From tom at eborcom.com Wed Feb 1 02:50:02 2006 From: tom at eborcom.com (Tom Hukins) Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 10:50:02 +0000 Subject: Planning a Technical Meeting Message-ID: <20060201105002.GA81387@eborcom.com> Hi all, Firstly, a quick report on last Thursday's pub meeting. We had an interesting chat over a few beers, and some of us had curry. We've talked before about a technical meeting where some of us give talks about what we've done with Perl. SpiraHellic Multimedia have offered to let us use their meeting room, which is nice and cosy and has a large screen TV for presentations: http://www.spira.co.uk/contact.htm I suggest we hold technical meetings every two months on the second Tuesday of the month starting at 7pm. Does this sound good? Does this cause problems for anyone? I plan to hold the first meeting on 14th March. We already have a few potential speakers lined up, but don't feel shy about putting yourself forward. :) Finally, what would you like to hear talks about? Maybe someone on the list could tell us about something we're interested in; maybe we could persuade a guest speaker to attend. Tom From nigel at titley.com Wed Feb 1 07:35:33 2006 From: nigel at titley.com (Nigel Titley) Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:35:33 +0000 Subject: Planning a Technical Meeting In-Reply-To: <20060201105002.GA81387@eborcom.com> References: <20060201105002.GA81387@eborcom.com> Message-ID: <43E0D545.1050008@titley.com> Tom Hukins wrote: >Hi all, > >Firstly, a quick report on last Thursday's pub meeting. We had an >interesting chat over a few beers, and some of us had curry. > >We've talked before about a technical meeting where some of us give >talks about what we've done with Perl. SpiraHellic Multimedia have >offered to let us use their meeting room, which is nice and cosy and >has a large screen TV for presentations: >http://www.spira.co.uk/contact.htm > >I suggest we hold technical meetings every two months on the second >Tuesday of the month starting at 7pm. Does this sound good? Does >this cause problems for anyone? I plan to hold the first meeting on >14th March. > > Sounds great. >We already have a few potential speakers lined up, but don't feel shy >about putting yourself forward. :) > >Finally, what would you like to hear talks about? Maybe someone on >the list could tell us about something we're interested in; maybe we >could persuade a guest speaker to attend. > > I'd be interested if anyone can give a talk on designing using AJAX principles. I'm reading up, but finding it a bit hard going at times. Nigel From robbie at chaoticage.com Sun Feb 5 09:30:32 2006 From: robbie at chaoticage.com (Robbie Bow) Date: Sun, 05 Feb 2006 17:30:32 +0000 Subject: MiltonKeynes-pm Digest, Vol 5, Issue 1 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43E63638.2070306@chaoticage.com> > Finally, what would you like to hear talks about? Maybe someone on the list could tell us about something we're interested in; maybe we could persuade a guest speaker to attend. Talks on practicable means of developing tests for legacy code bases and systems within a time and resource constrained environment would be interesting. In fact, working with legacy systems generally seems to be something we all do but no-one discusses much as far as I can see! From tom at eborcom.com Mon Feb 6 03:55:44 2006 From: tom at eborcom.com (Tom Hukins) Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 11:55:44 +0000 Subject: Legacy Code Bases In-Reply-To: <43E63638.2070306@chaoticage.com> References: <43E63638.2070306@chaoticage.com> Message-ID: <20060206115544.GA21395@eborcom.com> On Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 05:30:32PM +0000, Robbie Bow wrote: > Talks on practicable means of developing tests for legacy code bases > and systems within a time and resource constrained environment would > be interesting. In fact, working with legacy systems generally seems > to be something we all do but no-one discusses much as far as I can > see! Peter Scott's "Perl Medic" book contains lots of useful tips for working with an understanding legacy code. I strongly recommend it for anyone managing lots of Perl code you didn't write. For testing, "Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook" provides some useful ideas, particularly some of the mocking techniques. And, as if by magic, both these books have appeared in Robbie's office! Unfortunately, I can't perform this trick for most of you. Nor can I make the books talk. I've also found the Aspect module on CPAN useful for tracing method calls, and various GraphViz modules useful for inspecting data structures. Tom From nik at ngo.org.uk Mon Feb 6 15:40:11 2006 From: nik at ngo.org.uk (Nik Clayton) Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2006 23:40:11 +0000 Subject: MiltonKeynes-pm Digest, Vol 5, Issue 1 In-Reply-To: <43E63638.2070306@chaoticage.com> References: <43E63638.2070306@chaoticage.com> Message-ID: <43E7DE5B.1000001@ngo.org.uk> Robbie Bow wrote: >> Finally, what would you like to hear talks about? Maybe someone on the list could tell us about something we're interested in; maybe we could persuade a guest speaker to