I’m loving Dial2Do
So with my newly acquired cell phone, I’m finding that there are all sorts of interesting applications that I wouldn’t have been interested in before, but am now. I had heard of Jott, a service which transcribes spoken words into text and shuttles it off to different services, but apparently they went for-pay in February. [...]
MusicBrainz on my brain
I have discovered a lovely service, MusicBrainz, which will sort through my rather poorly categorized collection of music and tag it with the proper artist, title, album, genre, etc. It does this by “listening” to the song, generating a fingerprint, and then looking that fingerprint up on a website which seemingly aims to be the [...]
Tediousness vs. Interest
Just got done reading this post by a respected high-energy physicist at Fermilab. I find that the same behaviour applies in a lot of other endeavors in life. Some people on mailing lists I have frequented call this “bikeshedding.” Typically software developers tend to spend too much time getting the little things perfect, the average [...]
Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
Nate and I dreamed up this list this morning: Different programming languages’ approaches to “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.“ perl: Do the simplest thing that no one can read. C: Do the simplest thing that could possibly compile. java: Just extend SimpleNamingSchemeWithAllNounsNameContainer. C#: Do it in Java, only don’t suck as badly [...]
Heard in the office today
“I have a comment. In my code. That says ‘Uh oh.’ And I don’t know why.”
Debugging long-running perl programs in Debian
One of the slicker ways I’ve seen of trying to figure out what Perl is doing in a long-running process is defining a signal handler, like so: use Carp (); $SIG{‘USR2′} = sub { Carp::confess(“Caught SIGUSR2: Dumping stacktrace and dieing:”); }; It works great, dumping the current stacktrace to STDERR. But if you’re stuck in [...]
My first CPAN acknowledgement
It’s a small thing, but I’m listed in the acknowledgements for Test::Class, an excellent little xUnit-with-a-decisively-perl-twist module that we use at work. A star is born?