Ruby 1.9.2 gets a second release candidate - The H Open Source: News and Features

Ruby 1.9.2 gets a second release candidate - The H Open Source: News and Features

… According to the developers, the final version is expected to arrive in August …

defunct Ethernet cables because of broken "thingie"

Over the last many years quite some of my Ethernet cables got defunct because of that broken "thingie", which should in theory make the plug stay in the jack. If you don't replace the plug yourself (which looks quite difficult to me), you can just through the entire cable away. No shop offers a service to fix that. Why should they? They earn more money selling you new cables. Does anyone know of such a service anyhow?
And if you tell me the proper name for that "thingie", I will happily use it from now on.

this seems to be a "LinkedIn Day"

There are calm days, and there are awfully calm days, this one is not – like half a dozen of "friends" today confirmed my add for them resp. requested me to confirm their add.

Mac OS X screen lock image – how to replace?

I have no idea, how to achieve that. Anybody any idea?

DocBook Berlin – created the Google Group for the 1st regional DocBook User Group

I am very excited about this.

There is an exploding number of web views on that Google Group.
Keep your fingers crossed, that there will be frequent activities soon.

DocBook Website is going to revolutionise the activities necessary to set up static and almost static web-sites, it will not stay the gold mine for a few – it will be affordable for the many.

DocBook Slides is the new way to create slides, forget everything before!

Tell everybody about this user group in Berlin! Join "us" for learning and helping each others!

how to browse music?

Today resp. just now I found "yet another time …", that browsing my music library in iTunes / on the iPod / on the iPhone "by genre" is much more fun, then browsing by name on my file system – what a surprise!
Yet I still insist, that my music library has to be kept "by name" on the file system. Quite a contradiction, isn't it?!? But browsing a huge amount of music, with lots of covers included, that definitely is fun. Have a nice weekend, all of you out there …

editing XML documents in emacs using nxml-mode

One good reason for not not authoring in XML is not having a suitable editor or IDE. I personally use and recommend emacs and James Clark's nxml-mode. I create and modify all sorts of XML documents this way. If you supply nxml-mode with the right schema for your document, nxml-mode can even help you with tag completion and document validation. nxml-mode makes use of schemas in RELAX-NG, co-created by James Clark. RELAX-NG schemas are rather easily created, if not yet just available, as for DocBook, DocBook Website, DocBook Slides, and many, many other XMLs.

"Trang" is your tool for creating a RELAX-NG schema:

• if you want to convert a DTD into a RELAX-NG schema,
• if you want to derive a RELAX-NG schema from a couple of XML files of a specific kind,
• …

I have done that a dozen times, it does work.

Here you find nxml-mode's manual page.

Your mileage may vary …

DocBook Slides

• If you really are into XML,
• if you even write your documents in XML ie. DocBook,
• then you will love DocBook Slides: 

The Slides Document Type is an XML vocabulary derived from DocBook. It is used to create presentations (slides, foils, whatever you call them) in HTML or print.

Presentations are by nature visual and the Slides stylesheets provide a wide range of options to control how the transformation from XML to HTML is performed.

• http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/slides-demo/ – overview of the available styles

• http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/slides-demo/frames7/frames.html – the best of all of them!!!
  you will never want to create any different slides, never

• http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/styling/slides.html – Dave Pawson's notes

One good reason for not not authoring in XML is not having a suitable editor or IDE.

I personally use and recommend emacs together with James Clark's nxml-mode. Your mileage may vary though …

want to get signalled, when a command line job on your computer is done?

I have a long list of cpanm jobs,
don't want to put them in a batch all toghether,
and want  to get signalled, when each of them is done:

$ while true; do beep; done

In my case the beep is acutally just the flashing of an xterm window.

Update:
Yes, notify-send is far, far, far superiour, growlnotify on OS X.
Thanks for the pointers!

GNU Coreutils "seq"

the manual page.

