A sound investment
January 31, 2005
I bought myself a guitar for Christmas. Nothing fancy, just a six-string acoustic with metal strings. I also picked up a chord book. Together, these probably make out one of the best investments I’ve done in a while. It keeps me from sitting in front of the computer all the time on evenings and weekends.
The only downside is that if I lose track of time and keep at it for too long the fingertips on my left hand starts throbbing and pulsing with infernal vigour. Oh, and my fingertips’ sensitivity is windling away as the thickness of their skin is building up.
One possitive side effect is that I seem to be less bothered by typing on a keyboard now, but I’m not sure if this is directly due to increased finger strength, indirectly due to less keyboard action or something completely unrelated like using a different keyboard in my new job. I’m inclined to think it’s a combination of the first and the last.
Perl golfing
January 31, 2005
Earlier today I found this line of Perl:
$obj->bar() or return $obj->quibble("quux") if $obj->foo();
Unless you’ve seen Perl’s statement if $condition; form you’re going to keep scratching your head for a while. The or binds more closely than the if, so I rewrote it like this:
if ($obj->foo()) {
unless ($obj->bar()) {
return $obj->quibble("quux");
}
}
This is a lot clearer, though also much more verbose. That’s okay, though, and in fact I was not finished there. If an error occured, why would you care about the value returned from quibbling about this error? It turned out the quibble() method always returned false to allow the above shorthand (quibble about error and return false). It’s a cute idiom, but we ended up sacrificing it on the altar of clarity and rewrote it to the following:
$obj->quibble("quux");
return;
Thinking about sacrificing code readability for brevity or “cute” layout? Just don’t.
Pragmatic investments
January 30, 2005
A small update on how I’m progressing towards meeting the goals I’ve put down in my PIP.
- Earlier this month I had 109 unique ips hitting my site in one day. And this time it was not due to extra traffic from Freshmeat.
- I have changed jobs. I now program Perl for a living.
- I have sent patches to the maintainers of a couple of Perl modules (thus, improving a couple of existing projects).
Minor site updates
January 29, 2005
I’ve given my site a small css update. However, if you are viewing this site on IE under Windows you won’t see much difference. IE sucks.
One of the differences everyone will see, however, is that the titles of the diary entries now acts as permalinks for the entries. The explicit links under each entry have been removed.
DNS issues now resolved
January 23, 2005
Well, it seems I’ve now finally managed to get my DNS issues resolved. I had missed some configuration option with Gandi that still were pointing to the old IP address. After fixing that things started working pretty snappily. Mail have started to pour in again, and my website url works.
DNS woes
January 22, 2005
The DNS problems for my domain, brautaset.org, are still ongoing. I had hoped that they would be fixed this morning, but no such luck. I just discovered, however, something that might explain why I’m still seeing these problems. The IP address my registrar (gandi.net) listed for my authoritive nameserver was outdated.
Due to my machine’s IP changing (outside my control) some time back my box has for a transition period had two IP addresses. The one listed by my registrar was the old IP. The domains I have set up later, however, had the new IP listed and see no problems. I have now updated my main domain as well and I’m hoping this will improve matters.
FOSDEM
January 22, 2005
That’s right, I’m going to FOSDEM again this year. I booked my “flight” (with Eurostar) and hotel earlier this week.
MaraDNS
January 22, 2005
I’ve just switched to using MaraDNS to host my DNS for this site (and others). I’m hoping I’ll have less trouble with that than what I previously used.
Joy: MaraDNS makes it really, really simple to write a zone-file. I’ve not set up a zone transfer yet though, so I don’t know how hard that is. Presumably it’s not much worse.
Apache daemons
January 12, 2005
On advice from a colleague I lowered the Min and MaxSpareServers settings in the Apache config. This seems to have speeded up requests quite a lot. It’s just a hunch, but my site ‘feels’ faster now.
Categorised RSS feeds
January 8, 2005
RSS feeds are now available by category, in case you’re only interested in my rants, for example. If you point bloglines to this page, for example, it will pick up all the available feeds automagically.
