A bunch of simple questions.
What is BeijingCrawler, who wrote it, and what is it doing
looking at my webserver?
Does the book "Virtual Nation - The Internet In Australia" cover Telstra's overpricing, market gouging, rate limiting and continued anti-competitive behaviour? Does it talk about why Telstra is deliberately holding back on bandwidth improvements and Fibre To The Node in order to benefit its own bank balance?
Does Amazon realise that their "Sponsored Links" are the most irrelevant, stupid avertising tripe ever?
I've got a paper, or even two, to present at LCA, but I don't have any practice at writing up abstracts or things like that. The project in question is intended to be Open Source, probably licensed similar to Perl as most Perl modules are. It's up and running in production mode but a lot of the administration features are still relatively scanty, as is the installation process (since it's evolved from scratch). So how much of this kind of work do I have to do before it's ready to even submit as a paper?
How egotistical and rude is it to have given a talk for the last two CLUG meetings, be running the next CLUG meeting, and want to give a talk about my new programming projects at the Programming SIG?
Is going on a $2200 three-day PostgreSQL course going to teach me much more or give me some kind of qualifications that I can put on my resume? Is that even worth it?
*sigh*
posted at: 16:13 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry
Rocket module part 001
To borrow the words of Edna Mode, a new project that I can achieve
consumes me as only superhero work can, darling. My main project
is the Repository Configurator, which is working well so far.
But the key component that I've been finally inspired to write, and
that, in laying dormant in my mind for a couple of months, has had
the various problems unconsciously solved, is a thing I call Rocket.
Ruby on Rails, by contrast, is a rapid web application framework. It's designed to easily deploy in a site and gradually you implement overrides to the various defaults - display, authentication, data validation and editing being the obvious tasks. From the little I've seen it looks like a great idea. It just means I'd have to learn Ruby - I haven't even got beyond simple Python, I'm not going to start learning another language - and you still have to work within its framework system.
Rocket has the same basic objective - get a website that's based on the contents of a database up and running quickly. But it takes a different tack, and doesn't try to be a whole framework; it just provides (or will provide) a couple of things: print a table or query, print an editor, validate and update the data from the editor. By a flexible system of parameter overrides, which can be set up when you create the Rocket object, when you call PrintTable, or in the database itself in a supplemental table called Booster (either as global, or table-specific, settings), you can control its behaviour. But the Rocket still does most of the work for you - finding the data, handling errors, displaying it neatly.
(My further plan is to have a separate but parallel system that will read your CGI code, find calls to Rocket, and replace them with neatly labelled and commented code that does what Rocket does. This then allows you to further customise the process if you've gone beyond Rocket's capabilities, while saving you the copy-and-paste (or, from my past, trial and error) process of doing the same "Display the data" and "Edit the data" processes. Optimally, it would produce hard, optimised code in the places where Rocket has to be flexible and therefore slower. But that's a whole further project...)
Whenever I have this much hubris, I start worrying, though; it's usually at this point that someone says "But doesn't WellKnown::PerlModule do exactly that?". But, honestly, the HTML::Template and other templating modules I've seen take a third approach, which is to just simply differentiate between presentation and layout. That's a noble goal, and I should look at using that in my code generator. But it doesn't solve the problem of getting a table of data up there quickly and easily - you still have to copy and paste a bunch of lines to get the data and throw it at the template...
So: Who wants to be stuck on Rails, when you can fly with a Rocket? :-)
posted at: 14:31 | path: /tech/perl | permanent link to this entry
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