enlightened perl organisation

The very first post on this blog was about how I wanted a completely static blog and how it'll be great and wonderful and boy howdy was it ever. Over 500 lines of rather dense perl plus almost 20 separate template files because the kind-of-mustache t [...]

Note: you can find much more information about ledger on ledger-cli.org, including links to official documentation and other implementations

Recently my girlfriend and I visited the wonderful city of Vancouver, Canada. While out of country we tend to [...]

Note: you can find much more information about ledger on ledger-cli.org, including links to official documentation and other implementations

Another note: I've written a new version of this that is much more dynamic and flexible named Ledger Web.

Last [...]

Browsing around on hacker news one day, I came across a link to a paper entitled "A micro-manual for Lisp - Not the whole truth" by John McCarthy, the self-styled discoverer of Lisp. One commentor stated that they have been using this paper for [...]

Edit 2010-08-08 17:47: ProcLaunch now has a CPAN-compatible install process. See below for details.

I finally got the chance to work some more on proclaunch, my implementation of a user space process manager, like runit or mongrel or god. I wrote up a [...]

I've made some small changes to the way bugsplat.info is generated. First, I refactored publish.pl quite extensively. Instead of being a huge mess of spaghetti-perl, it's nicely factored out into functions, each one doing as little as possible. I [...]

Modern web applications are complicated beasts. They've got database processes, web serving processes, and various tiers of actual application services. The first two generally take care of themselves. PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache, Nginx, lighttpd [...]

As some of you might know, Twitter provides a streaming API that pumps all of the tweets for a given search to you as they happen. There are other stream variants, including a sample feed (a small percentage of all tweets), "Gardenhose", wh [...]

In my day job I use a mix of perl and C++, along with awk, sed, and various little languages. In our C++ we use a lot of boost, especially simple things like the date_time libraries and tuple. Tuple is a neat little thing, sort of like std::pair exce [...]

Creating actionable information out of raw data is sometimes pretty simple, requiring only small changes. Of the few feature requests that I've received for Calorific, most (all) of them have been for goals. Always listen to the audience, that's [...]

Note: you can find much more information about ledger on ledger-cli.org, including links to official documentation and other implementations

About three years ago I was in some serious financial straits. I had just started my first job out of college [...]

Once in a while at Rentrak we have programming competitions, where anyone who wants to, including sysadmins and DBAs, can submit an entry for whatever the problem is. The previous contest involved writing a poker bot which had to play two-card hold [...]

Let's pretend, just for a second, that you want to make some money on the stock market. Sounds easy, right? Buy low, sell high, yadda yadda blah blah blah. Except, how do you know when to buy and when to sell? Not so easy. Being a nerd, you want [...]

After using Calorific for a month two things have become very clear. First, I need to eat less. Holy crap do I need to eat less. I went on to SparkPeople just to get an idea of what I should be eating, and it told me between 2300 and 2680 kcal. I hav [...]

I'm a nerd. I write software for a living. I spend a lot of my day either sitting in a chair in front of a computer, or laying on my couch using my laptop. I'm not what you'd call... athletic. I did start lifting weights about six months ago but that [...]

Someone at work today demanded that I add an RSS feed, so here you go: atom. It didn't take very much to hack it in. Basically, all I had to do was install a few more CPAN modules, specifically DateTime::Format::Natural, DateTime::Format::W3CDTF, and [...]

I'm a strict believer in learning by doing. It's how I learn best. In the spirit of learning, then, here's how I built the engine that powers this blog.

Right away I decided that there's no point in having a database to back this thing. The only u [...]