Ilia's Random Prose

foreman Procfile troubles

2011-10-10T19:47:00.004-04:00

Having trouble with your foreman Procfile? Make sure the file is saved in unix mode.
I had a worker process defined and I was getting this:


19:38:23 worker.1 | rake aborted!
'9:38:23 worker.1 | Don't know how to build task 'resque:work
19:38:23 worker.1 |
19:38:23 worker.1 | (See full trace by running task with --trace)

I ran dos2unix and the problem went away.

Google App Engine billing rant

2011-09-01T00:09:00.004-04:00

So I signed into Google App Engine after a year of hiatus and lo and behold I find out I owe $116.28. I wish I had gotten an email telling me that I'm being billed every month, so I could do something about it. Real sneaky Google...

Bishnu Yoga Teacher Training Course

2010-08-23T23:07:00.007-04:00

A few people have been asking me about the Yoga teacher training course I recently finished. It lasted from October 2009 to June 2010. The studio is Hot Yoga Challege at 720 Spadina Ave at Bloor St. W. The website is www.hotyoga.ca. This is the first Bikram yoga studio in Canada but as of 2008 (roughly) they cut ties with Bikram for reasons that deserve another blog post.

[Guru at work]

I would say it's a decent teacher training course. I had a full time job, a contract on the side and a baby on the way at the same time. So I had trouble memorizing the script on time. Usually about 4 postures per week had to be memorized and recital tested every Saturday. Aranka is strict but was quite forgiving and very patient with me. Still the pressure from Aranka was stressful on me. I liked Sasha more when he was lecturing or testing us. Although he was strict in other ways, there was a level of wisdom about him that I appreciated.
Aranka taught us some other yoga as well including videotaped lectures on Yin Yoga and chakra meditation. I still do chakra meditation now as it helps me to de-stress and recharge. There was never any lack of material to learn that's for sure.
Internship is part of the course so I taught about 10 classes at the end. It did help me gain confidence with speaking in front of an audience. Now I just don't have time to do it. But my goal wasn't necessarily to teach. More to become a better student.

Hope that helps you decide if you want to take this course. Best wishes. Namaste.

Moving scam

2009-12-18T12:48:00.005-05:00

Yesterday was not a good day. This post will explain my experience with one moving company based in Ontario, Canada.

Business info:

Movers on Demand, Inc.

http://movers-on-demand.com/contact.html

416 919 6683

WHOIS info for domain name:

CHINYENZE, KNIGHT KNIGHTAPIWA@YAHOO.COM

165 GREEN VALLEY DRIVE

UNIT33

KITCHENER, On N2P1K3

Customer experiences:

http://www.druid.net/darcy/movers_on_demand.py

http://www.movingscam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17789

Problem explanation and dispute position:

Two weeks before the moving date, we researched various moving companies and decided on one called "Movers on Demand, Inc."

The company website (http://movers-on-demand.com/) advertised that an estimate will be made before the moving date. This was never done. Over the phone a quote was given for approximately $265.

The moving date was set for December 17 at 10 am.

On the date of the move at 10am when the movers did not show up, we called to confirm the time. We were told the movers would be coming in the afternoon. We said that is not good enough and we were told they would come at 11:30am. They did show up at 11:30am but this was 1.5 hours late. Furthermore only 2 movers were present instead of the 3 promised over the phone.

It took 2.5 hours to load the truck. 20 minutes to drive to the new house. Once at the new house the movers sat in the truck for about 10 minutes. Upon emerging they presented us with an invoice for $855 before taxes with a breakdown as follows:

Labour at 45/hour - 360

Travel time - 45

Stairs - 180

Appliances - 30

Piano - 60

Special handling - 30

Assembly/dismantling - 60

Heavy Items - 90

The movers would not unload the truck until we paid the invoice.

The unloading time is assumed by the movers to be the same as the loading time. By those calculations, the total labour is 5 hours. However the invoice labour cost of 360 was based on 8 hours. Their explanation for this was to point out the contract terms where it stated a minimum of 4 hours per trip. This is then multiplied by 2 to get the minimum labour of 8 hours. We talked on the phone to the supervisor Kevin and we disagreed on the reasoning for multiplying and the result of 8 hours. We also disagreed on the surcharge for "Piano" as the piano involved is actually a digital keyboard that came apart and is not nearly as heavy as a conventional upright piano. Kevin agreed to take $45 off the labour charge and to remove the "Special Handling" charge of $30. The subtotal was therefore reduced to $780. After 13% taxes and a $20 credit card surcharge, the total charged to my VISA was $901.40.

