keith’s new self

So I’m in Toronto for YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) 2005 - doing a talk on my work with Sxip - in particular developing an identity webservice using Catalyst, an MVC framework for Perl. My day was fairly strange. I was up all night working on finishing up a web development contract - which left me in a bizarre no-sleep coffee-soaked haze for the first half of the day. Luckily I perked up enough to deliver my talk. I then took a three hour nap, and my whole system was discombobulated by this abrupt change in sleeping patterns… so I decided to go shopping. Something about being in a different city makes me want to buy clothes. Anyway, so I spend a couple hours at a mall in downtown Toronto - and find some great stuff. I then return to my hotel room, and browse the web a little aimlessly - I recall that the Toronto Jazz Festival is happening, so I go to their website and see if I can find any good shows. Lo and behold, I see that the fabulous Medeski, Martin and Wood are playing at 8pm today - I check the time - it’s 9:15 - but there was an opening act so I change into my new clothes and run off to check it out. As it turns out, the park where they are playing is just a two minute walk from my hotel. I get there, and they have just played their first song. Joy! The next thing I know I’m drinking Carlsburg and Truborg, and grooving out to the ultra-funky sounds of MMW, in my new shwag. How cool is that? Truly a memorable evening.
tags: mmw, music, perl, toronto, yapc

posted: 10:40 pm

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Even though I buy groceries from an organic food store, my diet is quite high in sugar and fat. Typically my roomies and I have cheese, yogurt, sweetened cereal, sweetened soy milk, granola, organic root beer, waffles, potato chips, and other rich food in high supply, while our stock of fresh veggies is small, and not used as often. Part of the reason for this is that healthier food consisting of cooked raw vegetables, legumes, whole grains, etc usually takes longer to make. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves. I often come home from work and have a bowl of granola or a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner. Not the worst possible thing I guess, but the behaviour is based in a feeling of lack of time, and the reality is that I’m neglecting my bodily health for a quick hunger-killing snack. Yet somehow it feels good to look at the ingredients in a junky treat, and find that well known health-ravaging carbs, white sugar and glucose-fructose, have been replaced by the friendlier-sounding evaporated cane juice, concentrated grape juice, or my favorite, high-fructose corn syrup.

A related tidbit: I’ve had former vegans tell me that they never ate so unhealthily as when they were vegan. They could justify eating a whole box of cookies because it contained no animal products. These days, the vegan dictum of avoiding animal products seems morally insufficient, as awareness raises about the impact of imported foods on the environment and oppressive trade practices with poorer countries. No animals may have been killed or abused (directly anyway) to get that box of Oreos to your house, but what other environmental and social damage occurred? Buying local and fair trade have become the new moral imperatives of grocery shopping.

Anyhoo - as we speak I’m cooking up some whole grain rice for breakfast. I want to try edging back into whole foods again.
tags: ecology, food, health, organic, veganism, vegetarianism

posted: 7:18 am

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An odd comment on a 43Folders.com article about productivity tickled my fancy:

Put a single drop of liquid LSD on one coffee bean in each pound of coffee you buy. Then when you grind your morning dose of coffee there is a chance that it will result in an unexpectedly interesting day. The anticipation of possibly tripping your face off can force you to snap into productivity quickly and creates an extra layer of nervous energy to jumpstart the day. A little lysergic russian roulette!

posted: 11:41 pm

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Hey - wanna see some truly heinous code - check out the simpleboard component for the open-source CMS Mambo. It is a case study in horrid, nonsensical spaghetti code. The UI sucks too. And guess what? It’s the only truly integrated bulletin board for Mambo. I’ve been doing contract work for about a year implementing custom Mambo solutions, and much of it has been a horror show. Now, Mambo itself ain’t that bad. For an open source CMS in PHP (most totally suck), it has some nice features, and is fairly well written. The problem is the people who write the components… dear lord. It’s the software equivalent Vogon poetry.

Over the last while I’ve had to work with some the worst code I’ve ever seen - an unholy trinity made up of simpleboard, docman, and phpshop. All of which I naively decided to use in solutions for customers and ended up paying for fixing the many bugs, cutting out the backwards/superfluous/ugly UI ‘features’, and reading through pages of muck trying to extend them in simple ways.

