Ingy 2.ö

Coffee & Diffie

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:20:00 +0000

I've been hanging out in Palo Alto for the last week, meeting new coworkers at Socialtext, and visiting old friends. This last Saturday morning I made a new friend. I was waiting for my coffee and I spied a man sitting at a table using a laptop. Not a rarity around these parts by any means. But this was a man I was pretty sure I'd seen before at a Foo Camp some years ago... "Excuse me, are you Whit Diffie?" "Yes, I am." "Hi, my name's Ingy döt Net"... Whit and I talked a bit and then I ran off to have breakfast with Lyssa.

This morning I ran into Whit again and we ended up talking for about an hour or so. I think I am cursed with this condition that when I meet someone with interesting ideas, I feel compelled to turn those ideas into projects. Whit left me with two interesting ideas...

1) While discussing the concept of "ingy.net", he impressed on my that a query url is a long lasting resource of good information on a subject. For instance http://ingy.net (this blog) may become dead some day, but http://www.google.com/search?q=ingy+dot+net is much more robust. This led me to the idea of creating a blogware wrapper, that basically contained the latest google info about me, without me needing to lift a finger.

So far I have create http://i.ingy.net. For now, it is a simple redirect to google, but may be more interesting at some point. It might be an interesting meme to make domains like 'i.' or 'iii.' to mean, "general information". At this point "www" has very little meaning, but lots of people type it in regardless.

2) Whit is interested in NSA factoids and during some talk about this and Wikis, we came to the conclusion that a wiki would be a decent tool for a group of people with that common interest to share what they know. The main difference is that this data is more structured in nature and wikis are pretty much about free form content.

This discussion rekindled my interest in two older ideas of mine: Kwiki and CogBase. I think that there is a lot of potential in what I would called a "typed wiki", a wiki who's pages have a type and that type implies a certain schema (aka required data). That way you could set up a wiki that contained both free form prose, and also pages that made you fill in a form for certain data. Imagine a baseball wiki. You could have pages on players that required all the typical "baseball card" info and also free formed pages that talked about things like a certain famous game.

Whit was quite an interesting man, but given my current project schedule, perhaps dangerous to meet with too often. ;-)

A Twelve Pack of YAPC

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:32:00 +0000

I just got back from Chicago. I really love that place. I usually tell people, "Chicago is a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there", but I had a great visit.

I went salmon fishing on Lake Michigan with my dad and my brother. We caught 6 fish and drank a few beers, then we met up with mom for a nice family dinner.

I also got to see my old friends Dave, Brooke, Margy and Emily. They really took good care of me. Thanks!

The main reason I went to Chicago was to speak at my 12th YAPC conference. That's me in that picture at the end of my first ever naked impromptu lightning talk!

I've been to 6 North America YAPCs (2001,2002,2003,2005,2006,2008); 5 in Asia (2004-2008) and YAPC Europe in Amsterdam (2001). I've given talks at every one of them.

This year's YAPC was really inspiring to me. Larry Wall's talk was the best one I've ever seen him give. I think it rekindled my spirit to work on the following major (for various definitions of major) open source projects:

as well as my many Perl modules like Inline, IO::All, pQuery, Module::Install, Module::Compile, JS, WikiText and Vroom.

The best part of YAPC is always seeing your old Perl friends and making new ones. Too many people to list here. I love y'all, and y'all know who you are.

Good Morning Ingy

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:47:00 +0000

Last week I got back from a couple months in Taiwan, with a side trip to Tokyo. Nice to be back to some proper Seattle June weather... cold, wet, miserable. Ah well, we still got the most best coffee houses and I live right in the middle of the that sweet spot.

In the past I've always gone to the nearest cafe, Online Cafe, for my morning americano. While the coffee and people there are awesome... that's just criminal. Within 8 blocks of me there is Victrola, Caffe Vita, Bauhaus, Vivace, Fuel, Republik, Stumptown, Presse, and oh so many more. I love these cafes but never go to them on any regular basis. But this week two things changed...

I became (at least temporarily) a Morning Person. I thought I could avoid the jetlag coming back from Taiwan this year for sure. I did it last year, but alas, this year I got it bad. I woke up every morning at 2:30 or 3am for a whole week. Luckily Victrola opens at 5:30am so by then I was stoked to do something... like get my coffee. On the second day I figured out how to carry a coffee on my motorcycle!

My first Ducati mod. A MotorCycleCoffeeCozy!

Now I can easily go check out a new cafe every morning for like the next 10 years!