Our position is that the labour should be for 5 hours and that the piano charge should be dropped. The subtotal should therefore be adjusted to $660.

Improv Report Lesson 1

2009-06-17T11:55:00.019-04:00

Last week I signed up for Improv 101 at the Impatient Theatre Company. It cost CAD $150 for 8 lessons, once a week. Last night I ventured out to the first lesson. Here are my impressions.

The studio is located on Queen St W. at Roncesvalles. After some searching I found a plain door wedged between two storefronts with barely a sign. Good thing I was on time. 6:30pm. A flight of stairs led me to the studio lobby. I walked into a small room where a few people had assembled together. Someone that resembled an instructor greeted me. I forgot the name almost instantly, later to be reminded that it's Erin. Erin Lovely.

As quickly as I forgot her name, we were directed to another room. The Green room I think it was called, had chairs around the walls so everyone quickly sat down. Across from me were two men talking and smirking. I couldn't quite identify their nationality but soon found out they were Iranian: Jubin and Amir. In all there were only about 6 people so far. I was underwhelmed. Gradually more people showed up. Just as I was getting comfortable in my chair Erin decides to move us to another room. And so we follow to the Blue room.

The Blue room has, no surprise, blue walls. It's now about 6:45 and we are Jubin, Amir, Steven, Adiam, Giovanni, Dahlia, Neelam, Heather, Jenny. Erin hands out two pieces of paper. A course overview and a disclaimer. She reads the disclaimer aloud for the next 15 minutes. Each of us also gets a pass card for free show admissions, which we are encouraged to attend.

The rest of the class is a series of games, a 15 minute lunch break, more games. Finally, 3 hours later we share what we liked best about the class and what we took away.

Game 1: Zip, Zap, Zup
We all stand in a circle. Someone starts with yelling Zip and at the same time clapping hands in the direction of someone across. That someone across has to repeat with Zap. And then Zup and again Zip and so on.

Game 2: Zip, Zap, Zup with increasing loudness
By the end we're all yelling at the top of our lungs. And the window is open.

Game 3. Zip, Zap, Zup with throwing objects
Same as before but throwing or kicking imaginary objects instead of clapping.

Game 4: Slow-mo Samurai
Lights off. Pretend we're all samurai with big swords. Slowly retrieve the sword from the back with two hands and kill everyone around you. You can block with your elbows. If you're hit, slowly die. You can attack as you're dying.

Game 5: Chinese Throwing Stars
Stand in a circle and throw imaginary chinese stars at each other. Catch the stars with a clap and throw back at someone else. Add sound effects. If you fail you go in the middle of the circle and everyone throws stars at you and you die very slowly.

Game 6: Mnemonic Devices
We sit in a circle and go clockwise thinking up nicknames for each other. Giovanni is Don Giovanni of the Arts. Dahlia is Dahlicious. Neelam is decided on Vaneelam. Jenny is Je ne sais quoi. I am Gorillia. Amir is A-Miracle. Jubin is Ju-Ju-Bean. Steven is Steve-o-Meiser. Adiam becomes Adiamo.
Each of us then has to recite everyone's aliases.

Game 7: I love ___
One by one we stand up in the middle of the room and say what we love for 2 minutes. I got carried away here and mentioned some non PG-rated stuff.
I enjoyed this game because there was so much support and positive energy in the room. Audience had to clap and yell "yay" if they also shared your love.

Game 8: Panels
3 teams of 4 go on virtual stage and pretend to be a panel of experts on a topic chosen by the audience. Erin, our instructor is the panel moderator.
The topics were: Snake Caesarean, Nosepickers, Animal Paws. I was Dr. Strange, an expert on cataloguing animal paws around the world. I need lots of improvement here.

how to read the sms text messages backed up by iTunes from your iPhone 3G 3.0

2009-06-02T20:03:00.002-04:00

at the Terminal:

$ sqlite3 Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/$most_recent_entry/3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata
(replace $most_recent_entry with the name of the most recent directory)

sqlite> .schema message
(this will show the structure for the message table)

Then you can ask things like:
sqlite> select * from message where text like '%days%';

Ubuntu 9.04 and ATI cards

2009-04-26T08:04:00.006-04:00

I upgraded one of my linux boxes from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04. Everything went well but the Xserver wouldn't start. Turns out there's a big problem with ATI deprecating some graphics cards or something to that effect. My card is an ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro.

Solution:

start Ubuntu in safe mode
sudo apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
reboot

Other than that hiccup, Ubuntu 9.04 is indeed faster. The display is drawing much faster over VNC.

Good thing my other linux desktop is Nvidia.