Why do I keep forgetting the name of this wonderful little helper?


seq prints a sequence of numbers to standard output. Synopses:

     seq [option]... last
     seq [option]... first last
     seq [option]... first increment last

seq prints the numbers from first to last by increment. By default, each number is printed on a separate line. When increment is not specified, it defaults to ‘1’, even when first is larger than last. first also defaults to ‘1’. So seq 1 prints ‘1’, but seq 0 and seq 10 5 produce no output. Floating-point numbers may be specified (using a period before any fractional digits).

best practices in shell script programming – colons

My snipplet for an if/then/else in shell scripts looks like this:

if true

then :

else :

fi

The colons make that code syntactically complete, w/o the colons you run into a syntax error. The colon is the "null op" of (Bourne) shell scripting.
And the colons usually remain there for the remainder of the life of that code.
Have you noticed, that the youngsters, that talk about snipplets nowadays seriously think, they invented them? True, I guess, they created the term. Just the term.

best practices in shell script programming – double quotes

You do know the result of this:

a=A; echo $a

But are you just as sure here?

a=A; b=B; echo $a.$b

That depends on the shell, you are using. So I suggest you better write it this way:

a=A; b=B; echo ${a}.${b}

Enclosing variable names in curly braces is quite often a good idea.

Look at the following piece of code:

case $var in

  x*)

    echo var starts with x

    ;;

  *)

    echo var starts with something else

    ;;

esac

Looks alright, doesn't it?

No, it's does not. If that variable had not been assigned a value before or is of zero length, you will see an ugly syntax error occur.

Therefore enclose the variable in double quotes like here:

case "$var" in

  x*)

    echo var starts with x

    ;;

  *)

    echo var starts with something else

    ;;

esac

There is no good excuse for not doing it anywhere. It may look ugly and unnecessary, but it will help. That's the way shell scripting is. I learned this from Jürgen Gulbins around 1987, when I enjoyed working for him. This series of articles is dedicated to him. I owe him a lot.

best practices in shell script programming

You do know the result of this:

a=A; echo $a

But are you just as sure here?

a=A; b=B; echo $a.$b

That depends on the shell, you are using. So I suggest you better write it this way:

a=A; b=B; echo ${a}.${b}

Enclosing variable names in curly braces is quite often a good idea.

Task::Kensho – "A Glimpse at an Enlightened Perl"

See its manual page at CPAN!

• The installations with/for my self-brewn perl-5.12.1 on openSUSE-11.2 as well as on OS X Snow Leopard have a problem with Task::Kensho's TryCatch, I skip that, and all the remainder seems to be fine.
• The installation with/for my self-brewn perl-5.10.1 on openSUSE-11.2 runs straight through.
• The installation with/for the "native" perl-5.10.0 on my openSUSE-11.2 runs straight through.

App::cpanminus – a new CPAN installer

• article in German: "Perl 5.12 parallel zu einem bestehendem Perl installieren - App::cpanminus als CPAN-Installer" (by Thomas Fahle)
• metacpan.org/module/App::cpanminus
• …

How to …:

$ perlbrew switch stable # resp.
$ perlbrew switch perl-5.12.1
$ cpan  App::cpanminus
$ cpanm App::cpanminus 
$ perlbrew install-cpanm # remove the previous suggestions?

$ perlbrew switch perl-5.10.1
$ cpan  App::cpanminus
$ cpanm App::cpanminus
$ perlbrew install-cpanm # remove the previous suggestions?

To be continued ...

cookie hell …

sites w/o general admission so far:

• xing.com
• Google Calendar
• …

exceptions:

• draft.blogger.com
• www.twitter.com 
• www.blogger.com 
• mail.google.com
• www.facebook.com 
• chrome.google.com
• www.inkedin.com
• www.google.com
• fritz.box – my multi-functional router
• oreilly.com
• …

I would love to be able to not give further general admissions to cookie senders.
Cookies kill me, sort of.

AdBlock …

Ads are actually BLOCKED FROM DOWNLOADING now, instead of just being removed after the fact!

