What I learned at the Emerging Languages Camp

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Re-shared from a tweet from Matz, who in turn ...

Amos Wenger (ooc)

Any domain has two levels of knowledge: the core ideas for the domain, and the cultural wisdom around those ideas. The first tells you how to do stuff. The latter often tells you which stuff not to do. Any well-versed programming language person can tell you about both recursive-descent parsers and generated parsers. They'll also tell that generated parsers are the "right" way to do that.

Most of the time that advice will save you from wasted effort, but sometimes I think it keeps people from going down paths that may actually be fruitful. Sometimes the thing that everyone knows is true isn't. (For example, every language I know of with a lot of real-world users actually does use a hand-written parser.)

Amos is a young French iconoclast. If he'd been born in a different time, I expect he'd be a brick-tossing anarchist. One advantage that attitude gives him is that he and the others working on ooc pour features into the language while the rest of us are still sitting around fretting about minutia. I think a lot of us could use some of that "let's just fucking do it" spirit.

The Fault Tolerant Shell

The Fault Tolerant Shell

Found this through one of Yukihiro Matsumoto's tweets.
You know him as  the co-author for The Programming Language Ruby and also as the inventor of the language itself.

son#1 teaches me mind mapping - I'm so proud!!!

During my last conversation with my lawyer (she is cute and pretty tough, I hope she is not going to take too much money, but we are going to see; she e-mails with me and she sends me the communication with the other party as PDFs, I am amazed!!! she is a digital native!!!), I asked myself, how often I would have to explain her that situation. Afterwards it came to my mind, I should have created a mind map together with her, and just for fun I did a little research and I also involved her there. And you know what: she told me the names of the software, she has already been using. I was embarrassed, at least a little. Alright I installed Free Mind, and I am a little stuck with it.
Weekend comes, son#1 shows up again, ..., I ask him, whether he know the term Mind Mapping, and yes, he knows it, I am kidding with him, asking, whether he can show me (and teach me), how to do it, and you know what: he said: yes. Yes, he will do it. That was last night or so, around our watching Godfather I.
Now today I set up an account for him on my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard (and of course he loves that, who wouldn't, it is a hot Mac!!!), I dragged Chrome in his dock, removed a lot of the unnessary stuff there, explained him, how to use the "right mouse button" with the mouse pad and how to scroll with the mouse pad, a few things. And now he gets into that, and I am looking forward to son#1 teaching me mind mapping. I am really amazed. That will be good for the two of us.
I'll keep you updated, watch this location!

Update / 2010-07-24 18:28:
Although son#1 and son#2 are actually hard to confuse, this is actually about son#1.
Son#1 is 13 years old (he learned mind mapping at school, I guess with a teache from SW Germany as well), son#2 is 3.9 years old, I am >40.
And another thing I should add:
Whenever they started calling that sort of stuff mind mapping: one of my teachers on high-school actually taught us that sort of stuff ages ago. And I guess they also did at the Agora of Alexandria.
What a luck, this sort of stuff cannot get copyrighted!!!

Parrot – everything we have heard so far seems wrong

Emerging Languages camp - day 1 | Ola Bini: Programming Language Synchronicity

Allison Randall gave a talk about what’s currently happening with Parrot. It seems they are going for a new rewrite of most of the subsystems. One of the changes is going from a CISC style op code system to a RISC style. Parrot apparently has over 1200 op codes at this point, and they want to scale back everything to about 20-30 bytecodes instead. As a preparation for this, they have ripped out the JIT and will revisit most of the subsystems in Parrot to see what can be done. Allison also gave the audience the distinct impression that Parrot is still quite slow for user programs.

It looks like everything we have heard so far and what we told others seems wrong. Isn't that embarrassing?