Reference:
ATI Graphics Cards and Jaunty: What Works?

Deploy to your iPhone without Apple's provisioning profiles, in two steps

2009-01-18T20:57:00.009-05:00

You will need a mac with OS X 10.5.6 or higher and a jailbroken iPhone with 2.2. Jailbreak using quickpwn

obtain a self signing identity as per Apple's directions, use the name "iPhone developer"
save the following to Info.plist.patch
54a55,58
> PROVISIONING_PROFILE_ALLOWED
> NO
> PROVISIONING_PROFILE_REQUIRED
> NO

Then:
patch /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Info.plist Info.plist.patch
(skip if you used "iPhone developer" in step 1) Open your project and go to (menu) Project > Edit Project Settings. In the list of properties, find “Code Signing Identity” > “Any iPhone OS Device” and click in the empty box. Assuming there are no entries in the menu, click “Other” and type in the same name you used to generate the code signing certificate above. Hit OK and close that settings window. This setting should persist in future projects.

You should now be able to build for Device using Xcode. scp the .app to root@your_iphone_name:/Applications/ and reboot the iPhone.

I have collected the links I used in my research at http://delicious.com/nurey/iphone+deploy

Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 on Ubuntu

2008-11-29T23:14:00.012-05:00

I bought a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 today for a linux box (Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex). My preliminary research on this webcam found a few people getting it to work out of the box with Intrepid.

My story was anything but. The webcam did get detected by whatever hotplug manager du jour is for Ubuntu. However Skype test call wasn't working. After a few hours of google searching -- there goes my Saturday -- I fixed the problem and here are my notes.

sudo apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio (another sound server du-jour)
System/Preferences/Sessions, uncheck Pulse Audio
System/Preferences/Sound, set everything to ALSA, set Sound Capture to USB Device OSS
Skype/Options/Sound Devices, Sound In -> USB Device (plughw), Sound Out -> Default, Ringing -> Default

Now video is flickering. Very annoying. I have an ATI card with compiz running. Fix is to turn off "TexturedVideo" in xorg.conf:


Section "Device"
   Identifier "Configured Video Device"
   Driver "fglrx"
   Option "TexturedVideo" "off"
EndSection

iPhone goodness

2008-11-29T22:58:00.008-05:00

So I finally got an iPhone for myself a week ago and it continues to amaze me. The amount of useful apps in the App Store is astounding. The features I'm using most often so far are the push email, sms, the camera for taking snapshots of books I'd like to find time to read, youtube, podcasts, and of course visual voicemail is just awesome. Some of the free apps I've downloaded and actually using include:

Forex OTG for checking foreign exchange rates and charts (room for improvement there)
Shazam for finding the name of the song playing on the radio
Urbanspoon for restaurant picking
AroundMe for finding a starbucks near me
i.TV for TV schedules
Twitteriffic for twitter
Google Earth
Google app for voice activated google search and google reader
1password for password syncing with my mac
iTalk for recording notes
To Do's for todo tracking. Though this is proving to be too basic. I might try Things or go all out for OmniFocus
Fring for Skype and AIM
MyMote for controlling my MythTV box
FlyCast for online radio
TouchTerm for ssh
Apple Remote
Evernote
Tap Tap
BigOven for recipe search

There's only a few apps I've actually bought and one of them is Ocarina. Just amazing.

2008-10-11T17:26:00.003-04:00

So back in July I placed an order over the phone with Fido for an iPhone 3G 16GB. It's now October 11 and no iPhone in sight. I called them two or three times. Yesterday they said I will get it by October 30th.

Meanwhile I was able to walk into a Fido Kiosk on September 30th and walk out with an iPhone 3G.

2008-05-29T10:38:00.001-04:00

OS X Blooper of the day... "auromatic proxy"

2008-03-23T13:57:00.006-04:00

Yesterday I went out to Home Depot and bought a peg board and cable ties. Here's the newly organized office desk with less cable clutter. The main point was to get stuff off the floor. Thanks to Decluttered for the idea. The dimensions of the peg board are 33'' x 24'', cut from a 48'' x 48'' board. About $10 CAD at Home Depot.

N.B. the radiator by the window is non-functional.
There's a little ikea pencil stuck in the peg hole just under the hard drive enclosure.

2008-03-17T11:33:00.003-04:00

Fujitsu has announced the availability of ScanSnap S300M. The wildly popular sheetfed scanner is now available for the Mac platform.

I've been using a cheapo CanoScan LIDE 90 with ReceiptWallet to scan all my receipts. The Canon OS X drivers aren't that great. And the flatbed scanning is slow. I think I will be buying the Fujitsu shortly. If so, stay tuned for a review.

