Re: XP-Replacement for Parents
On 28/03/2014 21:01, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 2:55 AM, david wrote: Thread drifting for a moment, do folks have any recommendations for where to buy reasonably priced, legal Win 7 licenses ? I really should upgrade my compatability platform... The trick is to go for the "OEM" license. This is cheaper because you're opting not to hassle MS for support. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116986 Paul You're also agreeing never to transfer it to another machine. I think machine is actually "motherboard", ie you can change other components, provided MS don't think you're trying to sneak a complete change through.
Re: XP-Replacement for Parents
Thoughts at random... I do not use Windows, but AFAIK XP->Win7 is an upgrade, not a wipe and re-install. From the back of the Win7 upgrade pack: "If you are upgrading from XP, you will need to back up your files and settings, perform a clean install and then reinstall your files, settings and programs." Whether you could partition the main disk and preserve what's on D:, I don't know. They probably want you to move from FAT to NTFS. Anyway, received wisdom is that a clean install of Windows will be much better performance-wise, ie you defrag, lose dead registry crap, etc etc. The same box cover also reminds me that Win7 Pro or Ultimate editions will allow you to "Run many Windows XP productivity applications in Windows XP mode". Some sort of VM or emulation, or just compatible libs? I don't know. I did an upgrade for my father recently but I didn't try running Win 7 on the hardware he used for XP. I'm all in favour of Linux, but I wasn't brave enough to convert Dad - he's been using DOS & Windows since 1986 and knows enough to get himself out of basic trouble; on most of the Linux desktops I've tried, I could imagine him tweaking some odd setting and then me struggling to work out what the heck he'd done. Plus I needed to migrate various apps, scanner, printer, etc and get in and out in a weekend. YMMV. One potential gotcha - my father had a lot of MS Works stuff - databases and spreadsheets rather than word-processing. MS totally don't support Works beyond XP, LibreOffice doesn't import the files; I had to find some terribly clunky s/w to do conversions. If your scanner doesn't have manufacturer drivers for newer Windows versions, try VueScan. I have an Epson which was only supported on XP, and Epson's own site actually recommended VueScan for newer Windowses. It gives you a lot of knobs to tweak, if not the slickest interface - maybe better for scanning a few photos than dozens of documents. +1 for the live-CD/USB test. You could actually give your parents a chance to say "that's horrible/fantastic" before committing, as well as testing scanner drivers. User-focus! Re the security fears: I think the logic is not so much that XP will suddenly fall apart, but that whenever MS publish fixes for Vista or 7, blackhats will look to see if the same holes exist unpatched in XP. HTH Gordon
Re: London.pm Dim Sum, Leong's Legends, Thursday 12th September 13:00
Oh yes /blushes On 11/09/2013 20:59, James Laver wrote: 13:00, as per subject? :) /j Sent from my iPhone On 11 Sep 2013, at 20:44, Gordon Banner wrote: Any particular time? On 11/09/2013 06:52, James Laver wrote: Motivated by the dual reasons of Jay Rayner having finally discovered their xiao long bao and writing about them in tones that made me crave them from when I used to do them regularly and a strong desire to avoid a particular client meeting I don't want to be in, let's have dim sum tomorrow - it's been ages! (Opposite De Hems) Leong's Legends, 4 Macclesfield st W1D 6AX James Sent from my iPhone
Re: London.pm Dim Sum, Leong's Legends, Thursday 12th September 13:00
Any particular time? On 11/09/2013 06:52, James Laver wrote: Motivated by the dual reasons of Jay Rayner having finally discovered their xiao long bao and writing about them in tones that made me crave them from when I used to do them regularly and a strong desire to avoid a particular client meeting I don't want to be in, let's have dim sum tomorrow - it's been ages! (Opposite De Hems) Leong's Legends, 4 Macclesfield st W1D 6AX James Sent from my iPhone
Re: Almost on-topic
The odd thing is, to hear that zookeeper talking about the difficulties, you wouldn't have thought camels had been domesticated beasts of burden for centuries. Perhaps in less enlighted times, they just hit them with sticks? IANA camel trainer...