SourceForge.net: Expect great script automation from expect-lite

SourceForge.net: Expect great script automation from expect-lite

Beginning Perl Programing with Emacs

Beginning Perl Programing with Emacs :

http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/YEWENBIN/Emacs-PDE-0.2.16/lisp/doc/QuickStartEn.html

bash Pocket Reference - O'Reilly Media

bash Pocket Reference - O'Reilly Media

What Are Syndication Feeds - O'Reilly Media

What Are Syndication Feeds - O'Reilly Media

Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom - O'Reilly Media

Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom - O'Reilly Media

GENIVI chooses MeeGo for in-car infotainment systems

GENIVI chooses MeeGo for in-car infotainment systems - The H Open Source: News and Features

Perl creator hints at imminent release of long-awaited Perl 6

Perl creator hints at imminent release of long-awaited Perl 6 | Open Source - InfoWorld

This might evolve into an emerging feedback loop.
So better don't keep resharing it too long!

peeking and poking Google Chrome

Is there an "ordinary way" to get the "extensions" listed, or is this pseudo-URL "the ordinary way": chrome://extensions/?
(Now, that I wrote of it here, I can finally close that tab, as I was really worried to forget it again. BTW: of course also this list is made far nicer then everything (at least) I can compare. Did you notice, what they do, if you delete a bookmark folder? That's just awesome IMO, if I had not to do a lot of work, I could keep doing that all through the night.)
Oooo, it's under that wrench icon as Extensions. And there is also Downloads. Good, that I found that!
And now I also know, how to underline using the Blogger article editor. Well, switch to "Edit HTML" – you know the rest of the story. It's that simple.

And do you know, how to make the wrench icon appear on OS X Chrome?
Chrome / Preferences / Basics / Toolbar / Show Page and Tools menus.

Have you come across the Task Manager below Developer yet?

And did you dare clicking on Stats for nerds?

How bad, that I can't use Chrome on my Linux notebook, as it keeps negatively interacting with the window manager or so, which after a while locks up.
Well, they are going to solve that issue sooner or later.

Matz’s guiding philosophy for the design of Ruby

Ruby is designed to make programmers happy.

Apache FOP gets a 1.0 release - The H Open Source: News and Features

Apache FOP gets a 1.0 release - The H Open Source: News and Features

That's funny: A couple of hours ago I downloaded it for the machine, that I used for creating HTML and PDF from DocBook Slides, here is a rather impressive DocBook Slides example. And I didn't know, it's that brandnew. I just needed some working version, and the last download on another machine was 0.93.

"The Ruby Programming Language" – THE book on Ruby by Matz

The book is co-authored by a 1st-class author this time: David Flanagan.
And the book follows the lines of a classic book of the Unix universe: The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.

what's the right Unix-ish software and hardware in 2010?

In 1994 I had no doubt: it's a PC with some Linux distro on it. And changing my mind was out of the question until not so long ago.
Now in 2010 I am doing things on a Samsung 17" notebook running some openSUSE Linux, and I am doing things on a MacBook Pro with a 17" screen.
I don't want miss either of them. Well, the Samsung thingie's resolution could be way better, but after my Sony thingie broke during my Leopard 2 main battle tank project, I couldn't afford anything better than that, and the decision and the purchase had to happen within minutes rather than within days. Terrible pressure and no mercy with Linux folks over there at defense.
But now I do many, many things on that Snow Leopard thingie, and I terribly enjoy it and it honestly improved the quality of my life a lot. That's what I wanted to state here and now.

how to make a rectangle image a square image using GIMP

I like reusing profile pictures from the web in my Google Mail Contacts aka address book.

On Xing or LinkedIn these pictures not necessarily are square, but on Google Mail Contacts you have to choose a sub-square. So maybe you want to resize the picture appropriately, so you don't cut it, where you don't want to cut it. Here is, how to proceed:

• Image / Canvas Size: disconnect the coupling between width and height,
• then make both the same, preferredly the larger one,
• then center
• and resize!
• Last not least: save the file with the highest quality!

BTW my designer mate doesn't like GIMP, he prefers Photoshop. I gave GIMP a try for this purpose, and it did, what I expected it to do, in a perfect way, every try a perfect hit!

How to Build an RSS 2.0 Feed - O'Reilly Media

How to Build an RSS 2.0 Feed - O'Reilly Media

Wonderful little helper from O'Reilly.

weird error messages during the DocBook Website compilation batch…

Sometimes you really didn't change anything crucial, and you find the new error messages just too obscure, then do this:
$ make clean
$ make realclean
And most of the time the error messages ar gone. That worked at least for me.