2007-12-17T12:16:00.001-05:00

I have published Business::OnlinePayment::CyberSourceSOAP in a public svn repository.

I have also started discussion on the bop-devel mailing list regarding the future of Business::OnlinePayment::CyberSource. So far the consensus is that long term the current cpan module should move to the SOAP implementation. I agree with this idea because the current cybs.pm (aka CyberSource::SOAPI) implementation is limited to x86 hardware.

2007-12-03T23:17:00.001-05:00

Just got back from DemoCampToronto16. Met some smart people. Igor Foox' demo on U-Test was very impressive. The iStockPhoto talk was enlightening and well presented. All in all, the event exceeded my expectations. Wish I could stay for drinks but gotta do some more work.

2007-10-30T21:42:00.001-04:00

I decided to block access to certain sites for just one computer on my LAN, let's call the computer Adell.
I have a WRT54G router running OpenWRT and I have another machine running privoxy. How to setup transparent proxying?

On the router:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -i br0 --source Adell --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8888

Port 8888 is tinyproxy which is redirecting to the privoxy daemon on the other machine.
/etc/tinyproxy/tinyproxy.conf:
upstream privoxy_box:8118

And that's all there is to it.

2007-10-28T19:56:00.001-04:00

I use OpenWrt whiterussian (0.9) with miniupnpd 1.0-RC5. On the macbook I use Transmission.app for torrents. The problem is that it maps the port successfully but reports the port (9090) as stealth. I finally fixed this nagging issue with this command:

iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 9090 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.172

Now Transmission.app says the port is Open.

Here's the relevant iptables listing:

root@OpenWrt:~$ iptables -v -t nat -nL |grep 9090
188K 9893K DNAT tcp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:9090 to:192.168.1.172:9090-0
187 11636 DNAT tcp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:9090 to:192.168.1.172

The first line was added by miniupnpd. Not sure what the -0 is there for.

2007-10-26T09:56:00.000-04:00

The workshop on "Desktop-enabling Web Applications" was not bad. Matt Finkle from Mozilla made us go through the latest iteration of WebRunner which is now an official Mozilla project and is renamed to Prism.

On a sidenote, while looking at Prism I stumbled upon Joey -- a Mozilla Labs project that lets you "send web content to your mobile phone". This seemed like a nifty idea.

2007-10-26T09:39:00.000-04:00

DOJO widget demo was impressive. lots of widgets: accordion pane, tree, calendar, color picker, rich text editor.... and all are keyboard accessible, high contrast mode compatible.

2007-10-26T09:08:00.000-04:00

At the conference now. Turns out they're using Bluesocket controllers for the wifi.

First session is Accessible RIA.

- HTML5 + ARIA spec allows focus on all elements.
- DOJO provides some nice keyboard accessibility convenience

ARIA spec: machine readable semantics for widgets (eg. menu)
- works in Firefox.

- specifying ARIA semantics in the html gives screen readers more information.

2007-10-11T23:14:00.000-04:00

I had a break-in at my house yesterday. I live on an upscale street with million dollar houses next door, so break-ins are common. I just did not think I would be targeted because the house is relatively old and run down. This has already been reported to the police.

Based on the evidence left behind I can suggest the following order of events at around 4 am. I shall assume there's more than one burglar even though I have no evidence to support such. The burglars first try to get in through the basement window at the back side of the house (the exterior screen was left removed). Then they go into the mud room (veranda) which is usually unlocked because there isn't really anything valuable. There is another door between the mud room and the house and this was pretty easy to break into: they cut the insulating strip around the opening of the door, slided a card into the opening at the lock and pried the door open. Stupid door - no deadbolt. Once in the house, they got spooked off by something, maybe the cat. We were asleep in the house. Perhaps they heard me moan in my sleep. So they leave the house and proceed to the car in the driveway. They get it unlocked. It's possible they have a master key for toyota corollas.

The car was left messed up inside. Gym bags were turned inside out, garbage scattered around. Stolen items include my Nokia770, my bluetooth GPS unit, two cell phone chargers, an inverter.

Oh and the bastards took a pair of fake Ugg boots from the mud room.

All day yesterday was spent replacing the front door lock, the side door lock (we suspect they made a copy of the keys) and nailing/barricading the back door. The cop recommended we leave exterior lights on overnight and I will definitely do so from now on. Also the cop advised to clear the foliage/branches from the front lawn to increase visibility for patrol cars. I spent a whole lot of time today on that.

We are still kinda shocked this happened. At least the damage was minor.

