My building, like many here in the fair City O' Fog, has a door entry system which calls a phone number - I can then buzz the door open using the hash pound octothorpe key. This is handy because even when I'm not home I can let people in. Or if I forget my keys then at least I don't have to wait around outside ( Read more... )

And ooooooooooooh, the music puns get worse and worse.

So, at work we stumbled across an interesting Perlism. Well, interesting if you're a huge nerd which, must as it pains me, I'm going to have to concede.

Anyway, so Perl has the concept of a DESTROY method which gets called on an object when it's, err, destroyed. Also, in Perl, objects can be ( Read more... )

After my last bit of Calendar fiddling I was left slightly disgusted by the state of the code. In my defence it was written over the course of a hungover Sunday afternoon but there was CGI and DBI code mixed up together, no DBI place holders and all sorts of other perversions and sickness. At least it was all templated, which is something ( Read more... )

Last week I did a big refactor of some Java code, massively simplifying the flow and making things clearer, faster, more extensible and more secure. In general I'm hugely happy with it and I'm also pretty happy with my Java. It was a long time ago when I last did Java professionally and so this past year I've always been a bit wary that my code ( Read more... )

Que geek! That overwhelming urge to automate your life using nothing more than a rag tag collection of Perl scripts, RSS feeds, chewing gum and lollipop sticks. I'm convinced that if I had children they'd be read bedtime stories using a combination of Festival and Project GutenbergHmm, thinking about it - maybe that's why I was subjected to ( Read more... )

I finally got to do a bit of hacking this evening and noodled around with Net::Social. I'm not entirely sure on the name but this module will probably go nowhere since it's mostly just satisfying my curiousity ( Read more... )

Social networks. Kind of like Pokemon - gotta catch'em all, ya know ( Read more... )

It's true, I probably haven't done any hacking for 2 months and 11 days.

I'm not sure if this is because I haven't had any good ideas or because I'm mildly burnt out again or because ... because of some unknown reason. I mean, I've noodled around getting London.pm's website moved to a new system and given it an RSS, Atom and iCalendar feed but ( Read more... )

brad was working on Brackup and in the comments of his LJ someone mentioned that a Gmail target would be cool.

Python has had an extension that lets it access Gmail including storing files on there (using a certain amount of trickery) which someone used, along with FUSE to create a Gmail File System

Perl had no such ability to store and retrieve ( Read more... )

After my last excursions in AJAX and DHTML I feel slightly more confident about hacking together the last bits of EventQueue to make it full functional.

However, before I release it I really want to make it so that it can have multiple backends (mod_perl 1 & 2, cgi, static) which shouldn't be too hard but means that it's become suspiciously ( Read more... )