"Perl Best Practices" as a useful good night story

"Perl Best Practices" - O'Reilly Media


I really like reading good night stories for my sons late in the evening, but I hate reading "Spiderman fights Hulk", absolutely. Really!
Now, I actually found out years ago, that it doesn't really matter to the kids, what you read, but that you like, what you read to them.
Last night I selected a book, which didn't come into operation then, but with one day delay today it actually did so.
Pls find the title attached! (This referred to, when this article was a Google Buzz and there was even a picture attached. I do love Google Buzz, but the number of followers is rather depressing, I actually prefer not to know, how many usually read my blogs. And last week's Google presentation of the Buzz API at Berlin.Betahaus.de with finest catering and unlimited free drinks even encouraged me to love it more.)
Now you may understand, what I referred to by: "it doesn't really matter to the kids…"
You may even think, I am a bad father. I seriously don't agree. Well, the useless social workers of the "youth welfare office" at Berlin might agree with you. But then, I don't care.
Son#2 literally slept within minutes, which is otherwise never easy to achieve. (He can easily fought 2 hours against his sleepiness.)
Now this either has to do with the quality of the book, or simply with my son liking my voice. Choose yourself!
Son#2 actually started sleeping deeply in the middle of the preface, but I insisted on completing the preface, of course w/o even touching the acknowledgements. Sorry for that. Maybe I will browse them silently another day. I do find names interesting, and after 30 years in IT you do know a few ones.

After that I decided to get the PDF for $5 from O'Reilly's, and I immediately went for it. That PDF is now on my disk. I even think parts of this book will make good presentation material at future Berlin Technical Perl Meetings, well, maybe Stuttgart Technical Perl Meetings, if the Berlin Perl Mongers are lucky enough resp. not lucky enough. Decide yourself, which way it's meant!

This book looks like entertaining but educative literature, just the way I considered Larry Wall' classical Camel Book almost 20 years ago. But I read it then in the Berlin Underground on my way to work or back home.

Pls have mercy and excuse my Bad Simple English!

"Judaism deals better with sex than Christianity", says Swedish prof

Interesting article in a way, but then: we are in the 21st century – WTF^H^H^H who cares for Stone Age books and their ancient morals?

3rd party Facebook applications – use with caution!

Right now there was yet another Internet service with a big Facebook button…
When you press this button, and they ask you in a very tiny print, whether you allow them to pull your friendlist on Facebook, then press Stop without further hesitating! They are simply bad. You don't want get your friends dragged into your experiments, right? Sometimes they also say: "Let's find you some friends?" That's about the same. Don't! Just don't!

I am waiting for the day …

… when somebody contacts me, asking whether I would have a little time now and then publishing a few lines not to badly pair for his magazine. I wonder, whether this is going to happen in this life or the next.

learning from others – a temporary home-worker's experience

I really enjoyed working with my design profession mate yesterday. He brought his MacBook with him, and I also learned from him, what the MacBook substitute for the scroll-wheel is: a two-finger wiping over the touchpad.

"the right tool for your job"

I thought, I should cross-post / sort of "retweet" this article "the right tool for your job" from the rails to the perl world. Of course, the words are different, and also the tools, but the professional researcher attitude is the same, I think. Maybe someone picks the article up and translates it into the perl world.
I particularly like, what he says in the end:

Use what works
Use the best tool for the job, don’t be afraid to look outside your main language or to push outside your comfort levels. Don’t hesitate to make a switch to another plugin or gem if the one you are using doesn’t seem to fit your needs. Most of all, just take some time to really examine what you are using - it can go a long way.

According to my experience you can't share this attitude with most employers or clients, but as a professional researcher software developer I fully agree.

using SVG for graphics within HTML generated from DocBook Website

I learned the hard way, that SVG graphics must get referenced via EMBED, not via IMG. I do that now.
But still…
I created a "generic logo". It's white on a transparent background, the real background determined by the context. That's the idea. But I found this on the web – now I am confused:

How do I set the background color of an SVG image?