Taiwan was a great trip. I got to hang out with old friends Gugod and TvCafe. The Kogai family treated me to 10 days of bliss in Tokyo. Larry and Gloria Wall were there as well (Perl geek nirvana). I actually sat next to the same person on both of my flights to and from Taiwan and get this... he lives 2 blocks from me in Seattle and his name is Jimi Hendrix! We're going to hang out this weekend. Lyssa from LA came out to spend the last two weeks of Taiwan and Tokyo with me. She really knows Tokyo and I know my way around Taiwan, so it was a perfect match.

Good to be back in Seattle and America for a while. Obama FTW!

Comprehensive Programming Archive Network

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:35:00 +0000

Tonight I uploaded jQuery to CPAN.

True. The 'j' in that sentence stands for JavaScript, and the 'P' stands for Perl. So why put a top notch JavaScript library on the world renowned archive network traditionally used for Perl?

To me it's all just about programming. I have been a major Perl module author since 2000AD. Last time I checked, less than 10 people have more Perl modules on CPAN. For the last 3 years I have been hacking more JavaScript than Perl. I do this mostly for work, but since my work supports Open Source, I have released much of this code as JavaScript modules on JSAN. I happen to be the only person in the world with a module that is both on JSAN and CPAN; the Jemplate module, because it is half Perl and half JavaScript. (It lets Perl's famous Template Toolkit be used in JavaScript).

JSAN was a really good idea, and led to some key people porting important parts of the Perl packaging framework to JavaScript. Especially the test framework. The result is that there is a fairly standard way to package JavaScript modules, especially if you are a CPAN guy like me.

The problem is that there are only a very small handful of folks paying any attention to the upkeep of JSAN. Truthfully JSAN will never be close to what CPAN is. Fortunately, I have found out it really doesn't need to be. :)

I started toying with the idea of putting other languages on CPAN about 5 years ago, but decided against it after discussing it with some Perl mongers at OSCON. I also started FreePAN.org in 2003 with the goal of making a CPAN for all languages, but that project never really took off.

A couple weeks ago I started rethinking the whole thing. Certainly most languages have their own strong communities and distribution systems in 2008. But JavaScript (as a language) really doesn't. And almost every project I work on these days involves both Perl and JavaScript. And JSAN made JavaScript modules look like Perl modules. So I decided to look into how hard it would be to leverage CPAN for JavaScript's benefit. It was surprisingly easy.

It turns out that if you put any file in the lib/ directory of a CPAN module it will get installed. So, for example, lib/jQuery.js would be installed when the user runs make install.

However, I decided that it wouldn't be too cool to put the jQuery package on CPAN and let the user figure out that it was JavaScript and not Perl. Besides, there is already a Perl module called jQuery! I decided to put all these modules in the JS namespace. So jQuery becomes JS-jQuery on CPAN.

But what use is it to get JavaScript modules installed on your machine if JavaScript can't find them? I wrote a companion module called JS.pm. This module lets you run a command like:

> js-cpan jQuery.js /Library/Perl/5.8.8/JS/jQuery.js

So you can get the path names of the JavaScript modules you have on your system. You can then copy or symlink these modules into your web app. With a *nix command like this for example:

ln -s `js-cpan jQuery.js` jquery.js
Now you can distribute Perl web apps on CPAN that require certain JavaScript modules, and have them be included in the standard way as Perl module prerequisites.

For the most part, I plan to just upload my own JavaScript code to CPAN. But lately, almost everything I write in JavaScript relies on jQuery. It's just that good. If JavaScript 2.0 ever comes out, it should have the jQuery core included in the spec. :)

The Year of the Wiki

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:40:00 +0000

Happy new year! It's Chinese New Year. The year of the Rat.

Rat. Hmm. I don't think I want to spend this whole year giving honor to the Rat. See, I live in America. I've spent the last 7 years under the Rat.

I'm actually very excited about this upcoming year, and the possibilities for doing good things and creating great things. I'm particularly excited about Wikis.

In 2003 I wrote some Wiki software called Kwiki. For a while it really started a wildfire, especially in the world of Perl. I set Kwiki up to make the software itself a collaborative experience, much in the way the Wiki is about collaborative content. In the following months and years, many Perl hackers hacked over 250 Kwiki Plugins!

Sadly, Kwiki fell to the sidelines for the last couple years. Last winter it started to surge again only to be stopped dead in its tracks by my accident in Taiwan in the Spring.

Now I am almost fully recovered and my enthusiasm for Wiki and Kwiki is back in full swing.

I spent this last week at Socialtext in Palo Alto. Socialtext is the original Wiki company and my employer of the last 5 years.

This last weekend I spent 48 hours in San Francisco, scheming and hacking with Eugene Eric Kim (eek) the father of the Purple Wiki. Eugene and I crafted some very ambitious Wiki plans for 2008.

Tonight I am at the Portland Wiki Wednesday, sitting across the table from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the Wiki itself.

It's definitely been a Wiki Week. I'm getting the feeling that maybe it should be a Wiki Year. With all due respect to the Chinese, I declare the next year, starting right now:

The Year of the Wiki!!!

If you'd like to join me, visit:

http://www.kwiki.org
#kwiki on irc.freenode.net

The Hackers Will Always Overcome

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 03:53:00 +0000

So I bought a ticket to go to Taiwan in December, but later decided to postpone the trip.

The departure date was next week so I knew I'd better call today and cancel it. I called the airline at 5:15pm and they told me to use their website to cancel it. So I hung up and surfed on over.

After finally navigating this very crufty site to the cancellation page, I filled out the form and clicked the CONFIRM button. The page simply zipped to the top and did nothing. Strange. I tried again. Same thing. I looked around to find a better button to click. Nada.

So being a hacker I viewed the source code for the button and saw that it called the "validate_data" javascript function. I tried entering in some bad data, and it gave me alerts saying that my data was bad. Then I fixed all the bad data again and nothing. again.

At this point I said fµck it and called them back... I'm sorry, the office is now closed... office hours are from 9am to 5:30pm...

FµCK! This time I really said ƒµçk it!! I'm a hacker! I'm going to hack this site and make it work!!!

I fired up Firebug and did a document.getElementsByTagName('form'). Cool! Just one form. I clicked on the result and firebug showed me the guts of the form. It all looked good. Then I saw onsubmit="return validate_data()". That stupid stupid JS function. document.getElementsByTagName('form')[0].removeAttribute('onsubmit').

Buh-bye.

Now I went back and clicked CONFIRM again. Nothing... Hmm. Is this button even part of the form? Oh ƒµçk it. Who needs a button to submit a form? document.getElementsByTagName('form')[0].submit().

Voilà!

Don't let crappy e-commerce sites get you down. Just hack the ƒµçk out of them!

Fling, Me, A Passport

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:10:00 +0000

The craziest thing just happened to me! It makes me believe in life a little bit more.

A delightful man named Fling, whom I've never met before just walked up to me whilst I was working at Online Cafe. Yes, Fling. Yes, Online Cafe. None of this is made up. (I'm just not that creative!)

Fling asked me "Is your name Ingy"... Yes... I found your passport on the street... (jaw drops)... wait here and I'll run home and get it for you.

So two nights ago I got back from visiting my coworkers in Vancouver. I guess in the process of unpacking my car, the passport fell out. I had actually noticed it right away, and figured it was safe inside the car somewhere. Today when I got to the cafe, it crossed my mind to go get it from the car. Luckily I put it off and stayed in the cafe so Fling could find me, instead of going into a major freakout that would have ensued, since I need that passport to get back to Vancouver tomorrow.

Wow!

Fling rocks. Life is beautiful.

Speaking of life, I attended the funeral reception for the passing on of my good friend Meghan's
father, yesterday. The Tesh-s are a great family, and we all had a good time enjoying the comfort of friendships, and toasting to the life of Don Tesh. I only met him once, but he had an important effect on my life... He was the retired doctor who referred me to my most excellent wrist surgeon in April.

Rest in peace, Don.

Alter Ego And Edamame

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 05:59:00 +0000

I had dinner with Ingy !

Last night I got together and dined with my local alter ego, Ingy Pants. We ate at Seattle's best sushi restaurant, Maneki.

We babeled a bit about French and Chinese language, various arm surgeries, and the 4 "P" languages (Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby). We feasted on some fabulous Japanese food including the ever succulent Black Cod Collar Miso.

I met Ingy a couple years ago googling ingy seattle. She was number one, so I had to meet her. Today the spot seems taken by some dude named Brian Ingerson (maybe I'll meet him too some day).

Good to see you again Ingy. There's definitely room for two of us in this town.

Trail of Four Cities

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 19:25:00 +0000

Somehow I always end up back in Seattle. But then I get wanderlust and takes to all kinds of great places in this great world. Still I have my favorites. The are the cities that I just feel at home in:

新竹（Ｈsinchu) - This is the Taiwan city that I lived in for 6 months. Also the one that recently tried to eat my wrist. Still I love it and can't wait to get back. I will learn Chinese before I die.

Vancouver - Couver is a techie's haven. And it is naturally beautiful. And full of my favorite people. And it has the Excellent Eatery!

Portland - Portland peeps are real. I love it there. Where else can you find over half a dozen movie theaters with beer and pizza?

Seattle - You always get me back. But I'll always leave you again.

So hmm. What do these places all have in common? Great bicycle riding. Decent weather year round (except 新竹 in the summer). Ocean, mountains, flats and lush green. Great food (the best outside of Chicago, which is really the only city I can recommend for food). Technology. High cost of living (Couver is a bitch). Great people.

I think I'm ready to make a next move, Seattle... where shall I go?

Post Op Days

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 22:59:00 +0000

It's been almost a month since I wrote here. A week after I wrote that I went to the Swedish hospital for wrist surgery. In a word, the surgery was "good". The doc keeps his cards pretty close to his chest, but I could tell he was pretty excited about the turnout. That's the good news...

...life has been so low key since then. My wrist is going to be in the healing phase for the next year I think. It doesn't bend so much now, and I guess fixing that takes a long time.

But I have been steadily doing some low key but fun stuff. I went on a trip to Portland last weekend. I love that town. I'm always tempted to move back.

This past weekend my buddies Tatsuhiko Miyagawa and Steve Howell, were both in town. Monday night we all went to watch the Mariners beat the crap out of the Red Sox. I don't go to many baseball games, but can someone please tell me why every other fan at Safeco Field was cheering for Boston?!?

I hope Miyagawa had a good time. I'm not in the best shape to host people I think. But the weather was great and we got out a bit. Friday night I had my first BBQ party in nearly a year. I'm ready for another.

So ever since this surgery I've been sleeping more than ever. At first I thought it was the sleep drugs, but I've stopped taking those, and I'm still a zombie half the time.

What else? I've been spending some time writing my new Perl module, YAML::XS. It's exciting because Perl has been dieing for top notch YAML support, and YAML::XS is just that. It is a C binding to Kirill Siminov's libyaml library. The "top notch" credit all goes to Kirill. libyaml is simply amazing. I think Kirill is to programming, what Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was to music. Well I just get the feeling that Kirill makes no mistakes. I haven't found a single bug in this opus of code.

Today I got out on my motorcycle! Technically I should probably wait a couple more weeks, but man... I gotta live. It was great to ride a few miles. Yesterday I rode my road bike for a bit, and last week I started running again. I'm still loving being alive. I think getting the pace of your life slowed down can be a good thing. It helps you notice all the good stuff around you.

One Less Fixie

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:12:00 +0000

So I talked to the doc yesterday. Last week he told me the "external fixator" would need to be on 8 weeks total, or about 3 more weeks. But then yesterday he talked me into doing a wrist surgery next week. Since I agreed, he now wants to take the bionics off the arm ASAP.

Funny... I completely agree with him!

Today at 4pm I become a relatively normal looking dude again. No more wrist piercing jewelry.

So for the surgery, I think he's going to break off the end of my radius into a few pieces and do his best to make it more like it should be. Then he'll hold it all steady with internal screwed in plates. What could possibly go wrong?!

index.yaml

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Sun, 20 May 2007 23:03:00 +0000

Spent part of my morning at Target and Barnes & Noble. I'm not much of a mall guy at all, and I never ever buy anything from St4rbucks. Still I do like getting my undies at Target and B&N was next door, and my friend wanted to get a Sudoku book. So I do what I always do in a corporate chain book store... I look in the computer section.

I must first say that I am happy to report that computer books are finally on the decline. There's just half a normal sized aisle's worth, and half of that is mandatory Microcrap stuff (this is Seattle after all). Perl is (sadly) all but gone. The only new rage seems to be Ajax and a gaggle of JavaScript books. Nothing wrong with that, just not too exciting to me. I mean how much can you really say about either?

I decided to look at the indexes of some new books and see if there was the word "YAML" in any of them. (Yes, ego browsing). First I have to say that not many computer terms at all begin with the letter Y. I found:

yield
Yahoo!
YUI
YAGNI

Kind of redundant. YUI *is* Yahoo! (and also YAGNI ihmo)

So I did find a few books with YAML in the index. At least one had a decent amount of YAML in the content of the book. Here's what I found:

Ajax on Rails - YAML isn't needed in Ajax so much, but Ruby and Rails really like YAML. This book only mentioned YAML in passing, and errantly thought it stood for Yet Another Markup Language.
Ruby Cookbook - Ruby has shipped with native YAML support for years. This book had quite a bit of YAML info/examples/usage/etc. It seemed fairly accurate.
Agile Web Development with Rails - This book got the name wrong too but just by one letter: "YAML Ain't a Markup Language".
Intermediate Perl - This book (written about my native computer tongue) talks about YAML. Unfortunately the examples are really old and dated (YAML 1.0) even though the book was reprinted in 2006. Also the book attributes the YAML creation to some bloke named "Brian Ingerson". We all know YAML was invented by Evans, Ben-Kiki and döt Net.
PERL HACKS - This one blasphemously puts Perl in ALL CAPS on the cover, even though the author's name is purposefully all lower case. The content contains one HACK involving YAML.pm.

I'm sure there are more books out there that mention YAML. It got me thinking about maybe writing a book about YAML. It also got me thinking about how to start getting YAML support in browsers.

Grooming is Creepy

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:25:00 +0000

WTF! I met Chris Dent at Freshy's Cafe in West Seattle today. He's my coworker and sometimes mentor and sometimes mentee. He's also always had long hair and a scruffy face. Today he walks in looking like above! I think we've practically switched looks. Creepy! The universe works in mysterious ways.

I always enjoy the rare times we get to hang out. Today he had to leave early for a massage appointment right down the street. I went with him, met his massager and made an appt for myself for tomorrow. The Taiwan crash has left my back muscles in a really bad state. Last night the pain reached a new excruciating level. Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...

YAML and JSON

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Tue, 15 May 2007 18:45:00 +0000

YAML was invented in April of 2001. Well it started then... It's still being invented at some levels. I happened to be one of the primary 3 guys who spent several years and countless email hours inventing it.

JSON showed up on the scene around 2005(??). JSON didn't need so much inventing because it is a subset of JavaScript. JSON and YAML have a lot in common and also distinct differences, but I can't seem to find any web page that talks much about it. So I'll do it here.

Technically YAML and JSON aren't even related. And just for the record neither are YAML and XML. Wikipedia pretty muchs gets it right in the first sentence definition for each of these:

XML is a ... markup language.
YAML is a ... data serialization format.
JSON is a ... data interchange format.

Except that "YAML (and begrudgingly XML) is also a useful data interchange format", there is really little crossover in definition. YAML and JSON are not markup. XML and JSON are not intended for serious serialization.

NOTE: I'm not talking about XML from here on. This post is about YAML and JSON.

But YAML and JSON have a common spirit. They both are programming language agnostic. They both are centered around hashes, arrays and scalars (or whatever you call these if you aren't a Perl guy like me). This makes them really attractive in Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby and (of course) JavaScript because these modern languages are also based on hashes, arrays and scalars as their primary data model.

One day, early on in JSON's existence, someone noticed that JSON is a pure subset of YAML. Well this wasn't completely true, but enough so that both camps adjusted their specs to make it true. The whole concept is freaky because YAML showed up years before. My only rationale is that YAML was so ambitious. We tried to make it look like everything. And we got really lucky with JSON. Anyway it's all history at this point...

So what are the differences then? In a nutshell JSON handles all the common cases for turning data into text and back into data. YAML handles all the cases so it can be a serious data serialization language. This makes JSON almost trivial to implement, and YAML almost impossible. So even though YAML was first, JSON caught on like wildfire. Since JSON is a subset, it really doesn't have anything YAML doesn't. Except a cool logo. YAML has no logo!

Here's a list of what YAML does have:

YAML has two ways to show collections (hashes and arrays): (Python-like) indentation and (JSON-like) braces.
YAML has many scalar quoting styles. Unquoted, double quoted, single quoted, literal block, and flow block. JSON uses double quotes for all strings.
YAML has data typing. It uses a taguri based system for explicit typing, and also supports implicit typing. JSON supports only String, Number and Boolean scalar types.
YAML supports multiple references to identical nodes, including circular references. JSON does not.
In YAML, a hash (mapping) key can be any node (including another hash, array or aliased node reference). In JSON a key is always a String. It should be noted that YAML goes beyond the capabilities of most programming languages in this regard. Only Ruby has full object key support, afaik.
YAML allows a "stream" to consist of multiple "documents", or top-level nodes. These can be any node of course. In JSON you can only have one top level object, and it must be a hash or an array (not just a scalar).

That's about it, but that's a ton. Especially in the details.

I think all of these things make YAML a great serialization format, and avoiding all these things make JSON a great data exchange format.

Back in the USSA

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Tue, 15 May 2007 00:28:00 +0000

What a week! Been so busy, ain't even had time to blog it...

So my flight home was fine, even though I was worried sick when I got on that 747 pointed East. The doctor told me I shouldn't fly for a month, so of course I'm sure my guts are gonna go splaying when we hit 10,000 feet. I take a Xanax to cool out, and I was totally fine. No rib pain nothing. The flight attendants seemed extra nice to me because I was "injury boy".

I think I was the only one who didn't sleep on the flight which was my plan actually. The plane landed at 7pm, so why sleep and make it impossible to sleep later. Then again I have Ambien so why am I worried in the first place?

I got home and called a few friends to meet me for a few drinks before bedcrashtime. I called my best friend Larry, but ended up not-drunk-but-just-as-incoherently-dialing Larry Wall instead. It was bizarre. "Hey you're not Larry"... "Yeah this is Larry"... "Look, stop playing games, put Larry on"... "This *is* Larry"... "Whatever! Whoever you are, tell Larry Ingy called"... *click* ZOMG. Embarrassing. I just happened to have Larry Wall's number in my phone. Never called him before. Get some drinks with Larry and Helen and Meghan and Terra and hit the hay. *HARD*

Next day I get up and drive to Vancouver BC for the Socialtext Great Couver Hackathon. Good to meet my coworkers face2face. Lots of new faces 2 face... Next day head back to Seattle. Meghan's 3 day birthday procession requires my presence. *EPIC*

I somehow survive this girl's 28th trip around the sun party. Sick people are supposed to rest. Then again all people only live once.

Lot's of other stuff going on. Beach Club 2007 officially started today. Helen and I are considering moving to a new place this summer. Watched 5 straight episodes of 6 Feet Under. See my American Hand Doctor in 2 days. Turns out he is a customer of Larry's bike shop! Crazy small world. Oh yeah, Larry totally customized my exoskeleton with some skillful use of his bike shop's die grinder.

Also I start writing YAML::LibYAML this week. This will be a great tool for Perl people. I'll write more on that tomorrow. Great to be back!!!!!!

三 Grand

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Tue, 08 May 2007 13:16:00 +0000

I swear I'm getting clobbered by javascript errors, I think due to this airport's wifi eXtravaganza. So I best keep this short...

As you guessed I'm at the plane place with Gugod ready to get out of here. Taiwan must not want me to go cuz they charged me 3000 taiwanese pesos to ship my bike. I'm 3 grand poorer, taiwanesewise...

And then they asked me if my arm was OK... "Great" I say. No need telling em about my ribs. OK looks like I'm gonna make it, got my ticket. Got a bowl of beef noodles in me. And a cup of joe. And my electric pocket sudoku game. And javascript is creeping up on me so see ya soon Seattle. Tuesday@Liberty@9pm all'y'all, iykwim, aittyd!

The Last Supper

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Mon, 07 May 2007 12:57:00 +0000

Tomorrow I head back to Seattle, so today was my last day to do some things. Gugod and I went to the hospital to renew some prescription meds to last me for another week. After that I'll be seeing a Seattle doctor and hopefully won't need meds anyway. Then I did a little last minute shopping.

Tonight was extra special because Gugod's Mom came over and made a giant dinner of some amazingly good food, including Hakka Kong Rou! Gugod invited roughly a dozen friends and we all had a great time together eating and joking.

I'll certainly miss Taiwan, but I'm very ready to be in Seattle. See you tomorrow Seatown...

Sunday Hanging from OP

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Sun, 06 May 2007 11:04:00 +0000

Today I finally ate Teppanyaki again. Gugod and I went to our usual place. I guess it's called 肥仔龍, which means "Fat Dragon". It was crowded as usual. The crowd sitting on the outside of a huge horseshoe shaped grill with two chefs in the middle cooking their butts off. I got the beef and seafood set meal. Basically food keeps getting dumped on your plate, and eventually you are full. Love it.

Today I bought a half dozen really fun Taiwan scooter helmets. Cost maybe $35usd. Gonna buy few more and make an art exhibit at Liberty Bar sometime soon.

Now I'm hanging at Gugod's OPCafé. With my bad arm even!

Mostly this evening I'll be working on YAML2. I have to admit I'm over my head on this project so far. Despite being the creator of Perl's Inline.pm, I really don't know C or XS. Not anymore at least. I'm in total nööb möde. Hopefully I will upload the first version of YAML2 to CPAN tonight.