Re: Living with smart match breakage
On 15/06/2013 22:13, David Cantrell wrote: On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 12:03:20AM +0100, Gordon Banner wrote: Finally, the OP mentioned "convoluted boilerplate" and was offered no warnings 'experimental::smartmatch'; # or use experimental 'smartmatch'; If you think that's memorable and quick to type The complaint wasn't about stuff being hard to remember or type, but about it being convoluted. They're different. Very precise point, well made. And yet I'm oddly unashamed of my lack of rigour here. :-)
Re: Living with smart match breakage
Putting my hand up as one of the idiots... I've been using given/when for ages. My impression was that it was announced as a new feature, "yay perl has a case statement (only better) at last", and I piled in. Maybe I passed danger signals on the way, but not consciously. Lots of books/presentations promoted it, and I don't remember the small print. Marking it as experimental now seems to me to be rewriting history, what we wish we'd said at the time. The 5.10 perlsyn page for example does not give any warnings at all. I defend the option to change the language and remove broken stuff, but I'm slightly peeved to be labelled a bleeding-edge cowboy for using something that has been promoted widely for years. A quote from the 4th edition Camel, at the end of *5 pages* of discussion of given/when: "We still consider some of the darker corners of given and when to be experimental, but please be assured that in practice most of your switch statements are likely to be based on simple string or number matches, and these will always work the way you expect." I want my matches - just about all of them simple string or number matches - to "always work", please. Finally, the OP mentioned "convoluted boilerplate" and was offered no warnings 'experimental::smartmatch'; # or use experimental 'smartmatch'; If you think that's memorable and quick to type, your brain and fingers must move faster than mine, or you program in an IDE. By the time you've knocked that lot out you might as well type a bunch of elsifs anyway. Slightly more annoyed than I expected to be at the beginning of this rant, Gordon On 14/06/2013 16:09, Graeme Hewson wrote: On Friday 14 Jun 2013 16:29:23 Abigail wrote: (If you hire more than a handful of new devs each month, someone will not have gotten the memo). Some people will think they /have/ got the memo because the feature's been written about in the Camel book, Modern Perl, and no doubt other books too.
Re: Scope of variables in a function
Also that would break
my $var = "outer";
{
my $stashed_value = $var;
my $var = "inner";
...
}
I don't have an instant example of why doing that would be a good thing,
but it's quite clearly supported at present.
Gordon
On 02/06/2013 12:49, Dave Mitchell wrote:
The original patch was a proof-of-concept that hoisted the run-time
effects of my to the start of the containing scope. So that from a
run-time point of view,
{
AAA;
my $x = ...;
BBB;
my $y = ...;
CCC;
my $z = ...;
DDD;
}
is executed like
{
my ($x,$y,$y);
AAA;
$x = ...;
BBB;
$y = ...;
CCC;
$z = ...;
DDD;
}
The main problem with it was that in something like the following:
while (<>) {
next unless /rare condition/;
my ($lots, $of, $lexicals) = split;
...
}
all those lexicals would be initialised and cleared every time round the
loop, rather than just on rare occasions: which could be quite a
performance hit.
Re: Scope of variables in a function
I've seen this "feature" in action on about 3 occasions ... each time after someone spent a couple of frustrated hours debugging. I have also seen it mentioned as a "cunning idiom", before we had the state keyword. I suspect that it's used far more often by accident than cunning plan ... and that using it intentionally is pretty much obfuscation (as well as relying on undefined behaviour). It's all very well to say RTFM, but I don't think every user should have to RT *whole* FM before starting to code, just the bits they intend to use. And this is not something a beginner will notice and internalise while reading about "my" and "if" for the first time, even if perlsyn is the tutorial(!) they start with. The problem is this is kind-of in-between documentation ... faced with that behaviour, what would you search for? It's not like there's a mysterious foo() call that you could track down. My vote would be to actively deprecate the usage, start generating warnings, and suggest that it won't compile under "use strict" in a release or two... Gordon On 01/06/2013 19:15, Anthony Lucas wrote: On 1 June 2013 18:58, Andrew Beverley wrote: I try to avoid separately declaring variables where possible, as IMHO it clutters the code. Cluttered !== Less Lines of Code I would suggest re-adjusting your concept of cluttered. I would call any statement including a declaration, doing anything other than declarations to be the more cluttered option. On 1 June 2013 19:03, Andrew Beverley wrote: Thanks for that. Obviously I should have RTM, but it does seem strange that something that is not recommended does not produce any sort of warnings. It's not that it's not recommended, it's just that it's usually not what you meant. There's nothing objectively wrong with not reinitialising a variable on every call into your function.