2007-10-09T21:31:00.000-04:00

Some great news today. Alena can ride a bicycle! I've been teaching her maybe 5 times and she got it this time. Impressive considering it's a circa 1975 road bike with the racing handlebars.

2007-10-09T20:35:00.000-04:00

Just got a shiny white cordless laser Mighty mouse to go along with the shiny white macbook. Not very happy so far. Doesn't work on the clipboard surface that my old logitech optical (non-laser) mouse loved so much. Does not work on plain white sheet of paper. I can only get it to work on the back of a magazine, which is glossy and dark. I thought Laser technology works on more surfaces? This really blows. I'll have to order one of those Razers.

2007-09-28T22:36:00.002-04:00

Yesterday's talk went well. The TPM group was awesome. I did some sloppy video recording: it only captured 5 talks or so and I was partially out of the frame for my talk.

Download the slides in pdf format here (0.5MB). The second slide is the screencast. Download it here. Note that it's a divx file (1.5MB).

I'm planning to make the source code available soon.

[update: see http://nurey.com/bankelf]

2007-09-26T12:30:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow (thursday) I'm doing a lightning talk at the Toronto Perl Mongers. The title is "Consolidating Online Banking using Perl and AJAX". Should be about 5 minutes. I've done my slides using Keynote 4.0 (from iWork 08). Not having ever used Keynote before, I found it a breeze to learn. I've even got an animated slide.

Anyway, here's the lineup for the TPM lightning:


Ilia:            Consolidating Online Banking using Perl and AJAX
Olaf Alders:     Parsing UserAgent Strings
Olaf Alders:     URI::ParseSearchString::More
Alan Rocker:     Egg-sucking for Seniors
Eric Bower:      A USB-powered Digital Storage Oscilloscope
James.Q.L:       Customized Form Error Message using Data::FormValidator
James.Q.L:       Perl Application Deployment
Jim Harris:      From Logs to Locks
Michael Graham:  Use a Web-based Proxy to Foil Cybercafe Keyloggers

Location: 2 Bloor Street West, 12th floor, classroom 5
Time: 6:30 pm

2007-06-29T18:43:00.000-04:00

Summer's here and I ported the jQuery Corners plugin to Prototype/Scriptaculous. Demo here

2007-04-15T17:34:00.000-04:00

Problem of the day: find a way to convert a video recording from VCD format to something I can edit in iMovie and then upload parts or all of it to Google Video/YouTube.

Problem solved: VCD and MPEG Tools (for OS X) lets me convert to DV format and YouTube recommended format.

2007-03-23T14:35:00.000-04:00

Just created my first OpenID.

Nice instructions at "Grokking OpenID and blogger"

2006-11-20T15:54:00.000-05:00

Looking for some hilarious footage of anti-consumerism and destruction? Go to SmashMyPS3.com

2006-11-20T09:46:00.000-05:00

Things I really want:

- Macbook Pro 15''
- a 22'' flat panel
- a decent laser printer; the HP 1012 has become unreliable after 3 years (not that that's necessarily HP's fault: the printer had suffered a fall two times and i'm frankly surprised the thing still works)
- an 8MP or higher compact digital camera
- a no-frills cell phone with good bluetooth headset profile

2006-10-20T12:18:00.000-04:00

I gave myself an early christmas present a few days ago: a bluetooth GPS receiver -- Holux GPSlim 236 -- to go along with the Nokia770's killer MaemoMapper application.

Here are some photos...

2006-09-16T21:51:00.000-04:00

Here's what I've been working on today. Got 2 boards of pine 20''x96'', each cut into two pieces, resulting in these 4 shelves mounted on 20'' brackets and two upright railings.

And voila... utility shelving for my office.

2006-09-11T00:31:00.000-04:00

In other news me and Anna went to the AGO to check out some much needed contemporary art: the Andy Warhol exhibition titled "Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964", guest-curated by that famed film director David Cronenberg. I think that means he narrated the audio guide.

Now i've heard about Andy Warhol before and seen some of his work in a few art books. After having seen this particular installation, I have to say that I was expecting a lot better. I left the gallery half-wanting to see more, which is good and bad. Good because I guess I took something away from this. Bad because the installation was quite small: about 19 pieces with audio commentary and perhaps another dozen without any commentary. Anyhow, I've certainly learnt a lot about Andy and his obsession with found-art

One work in particular that I enjoyed -- and indeed it appeared popular with the rest of the art going public -- was titled "The Couch". Basically he had a couch at his "factory" (a studio which in itself is a work of art) with a film camera pointed at it. Various persona would appear at or around this couch and perform random performance art. There were quite a lot of scenes which would not at all qualify for a family audience. Nudity was just the beginning.

