Russ Allbery: Still having a blast
I did not realize how much I was missing this sort of heads-down
programming time in my life until the last two days. I think the last
time that I had this much fun with my job was when I was learning Java,
and even that wasn't quite this much fun since it was a lot of
experimentation rather than being directly productive in a language I know
well.
Here's a short list of modern Perl, Perl techniques, and interesting
modules that I'd not had a reason to use before today:
- Profiling and Devel::NYTProf. What a lovely piece of software. I'm starting to like this trend towards useful developer tools dumping their output in HTML, particularly when many of them are this pretty. (Devel::Cover by way of Test::Strict also does this, and I've been making heavy use of it.)
- Memoize. I've known it existed for years, but I've never had a reason to use it. Memoizing str2time when doing log parsing cut the time by a quarter. (I'll probably write a hand-rolled date parser for the specific date format eventually, since str2time is really slow since it's so general, but wrapping Memoize around it takes five seconds.)
- Module::Build. I was staying away from this because of all the problems Debian had with embedded code copies, but it appears to not be doing that any more (or at least I can use it in a way that it doesn't). And it really is so much nicer than ExtUtils::MakeMaker. I will probably convert all of my packages over time, although I have to see what it's like for XS modules. ETA 2013-01-24: Gregor pointed out that I was confusing Module::Build with Module::Install. I feel silly now; I've been avoiding Module::Build solely because I've been confusing it with something else entirely!
- HTTP::BrowserDetect. This isn't a general piece of software, of course, but once again it was lovely to discover that CPAN already contained exactly the piece of software that I needed. I'm trying to produce a summary of what browsers our authenticated users use as part of a general software inventory, and this turned the nonsense that browsers send into exactly the sort of management-consumable classifications I needed.
- IO::Compress and IO::Uncompress. Yes, this is much nicer than what I used to have to do with Compress::Zlib. It's like people kept working on Perl while I've been using all the things I learned five years ago!
Oh, the joys of the Internet.
A Mexican and an Argentinian listening to a Spanish cantaor singing Mexican music for an Argentinian audience, remembering a Costa Rican woman.
What?
Regina and me are finally back home in Mexico, after a month (me) and six weeks (her) of vacations in Argentina. And this week, in the city of Cosqu n (C rdoba, Argentina), they celebrate most important Argentinian folkloric festival. The Cosqu n Festival can be 
If anyone s in the area, there will be a Debian BSP this weekend at SIPB s MIT office.
Hope to see everyone there!
Check out details @ 
With the arrival earlier today of the 
Debian meeting system.
I'm updating the AppEngine application to handle enquete related parts. Hopefully my changes will improve response rates.
After arriving yesterday, and doing the obligatory jetlagged wander around
ITWire ran a story on the 12th of January entitled "Fedora still has problems with secure boot". It ends up discussing two issues with the author's experience with the Fedora installer - that he can't reclaim any free space on existing drives, and that the installer didn't automatically add entries for Windows to the grub menu. These are certainly legitimate issues, and I don't want to suggest that it's reasonable for people to have to manually alter their configuration in order to support dual boot. But they're not issues with Fedora's support for secure boot, despite the enthusiasm with which certain people have jumped on the story. We've received one credible report of a secure boot related problem with Fedora on a couple of Toshiba laptops, which appears (and I want to stress that we're still working on diagnosing it) to be a firmware bug rather than any kind of problem with Fedora.
Recently I recieved a 
I want to like LDAP. Every so often I do interesting things with it, and I start to think I like it, then some software that claims to support LDAP fails to do so properly and I remember I hate it again.
I guess the problem with LDAP is that most people are scared by it, unless you reach a certain level of scale you don't need it. That makes installing it out of the blue a scary prospect, and that means that lots of toy-software applications don't even consider using it until they're mature and large.
When you bolt-on support for LDAP to an existing project you have to make compromises; do you create local entries in your system for these scary-remote-LDAP-users? Do you map group members from LDAP into your own group system? ANd so on.
To be fair to the application developers if the requirements for installation were "Install LDAP" they'd probably have a damn smaller userbase, and so we cannot blame OpenLDAP, or the other servers.
All the same it is a shame.
The very next piece of software I ever write that needs to handle logins will use LDAP and only LDAP. How hard can it be?
In happier news 
GNOME 3.4 for Debian wheezy is shaping up quite well. A handful of bugs remain to be fixed, but we are now in a polishing phase, as expected given the freeze status.
With upstream introducing heavy changes in new versions, it is time to think of what will happen with GNOME when we introduce version 3.8 in unstable. Namely, there are two categories of changes that have a heavy impact on Debian: