everything e-diotic

My favorite filters in Jira today showed me that Everything is 666

I wonder what this means… should I stop working or should I work more?

I got this weird mail in RT queue for Games::Bingo.

First I thought it was spam, but then I read it and it struck me. Could somebody be reading these mails using RT as a proxy?

You locate some newsletter you want to receive, you provide it with the email address of a RT queue, which is public available, like all of the CPAN queues.

You sit back and wait and at some point the mail arrives and you can read it, without anybody tracing your email. Of course you there is the problem of providing the RT queue email to the subscription/sender, but I guess there are ways around that like using kiosk machines etc.

Or perhaps it is just spam? and I am being paranoid

I was filling in a form on a website yesterday and when I picked Denmark as my country I was presented with a list of cities/regions in Denmark.

The one I have marked ‘Staden Kobenhavn’ is a bit funny in that sense that, staden is what we normally call Freetown Christiania… how would have imagined it had it’s own pick in a drop-down.

I tried to spark some debate in relation to my blog post on Perl::Critic and Subversion.

Only a few people responded, but at least it was some very good responses. Clearly one of these two-camps discussions, but the positive thing is that both camps have valid arguments and this is good since then people evaluating the practice if using Perl::Critic in pre-commit hooks can weigh these against each other and try to map them on to their local organization and practices.

As Jefffrey Thalhammer formulates it:

Teams should use Perl-Critic in whatever manner best suits their collective values, abilities, and priorities.

Pros:

- Strict control of code base
- Enforcing of coding guidelines for common code base

Cons:

- Latency in productivity
- Redtape over productivity

Both camps can however agree on several aspects are good practices, such as:

- Use of version control
- Unit-testing
- Continuous integration (CI)

And of course that static analysis is a good thing, when used properly.

This does not seem as many arguments, but many of the arguments in this debate are more or less related to the general use of static code analysis and do therefor not weigh in as arguments for or against the configuration of a pre-commit hook.

Ovid gave some marvelous input and then disregarded the whole debate as silly, saying that the pre-commit hook should assist the developer in making the right judgment, so he or she could choose to or not to commit.

From Ovids comment I do however deduct a very interesting aspect of programming and that is that programming is a very subjective activity and different developers would probably be able to implement the same functionality in very different ways, rendering different results when subjected to static code analysis.

I have passed on Ovid’s very pragmatic approach to Alexander, who’s CPAN contribution sparked the whole thing. And one of the more important things we can all agree on and that is the tools must be flexible enough to accommodate all camps. Perl::Critic is such a tool, so a pre-commit hook should be implemented in the same spirit.

The whole discussion seems to be leaning on the discussion on what quality really is, since this definition does seem to make the foundation for use of static analysis. This is again a very subjective discussion, which probably have even more camps, so we better not start a flame war about that.

All in all we can agree not to agree, so in regards to Jeffrey’s quote above I think we can conclude that the tools are there, put them to good use in the way, which makes the most sense in your situation.

Please feel free to chip in if you have an opinion on static analysis used in pre-commit hooks for SCMs.

Alexander Simakov has created a general script for use as a pre-commit hook in Subversion integration Perl::Critic, he describes it in his blog.

Elliot have previously discouraged this in his blog, so this of course got mentioned on twitter.

Going over the documentation of: perlcritic-checker.pl in relation to Elliot’s point of view, the following stood out.

# Emergency commits: {0|1}. There are situations when you *do* need
# to commit changes bypassing all checks (e.g. emergency bug fixes).
# This featue allows you bypass Perl::Critic using “magic” prefix in
# comment message, e.g.: svn ci -m “NO CRITIC: I am in hurry” FooBar.pm
allow_emergency_commits => 1,

# Magic prefix described above can be customized:
emergency_comment_prefix => ‘NO CRITIC’,

So Alexander actually supports commits which does not necessarily live up to the local standards implemented and configured in Perl::Critic.

Whether polluting your code base for an emergency fix is a good idea, is another discussion and taking Elliot’s example:

## no critic (RegularExpressions::ProhibitEscapedMetacharacters)

Would or at least should do just as fine, I think, without having tried it out.