2006-09-11T00:04:00.000-04:00

So i'm back in Toronto as of August 29. I had been in Boston MA for 2.5 months and then in Paris, France for 10 days.

Anyway, the point of this post is to illustrate my battle with the racoons. Yesterday night they made a mess of my green bin. The driveway was strewn with organics. It was horrible and disgusting to clean up. Difficult too because the driveway is paved with small rocks.

Determined not to go through another such cleanup, I made a bit of research online and found a product called "Raccoon Check" which is a strap that you screw onto the lid of a garbage bin. Here's what it looks like on my 2 green bins. I had to drill 3 holes on each bin. 2 holes on the lid, 1 on the side front.

After tonight we shall see who is winning!

2006-08-01T10:35:00.000-04:00

Gmaps Pedometer!
I wish the site was around when i was training for the marathon two years ago. Back then I was using the MapArt Toronto CD, which worked well but of course, the user interface wasn't nearly as good as gmaps. Sigh, how the world has changed...

2006-07-12T16:30:00.000-04:00

Free Parisian Pass Thursdays at the MFA: "After headbutting its way through the World Cup on Sunday, France seems to be in the spotlight this summer, especially here in Boston. The Museum of Fine Arts is hosting their new Americans in Paris 1860-1900 exhibit, which features painting by James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Mary Cassatt. It seems that American painters all flocked to Paris to attend art school, gain a reputation, and eat lots of crepes during this forty year span. They also happened to produce some great art, which will be on display through September 24th; the most well-known pieces in this exhibit are two portraits of ladies with extremely different styles: Sargent’s portrait of Madame X and Whistler’s portrait of his mother.

Starting this Thursday and running the next two Thursdays as well, you can see the exhibit free courtesy of Bank of America. (Sure, they might charge a $35.00 fee for each overdraft offense, but they are opening their corporate hearts an"

2005-10-11T17:09:00.000-04:00

Apparently, Starbucks' policy allows customers to request a cup of fair trade coffee! I worked at a starbucks for 4 months and didn't even know. Shame on me. See http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/10/starbucks_chall.php

2005-10-11T11:03:00.000-04:00

Just discovered Pandora.com yesterday. I gotta say: it's kickass! You give it a song/artist you like and it makes a streaming radio station with similar songs. For now it's 128kbps mp3. I sent an email enquiring about higher bitrates and/or aac+ streaming, and I got a response a few hours later basically saying they'll be working on it. Very nice to get such quick acknowledgement.

2005-07-06T00:18:00.000-04:00

A little bit about the third day.
"Where did my memory go?" by Dan Sugalski -- basically emphasized Devel::Size and Devel::LeakTrace.
"Lazy test development" by Joe McMahon -- introduced Devel::TestEmbed and Devel::Command. Embedding Test::More in the perl debugger so you can use the familiar ok/is right in the debugging session and have the commands saved for later testing. Too bad Devel::TestEmbed didn't pass the make test for me.
The really interesting talks were by Brian Ingerson. He has a nice laid back approach to presenting which just needs to be seen. So, he had two talks, one after the other.
"Building Data Driven Test Frameworks (and actually enjoying it!)" -- ingy introduces Test::Base, which really blows the socks off Test::More because, well, just check out the SYNOPSIS for Test::Base.
"Perldoc - New Tools for Perl Documentation" -- ingy does it again, this time rethinking POD (plain old documentation). What's really nice is that you can write your perl documentation as comments. Perldoc.pm (not quite on cpan yet) parses the comments and generates POD. IMHO, this module is definitely worth using once it comes out.
And finally, the last official talks: the Lightning talks. I think there were 16 presenters with 5 minutes each. There was also a lot of comic relief, which was met very well by the audience. The juggler dude was amazing. All in all, the conference was more than worth the $80 USD. It was, like Richard Dice (the head organizer) said, a "BIG PARTY" for perl hackers/lovers/etc.

2005-06-28T19:57:00.000-04:00

2nd day at the YAPC was somewhat more fun. First session I went to was Abigail's Lexical::Attributes talk. I thought he went into a bit too much detail over how his module came to be. But that's ok. He was trying to show us that inside out objects are a good thing: providing the encapsulation of object members that regular perl objects are lacking today. I admit he sold me on the Inside Out idea. I've heard of it before, but now it just makes sense. The Lexical::Attributes module implements Inside Out objects using perl6 OO constructs.
Now I want to start using this module under mod_perl! Although source filtering is used in the module, only compile-time performance is affected, which is not important under mod_perl.
After the lecture, I asked Abigail about run-time performance of using Lexical::Attributes vs. the regular perl5 OO. He said it should be equivalent. Oh and he was giving out previews of Damian Conway's soon-to-be-released book, "Perl Best Practices". I managed to pick one up. Very informative material.