YAML 2.ö

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Sat, 05 May 2007 11:04:00 +0000

Today I am starting to implement YAML2.pm, which is a replacement for my Perl module YAML.pm. YAML.pm has been around has been around since 2001. It is one of the oldest YAML implementations and one of the worst. My fault.

Last summer I agreed with The Perl Foundation to produce a replacement by porting Kirill Siminov's Python/C YAML work to Perl. YAML2 is my latest go around at this work. It will start by creating a wrapper for Kirill's libyaml.

It will become available on CPAN a YAML2, and will be backwards compatible with YAML.pm. When it is stable I will make YAML.pm be the same code, and phase out YAML2.

For you non-programmers YAML is a computer language for expressing computer data in a human readable/friendly manner. I started the YAML project in 2001 with Clark Evans and Oren Ben-Kiki. Now it has become a pretty big deal in the computer world.

...

In other news, my Taiwan trip is winding down and I'm getting ready to return to Seattle on Tuesday. Given that my guts don't explode on the 747 I have a pretty busy week on my return. My company's programmers are meeting en masse this week in Vancouver BC, and I'd like to join them for at least some of the fun. Also it's Miss Meghan Tesh's ?? birthday and from what I know so far, a Tesh birthday is a MAJOR event.

Only problem is I run out of all drugs on about Tuesday. I hope Gugod will be a good sport and take me by the hospital for a refill before I go.

Speaking of Gugod, I got to meet his wonderful parents last night. They stopped by to check out how ole Ingus was doing. Evidently they want to cook me dinner on Monday. Yum!

Jammin' with Jessie

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Thu, 03 May 2007 10:14:00 +0000

Yesteray at mo!relax I met a girl named Jessie. She was sitting on the couch next to me practicing her electric. I had to ask her to borrow the thing. I've been wondering if, since bike and motorcycle riding are straight out, can I still play my guitar when I get home.

Sadly no. It hurts like hell. Especially bar chords. My wrist doesn't bend at the moment.

Anyway I ended up having good conversations with Jessie. She's in university and a rebellious post rocker. She's been to Philly and speaks English way better than she thinks she does. Her band covers Radiohead, and Paul Gilbert is her guitar hero. She drew this sketch of ole Ingus:

Hmm. Kind of a cross between Mad Max and Damian Conway. Genius!

On a separate note I ran across this picture on the intarweb:

Man, that's what I'm talking about. I knew there had to be a less bulky way to do this exoskel stuff...

The High Speed Way To Get Mo!Relaxed

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Thu, 03 May 2007 06:10:00 +0000

No doctors to see today. No cops or insurance people. Just a day in Taiwan to spend how I like. Lately here's what I like:

Get a good night sleep and wake up by noon. That's what I did first today. I can actually sleep pretty well. The pain level, given the right drugs is now bearable. My arm always hurts but I can kinda ignore it most of the time. The funny thing is that the metal framework part is not what hurts at all. It's mostly the support system. The shoulder, elbow and inner forearm. Ouch. @#$%!

After I woke up I jumped in the shower. Everything takes a little longer these days, and I needed to get dressed and packed by 12:30 to get a taxi to the train station. I said my morning pleasantries to Gugod and hit the road.

So about this train. It's totally new and all the rave, and it just rocks harder than, say, Pat Benetar. Destination 台北 (Taipei). In the old days (last year) this meant a 2.5 hour bus ride from 新竹(Hsinchu) but this is a HIGH SPEED RAIL. 35 minutes of total comfort for under $10USD. The 台北 station is also a MRT station, so I switch trains, 10 minutes and 4 stations later I'm at the neighborhood of my favorite 台北 cafe, mo!relax.

It's now 1:55. The cafe is just opening and my new friend and owner of the joint, 詩琪 (Shi Qi) is there to greet me. She even takes the time to make me my first Americano in almost a week. Today is gonna be a good one!

Yeah, My Left Arm Has a Hemi

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Wed, 02 May 2007 10:44:00 +0000

OK so basically I have a major contraption bolted on to my arm. 4 stainless steel pins, two screwed into my hand, 2 in my forearm. Each pin pair has an aluminum block lashed to them, and each block has a 3-4 inch aluminum bar fixed to it. These form two fixed components that are held in some exact position from each other with 2 footlong aluminum bars. Kinda barbaric but kinda elegant in that it gets the job done. (The "job" is to position my hand away from my broken ulna tip until it heals.)