Etiquette [was: Re: Updating lots of database fields in a single row]
Be nice as this list has more to offer than silly pounding on people that release things onto the CPAN or send unclear emails. A person asks a question. We give an answer. We can only say so much. A person can only take on board so much. So we have to make that answer as good as possible in the limited scope available. I'm proposing Gordon's law, somewhat akin to Godwin's: As a discussion in the London.pm list grows longer, the probability of it turning into a meta-discussion of what is (not) an acceptable posting approaches 1. It's great that we're all so keen not to put off newbies, not to allow time-wasting, etc, but my word is this list self-conscious! ;-) Gordon
Re: Project management
On 23/01/2013 10:34, Adrian Howard wrote: 1) Consider Certified Scrum Master course. The certification itself is pretty useless as a signifier of skill - it basically just means you attended a two day course - but the courses themselves tend to be quite useful. That was my experience - a very good and throught-provoking 2 days followed by a laughably trivial quiz. 2) General Assembly and Skills Matters http://skillsmatter.com/ & http://generalassemb.ly/ They both do free/cheapish courses with good presenters. Might be worth dipping a toe in here. +1 for SkillsMatter. I've done a number of courses there and they pride themselves on covering topics which are at the leading edge, ie if you start hearing a buzz about something, they're just about to run a course. They don't have a permanent team of fulltime trainers - their trainers tend to be committers on the project you're learning about ... perhaps less polished but at a different level for depth of knowledge. Going back to the original question: I'd like to grasp a decent methodology. From what I've seen that would be Agile. You may need to decide what are you trying to achieve exactly. I think the Scrum approach is a breath of fresh air after years of over-rigid project planning. But Scrum is more about managing development work, rather than "project management" as such. Basically, Scrum & other Agile approaches tend to start from the view that a traditional project plan with a 2-year delivery date is doomed to failure, and does more harm than good. But this may not be what "management" want to hear, and the sorts of places that advertise for a Project Manager role probably still want someone with PRINCE and a nice line in oversized pert charts. My feeling would be to go on the Scrum course and avoid the places that want PRINCE, but YMMV. Gordon
Re: Brainbench perl test?
On 05/09/2012 17:35, Abigail wrote: No. Well, it filters out the wannabees. It doesn't recognize the serious coder. If, given the Fibonacci sequence, or a similar recursive formula, and your first instinct is to solve it with recursion or iteration, you aren't serious. Your first instinct should be "Is there a generating function I can use?". Abigail I used to do a lot of interviews with brand new graduates, and quite often asked the CompSci ones to write me a factorial function (though Fibonacci would have done just as well). I don't recall any cases where knowledge of the maths was a problem; and the simple implementation was not intended as a filter, it just got them into the programming mindset. Of course, almost all of them would use recursion, and my real interest was in the follow-on discussion "why did you do it that way?", and how long it took them to twig that while factorials are a good illustration of recursion, recursion isn't necessarily a good implementation of factorials. However, if interviewing, say, an engineer or physicist with self-taught practical knowledge of programming, you usually wouldn't get the same reflex response, and I'd probably not bother with that question... Gordon
Re: Wanted: Speakers for London.pm Technical Meeting
On 18/06/2012 21:12, Leon Brocard wrote: On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 04:26:25PM +0100, Leon Brocard wrote: I'm trying to organise a technical meeting for the 2012-07-12 in east London. I'm looking for a few speakers for 20 minute talks. Could you email me offlist if you're interested? I'm looking for another talk. Anyone want to repeat a YAPC::NA talk or practice a YAPC::Europe one? Leon Hi Leon As mentioned today at the Mongo thing, I will probably be able to do something for this. It might be about unicode files on Windows, or (inspired by today) something NoSQL-y, or might be Something Else. But I have *weeks* to work on small details like the topic. I'll sort something out next week and let you know for definite. Gordon
Re: YAPC Pisa
Nigel Metheringham wrote: [I'm in a different hotel - since the conference one took many days to respond to a query about rooms - by which time I had booked elsewhere] Yes, it seems like they have one guy arranging all their YAPC bookings, so you have to wait for his next shift to get a reply. So it turns out that "go elsewhere" was the solution. They would have accepted a fax, but by the time I'd dithered and finally got back to them, one of the nights (6th) was no longer available. So I booked online, no fuss, for less money, at one of the other hotels listed on the YAPC Site. End of saga. :-) Gordon
YAPC Pisa
On the subject of YAPC, has anyone else tried to book at the conference hotel and been worried at being asked to send credit card details by email? They won't accept the info by phone, and their online booking doesn't work for YAPC. So ... Am I being paranoid, or is email not a good place to be entrusting your secrets? Has anyone found a better way around it? Gordon Gianni Ceccarelli wrote: On 2010-06-24 Léon Brocard wrote: If you're not going to YAPC in Pisa then you might want to catch Damian's excellent regexp tutorial in London: And if you *are* going to Pisa, you can catch it there! http://conferences.yapceurope.org/ye2010/training_courses.html Please spread the word, book the courses, come to Pisa :)
