OSCON Presentation Progress

So I did a practice run for one of my OSCON presentations last night with some guys from work as my test audience. I think it went pretty well. I was pretty much on target for time, and that should improve with a few more practice runs.

I need to work on moving smoothly from one slide to the next as opposed to pausing, giving a summary of exactly what I just said, and then having to glance at the next slide to see what the hell I'm supposed to be talking about next. As I said, practice will help with that.

I also got some good pointers on what parts of the talk worked, what parts didn't, and what parts needed to be fleshed out more. I had a good mix of people who had been exposed to some of the subject matter before and people who had not, and everyone seemed ok with it, so I imagine it should work out well for the OSCON audience.

Now I just need to finish the other talk and give that a run through to knock out any bugs before sending the slides off to O'Reilly later this week.

Random Developments

So I was actually rather productive this weekend.

I accomplished at least 3 separate things:

1. At the prompting of Richard Clamp factored the log retrieval code from SVN::Log::Index out into a new module, SVN::Log. Still waiting for his feedback on the final SVN::Log interface before I let it lose on CPAN though.
2. Finished reviewing PDFs of the first 5 chapters of the book, and made copious comments on the stuff that was unexplainably broken. If I haven't said it before, I hate Framemaker, it mangles DocBook in ways previously unknown to man.
3. Wrote GenX4r, a Ruby wrapper for Tim Bray's genx library. It's my first real work with Ruby, but it seems to work, and was quite a bit of fun to write.

Plus, I did laundry, since we now have a washer and dryer.

Oh, and Chris hooked me up with a GMail account, (rooneg@, for the curious), and it's damn cool. I'm using it for FreeBSD mailing lists just to get a feel for it. So far I'm quite impressed.

Fun with Ruby

So I've been playing around with Ruby over the past few days, and as usual when I play with Ruby I continue to be amazed at how cool it is. Now I just need to come up with a real project to use it in...

A few of the neater things I've been playing aroun with:

• Rails - A web application framework for Ruby. Actually it's made up of several subprojects, only one of which (ActiveRecord, the Object-Relational mapping package) is available at the moment, but still, it's quite impressive. When the rest of it is ready for prime time I'm going to have to throw together some toy web apps to get a better feel for it.
• RubyGems - A packaging framework for Ruby code. While it does fall into the totally lame trap of including the name of the language in it's name it still manages to be quite cool. I hope more Ruby projects start using it in the future.
• Rake - A 'make' like build tool written in Ruby. Actually, the 'rakefile' you write for your project turns out to be a complete Ruby program, so you have all the power of the language right there for you to access. Plus, with Ruby's nice readable syntax the whole thing turns out to be much easier to understand than a Makefile. How cool is that!
• Ruby 1.8.1's standard library has all sorts of neat stuff in it. Full YAML support, a unit testing framework, a framework for building custom little http servers, XML parsing, the list goes on and on...

Anyway, I'm still in the 'playing around' stage, but all in all I continue to be more and more impressed with this stuff...

Some Random Stuff

Well, I'm finished moving into the new apartment, and I don't have some need-to-get-it-done-right-damn-now thing to do on the book, so I figure I might as well post something here.

No pictures of the new apartment yet, since I'm still quite a ways from actually unpacking all my stuff, but soon, I promise.

This article by chromatic struck a nerve. I'd kill to have an editor (and other associated people at the publisher) who wanted to work like that, as opposed to the refugees from microsoft-land I currently deal with.

Anyway, I'll have to try to buy him a beer at OSCON for preaching the gospel of using reasonable tools for producing technical books.

I'm positive there's something else I meant to mention once I got around to posting again, but it's totally slipped my mind, so until next time...

Almost, but not quite, Disaster

So when upgrading a FreeBSD install via make world you really should read UPDATING first.

Especially when upgrading to a version of the OS that adds a new system call.

You do not want to install a set of userland tools that require said system call without first installing a kernel that supports it.

Figuring out how to install the kernel without working make and ls commands was fun.

At least I had already built the new kernel, so I didn't have to scramble to find a bootable rescue CD...

This is totally why I am not a sysadmin.

Realization

Only now, as I sit in my new apartment, surrounded by a significant percentage of my stuff, noticing that it's gotten rather dark, do I realize that I left all of my lamps in the other apartment.

Needless to say, since I spent all day moving that significant percentage of my stuff into this apartment, I am far too tired to do anything about this tonight.

I'll just have to add it to the list of things to grab on the next trip to Stamford.

Other than the distinct lack of light in several of the rooms, things in the new apartment are looking great. All my major bits of furniture have made their way here, and over the next week or so the remaining chunk of my clothing and consumer electronics will make the trip. Now that there's actual furniture in the rooms, they're actually looking quite a bit better than I'd thought they would. I had been a bit worried about some of the rooms being a bit small, but now that there's some stuff in them to give the whole thing some sense of scale, they actually look more than roomy enough.

Yes, I promise we'll be having some sort of apartment warming party in the reasonably near future, once we've settled in a bit.

Update

Just a few random notes from my life over the past week or so...

• Framemaker is considerably pickier than xsltproc and the Docbook XSL stylesheets. This means it's considerably more of a pain in the ass to import my book into Framemaker than one would think, considering that the book is written in Docbook and Framemaker supports Docbook...
• Coldstone Creamery rules. Any ice crean store where the employees will sing for tips is just damn cool.
• Apparently the Emacs people fixed whatever bug was screwing up syntax highlighting after using nxml-mode.
• The readdir implementation on Mac OS X can bite me.
• My parent's beach house looks totally different (and damn nice) with it's new deck.
• In related news, my Dad's friends who actually built the deck are just too damn good at estimating, both in the amount of time it would take to build and in how much raw material would be required. If I could estimate half as well at my job I'd be a god.

Page 23, Sentence 5

Well, lots of other people have been doing this...

"Our attempts to define comics are an on-going process which won't end anytime soon."

(from Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics)

The idea is to take the closest book to you, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post it to your weblog, along with these instructions.

The Moving Process

So my friend Craig and I spent much of the last week scrambling around searching for apartments in Norwalk.

Since $COMPANY is moving there later this summer, and we're both tired of paying insane amounts of rent in our one bedroom apartments, we figured now would be a good time to find someplace close to the new office with enough room for two geeks and a truly absurd collection of computers.

After a lot of procrastination followed by a few days of actually looking, we found our new apartment.

It's half of a duplex on a dead end street between railroad tracks and the highway, directly adjacent to a cemetery!

How can you go wrong with a place like that? ;-)

Actually, the place is pretty nice. Other than the lack of AC it's better than the other places we looked at. There seems to be sufficient room for all our crap, it's within walking distance of the new office, my half of the rent will come out to only slightly more than half of what I'm currently paying, and the neighborhood seems decent.

Our lease starts mid-may, so if you're in the area and feel like helping us move in return for free pizza and beer drop me an email or something.

The Dark Side of TiVo

You know, TiVo has a dark side.

When you stop watching the stuff TiVo has recorded for you, say for a little more than a week, perhaps because you're alternating between watching season 5 of Babylon 5 and working on a chapter of a book, you end up with a huge backlog of good TV that you really want to watch, but you can never find the time to get through it all.

Curse you TiVo!