One of these milksops told me "the other day", that wouldn't be true, and I couldn't prove him wrong then. It hurts having trusted yet another shameless lie.

If you notice Google Chrome as a tag here, that means, there is now AdBlock for Google Chrome.

created more wiki web profiles …

• http://wiki.DocBook.org/topic/JochenHayek (MoinMoin)
• http://www.EmacsWiki.org/emacs-en/JochenHayek (Oddmuse)

MoinMoin offers a web GUI, but not for Google Chrome.
Both are very nice wiki systems with pretty comfortable markdown.

Credos written as profiles.

creating my 1st DocBook Website web-sites

I have the DocBook XSL book in front of me (opened at "Chapter 31. Website"), asking myself and the world (irc://irc.freenode.net#docbook) silly questions, like the ones, you can find as my recent articles on this blog.

I want to change a couple of pretty raw vanilla DocBook web sites to pretty raw but neat vanilla DocBook Website web sites during the next couple of hours. There is other work to complete pretty soon, so I rather complete this thing now.

I am using docbook-website-2.6.0/example from Sourceforge (look around here!! ((FIXME))) (of course as example-JH-0, so I can always diff to the origin).
Their Makefile-example.txt is now my Makefile, I just had to adapt DOCBOOK_WEBSITE and XSLT:

• DOCBOOK_WEBSITE=/usr/local/docbook-website-2.6.0

• XSLT=xsltproc

...
Try this:

$ make clean
$ make realclean
$ make depends
$ make

...

Update / 2010-07-14:
I have made pretty good progress during the last couple of days.
I converted a couple of plain DocBook web-sites (HTML!!) to DocBook Website, and I rather sense some satisfaction there. You can find those web-sites right here in the right column listed as my most exciting web-sites. Sorry for the bragging, but the Website guys did a rather good job, so even me cannot spoil that a lot.
Right, and a web-designer mate of mine will show up on Friday, and we are going to discuss the replacement logos for all the NDW-logos around there. And a very big "thank you!!!" here to Norman for all his good work!!!

DocBook Website - where to get the Relax-NG schema from?

I found it at SourceForge.
I really love editing XML in Emacs's nxml-mode. I did mention that at my DocBook Wiki home page already.

DocBook XSL, the book - where can I download the samples from?

I have a copy of that book (paper so far), and I am tempted to use certain smples. Other publishers supply you with TAR balls, that you can download from their web-sites, so that you can play with the samples. I didn't find that mentioned in that book, but to be honest with you: I haven't yet read this book all through, I rather assume I will only look up certain things occasionally, and actually this is just my "thank you!" to Bob Stayton, the brave DocBook warrior.

Looks like you can only copy+paste the code from the PDF (purchase it!)  or from the free HTML.

Google Chrome, my 2nd experiences

On openSUSE-11.2 Google Chrome 5.0.375.99 beta makes my X-Windows freeze after running for a while. If I "killall chrome", this drags my X display down, only restarting the XDM or so helps.
On Snow Leopard Google Chrome 5.0.375.99 runs quite nicely. Yes, it's fast as lightning, but of course, there's not adblocker, and there is no such thing as NoScript running on it.
Of course it's rather nice to edit your blogs with such a fast thing.

DocBook XSL, the book – incorrect IRC channel

DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide - 4th Edition, Chapter 1. Introduction,  Online resources for finding solutions to problems (the paper book and the online version as well) says, that the IRC channel of DocBook would be at irc://irc.openprojects.net#docbook, but it actually is at irc://irc.freenode.net#docbook.

http://www.docbook.org/help had the right information.

This is not on their Errata yet, and I told webmaster(AT)sagehill.net about this problem in the meantime. I only wondered for a very, very short time, whether anybody will ever come back to me.
Bob Stayton (himself) answered at 2010-07-06 22:12:18 (my time at Berlin, ie. only an hour or so later):

Apparently it changed since that was written.
I'll put the new address in the next edition and add to the Errata.
Thanks for the report.

