next LA.PM meeting: Wed Jun 30.

Hiya Mongers! See ya tomorrow, Wednesday June 30th for our next perl mongers meeting. All the details are at the la.pm.org website. Presentations are still "to be determined."

Please let me know if you are coming and if you'd like to present!

Tentative presentation ideas:

1. CPAN author tools: care and maintenance of your cpan module, the rt queue, cpants. Scenario: "my module works great for me but fails install tests on 90% of hosts, how to fix that." I wish that was completely hypothetical.
2. Perl hadoop streaming examples follow-up. I didn't get to show much code for Hadoop::Streaming::Mapper last time around. I'd like to show snippets of the code I'm working on now for $work (cleansed appropriately)
3. mega extreme prorgramming to the max. "Pairing" with a room full of coders (instead of just a pair) trying to code onto the main display. Expanding App::PM::Announce to our nefarious purposes

What:	Los Angeles Perl Mongers Meeting
When:	7-9pm
Date:	Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Where:	The Rubicon Project HQ - 1925 S. Bundy, 90025
Theme:	Perl!
RSVP:	Responses always appreciated.

Iron Man Challenge -- what happened to the status images?

Does anyone out there know the status of the "IronMan Status Images"? They disappeared when the code rewrite went out. I miss seeing mine, but I miss seeing them on random blogs even more.

I don't have the tuits to rewrite that part of the system, but maybe if I knew where the blog meta info was kept, or even if the old csv list is being updated with each blog's posts listed by date( unsorted ). Maybe I will be writing it afterall.

hideous remakes and sequels

I listened to the Manager Tools podcast on keeping a "Delta File" this morning [Career Tools]. A Delta File is where you list stuff that annoys you about your job and/or your manager that you promise that "I won't do that when I'm a manager. I'll fix it!" When you do become a manager, you can look back and get feedback from your previous self, lest you find yourself doing a scene-for-scene remake of your previous manager's actions.

Waiting for me on gale chat was a conversation on hideous remakes and sequels. Beautiful Synchronicity! The pillaging of my childhood memories continues, thanks to the soulless profiteering freaks in Hollywood, to paraphrase Jason and provides plenty of fodder for my 'Hollywood Executive Delta File' to remind myself what not to do when I become a hollywood executive. Remind me not to read slashfilm, lest I learn about these things sooner than I need to.

I do plan to go see A-Team soon, it looks pretty sweet. I mean, it's the friggin' A-Team!

The A-Team and The Karate Kid?
No, seriously, W - T - F? I mean... I just... why?
--jason

Just wait until Peter Berg's "Battleship" [1], Sony's "Risk" [2], Gore Verbinski's "Clue" [3], Steve Oedekirk's "Stretch Armstrong" [4], Etan Cohen and Kevin Lima's "Candyland", and even Ridley Scott's "Monopoly" [6]

1. Peter Berg's Battleship moved up a week
2. Sony Pictures to make movie based on the board game RISK
3. Gore Verbinski to direct CLUE
4. Worst idea ever -- Steve Oedekerk to write Stretch Armstrong movie/
5. From the guy who wrote Tropic Thunder comes Candy-Land the movie
6. Worst Idea Ever - Ridley Scott is directing Monopoly/

--presto

You forgot Universal's Asteroids
--erich

Save us all.

g33k d1nner -- returns for one night only (tonight!)

g33k d1nner (Los Angeles Geek Dinner) is back for one last performance: tonight only. Come out to Cantor's deli in Midtown around 7:30 to meet and greet. Leave your sales pitches at home.

What	Dinner with your fellow geeks
When	Jun 15, 2010, 7:30pm
Where	Canters Deli [ Canter's Fairfax Restaurant ]
Address	419 North Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Who	People who self-identify as geeks
RSVP	at upcoming
Why	"It’s a chill scene. No uber networking, self-promotion or company promotion. Just be cool. We’re all friends you haven’t met yet."
How	Show up. Look for the like minded peeps. pay for your own food. enjoy.

More info available on the geekdinner website [ g33kd1nner ]:

1. What is Geek Dinner About
2. Geek Dinner Redux

ubuntu 10.4 + perl 5.10.1 => personal config moved to .local/share/.cpan

The personal .cpan directory for perl 5.10.1 under ubuntu 10.4 has moved from $HOME/.cpan to $HOME/.local/share/.cpan. I was very confused to get messages about not being able to write to /root/.cpan/build when I knew I had that overridden in my personal configuration file.

Once I found this new location, I was able to delete the new .cpan directory and replace it with a symlink to my old ~/.cpan. Now I can get back to building modules as a non-privileged user into a local::lib based configuration.

Delete empty new .cpan directory and replace with a symlink to my old .cpan:
rm -rf $HOME/.local/share/.cpan && ln -s $HOME/.cpan $HOME/.local/share/

Thunderbird SSL Exceptions

Steps to manually add an exception for SSL handling in Thunderbird.

1. Open Preferences:
   Edit Menu -> Preferences
2. View Certificates:
   Advanced Tab -> Certificates Sub Tab -> [View Certificates] button
3. Servers Tab :
   [Add Exception] button
4. Add domain :
   Enter domain in Server Location text field
5. Get Certificate :
   [Get certificate]
6. View Certificate (optional) :
   [View Certificate] then [Close]
7. Check permanently store exception :
   [X] Permanently store this exemption
8. Confirm Security exception :
   [Confirm Security Exception] button
9. close certificates :
   [close] button
10. close preferences :
    [close] button

The exception core for Thunderbird is separate from the one for Mozilla / Firefox, so if you've already added an exception there you'll need to repeat it for Thunderbird. I needed to do this because I get legitimate emails from a site that come to me from the internal company domain using our external company SSL certificate. Having to click through 3 pop-ups each time I saw a bamboo build status message is a non-starter.

I wonder if there is a simpler perl interface to directly manipulate these configuration options? Perhaps using Mozilla::Prefs::Simple?

Ubuntu 10.4 upgrade and reset metacity bindings.

I've updated my laptop to Ubuntu 10.4. The upgrade went very smoothly, and I'm pretty happy with it. I needed to upgrade to thunderbird3 as thunderbird2 was having trouble sending mail to my work email server -- 50 seconds of single thread blocking doing the AUTH calculation on each send had made it impossible to work with.

The metacity window manager configuration has been changed considerably: the minimize, maximize, close buttons have been moved from the right to the left, and reordered. Rather than adjust to these new settings, I modified the configuration to put them back where they were before. This is a good reminder that I should go back to my own window manager and config. I'm not sure what will be best for the laptop, I am very happy with ion, at least with the ideas behind it, it's kind of a pain to configure. I still haven't duplicated my ion1 settings in ion3. Now that the developer gave up on it and switched to windows (sigh), I'm not sure if I should move on.

How to change the metacity button layout: Edit the gnome config for apps/metacity/general/button_layout, which is a string describing the button locations. I have changed mine to menu:maximize,minimize,close. Using the gconf-editor tool, navigate to apps/metacity/general, then find the button_layout option. Changes are immediate. Invalid button names are silently ignored, to future proof against updated button names in later configurations.

Thanks to lifehacker and how to geek for tips. Check out the howtogeek article if you need a walk through for gconf-editor.