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Author Archive for bigpresh

Facebook – become a fan

Published by
bigpresh
at February 27, 2010 in Uncategorized and humour. 4 Comments

via theweaselking

Several Perl scripts released to Github

Published by
bigpresh
at February 26, 2010 in Uncategorized, perl and programming. 1 Comment

I’ve been playing with Github lately, and rather liking it.

I did briefly try it about a year ago, and was impressed, but wasn’t driven enough to consider moving away from Subversion.

I tried it out more when I started contributing to the Dancer Perl framework, and got to like it; since then, I’ve moved several of my modules over to Github already.

I finally got round to moving some miscellanous Perl scripts too, ones which I’ve been meaning to release as open-source in case they’re of use to anyone, but didn’t get round to doing.

They’re now online at: http://github.com/bigpresh/misc-scripts.

Github made sharing my code easy – Github++;

Now, that’s enough geekery for one evening.

Dancer 1.150 released – a flexible, lightweight web framework for Perl

Published by
bigpresh
at February 17, 2010 in Uncategorized, perl and programming. 3 Comments

Version 1.150 of the Dancer web framework has just been released, so this seemed like a good time to write up this post.

Recently, I’ve been wanting to find a Perl web framework that I really got on with. I’ve used Catalyst, which is very powerful and popular, but it’s quite heavy (a lot of dependencies, and reasonably high memory usage and startup time), and I felt as though it forced me to code “the Catalyst way”, rather than staying out of my way and getting on with writing my code.

I took a look around at the current Perl web frameworks (e.g. CGI-Application, Jifty, Catalyst, Mojo…) – all good in their own ways, but for various reasons, none of them really struck me as something I’d be particularly happy to work with.

I did briefly consider trying to write my own, but that’s a wheel I do not want to re-invent – there’s enough odd-shaped wheels out there already.

When I found Dancer (a port of Ruby’s Sinatra framework), I immediately liked the fact it looked simple and stays out of the way as much as possible, so I gave it a try – and, I must say, I’m impressed.
Continue reading ‘Dancer 1.150 released – a flexible, lightweight web framework for Perl’

Users don’t like new “Facebook login page”…

Published by
bigpresh
at February 11, 2010 in fail, humour and rant. 5 Comments

Seems a lot of clueless users have been trying to get to Facebook by searching for “facebook login” rather than going to Facebook, and landing on a blog post titled Facebook wants to be your one true login from ReadWriteWeb, not understanding that they’re on an entirely different site, and bitching (in depressingly moronic ways) that they don’t like the new Facebook login, or can’t understand how to log in.

The comments on that post (all 7 pages, as of last time I looked) make for depressing reading.

Now, I don’t like to make fun of people just because their computer skills might not be particularly good, but the lack of literacy, reading skills, logic and general comprehension shown in the comments is just… it’s depressing.

Some examples:

WHAT THE HELL IS GOIN ON WITH THIS FACEBOOK.. FIRST YOU WANNA CHARGE NA YOU WANNA NOT LET US LOG IN….. UGH STOP CHANGIN IT I LIKE THE OLD FB…. IF YOU ARE THE NEW OWNER YOU SUCK AND I WISH YOU WOULD CREATE UR OWN SHTY AND LEAVE FB ALONE LOSER………

wtf is this bullshttttttttttt all about. can i get n plzzzzzzzzz

This is such a mess I can’t do a thing on my facebook .The changes you have made are ridiculous,I can’t even login!!!!!I am very upset!!!

i do not like this, please go back to the old one or drop me from facebook.

My daughters&sons show me how 2 use facbook,Iwas confuse then now i’m really confuse just let me log in the old way this way really sucks!!!!!!!!

this is a waste of time, go back to the way it was!!!!!!!!!!!

I like thr old way to sign in this sucks big time let me in

this is not a good thing i just don’t think u have thought this thru. I haven’t made a decision yet but i might give facebook up this is too much trouble

I hate this bring the old facebook back. Cannot login.