Sadly, SVG does not support directly specifying an image background color. With aiSee, however, you can easily work around this drawback by artificially enlarging the layout plane as follows: Open the SVG file with a text editor and manually adjust the four values of the viewBox attribute. This attribute is to be found in the third line of the SVG file.

The idea is to share this logo with the DocBook community. So far all new DocBook Websites are branded NM like Norman Walsh, that's because he started that software. I asked him for the sources of the logos a couple of days ago, but he couldn't find them, and they were GIMP XFC anyway, and not scalable as SVG. SVG is the hit IMO.

I thought I should mention this: I am using O'Reilly's SVG Essentials, that's IMO a great book, and you can read and print it for free on their O'Reilly Commons wiki.

editing XML documents in emacs using nxml-mode / cont'd

I was suffering for many weeks now with emacs on Snow Leopard, as I had forgotten that nice customizable variable nxml-sexp-element-flag. Setting that one to t (Lisp, yes!!!) really gives XML editing a boost. Now you can "move" forwards and backwards beyond entire tags enclosing huge amounts of text. I had been too lazy digging into that thing the first time, I noticed XML editing on my Snow Leopard MacBook is harder than on my openSUSE Linux ASUS notebook. I do confess that. Being lazy is always bad.

this was a rather good day DocBookWebsite'ing

Migrated all relevant web-sites to DocBook Website. Simple HTML from DocBook documents looks quite a little different and not so appealing. I can only recommend using DocBook Website.That's another good reason, why I want to spread the good word of DocBook in Berlin. Have a look at the block "my most exciting web-sites" in the right column here!
Update / 2010-07-15:
If goals are easy to achieve, you don't delay them for very long, you just do them. With DocBook Website things are easy to achieve, and I keep simplifying, improving, and renovating my web-site(s). I guess, the need to change will saturate rather sooner than later.
Hayek.name is now as short and as nice, as it has never been before.
BTW: Now I removed xmllint'ing my documents from my Makefile, as it kept spitting out weird messages. Alright, I agree, that sounds rather silly, but … I use nxml-mode, and that constantly validates my documents, so I assume, I am on the safe side.

The next step:
Continuous Integration. That means, each web-sites gets recompiled, as soon as its sources got modified. Pretty cool stuff, serious!
For now I am using the Unix batch command. Pretty neat as well, of course, but not as neat as Continuous Integration, that's for sure.

no more Reactions and Ratings on my blog posts

Nobody ever made use of them, so I rather remove them, so that the entire thing loads faster.

Of course, you can always leave your comments, that's for sure – so far ;-)

an article on railsfreak.com: the right tool for your job

My second thing to do this morning might me digging into this tweet by rubyflow, the twitterer:

The right tool for your job

A tweet pointing to an article on railsfreak.com.

an interview with Stevan Little about Moose

Starting my day with an interview with Stevan Little about Moose, an idea I picked up from a tweet from perlbuzz, the twitterer.


(Do I really have to keep in mind, that this will be picked up by ironman.enlightenedperl.org? BTW it's bad, that they even match "perl" within words of my blog-articles, even if that does not have anything to do with perl as a programming language.)



Listening to the "perlcast",
reading the text at the same time
(keep in mind: I am not a native English speaker/reader/listener, so that helps!!),
drinking my breakfast coffee …

»Audrey coined the term “O-fun,” optimized for fun.«
"O-fun" – I think I will use this term a lot from now on.

»We’re hoping that Moore’s Law will catch up, and we’ll have a break.«

»I didn’t want it to have “feature-itis”«

»It’ll probably be a good idea to let people know where to go to get started if they wanted to learn about Mouse. …«
»… Yes, we have the Moose.Perl.org domain. …
The IRC channel has Moose on IRC.Perl.org. …
And the mailing list.
The mailing list has been getting a lot of traffic lately,
which I’m very happy about
because that means we have a lot of indexed content in there.«



(wow, I am still learning how to make better use of my Mac keyboard.
what do you think, where are these "guillemet" quotation characters hidden?
at q like quotation, of course … .
have a good laugh: at some stage, when I tried using that, I confused the Alt and the Cmd key, and … ;-( my browser shut down,
but luckily enough it restarted with all the right places.)


that perlcast was a very good thing to start my day with.
it boosted my motivation to use Moose.

this article was actually first "prepared" as a Google Buzz.
follow me there, if you want!
I would welcome that very much.