attend. > > Talks on practicable means of developing tests for legacy code bases and systems within a time and resource constrained environment would be interesting. In fact, working with legacy systems generally seems to be something we all do but no-one discusses much as far as I can see! This is something I'm right in the middle of doing at the moment, and could probably talk about. N From robbie at chaoticage.com Tue Feb 7 23:02:38 2006 From: robbie at chaoticage.com (Robbie Bow) Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2006 07:02:38 +0000 Subject: Legacy code talk In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43E9978E.7000409@chaoticage.com> Talks on practicable means of developing tests for legacy code bases and systems within a time and resource constrained environment would be interesting. In fact, working with legacy systems generally seems to be something we all do but no-one discusses much as far as I can see! > > This is something I'm right in the middle of doing at the moment, and could > probably talk about. > > N > Appreciated if you could! From tom at eborcom.com Tue Feb 14 04:53:14 2006 From: tom at eborcom.com (Tom Hukins) Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:53:14 +0000 Subject: Planning a Technical Meeting In-Reply-To: <20060201105002.GA81387@eborcom.com> References: <20060201105002.GA81387@eborcom.com> Message-ID: <20060214125314.GA36820@eborcom.com> On Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 10:50:02AM +0000, Tom Hukins wrote: > I suggest we hold technical meetings every two months on the second > Tuesday of the month starting at 7pm. > > I plan to hold the first meeting on 14th March. I thought I should send an update to confirm that we have booked this and so far have two confirmed speakers: Dave Cross will present the "Databases and Perl" talk he gave at the recent London Perl Workshop: http://mag-sol.com/talks/db/ I will present a combination of the various "Gathering information from the Web" talks about WWW::Mechanize I gave last year: http://london.pm.org/lpw/talks/2005/tom_hukins-www_mechanize_intro.pdf http://people.freebsd.org/~tom/yapc-eu-2005.pdf I'll send out a formal announcement in the next week or so. If you'd like to talk about something, even if only for five minutes, let me know soon. After the meeting, we'll decamp to a pleasant, nearby pub for informal discussion about the talks and whatever else takes our fancy. Finally, it's only a week and two days until our next regular monthly meeting. See you soon! Tom From tom at eborcom.com Tue Feb 21 08:20:27 2006 From: tom at eborcom.com (Tom Hukins) Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2006 16:20:27 +0000 Subject: Meeting: Thursday 23rd February Message-ID: <20060221162027.GA31164@eborcom.com> It's that time again: the regular crowd of Perl Mongers converge on the pub and welcome everyone to come along and join the fun. The next miltonkeynes.pm social meeting takes place in Wetherspoon's (near the railway station, not the one in the snow dome) this Thursday, the 23rd February. For directions, see the Web site: http://miltonkeynes.pm.org/ I'll be there from 7pm, as usual, but feel free to show up earlier or later. We'll probably end up discussing all manner of things Perl and non-Perl. See you soon, Tom From michael at galton.ucl.ac.uk Fri Feb 24 02:17:57 2006 From: michael at galton.ucl.ac.uk (michael) Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 10:17:57 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Scandisk on a DVD Message-ID: <20060224091925.U78286@ash.gene.ucl.ac.uk> Had a nice time at the pubmeet last night I asked a tech question and now, for some reason, can't remember the answer I got. So I'll ask again I've built an archive server with mirrored disks using rsync and set it up so it copys new and changed files to a diffs directory which are burned to two DVD one of which goes to my Mum and Dad :-) Given that DVD's are fragile I should really periodically check that there OK is there a linux scandisk for this sort of thing? -- Michael From tom at eborcom.com Fri Feb 24 03:45:40 2006 From: tom at eborcom.com (Tom Hukins) Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 11:45:40 +0000 Subject: Scandisk on a DVD In-Reply-To: <20060224091925.U78286@ash.gene.ucl.ac.uk> References: <20060224091925.U78286@ash.gene.ucl.ac.uk> Message-ID: <20060224114540.GA15451@eborcom.com> On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 10:17:57AM +0000, michael wrote: > Had a nice time at the pubmeet last night Me too! > Given that DVD's are fragile I should really periodically check that > there OK is there a linux scandisk for this sort of thing? Combining both of Rod's ideas, I'd go for something like: dd if=/dev/dvd | md5sum to periodically check you can read the whole disk. Comparing the checksums over time gives you an extra sanity check. > I've built an archive server with mirrored disks using rsync and set > it up so it copys new and changed files to a diffs directory As I mentioned last night, you might want to look at rsnapshot: http://www.rsnapshot.org/ I've not actually tried anything I'm suggesting here, but it all seems reasonable to me. Free advice, eh? Tom