Next talk was "Perl Modules for Exceptions, Logging and Parameter Validation" by David Rolsky. Very well presented even if there were a few glitches at the beginning. David is the author of Exception::Class. As it turned out, I didn't learn that much new here. But it did remind me of the importance of throwing exceptions. Oh and that Error.pm may have memory leaks due to nested closures. Also, source filtering does not play nice with Apache::Reload. OK so maybe I learned a few important things.

Next up: "How to Serve a Billion Requests a Day with Perl" by Kevin Scaldeferri.
The ballroom was full for this one. Not surprising considering the topic and the fact that the presenter was from Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). The material was very high level, architecture stuff. It was well done and very professional. I learned that they were using distrubuted, n-tier topology... basically a web server farm and a database farm and a few load balancers (Alteon, F5). So, nothing really new. The guy did recommend using Memcached, but it was not clear whether they were using it.

I hopped over next door to hear the genius Autrijus Tang's "Apocalypse Now - Perl 6 is Here Today". This was somewhat over my head, but it was fun to see and hear Autrijus Tang in person. He talked a lot about Parrot -- the supposed virtual machine for Perl 6, and his pet project, Pugs, the prototype implementation of Perl 6.

2005-06-16T21:58:00.000-04:00

I've created another blog, RawJourney, about our family's journey into Raw Food. The blog is hosted on a home computer, so it may be offline at night. Enjoy.

2005-05-24T00:35:00.000-04:00

Picked up a new laptop at FutureShop for $999 (demo). It's an AVERATEC AV3250HX-01. Inside is an AMD Athlon XP-M 2200+ with 512MB RAM, 80GB HD (with a temp sensor!), DVD+-RW/CDRW combo drive, 3 USB ports, VGA out, 802.11g, 12.1'' XGA, 1'' thin and 4.3lbs light.
I proceeded to install Gentoo Linux. I'm using kernel-2.6. The kernel modules installed are:
via-rhine for the NIC
ehci-hcd, uhci-hcd, ohci-hcd for the USB
powernow_k7 for the powernowd (a nice userspace cpufreq daemon)
video, fan, thermal, ac, battery, processor, cpufreq_stats, freq_table, cpufreq_userspace (basically all the ACPI modules)
WIFI: `emerge rt2500` to get the 802.11g driver
SOUND: use ALSA's snd_via82xx

2005-05-07T10:22:00.000-04:00

woohoo sparklines in python! i have got to go implement this somewhere...

2005-05-06T16:00:00.000-04:00

I'm selling this 61'' Toshiba rear-projection complete with furniture. This is 6 years old, so no HDTV. Asking price: 1200. Buyer must pick up in Central Toronto. 416 481 5916

2005-04-28T22:08:00.000-04:00

I finally went down to my old MPL office to pick up the 4 year old P3-800 server. It's been offline for awhile and I realized I needed it now because it's the only machine that still has my private gpg key.
While I was at it, I also transplanted the server's hard disk, floppy drive and a case fan to my P4 desktop. I also picked up an Enermax double ball bearing case fan with manual RPM (1000-3000) control.
So now, the P4 desktop has two front inlet case fans directed at the 2 hard drives and a little wire dangling out of the front usb port enclosure. It's pretty fun manually adjusting the fan speed, seeing the RPM numbers climb in GKrellM2 and hearing the decibels.
Now I just need to get my hands on some case fan spacers, specifically the Acousti AFG80C Anti-vibration Silicone Fan Gaskets or Gel Fan Mounts.
Here's a useful link that shows proper airflow.

2005-03-21T01:51:00.000-05:00

I should probably explain my long absense (abstinence?) from blogging. Wow it's been almost a year. What have I done since July of last year?
Well, I did run the Toronto Waterfront Marathon on September 26. Yep, the whole 26.2 miles/42.195 km. It was amazing! I never ran such a distance before. Heck, a year before I started training, I could barely run 5k without stopping. I would like to say thanks to Hot Yoga (Bikram, Moksha styles), The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer, Pete Bevin, Runner's World, Running Room, POLAR, and various internet resources. Photos from the marathon can be found here.
In September, I also made three (!) changes: I left my nice coding job at Stabilia and I moved to another apartment with my girlfriend and her daughter. Darn, I should have snapped some photos of the moving day. Lots of oversized furniture, big screen TV, U-Haul truck. It was fun. Stressful at times, but fun. And the third change was going back to university. YorkU for Biotechnology.
Hopefully, you understand why this blog was neglected.