DocBook Website

All the relevant pointers in one place:

• Norman Walsh's example on SourceForge – enjoy it!
  (IIRC he says, you shouldn't regard the information contained in there as up-to-date)
• the example within the Website release on SourceForge is slightly more extensive
• the release notes for the current release on SourceForge
• Bob Stayton's book DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide, chapter 31. Website
  (I do own the dead tree version of it, and if I got a bundle price for the PDF, I would go for it)
• searching Bob Stayton's book: "site:www.sagehill.net sitemap"
• Dave Pawson's article How to use the DocBook Website system
• searching Dave Pawson's article: "site:www.dpawson.co.uk website sitemap"
• …

DocBook, The Definitive Guide (the book) (I honestly do own various versions of it):

• http://docbook.org/tdg/ – the book's website
• http://docbook.org/tdg5/ – the new book's website (DocBook 5, The Definitive Guide)
• http://docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/docbook.html – the new book as HTML
• http://docbook.org/tdg51/en/html/docbook.html – the book in progress as HTML
• http://docbook.org/tdg51/en/html/variants.html#s.variants – Website only gets mentioned there
• …

General pointers:

• http://wiki.docbook.org
• …

Update / 2010-07-24:

I found the mailing list docbook-apps hosted on oasis-open.org very, very valuable.

I read the mailing list archive via my newsreader at news.gmane.org.

Not that you want to know that, but my newsreader is Gnus.

how to answer the phone in Portuguese?

I subscribed for a phone number in Brasília recently, that's because my SO stays there for the summer, and that makes communication easier.
Looks like an important person has had the number before for quite a while, and I keep getting calls from strangers.
I don't get away with explaining in my pidgeon Portuguese, that I am Jochen from Berlin, and that I prefer talking in English or German.
So in the tradition of my early social bookmarking customs, I will list here a couple of phrases mainly of interest for myself, but maybe also for you.

• who is talking? = quem está falando?
• this is Jochen speaking = Jochen está falando aqui
• how can I help you? = como posso ajudá-lo?
• I assume you dialed the wrong number = suponho que você discou o número errado
• I am a software developer = eu sou um desenvolvedor de software
• may I develop some great software for you? = posso desenvolver um software excelente para você?
• may I set up an amazing web-site for you? = posso criar um incrível web-site para você?
• do you speak English, German, French, Hebrew or Esperanto? = você fala Inglês, Alemão, Francês, Hebraico ou Esperanto?
• …

If they steal my time, I can just as well have some fun with them, right?
Luckily enough I can pronounce and also understand these phrases quite properly. Son#2 and quite a big part of my social context keep speaking Portuguese, and finally I have start practicing Portuguese after all these expensive courses – if not with friends and family, then with strangers. Exciting, I tell you.
There should be a button, helping me to redirect them from simple VoIP to Skype videophoning – that could be even bigger fun, I mean at least with one half of the Brazilian population ;-) But to be honest with you: Like 95% of the callers are male. I still have to achieve that somehow!!! Maybe like that:

• shall we talk over Skype? = vamos falar pelo Skype?
• do you have a webcam? = você tem uma webcam?
• my Skype ID is J-o-c-h-e-n-_-H-a-y-e-k = meu ID Skype é J-o-c-h-e-n-_-H-a-y-e-k
  (I will have to remember, how to spell the names of the letters properly;
  Google Translate actually also speaks that for me, but that's way to fast)

Update:

I am very grateful to my 1st commentator, who corrected my Google Translate provided initial phrases. I incorporated his suggestions here immediately.


Update:
You may regard this as bragging, and it may be that, but I hope you also enjoyed reading these lines and I also hope you had a very good laugh, that's supposed to be healthy. Maybe my SO or her daughters will pick this up. OMG! I deserver, what I deserve.