Re: tablets for parents
It would mean putting in fixed infrastructure, but modern smart TVs are capable of doing Skype. My parents have a Panasonic Smart Viera connected to a standard BT broadband line. It does Skype perfectly fine - in fact provides a much better video conferencing experience than basically anything else short of the $100k dedicated infra I've seen in banks. A smart TV combined with a Freeview box and the catchup services available on the Smart TV basically do everything my parents want apart from video games. YMMV, of course. Ben On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 9:20 PM, Nicholas Clark wrote: > Dear knowledgeable hive mind, > > It seems that my parents are finally cracking and amenable to the idea of > buying a device for the purpose of videoconferencing. My sister and I > suspect that the right thing is a tablet connected via 3G > > (my parents alternate between two locations in southern England, so fixed > line would mean 2 fixed lines, and two lots of fixed infrastructure, which > feels like a pain) > > So, what is good to get. Specifically > > 1) What tablet? >(with camera, obviously, 3G, and possibly not much else "special") > 2) What data plan? > > You can infer from this that they don't currently have an Internet > connection, and I don't think that once they get one they are going to > start > heavy surfing or high bandwidth activities such as watching videos on > YouTube or iPlayer. > > (They have had the "recording the TV" thing sussed for a decade or more > now, > and whilst they have migrated from VHS to hard drives, I don't think that > they are going to move from the idea of a box under the TV connected to an > aerial, that they program after circling programmes in a paper listings > magazine) > > I don't think that they care what OS, and I don't think that I do hugely > either. I just that care it doesn't get abandoned by the manufacturer as > soon as the next model comes out*, and it needs to work without assuming > that the owner has a PC for any sort of regular service activity. > > My sister has Macs (and a Blackberry too, I think), but is dealing with > Windows at work, so between us I think we can hand-hold most things. > > Nicholas Clark > > * So *this* would put me off Windows RT even if it ticked all the other > boxes, > as I can't see how MS are going to sanely sustain 3 different OSes and > ecosystems, and I suspect that RT is more than 33% likely to be the one > for > the chop. And even if it isn't, well, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, > Windows Phone 8 - they have a pedigree now of dumping their customers. >
Re: Finding the intersection between two regexes
This piece of anecdotal evidence is now a good ~8 years out of date, but I found that there were some surprising performance regressions for a complex, combined regex versus versus multiple runs with simple ones. As ever the moral of the story is, if performance matters, always measure, and get a friend to sanity check your results. Cheers, Ben On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 9:45 AM, Dirk Koopman wrote: > On 21/04/14 03:14, Mark Fowler wrote: >> >> On Sunday, April 20, 2014, David Cantrell wrote: >> >>> Can anyone point me at some code on the CPAN that, given two regexes, >>> can figure out whether there are any bits of text that will be matched >>> by both? >> >> >> >> I'm not sure I understand the question here, or moreover why you want to >> do >> this..is it just an intellectual exercise? >> >> If it's just a matter of wanting a single Perl regular expression that can >> match something iff both of these other regular expressions would match, >> surely you can just do this by inserting the second regular expression at >> the beginning of the first encapsulated in a zero-width positive look >> ahead >> assertion (with suitable variable length doodads to pad if they're not >> anchoring at the same place in the string.) >> >> What the link is talking about seems to be converting a regular expression >> down into a finate state machine and then combining that finate state >> machine with another finate state machine (I.e. non deterministic, being >> turned back into deterministic with maths). I can see how that's possible >> for a strict regular expression, but as you say, not for a true Perl >> non-regular regular expression. >> >> So...why do you want to do this? >> > > This may be related to the question I asked recently about turning (up to) a > few hundred REGEXes into one giant REGEX. The goal being to test all those > disparate REGEXes in the most efficient way possible on a string. > > Dirk >
Re: Dear Dr Who experts...
