or handheld rather than on a nice tripod in the middle of the room. If push comes to shove I can upload to youtube, or some other site - probably a total of about an hours footage, which is annoying for youtube. I was hoping to put up videos of slightly higher size/quality that youtube (.flv files still) I'll probably put them up on yapc.tv and then break them up into small lower quality chunks for youtube as well. Another place you could put the videos would be the facebook group for perl mongers. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: LPW videos
2009/1/6 David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk: On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 06:41:26PM +, Aaron Trevena wrote: I'm planning to upload my videos to yapc.tv this evening - that would be a good place. Can they be trivially downloaded from there in a sane (ie not Flash, not Microsoft, not Ogg) format? Read the fine website ;) From http://yapc.tv/about/ : Is it possible to get the video in higher resolution? Most recordings are available in two different formats (FLV and MPEG) and two different sizes. Links for downloading them appear on the right side of a page with video. Normally there exists also a larger original file which is not linked. A -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: Perl success stories
2008/12/18 Denny london...@metamathics.org: On Thu, 2008-12-18 at 10:25 +, Dave Cross wrote: Denny wrote: Inspired by this month's discussions about Perl community websites, we* have started Yet Another Perl Website. Sounds like a similar idea to http://proudtouseperl.org/. So it does! Damn your prior art! :) So, people should send relevant content to both sites, please :) The more widely those success stories get distributed, the better. Definately. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: Perl Christmas Quiz
2008/12/12 Paul Makepeace pa...@paulm.com: Fair enough, and not the place to make comments. I think I've just had one too many interview candidates in recent memory who have named their functions func and used variable names like foo, bar, etc. I'm dealing with a piece of production code featuring the variable $btchHash, it's a hash containing all the data used in several hundred lines of spaghetti code. even adding the missing vowell doesn't make it a helpful name. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: Copyright Theft
2008/12/10 Jonathan Stowe [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 2008/12/10 Denny [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Wed, 2008-12-10 at 14:36 +, Jonathan Stowe wrote: So, we all think that a site with no O'Reilly branding [...] The first image I can see on that page is the O'Reilly 'Programming Perl' image. The second link on the page goes to oreilly.com. Call me gullible, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to question it. Doesn't the link improve it's google page rank? The whole geek community has a big problem with intellectual ambiguity in respect of the whole intellectual property thing anyway IMO, we all tend to agree that ripping off the books is a bad thing and everything and then half of you go off and advocate using dodgy russian MP3 sites and bit-torrents BECAUSE THE CONTENT MUST BE FREE MAN! Mostly true, there are plenty of grey areas tho... Some Dodgy russian mp3 sites are no less legit than ITunes, in that they have contracts with national record industry bodies, apparently it's ok for Apple for instance to source cheap labour from china or africa, but it's not ok for consumers to source cheap (not counterfeit, or illegally copied) imports (digital or physical) from say thailand or russia. Strictly speaking it's illegal for me to use torrents to download songs because I'm too lazy to go into the loft, get the LP, find a record player, play it, put it back, and even illegal to copy a CD I purchased (or even to workaround DRM preventing me from even playing my Duran Duran CD on my computer). A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
