What tools does Alec use?

After Perl Mongers last night there was a short discussion over tools. Here is my preferred list

• Vim editor
• Git version control (and GitHub to host my remote repos)
• Linux operating system
• Perl and CPAN for programming. Not a prefect language, but has wide applicability to the the types of problems I solve
• Google search engine
• Email (gmail)
• Bash and the UNIX command line tools (sort, find, grep etc etc)
• OpenOffice
• Paper journal/notebook (currently using a Moleskine, but I prefer a Miquelrius)

Surely it can’t be so hard to be a better (Emacs and Docbook) geek?

I recently decided, despite using nothing but Linux on my laptop, that I had become a suite using purely graphical Office tools (Evolution for calendar, email etc, OpenOffice to write documents and presentations and so on). I was becoming a very rusty geek!

Time for Plan A. Migrate email, task management etc to emacs, start using Docbook for presentations and document creation (in Emacs of course) with git to protect my precious work.

However so far it all feels a bit hard…  There is no consensus on the best way to configure Emacs for laptop email using IMAP services (mix and match any of Dovecot, fetchmail, Gnus, RM, procmail, etc etc); and getting a decent fop processor working is harder than it should be (I got going instead with dblatex in the end) — now writing Docbook documents seems hard as well — all that XML  *sigh*. I’m not even feeling at home with git yet .

Update 29/Aug/08: Sacha Chua has some great advice to share on using Gnus for email

Anyone have some tips or encouragement to share?

Application Lifecycle Management safe in China!

I am glad to report that voga.com.au has not been blocked by the great Firewall of China. Anyone in China who needs assistance with their software process can safely get hold of services and help from your truly. I’m sure the doom mongers are feeling a bit foolish now?

With thanks to Alexia Golez

Handy Hack: Enter the office lottery syndicate with Perl

If you are asked to chose numbers for a lottery here is a rather inelegant hack to create some entries. Assume you need x numbers from a range of a to b inclusive then run this program as

./lottery.pl  a b x.

#! /usr/bin/perl
#

our %dup;

our $lower = $ARGV[0];
our $upper = $ARGV[1];
our $needed = $ARGV[2];

for (1..$needed) {
    my $x = int(rand($upper-1)+$lower);
    if ($dup{$x}) { redo }
    print  "$x \n";
    $dup{$x}++;
}

Alec’s “stream of consciousness” posting set-up

A long with a lot of other sad people, I have been throwing my random thoughts onto the intertubes in the belief that they are of interest to people. In order to maximise the spread of mental drivel and minimise the effort involved I have spent far more time than I should investigating and setting up (playing with) various services and feeds to spread my ‘goddness’ far and wide. Here is how it works

1. I have conversations on Jaiku
2. I use twitter to hit as many people as possible
3. Friendfeed allows me to see information from many more people than Jaiku
4. ping.fm allows me to post to Jaiku, Twitter and facebook
5. ping.fm also posts pownce, tumblre, plurk, Identi.ca and myspace but that’s probably a waste of time although I do have a limited number of followers there
6. I do not post to LinkedIn as sometimes my comments are not that professional
7. Both Jaiku and Friendfeed also receive feeds from my WordPress blog, my Flikr photos, del.ico.us book marks and my dugg stories

So I monitor friendfeed for the ‘big picture’, post to ping.fm and watch jaiku for interesting conversations.

My new software engineering methodology — BDALAP!

I think I can unite the Agile and Waterfall communities united around a common software engineering approach.

I give you “Big Design As Late As Possible” (BDALAP).

BDALAP recognises that certain design decisions are a) complex and b) have far reaching implications. They therefore require careful consideration and the use of such techniques as modeling and documentation. However we really would like to understand more about the problem and issues we are trying to solve first before we commit ourselves to a significant decision

A good example of this is the design of a database table schema which has implications all over a system and impacts how the system may be extended in the future. Other examples including communication of cooperating processes.

So in the first instance we can dummy them using such things as program data structures (it’s easier to modify the code than a RDBMs database schema). Later on an effective data schema can be created based on a more complete understanding of the system under discussion

I realise there is a bit of hand waving going on here and it’s not exactly original, but that does not need to be a problem or stop me becoming the BDALAP pundit.

I believe the usual way to implement this type of thing:

1. The BDALAP website and blog
2. A few journal articles on BDALAP success stories (must show that BDALAP was the sole reason for success and how it overcame ALL obstacles)
3. A BDALAP conference (I’d like somewhere pleasant — Nice in France?)
4. A BDALAP consultancy that can charge the same rates as an Actuary
5. The BDALAP patterns book
6. The BDALAP anti-patterns book

That should get me on the gravy train — anyone else want to come for the ride?