Now there's a T-shirt waiting to happen. On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 8:03 PM, Dominic Humphries wrote: > Real daleks don't climb stairs, they level the building :) > > > > On 8 October 2014 19:55:34 Gareth Harper wrote: > >> It's not just the more recent episodes (depending on your definition of >> "recent"), the Daleks could levitate during my childhood era (80s-90s). >> >> I'm sure I remember an episode from the Sylvester McCoy era where the >> Daleks were chasing him and to evade them he simply ran up some stairs and >> then the daleks levitated after him. A quick google shows that the >> episode >> was called "remembrance of the daleks" unfortunately I don't have the time >> to wade through the many youtube clips to try and view it. >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_the_Daleks >> >> "In the cliffhanger to the first episode, a Dalek levitates up stairs. The >> sequence was intended to put to rest a joke about the inability of the >> monsters to do so." >> >> The BBC's website seems to imply it's "always been that way". >> >> >> http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/remembrancedaleks/detail.shtml >> >> "This story reveals for the first time that the Daleks are capable of >> ascending stairs. (Although this is the first time that a Dalek is >> actually >> seen to ascend a flight of stairs, there is a scene in season two's The >> Chase: Journey into Terror in which such an occurrence is clearly implied; >> and season twenty-two's Revelation of the Daleks shows that both the >> Daleks >> and Davros are capable of hovering above the ground.)" >> >> According to wikipedia, season 2 was ~1965. I can't help you with the Tom >> Baker question though, it's a tiny bit before my time. >> >> -- >> >> Gareth >> >> >> On 8 October 2014 11:19, Nicholas Clark wrote: >> >> > Dear Dr Who experts (I'm sure that there are many here)... >> > >> > IIRC there's a scene in an episode of Dr Who (in Tom Baker's time) where >> > the Doctor escapes by climbing up through a hatch in the TARDIS ceiling, >> > calling down a one liner to the Daleks stuck below just before he closes >> > it >> > >> > 1) Am I remembering this correctly? >> > 2) If so, is a clip of this online somewhere, in an easily linkable >> > form? * >> > >> > >> > Further, my understanding is that in the more recent episodes, the >> > Daleks >> > have figured out how to overcome their previous inability to cope with >> > stairs, ladders, etc, uttering "levitate" before doing exactly that. >> > >> > 3) Is there a representative clip of this online? >> > >> > Nicholas Clark >> > >> > * please don't post links to places that would make Auntie upset. >> > > > >
Re: Interactive graphics
D3 (Javascript) or Incanter (Clojure) are typically my choices these days. Thanks, Ben On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 12:02 PM, Sue Spence wrote: > From: Roger Bell_West > To: london.pm-annou...@london.pm.org > Cc: > Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 09:03:08 + > Subject: Interactive graphics > What are the cool kids using for interactive graphical stuff these > days (not just dialogues, but changing graphics), assuming the > underlying language is still Perl? I used to use Perl/Tk. Perl/Gtk? > Something that runs in a web browser? Or something else? > > R
Re: (Planned) Emergency Social - Friday 20th March, 6pm, Wenlock Arms
James Laver wrote: [3] And if you're planning to come, please mail me offlist, I've no idea how many people are going to turn up. I'm planning to come along. Ben
Re: (Planned) Emergency Social - Friday 20th March, 6pm, Wenlock Arms
Ben Evans wrote: James Laver wrote: [3] And if you're planning to come, please mail me offlist, I've no idea how many people are going to turn up. I'm planning to come along. Ben Apologies - I'm trying out a new mailer - but it doesn't seem to be behaving itself - that was supposed to go to James only. Ben
Re: Schema into diagrams