However! I am kind of a mechanical guy and I am quickly finding faults in this setup, and also dreaming up solutions.

Last night I went to my favorite bike shop in 新竹 and asked the owner if he would hack off the extra bar ends with a saw or die grinder. He politely declined. I think he saw the wisdom in my thinking, but sided with the wiser avoidance of a law suit.

However, once I get back to Seattle, I will be trying this tactic again, with my good friend and bike shop owner, Larry. I just need the tools and I could probably do this myself...

See, the aluminum bars are just a little too long and get in the way of various things like riding a scooter around 新竹. I know, I know... But that's what I did yesterday. Had to get over the fear. But boy did it hurt. I could feel every bump in a whole new way.

Then later today I had an idea of how to remove the bars altogether. Just fuse a single, low profile carbon fiber pipe between the aluminum blocks. Just need to find the right guy for such an endeavor.

I actually spent the morning at the hospital talking to my rib doc and my wrist doc. The rib doc gave me the OK to fly home next week. And the wrist doc gave me the OK to chop the bars. But then his colleague said No. But then Ingy said Hell Yes. The docs gave me some new exciting drugs to try in my copious spare time. The funniest part is they actually burned me a CD of all my Xrays. I'll post one or two pics here tomorrow.

In computer/work news I am currently dealing with the need to render any text as an image. Trivial if you have the fonts. Turns out there is no Open Source font that covers all of unicode! What planet is this?? Well ole Ingus has tricks up his aluminum sleeve, but if someone out there can find me such a font, give me a call. Collect!

Out of The Saddle

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Tue, 01 May 2007 05:24:00 +0000

I've always considered accidents to be the exception. If there's something I want to do, that carries a slight chance of going really wrong, I'm gonna go for it. So today when Gugod said he was going for a two hour bicycle ride to the ocean, I told him to wait up a sec while I got ready to join him.

I knew if I fell it could be really bad. But I also knew that part of the (well my anyway) healing process is to get back in the saddle as soon as feasible. So today was my day.

And then it wasn't. I ended up riding about a half mile. I realized that I couldn't grip the handlebar with my left hand and that I couldn't squeeze the left brake lever enough to even slow down. So I aborted the mission.

This experience made me realize that when I get back to Seattle I might not be able to ride my motorcycle either. If I can't do the clutch, it's right out. I think I need to start doing some squeezing exercises.

In other news, I slept 10 hours last night, with just a couple painful interludes. The Ambien probably helped but it definitely wasn't trippy for me. I think the real reason I was able to sleep so long is that I can now sleep on my left side, my right side and my back. Before I couldn't really do any side. So I'm getting little better. Yay!

My Morning Drug Run

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:18:00 +0000

I slept last night. Fantastic. But I wasn't taking any chances. I was already exhausted and purposefully decaffed when I popped 3 Xanax pills and the two Nyquil pills for good measure. I also found a new slightly upright position to sleep in.

So I got to bed around midnight and up around 9. In pain, but happy. I asked Gugod if he could take me to the 新竹General Hospital. It was Monday and the docs were supposed to be in. I needed to talk to a doc about getting a new drug regimen.

When we got there the place was jam packed full of people, but I must say the Taiwanese are efficient people. I got to see a doc in < 30 minutes. This guy was really cool. He spoke good English (rare in that place) and worked with me to get a good set of pills into my possesion.

I got more Xanax plus Ambien, Voltaren and Alprazolam. Pain killers, muscle relaxants and sleepers. I didn't specifically ask for these but I'm very happy with the outcome. I'm especially looking forward to taking the Ambien which my ex, Eileen Chaos, used to go on and on about. She said they made her trip visuals and have very strange thoughts before knocking her out. Can't wait...

Staying off the coffee until I get this thing under control.

In the computer world, I'm starting to think about ramping up the Wikiwyg project. Wysiwyg editing for Wikis. I'm writing this post in the Blogger wysiwyg editor, and it's rather nice. But I can do better!

No Rest For The Caffeinated orz

noreply@blogger.com (ingydotnet) — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 13:23:00 +0000

I took 1.5mg of Xanax last night but nada. Well I guess I felt kind of out of it. But I must have been pretty much into too, cuz I never fell asleep. Know what I mean?

Today I actually fell asleep on the couch of the XD Studio Cafe. For some reason couches are more easy on my ribs than my bed.

Anyway the basic plan is no coffee today and try the Xanax again tonight. This happens in about two hours. Wish me luck...