2005-03-21T01:07:00.000-05:00

Here's a fun (albeit cynical) blog on a religious theme. Good reading if you're apprehensive/skeptical about spirituality issues.

2004-07-26T12:11:00.000-04:00

16K on sunday

it's an amazing feeling to run 16K one way. From Taylor Creek Park at Dawes Rd west to DVP, down along the Don Valley River, and east to the beaches.

Still, this is 4K short of my scheduled 20K run as per the training program. I suspect running against the wind on lakeshore contributed to the shortage. I was also guessing the mileage after hitting the 10K mark at DVP/lakeshore at which I was supposed to turn back for a perfect 20K but decided to carry on for fun. Oh well, there's always next sunday.

2004-07-07T11:06:00.000-04:00

farm getaway

Monday July 5, noon - Tuesday July 6, 11 am: me and Anya spent time outside Toronto at a nice getaway farm, the Hart House Farm. It was just the two of us in the cottage, complete with a fireplace and a wooden sauna by the pond in the forest. Serene, beautiful, fresh air.

2004-06-30T13:11:00.000-04:00

moksha yoga westtown

started going to MokshaYogaWestTown. Nice studio, superb teachers, close to work. Did I mention nice studio? I mean really nice: loft style, high ceilings, lots of windows, facing south. Spacious changeroom and they let you clean the mat with their natural spray.
I'm trying to do 5 days of practise in a row. I've done Monday and Tuesday. I have tonight, thursday and friday to look forward to.
The only problem is that after the 7pm class I have no time for anything but grabbing a bite and going home to sleep.

2004-06-25T16:46:00.000-04:00

Mandarin Buffet free on Canada Day. whee let's get loaded...

2004-06-03T12:59:00.000-04:00

foot pod/accelerometers

I'm considering investing in a gadget to measure distance/speed while running. With the new foot pod technology, a slew of products is on the market with 97%+ accuracy: Polar S625X, Nike Triax Elite and other models, and the FitSense FS-1

2004-05-20T11:41:00.000-04:00

mixed astanga with tina

Yesterday, wednesday, I went to Tina's Mixed Astanga lunch class. What an amazing workout: I was sweating like crazy. Not as much as Bikram's but still, this was in an air-conditioned room.

Also, at Monday's dance rehearsal, the barre workout, although only about 30 minutes long, made me sweat much more than usual. I suspect Bikram Yoga altered my sweating pattern somewhat. Anya says this is a good thing.

2004-05-11T13:21:00.000-04:00

yoga blog

here's a link to an interesting yoga blog

2004-04-30T10:25:00.000-04:00

eyes getting better

i think my eyes are getting better.

yesterday, I did a 30 minute run during lunch time and I did most of the breaks and micro pauses recommended by Workrave. I got off work at 18:00 and walked about 10K at a fast pace. Then it was Krishna Das at 20:00. More on that later. End of the day, I'm feeling great and my eyes don't hurt nearly as much as they usually would.

2004-04-28T16:56:00.000-04:00

Yoga at work

Today was the 2nd time I went to the SundariYogaStudio for the 1 hour lunch time session. This time, it was Mixed Ashtanga. It's nice. I especially like the studio's loft design with high ceilings (naturally) and the skylight. Another bonus: it's only a 3 minute walk from the office.

Going to Bikram's Hot Yoga later at 18:30

2004-04-28T16:48:00.000-04:00

struts in Perl

Just found out about Simon Cozens' MayPole, the closest thing to Jakarta's Struts in Perl.

2004-03-31T12:34:00.000-05:00

dashboard is cool

2004-03-26T14:05:00.000-05:00

Here are some online radio stations I listen to at work:
SomaFM - for GrooveSalad (chilled/ambient)
Digitally Imported - for Trance, Hard Trance, Vocal Trance, Deep House
Deep Mix - for downtempo, deep house, dub
Music One - for general dance
Mystic Radio - inspirational new age, ambient, chilled, lounge

2004-03-24T17:04:00.000-05:00

Linkedin looks like an interesting idea. Check it out.

2004-03-24T16:57:00.000-05:00

mono and c# look to be promising. And here's a nice comparative overview of C#.

2004-03-15T13:46:00.000-05:00

nurey.net was taken by someone when i didn't renew the domain and now points to my old journal on usePerl. It's nice to see that somebody else thinks of me...

2004-03-05T18:11:00.000-05:00

why do my eyes hurt so bad? why am i such a complainer? why do i sit so much in front of the computer? because i need to work... to get paid... to live