Paul Makepeace wrote: On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Dave Cross wrote: Paul Makepeace wrote: 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 use SQL::Translator for that http://search.cpan.org/dist/SQL-Translator/ Thanks. (Used that years ago so it goes) OmniGraffle is a great tool for this kind of thing, and it looks like its file format is an Apple plist (XML) so should be reasonably straightforward to have SQL::Translator spit out data that OmniGraffle could render nicely. Has anyone done this or anything in this direction? I haven't, but it would be a great help with something I'm currently working on, so if anyone does have any tips, please can we keep the list copied on them. Thanks, Ben
Re: [OT] finding memory hungry bits of my code
Edmund von der Burg wrote: 2009/4/9 Andy Armstrong : That sounds as if it could just be Perl getting up to cruising (memory) altitude. Perl isn't especially keen on giving memory back to the OS once it's used it; instead it keeps it hanging around and uses it to satisfy future allocations. Perhaps you're right - but our cruising altitude would seem to be very high: our biggest processes according to top: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEMTIME+ COMMAND 2050 web 15 0 126m 112m 5624 S0 1.4 0:21.66 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 1702 web 15 0 126m 112m 5420 R6 1.4 0:22.88 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 3511 web 20 0 124m 110m 5544 S0 1.4 0:13.07 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 4198 web 15 0 124m 110m 5560 S9 1.4 0:08.84 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 2037 web 15 0 124m 110m 5588 S0 1.4 0:17.96 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 3143 web 25 0 122m 108m 6116 S0 1.3 0:15.10 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 1321 web 17 0 121m 108m 6356 S0 1.3 0:22.96 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 1329 web 15 0 121m 108m 6348 S0 1.3 0:18.82 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 3160 web 16 0 119m 105m 5572 S3 1.3 0:13.70 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 3512 web 16 0 117m 104m 6292 S2 1.3 0:10.58 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 3155 web 15 0 118m 104m 5588 S0 1.3 0:14.26 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 3492 web 15 0 117m 104m 5572 S4 1.3 0:12.85 /usr/sbin/apache-perl 3151 web 18 0 117m 103m 4504 S4 1.3 0:15.30 /usr/sbin/apache-perl Am I missing something? I don't see what's particularly scary about those numbers. Ben
Re: Perl on JVM Slides
Ovid wrote: Last night's tech talks had a very interesting talk about Perl on the JVM Are those slides available anywhere? I don't know if Leon's put them up anywhere yet. If not, mail me offlist and I'll send you a copy. While I'm here - if anyone (whether an attendee at last night's tech meet or not) would like to work on this - please get in touch as well. There are plenty of interesting things in this area. Thanks, Ben
Re: Perl on JVM Slides
Andy Armstrong wrote: On 17 Apr 2009, at 19:47, Ben Evans wrote: Ovid wrote: Last night's tech talks had a very interesting talk about Perl on the JVM Are those slides available anywhere? I don't know if Leon's put them up anywhere yet. If not, mail me offlist and I'll send you a copy. While I'm here - if anyone (whether an attendee at last night's tech meet or not) would like to work on this - please get in touch as well. There are plenty of interesting things in this area. /me waves :) I missed the tech meet so could I start with a copy of the slides please? Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in the topic. I've put a post up on my blog, at: http://boxcatjunction.blogspot.com/2009/04/invokedynamic-on-os-x-update.html which has details of how to get a JVM with support for invokedynamic built on your system (primarily for Macs right now, other platforms are similar, with small variations) - and how to get some examples up and running - including one which is reminiscent of a Perl closure. I'll also be writing up the current state of play with my code, and getting it to a state where I won't be embarassed to show it to other people. If there's interest, I can also set up a separate mailing list to talk about it (or we can stay here / move to p5p, as people prefer). Thanks, Ben
Re: Encode::Mangled?