HELL,WHERE IS THE FACEBOOK PAGE.DAM!SOON AS YOU LEARN ONE THING HERE WE CHANGING SHIT.

i dont like this new changes i like the way was before and now is a disaster at list live the page the same of before i dont’ care if they change the owner.ok?bye now hope you go back the same of before

Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work…

OK, that’s enough examples of epic fail.

It makes you wonder how some of these people survive in general life, and how they managed to get on the Internet in the first place.

*Yoink* Om nom nom…

Published by
bigpresh
at February 2, 2010 in humour. 3 Comments

(via theweaselking)

Custom Bash completions for lazy bastards

Published by
bigpresh
at January 25, 2010 in linux and shell. 2 Comments

At $work, we have a log server, where the current day’s logs from a given machine are stored in, e.g. /logs/machinename/year/month/day/. In a moment of yak shaving, I added a function to my .profile, named cdmachinelogs to allow me to type e.g. cdmachinelogs somemachine, and end up in the appropriate directory.

Now, Bash will automatically tab-complete e.g. “cdm” into cdmachinelogs, but I wanted to be extra-lazy and tab-complete the machine name, too.

Enter the following snippet:


complete -W "$(find /log/path -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -printf '%f ')" cdmachinelogs

So, it sets up tab-completion for the cdmachinelogs command, using a list of words obtained by finding each directory name under the path to the logs.

Posted mostly for my own later reference, but also for anyone who might find it useful.

Newsflash: America not centre of world

Published by
bigpresh
at January 8, 2010 in rant. 3 Comments

KFC advertisement in Australia sparks race row

The Australian arm of the fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken has had to withdraw an advertisement after accusations of racial insensitivity.

[...]

When the advertisement reached America via the internet there were complaints.
It was accused of reinforcing a derogatory racial stereotype linking black people in the American deep south with a love of fried food.

Picked up by the American media, the advertisement immediately stirred controversy, because it was alleged to have perpetuated the racial stereotype that black people eat a lot of fried chicken.

[...]

It is the second time in three months that something broadcast in Australia has caused a racial stir in America.

Dear America: the world does not revolve around you; please pipe down and shut the fuck up about things that don’t concern you. Kthx.

A little windy… Metcheck fail

Published by
bigpresh
at December 10, 2009 in fail. 1 Comment

Hmm, Metcheck seem to think it’s going to get a little breezy next week:

metcheck-a-bit-windy

Forecasting 305mph winds on Wednesday night? That would be rather far off the wrong end of the Beaufort scale, and I don’t think my fence would take kindly to that :)

Blackberry Bold Christmas wallpapers (480×320)

Published by
bigpresh
at December 3, 2009 in photography. 2 Comments

I recently upgraded from a Blackberrry Curve to a Blackberry Bold 9000, which has a higher screen resolution (480×320), so I decided to re-do the wallpapers I resized & cropped and shared last year, and figured I may as well share the results.

Below are a selection of wallpapers I chose; some my own photos, the others are taken from various places around the web. I believe them to all be in the public domain but unfortunately I’m not certain, as I didn’t think to note where each one was downloaded from.

Each thumbnail links directly to the full-size 480×320 image, so you can just right-click & “Save Target As” or similar.

Enjoy!

OpenDNS vs Google – speed comparison

Published by
bigpresh
at December 3, 2009 in internet, perl, programming, reviews and sysadmin. 5 Comments

I read a Twitter post earlier mentioning Google’s public DNS service, and suggesting that it could displace the popular OpenDNS

I thought it would be interesting to do a performance comparison between Google and OpenDNS, to see how they compare. I also decided to include the nameservers of my ISP, Virgin Media, to illustrate whether there are performance gains to be had by changing to OpenDNS (which I primarily use, along with others) or Google, or whether staying with defaults works. Continue reading ‘OpenDNS vs Google – speed comparison’

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