Dave's Free Press

Technology

 

Older stuff

  • Tech talks and presentations - the event and date given is the first time the talk was delivered:
    • Unit Testing: you're not doing it and you should - delivered at the 2012 London Perl Workshop: slides
    • Closures for Fun and Profit - delivered at the 2008 London Perl Workshop: slides
    • How to be a CPAN tester - delivered at the 2007 London Perl Workshop: slides
    • CPANdeps - lightning talk delivered at the 2007 London Perl Workshop: slides
    • Devel::AssertOS - lightning talk delivered at the 2007 London Perl Workshop: slides
    • news2mail - delivered at YAPC::Europe 2007: HTML | PDF | slides
    • rsnapshot - delivered at YAPC::Europe 2006: HTML | PDF | slides
  • Phone numbers
  • ionice for Mac OS ...
  • Perl, the language of choice ... Proud to be a citizen of the Programming Republic of Perl
    • As a service to authors who want to check out the quality of modules they might want to use, along with all the other modules that those might in turn depend on, I wrote and for several years ran cpandeps, which will show you all of a module's dependencies and their test results. I have now handed over maintenance to someone else;
    • For people who for whatever reason have to use an old version of perl, I wrote and for several years ran the "CPxxxAN", numerous CPAN "mirrors" that only contain distributions known to work with particular versions of perl, so if an author's latest release uses features missing in your version of perl, the mirror will still serve up something that should work for you. I handed over maintenance to someone else, but he has unfortunately not done anything with it and the service no longer exists. If you are interested then the code is available on Github;
    • For a while I maintained Nathan Rosenquist's rsnapshot filesystem snapshot utility, and previously wrote the rsnapshot-diff utility which is now bundled with it;
    • I have a set of tools for gatewaying email and Usenet without requiring INN. The first fruits of this are here.
    • My perl modules are too numerous to list here so have a seperate page. They can also all be found on the CPAN, and also on Github.
    • perl-dep, a script for finding dependencies in perl code, now at version 2 thanks to Walery Studennikov.
    • I have patched infobot 0.45 to allow 'karma comments'. This needs documentation.
    • I have also contributed patches to peoples' work
      • Added support for "infecting" child processes to Adriano Ferreira's Devel::Hide
      • Submitted a patch for PostScript::Simple to support drawing dashed lines instead of just solid lines.
      • Added trustme and support for tieing to Richard Clamp's Pod::Coverage module. The tie support simply makes it ignore all the special methods of tieing classes.
      • Added the addr2cidr and addrandmask2cidr functions to Net::CIDR.
      • Backtick interpolation in Rick Booth's sigmonster.

Retro stuff

  • Palm stuff Palm
    • Got a Treo 680 and want to look at your phone call records or SMS messages? In particular do you want to see how long your calls were or extract your SMSes to plain text files? It seems that these incredibly complicated tricks are beyond the wit of Palm, but I can do it.
    • Download Marcus Aurelius's Meditations in Palm Doc format.
    • Download Tacitus's Germania and Agricola in Palm Doc format.
    • Download Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico and De Bello Civili (Gallic Wars and Civil Wars) in Palm Doc format, either as one big file or as seperate files. (also on Memoware).
    • I encoded the above using Paul Lucas's txt2pdbdoc (which I have mirrored here in case anything Bad and Wrong happens to his site.
    • I have also released a perl module and script that not only encodes text (like txt2pdbdoc does) but also re-formats the document so that it looks better on a small screen.
    • I have contributed to the free public transport route planner Métro, including data for the Napoli Metropolitana, some London trains, and updates for London's Night Bus network.
  • Linux on the Libretto and the Asus Eee Libretto 50ct
    • I used to be a Librettist. Getting a useful OS onto a Toshiba Libretto can be a right swine because they have no built-in removable media drives, only one PCMCIA slot, and the PCMCIA CD isn't recognised. Here's how I got Linux onto my Libretto 50CT.
    • Asus's version of Linux is shite. Here are some instructions for installing Ubuntu, which sucks a little bit less.
  • 8-bit goodness ...