Richard Huxton wrote: I'm dealing with data from a web-page that claims to be ISO-8859-1 but actually has some Win-1252 embedded in it. I can convert it to UTF-8 and all seems well, however the characters need mapping. It's straightforward enough to handle the dozen or so chars I know about but I can't believe there isn't something on cpan for this. Now the *correct* solution is to track down the people responsible for this travesty and beat them with sticks. Failing that, are people just rolling their own three-line function each time? Sticks. I've heard the standard management argument that "it'll take longer to fix it upstream and cost more than working around it, and anyay the broken data source will be going away real soon now..." more times than I care to think about. Not only has it never been correct, it has never been within 1 order of magnitude of being correct. Sadly, the bleed and wastage that these types of idiocies incur is not something which is easily separately tracked - it just falls into the noise of "general development entropy". So push back hard, and get the damn thing fixed upstream, where it should be done. If the managers ultimately refuse then use Dave's solution and just aggressively trim errant crap out of the feed - and include clear documentation as comments in your code as to what you're doing and why - that way if people whinge you (or the next guy) know where to point them. Ben
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Technical meeting: An evening of dynamic languages
I just wanted to say thank you to Leon and Billy for organising last night's tech meeting. It was really good to hear such a diverse range of talks, and it's kick-started some very useful discussions for my own project. It was also great to meet some new people from different languages (and catch up with some people I haven't seen for ages!) My slides are here: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/973503/dyn_langs_bcs_2009-06.pdf Let's have another one later in the year! Ben
Re: Big Geek Day Out: Bletchley Park 18th July
Joel Bernstein wrote: On 15 Jun 2009, at 10:21, Dave Cross wrote: On 15/06/2009 10:14, Joel Bernstein wrote: [ Trip to Bletchley Park ] What's there? What will you do? You're kidding, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park I knew about the history but not that there was a museum. IRC has already enlightened me. Doesn't sound like something to take partners/girlfriends to. It sounds pretty boring. That rather depends on the partner, I would think. Ben
Re: Java wonks?
Dave Hodgkinson wrote: I'm tendering for a project which will require a Java bod for 3 months starting in August. Skills to include spring and maven. Where best to find such a person? Depends. If you're prepared to deal with recruitment agents, then you talk to me, and I provide you with a list of agents who can: a) Follow simple instructions, eg: "Do not call me between these times", "Do not send me roles in the West Midlands for 1/3 my current take-home", etc. b) Actually match candidates that might be of some use to the spec they gave you c) Not try and sell you a pup just to make a buck d) Actually behave like real human beings with whom technical people might want to hang out / drink with once in a while[0] Ben [0] Is it surprising that this is the only reliable indicator I've ever found for whether recruiters are worth my time - WIDWTG? (Would I Drink With This Guy). It may give false positives, but it's a start...
Re: Java wonks?
Nicholas Clark wrote: On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 12:33:26AM +0100, Ben Evans wrote: If you're prepared to deal with recruitment agents, then you talk to me, ^ and I provide you with a list of agents who can: a) Follow simple instructions, eg: "Do not call me between these times", "Do not send me roles in the West Midlands for 1/3 my current take-home", etc. b) Actually match candidates that might be of some use to the spec they gave you c) Not try and sell you a pup just to make a buck d) Actually behave like real human beings with whom technical people might want to hang out / drink with once in a while[0] Gosh. There's more than one that meets those criteria? I only know of one. (There used to be a second, but I don't know what happened to him) Yes. I didn't say it was a long list, and one of them that I know has just left recruitment to go off to University to do a CS degree, but > 1. Of course, it's fairly well-known that my minimum requirements for who I'll drink with are really quite liberal. Ben
Re: Mailing lists - was Re: London.pm Beer Festival, Edgar Wallace, TOMORROW, Thursday 2009-07-16
Andrew Black wrote: Léon Brocard wrote: 2009/7/17 James Laver : Our glorious leader prefers only to announce socials and techmeets, hence why I posted it to this list only. I think there is scope for a london.pm social list Not moderated and where you can post emergency socials, informal meets and so on. -1 We're a social lot and always have been. AFAIC, the main list, plus announce is where these types of announcements belong. Emails posted to the -announce list also go to other non-Perl announce lists. We shouldn't spam them too often. Indeed. The main issue I am aware is that announce -> gllug-social list where it raises hackles from anti perl brigade. Why would a "social" group not want to be informed of relevant, and usually very pleasant pubmeets? If they don't think it's relevant ot their interests, they can always unsub. Ben