I treat most of my no critic statements as #TODO points, points to be revisited later. Perl::Critic to me is lot about controlling technical debt, so hooking this mechanism into Subversion is in my opinion a good idea.

Alexanders script does even support different configurations, so you could let your pre-commit policy hook be a check for the most basic things, so your code base does not get too deep in technical debt and emergency fixes become day to day business, Perl::Critic was implemented to avoid that (see also my little Perl::Critic success story)

After all Subversion and Perl::Critic are just tools to help and assist us and our colleagues as developers.

I was reading an article on the Guardian about the dark side of the Internet. When my eyes fell on the ads on the page, one stood out:

The top banner said (translated using Google Translate):

“Congratulations!
You are our 99999 visitor!
You are at. 20:37:19 been selected as a possible winner of a new: iMac, iPhone 3G or IPAD.
If selected, click here: www.fritvalg.com”

Behind the link you have:

http://ad.adserverplus.com/

click2,CY80AGfQDACUlUcAAAAAALowEwAAAAAAAgAAAAYAAAAAAP
8AAAADFWymFQAAAAAAcTgaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACknAYAA
AAAAAIAAgAAAAAA1B-
oiCgBAAAAAAAAADM5ZjgxNGFlLTVkMmMtMTFkZi1hMmY4LTAwMjQ4
MTI2YjQzNQCZOzEAAAA=,,http%3A%2F%2Foptimized-
by.rubiconproject.com%2Fa%2F7845%2F12580%2F22638-2.html
%3F,http://
www.planet49.dk/cgi-bin/wingame.pl?
partner_pk=6&wingame_pk=41&sub_id=100326

Check the cgi-bin path: wingame.pl

Hmmmm… Perl can be used for many things…

I have lately turned my interest towards C and Objective-C, looking into iPhone application development.

So I my continued quest to get my tools box for this defined I am monitoring some interesting mailing lists to pick up stuff as it appears.

The other day somebody write to the official Apple Xcode list inquiring about using gcov and generating HTML data. My brain started spinning, I felt like I had read something about this on CPAN.

After a quick search on search.cpan.org I located: gcov2perl a part of the Devel::Cover distribution.

I have been a long time fan of Devel::Cover, having worked as a Perl programmer for many years, so I was happy to see that this particular tool might scratch this itch.

So I threw together your normal example helloworld.c

Code block

#include<stdio.h>
main()
{
    printf("Hello World\n");
}

I skimmed a tutorial on gcov to see how it would normally work.

Compile with options of using gcov:

% gcc -fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage helloworld.c

Run the executable produced:

% ./a.out

Turned to gcov2perl and followed the manual here (changed it to reflect my own example):

Creates a single gcov file in our case:

% gcov helloworld.c

Transform data to Devel::Cover’s format:

% gcov2perl helloworld.c.gcov

Create the report:

% cover

Open the report in your browser:

% open cover_db/coverage.html

And by clicking the filename you get this report:

The helloworld.c example is very simple, but it proves a point – that it actually works.

I am only scratching the surface of what can be done and I have not fallen into any pitfalls – everything worked fine and looks good, but I am sure it can become more difficult.

Have fun covering your C code and presenting in using a very nice Perl tool.

jerakeen
  
Snow Leopard terminal tabs titles can be set with xttitle. SOLD.

carlmasak
  
“OS X 10.5 includes a command line audio player (in /usr/bin) called afplay.” Ooh, I didn’t know that! Neat. http://bit.ly/dsvrso

Cleaning up my reading list I feel over an article on BoingBoing on a service being asked to cease and desist http://boingboing.net/2009/10/06/royal-mail-uses-lega.html.

I am very interested in post codes so I had it bookmarked for some time, since I wanted to read it at some point.

Then on twitter I see that a fellow programmer has developed a service to lookup you post code in the UK based on location data. http://whatismypostcode.appspot.com/

I immediately wrote him with a link to the article, without reading his service disclaimer.

Apparently the data has been opened to the public, please see: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/

So now I know what I want for Christmas, or perhaps even sooner – I want a similar initiative in Denmark.

Please…

Handy tip from TUAW for us who still have the memory limited versions of the iPhone

iPhone 101: Save space on your iPhone without removing a thing