I appreciate that people are making an effort to create free software, but I guess I just wish that the bar was higher in terms of quality. Is there a well written, nice looking (fairly minimal), open source CMS / Portal project, with equally good plugins/components, to be found anywhere?

If I had the time I would write some decent, simple Mambo components to replace the really bad ones, maybe using Cake as a framework. The world would be a better place for it. Anyway, glad to be moving on.
tags: badcode, code, mambo, php

posted: 1:11 am

  6 Comments

“Bright Eyes” aka Conor Oberst has been owning my playlist lately. The elements of his style - songwriting, singing, arrangement - come together in magical ways to create beautiful, captivating songs. Here’s a quote from a review, by someone more eloquent than me:

I’m Wide Awake perfectly captures a place and time in Oberst’s life. It chronicles his first memories of staying in New York City, and the metropolis rarely gets a folk singer to chronicle its streets this lucidly, at least since the hootenanny days; he frequents its parties and stumbles down its streets like a midwestern transplant instead of a jaded hipster, sings about chemical dependency and the endless pains of love, while capturing as a backdrop the build-up to a foreign war. I’m Wide Awake weaves the personal and the political more fluidly than most singers even care to try, and the consummate tunefulness just strengthens those moments where he pinches a nerve– the songs that still give me chills every time, like “At the Bottom of Everything”: “Into the face of every criminal strapped firmly to a chair/ We must stare, we must stare, we must stare.”

Yup, good stuff.
tags: brighteyes, folk, indierock, music

posted: 9:19 pm

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Went to a meeting of the Vancouver Perl Mongers tonight, hosted by my former employer ActiveState. Went out for drinks with a nice group of folks afterwards. Getting excited for YAPC:NA, where I will be giving a talk on some of the cool stuff I’m working on right now.

Yawn - I never know if I’m better off working late, or getting up early. Probably neither! I used to thrive on late night coding - now I hate it. It feels lately that no matter what happens, I’m better off with a good night’s sleep.
tags: perl, sleep, yapc

posted: 12:36 am

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Do away with your
Throat and lips,
And let me hear
What you can say.

- Shih-tou (700-790)

Courtesy of dailyzen.com
tags: koan, meditation, poetry, zen

posted: 6:54 am

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Safari has now become my main web browser, after a couple years of straight Firefox. The two browsers have their tradeoffs. I miss the Fox’s Live Bookmarks, but I just started using Bloglines, and overall I like their interface better (gives me the headlines-only view I like, but can expand headlines into full articles, plus I like that it hides headlines I have already read). Safari also loads faster, uses less memory, and has lower CPU utilization. Makes sense, since it is built for OSX - it seems to play nicer in general - which feels good, even if it is missing some of the power features of Firefox. I’ll definitely keep the Fox around for specific things (like web development), but I am liking Safari better for day-to-day browsing.
tags: browsers, firefox, productivity, rss

posted: 11:28 am

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I’ve decided to get my myself organized, after perusing several blogs devoted to productivity in general. Picked up “Getting Things Done” by David Allen (also known as GTD). A quote that drew me in was “Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax” - makes sense. One of the main points of the book is to take everything that is floating around in your head and put it into a trusted paper or electronic system, so that you can focus on one thing at a time and be confident that nothing is falling through the cracks. I’m a classic ‘keep everything in your head’ case, so this looks like good medicine.

Went a little wild at Grand and Toy yesterday, and now I’m stocked up with all the tools of the organized man - file folders, notepads, a nifty new pen, and filing boxes.

On the digital side I started using a unix command-line based calendar called remind (love it so far), installed great search-engine shortcut tool called Sogudi, and started playing with Quicksilver (but haven’t quite got the hang of it). I also devised a home-cooked system of tracking projects and tasks using plain text files and standard unix command-line tools. I’ll definitely write about this system once it’s more flushed out. Hoping that I can keep my energy of organized productivity going - as I have a habit of getting really excited about things like this and then after a while I just stop doing it. Hopefully the rewards of increased sanity and relaxation will be enough to keep me on track.
tags: gtd, productivity, quicksilver, remind, sogudi

posted: 11:59 am

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I simply adore the new Sleater-Kinney album, The Woods. It’s a real quantum leap in their sound. One of the most interesting aspects of art for me is when an artist transcends themselves and their work and finds a deeper, more essential expression. And I have a special place in my heart for ridiculously overdriven guitar.
tags: music, sleater-kinney

posted: 9:52 am

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