Re: He'brew
Ovid wrote: Since we're on topic, discussing beer, does anyone know where in London I can acquire He'brew, the Chosen Beer? I bought some back in the states, only to discover that I really, really like this stuff. It's a darker beer with hints of chocolate and nutty goodness. Utobeer at the Borough Market. Ben
Re: Wanted: Speakers for London.pm Technical Meeting
On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 5:19 PM, Dave Cross wrote: > Quoting Pedro Figueiredo : > >> and another one I've been mulling and considering writing to submit to >> LPW, but I'm afraid it wouldn't warrant me many friends in the L.pm >> community, it's titled "The problem with Perl" and is basically me ranting >> about the nice things in Java and Python that we (as in, myself until I >> started doing serious Java and Python, and some other L.pm'ers I've talked >> with) just tend to shrug off or don't even think about, or think they're bad >> but they're actually not bad at all. > > I think this one sounds really interesting. I'd love to hear it. I've been discussing a talk with Leon, tentatively entitled "Through The Looking Glass" - basically an account of what I found in the years I've been spending a lot of time with Java & JVM technology and communities. I could do either the technical or community aspects - both are IMO very interesting and provide, in many ways, very different perspectives (but also some surprising similarities). Ben
Re: Wanted: Speakers for London.pm Technical Meeting
On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 5:27 PM, Dominic Thoreau wrote: > On 16 October 2012 17:06, Pedro Figueiredo wrote: >> and another one I've been mulling and considering writing to submit to LPW, >> but I'm afraid it wouldn't warrant me many friends in the L.pm community, >> it's titled "The problem with Perl" and is basically me ranting about the >> nice things in Java and Python that we (as in, myself until I started doing >> serious Java and Python, and some other L.pm'ers I've talked with) just tend >> to shrug off or don't even think about, or think they're bad but they're >> actually not bad at all. >> > > After the course I took at the OU last year ( > https://msds.open.ac.uk/students/study/undergraduate/course/m362.htm ) > If someone can bring the synchronised keyword into perl, that would be > good. And make it work across platforms (like, load balanced servers) > that would be good too. You do not want synchronized and "visibility semantics pretty close to the JMM" as your primary concurrency mechanism visible at the high-level language level, or where anyone short of a Damian-level hacker can easily get at it. Sure, that may well be what your virtual machine (or equivalent hardware abstraction layer) wants, but don't, for the love of Mike, expose it in the HLL. That's pretty much the biggest lesson learned in the last 15 years of implementation decisions in the JVM. Ben
Re: Wanted: Speakers for London.pm Technical Meeting
On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 10:05 PM, David Cantrell wrote: > On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 05:23:04PM +0100, Ben Evans wrote: > >> I've been discussing a talk with Leon, tentatively entitled "Through >> The Looking Glass" - basically an account of what I found in the years >> I've been spending a lot of time with Java & JVM technology and >> communities. >> >> I could do either the technical or community aspects - both are IMO >> very interesting and provide, in many ways, very different >> perspectives (but also some surprising similarities). > > Do you think that between you and Pedro you could do both? :-) OK. How about this as a suggestion: I focus on community, but also talk about broad-brush features of the language and platform which I believe have shaped the community. Then Pedro could focus on the technology in detail, and show code & stuff :) How does that sound? Pedro, would that work for you? Thanks, Ben
Re: jQuery
On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Smylers wrote: > Mallory van Achterberg writes: > >> Ah, jQuery, something I try to avoid except when I can't. >> http://www.doxdesk.com/updates/2009.html#u20091116-jquery > > Thanks for that. Is there any decent combined documentation for > JavaScript + jQuery, pointing to whichever of the two is superior for a > particular task? > > I've been liking using jQuery for little bits of (optional) user > interface polish, but keep being caught out by not knowing proper > JavaScript (or Dom). I like Bear Bibeault's jQuery in Action (but it may be a little behind the times these days). You should also get a copy of "Javascript - The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford. My guys seem to like Angular.js as well. Cheers, Ben
Re: URL shorteners (was: Re: ISNIC DNS)
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 1:01 PM, Sam Kington wrote: > > Getting off-topic here, but what use are URL shorteners now that Twitter > converts all links to be t.co/blah ? They don't save you any space in > tweets, and they obfuscate the URL you're linking to. Is link-tracking > really that useful? Not only are they of marginal utility in almost all cases, they are actively harmful in many others. Ben