As I said, I will update this here, once I will notice their update.

NoScript, XSS risks, flattr, Firefox

I really loved to use NoScript, the plugin for Firefox. But after I decorated my blogs with these flattr buttons, I started having to much hassle.
Adding an exception rule didn't lead to the expected result.
I have got no further time to fix that, I switched of NoScript. R.I.P.

I really felt a lot safer with NoScript running and surverying my surfing activities.

unit tests for my procmailrc

I love adding procmail rules, as getting my incoming e-mail almost perfectly sorted eases my life in such a tremendous way – but sometimes that really frightens me.
I just thought, if I ever get around "to it", I will write unit tests for my procmailrc.

Catalyst based CMSs

According to cms.wikia.com/wiki/Impl these are the current Catalyst (so esp. implemented in perl)
 based CMSs:

• EasyCMS2
• Website in a box

Can anybody help me selecting "the right one"?

O, what do I want to use it for?
I got a few web-sites, most of them more or less plain text (HTML!), generated from DocBook, and I want them to look a little more spicy, maybe with a left and a right column and all that.
Alright, coming from DocBook maybe I should also have a look at DocBook website, a variant of DocBook for dealing with websites. But I want to consider the alternatives.

Polish court to decide on Brodsky

… Polish authorities may deport alleged Israeli spy Uri Brodsky to Germany this week. … The Brodsky affair has caused friction with two of Israel’s most important European partners. According to media reports in Germany, Israel has turned the diplomatic screws on Poland and Germany to prevent an extradition of Brodsky to Germany.
A Polish diplomat told the Warsaw-based Rzeczpospolita daily in June: “If we extradite him, we will anger the Israelis. If we release him, we will anger the Germans. When we discovered this man... we should have pretended that we had not seen him. But now it is too late.” The federal prosecutor told The Jerusalem Post in June that the matter is based on the forgery of a German passport and illicit secret service activity in the Federal Republic. He insisted that the pursuit of the alleged secret service agent is purely a legal matter, and would not identify the agent as Israeli. …

App::perlbrew - Manage perl installations in your $HOME or wherever you want

Prerequisites:

• $ zypper install patch
• $ zypper install gcc
• …

Caveat:

• yes, "perlbrew install" occasionally and too often  needs "--force" and even "--notest", don't be too surprised! my "5.14.2" and also my "5.16.1" needed it
• …

Main links:

• www.perlbrew.pl
• $ perlbrew
• $ perlbrew help
• http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?App::perlbrew – this one tells you, how to upgrade perlbrew:

$ export PERLBREW_ROOT=/opt/perlbrew
$ curl -kL http://install.perlbrew.pl | bash
# or maybe like this:
$ perlbrew self-upgrade

• https://metacpan.org/module/App::perlbrew
• https://metacpan.org/module/perlbrew : list-modules, how to migrate modules together with cpanm, …
• http://www.perl.org/pub/2010/03/testing-perl-5120-rc-1-with-appperlbrew.html (a little outdated)
• Perlbrew and my shebang line [Link]:

The developer/maintainer does not have in mind this use case as the main use case!! But it is my main use case.
What to do after installing a new perl, that you consider your new stable perl?

$ perlbrew alias create perl-RELEASE stable 

# resp.
$ perlbrew alias -f create perl-RELEASE stable
# use this shebang line with $PERLBREW_ROOT expanded [Link]:
#! $PERLBREW_ROOT/perls/stable/bin/perl

$ perlbrew switch stable # this will be our usual starting point!!! 

# but "perlbrew list-modules" does not work on such an alias, so "perlbrew use" to a non-alias before!

• Have a serious look at "$ perlbrew help" once in a while!!!

I decided to make use of $PERLBREW_ROOT, as I want to keep my home $HOME minimial, just data and scripts, no big files, they all go to other disks. And right, my home directory is on an encrypted partition, and this sort of stuff certainly does not get encrypted.