Look Ma! I’m an (honorary ) Gen Y member

Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web – ReadWriteWeb

There’s some contention over where exactly Gen Y starts and stops – some say those born 1983-1997, others think 1982-1997. In this week’s Entertainment Weekly, Gen Y is defined as “current 13 to 31 year-olds” and BusinessWeek says they can be as young as five. Regardless, we know who they are – they’re the young kids of today, the most digitally active generation yet, having been born plugged in.

When I have a working laptop at home I drive my wife mad as I surf facebook and post on Jaiku whilst watching TV. I always want to put information on Wikis (with open slather for everyone to update it) when my colleagues don’t understand the benefit and I’m posting here when I should be working on something else. I’m a man 25 years before my time!

Or perhaps I can just tell people I’m 22 years old?

Emacs!

For some bizarre reason I have started to use Emacs again (and even fallen in love with org mode). It seems more natural this time…

Spending far too much time…

pinging data around the intertubes.

I’m currently trying to use Jaiku, ping.fm, feedblitz and email to spray the world with news of this blog post.

Is that self-referential?

A proper desktop

A proper desktop

Originally uploaded by alecclews

How I wish my desktop looked all the time

Three terminal sessions (one to a remote Debian system) and an xclock

No GUI pollution

Just for the hell of it, another example Web Widget

Some of the places I’ve been lucky enough to visit in the world and a list of the some of my favourites

1. Srinagar, India
2. Jerash, Jordan
3. Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt
4. Parkes, Australia
5. Oxford, England
6. Beauvais, France
7. Portland, OR, USA

• Create your own travel map or travel blog
• Visit TripAdvisor.com

My Hero!

Blog

Australia’s Geekiest Man

Slashdot identified our very own Jonathan Oxer as Australia’s Geekiest Man, a well deserved honour and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Now we need to know who Australia’s Geekiest Woman is. Possibly Kirrily, although she recently moved to San Francisco so I don’t know if she still qualifies.

Updated: In early March Jon made it onto Australian national TV

Geeks are so cool we have pop videos

This guy is of course not that nerdy. Everyone knows that Kirk was the better starship captain!

My OSDC 2006 talk got blogged

planet catalyst

Alec Clews has a good few things to say about building “audit trails” to record all of the details about a binary build

Sam Vilian very kindley mentioned the talk I gave last year at OSDC but I’m not sure if he agreed with my approach or not…

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Wow! Japanese

After discovering that my blog is being translated into Arabic

http://alecthegeek.wordpress.com/2007/06/27/another-blog-than-is-not-ashamed-to-say-application-lifecycle-management/ の翻訳版

恥じていない「適用ライフサイクル管理」を言うためにより別のblog 敏捷なソフトウェア工程改善 敏捷なソフトウェア工程改善

Now someone is reading my blog in Japanese. I wonder How Application Lifeycle Management gets translated by Google?

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My blog in Arabic

نسخة مترجمة من عنوان الموقع Using an HP Deskjet-640c on Mac OS/X 1.0.4 Tiger/

الوصول غمايل متعددة من العملاء البو

This is so cool! I found someone has been using the Google Arabic translation service to view my blog. I asked my wife how good the translation is, but her Arabic has become very rusty, although apparently my name is correct.

I’m guessing if you don’t have the correct fonts installed then the above quote will not appear correctly – sorry.

(Updated: I’ve also discovered I’m linked from a Spanish language site at http://www.taquiones.net/perl/blogs.html, along with a bunch of other people who can actually program in Perl and have written books to prove it)

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In the hall of fame

Growing Blogs « WordPress.com

January 29, 2007: Growing Blogs

The Internet has a long memory. Someone recently got to my blog by finding this old entry

Working on my paper for OSDC 2006

Originally uploaded by Richard Jones

I was trawling through the flickr photos for last year’s OSDC and discovered that I had been caught red handed writing my material at the last minute.

I was a late fill in and had spend all my time writing a flashy demo, the slides then had to be written at the last minute so I missed a lot of the papers.

What was really frustrating was that laptop dual head mode did not work when I got to the presentation room and I had only my slides to present using a borrowed Mac, so no flashy demo.

I don’t intend for any of that to happen this year!

I have a Spock account

In my current quest to understand more about the world of Web 2.0 I have scored a Spock account and I have three invites to give away. If you want one please leave a comment

OSDC 2007

The Open Source Developers Conference 2007 call for papers has gone out and I have just submitted my paper proposal. Now all I need to do it write the paper and set up the demo’s… (if I get accepted)