$ export PERLBREW_ROOT=/usr/local/perlbrew

Therefore my perlbrew is installed as:

/usr/local/perlbrew/bin/perlbrew

They suggest, that my $HOME/.bashrc should "source" their .../etc/bashrc, but for the time being I let my $HOME/.profile do this, as IMHO this is right place.
So actually this is according to best practices for shell programming the right way (for me) to do it, and now this code is of course included in my $HOME/.profile:


# for perl's App::perlbrew :
export          PERLBREW_ROOT=/usr/local/perlbrew # on my Linux boxes
export          PERLBREW_ROOT=/sw/perlbrew # on my Mac box(es)
source         $PERLBREW_ROOT/etc/bashrc
##export  PATH=$PERLBREW_ROOT/bin:$PERLBREW_ROOT/perls/current/bin:${PATH}
path_prepend   $PERLBREW_ROOT
path_prepend   $PERLBREW_ROOT/perls/current


BTW: always "$ hash -r" after switching, so you avoid getting certain perl resp. perlbrew related error messages like this one and a few others (confusion of the right installation directory):

bash: …: No such file or directory

I successfully brewed 5.10.1 and 5.12.1 on openSUSE-11.2, but on OS X Snow Leopard I only brewed 5.12.1 successfully, brewing 5.10.1 failed.


To be continued …


Update 2011-10-16:
On my Mac running Lion I was able to perlbrew these releases of perl

• perl-5.15.3 and
• perl-5.14.2
• but not perl-5.12.4, 5.10.1, 5.8.9, 5.6.2

but that seems more than sufficient to me.

Looks like OS X got targeted as a serious platform for perl development only rather recently.
…

Update 2012-10-07: A historic note: I first looked into perlbrew in the context of "biz-JG".

"java forever" -- an amazing Youtube video

ruby, gsub, and backslash characters within the replacement

My ruby problem of the day: I have e-mail addresses, and I want to use them within procmail rules. Therefore certain characters like the dot character and also the "+"  need escaping.

It took me an endless while, like certain things always take an endless while on unknown grounds.

I started with single quotes just as in the gsub examples in the pickaxe3 book.

I didn't get the right number of backslashs in place within the replacement string, as long as the replacement string used single quotes.

Finally a Google search for "ruby gsub replacement backslash" led me to a solution. Not to an overly serious one, to be honest.

The example there used double quotes, so I replaced my single quotes with double quotes, and I started again increasing the number of accumulated backslash characters. That way I achieved within a pretty short time, what I needed to achieve. Not that I had learned too much.

Ruby User Group Berlin / 2010-07-01 "meetup" / a brief report

At today's meeting of RUG-B

• Jan Berkel talked to us about Ruby on Google App Engine
  (link added at 2010-07-02-14-42),

• and  Benjamin Krause talked to us about Unobtrusive Google Analytics Event Tracking.

Of course both presentations were given with quite some compentence and professionality, but the Google App thing excited me personally far more.
Here are
I am rather keen to see Jan's slides and his code getting announced on the Google Group.
Well, ruby apps run in a Google App environment through jruby, which in turn runs on a JVM. Jan told us of two different working approaches. Rails does run in theory in that environment, but it takes way too long to start. Instead Sintra seems to be the ruby framework of choice wrt the Google App Engine.

I might err there …, sorry, rephrase:
maybe that question is heretic, but simply put: what's the status of perl on the Google App Engine?
Looks like nothing moved after 2009-07-01 with perl-appengine, right?
I personally would love to see a perl app say "hello world!" on the Google App Engine.

RUG-B's mailing list lives on Google Groups.

some *-berlin.de domains

All of a sudden today I thought I should register a couple of domains.
Here they are:

• www.perl-berlin.de

• www.ruby-berlin.de

• www.rails-berlin.de

Quite a good start -- even e-mail addresses are set up!
If you want to have any such e-mail address -- talk to me!

working through elance.com

what do you think about working through elance.com as a "provider"?