Rock'n'Roll Programming: 2010

Monday, October 18, 2010

Macbook Pro Late 2008 MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-868 not burning

My Macbook Pro late 2008 was reading both CD's and DVD's fine but burning DVD's just didn't work.

I tried:
TDK DVD-R
Verbatim DVD+R
Hewlett-Packard DVD+R

I tried resetting the pram and smc as suggested on the Apple support forums. Didn't help.

Then I read about using a CD-cleaner.

I bought one at the local electronics shop here in Stockholm, Kjell & Company. Now DVD-burning works fine!

CD linsrengöring

(The instructions didn't recommend to use it in a slot loaded DVD but it worked fine.)

Thursday, October 14, 2010

GTD in Gmail and Google Calendar

Gmail and Google Calendar has a great task feature that you can use to setup a GTD system.

Basic setup
Start with creating the basic set of task lists (they all start with ! just to keep them at the top of my task lists):

!Inbox
!Next
!Waiting for
!Someday
!Scheduled

Enter all your stuff to the !Inbox list.

Emails are easily entered by selecting "Add to Tasks" from the "More actions" menu.

If you select a task and then click the little arrow on the right you can:

move the task to another list.
set a due date
add a comment

(You can create hierarchies of tasks by just tabbing them.)

There is no real tagging available (to use for context presumably) but you could either use the comments for that, or do as I and create two default tasks on the !Inbox list, @home and @work, and then just order the tasks under them.

Scheduling
The simplest way to do this is of course just to add the calendar events as needed and remove the tasks from the !Inbox.

But since I like to keep track of everything in lists I added the !Scheduled list. I move tasks from the !Inbox here and set a due date for them. Then I open up the Google Calendar and select tasks and then the !Scheduled lists and boom (as Steve would say) the scheduled tasks are visible in the calendar. They can be marked as completed as well as rescheduled. (The one downside is that a specific time can not be scheduled for the task in this system, you have to create a specific calendar event for that.)

Conclusion
There are of course lots of ways to set this up. And different plugins available. But since I am new to GTD I wanted the simplest setup possible to get me started. We'll see how it goes...

You're welcome to add comments with questions or thoughts or ideas to improve the above setup.

!Next list in Gmail

!Scheduled list in Gmail

!Scheduled list in Google Calendar

Monday, October 11, 2010

GTD

GTD basics at FlippingHeck

Google Tasks

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

LG 37LD420 USB HACK

How to get divx/xvid playback on your LG TV (bought in Sweden).
1. Buy a cheap but great LG 37LD420 on komplett.se for 3995SEK.
2. Borrow a Nokia E51 from a friend.
3. Install irRemote from Psiloc.
4. Add device TV->LG and then refresh.
5. Search for IN-START and then refresh.
6. Select mon.
7. Select the downloaded profile.
8. Press 2 on the phone and have it close to the tv.
9. Password menu pops up. Enter 0413 on tv remote.
10. Select tools option 3 using tv remote.
11. Set Divx to 1 using tv remote.
12. Press exit on the tv remote.
13. Enjoy!

For a more detailed guide check out LG TV USB IR-Hack.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Apache modules

Modules are either compiled in (static) or dynamically loaded (shared).

List static with httpd -l

List all with httpd -t -D DUMP_MODULES

Shared modules are stored in /etc/httpd/modules/

Shared modules are either loaded directly in httpd.conf or by looking in conf.d/*.conf

E.g. conf.d/perl.conf

...

LoadModule perl_module modules/mod_perl.so

...

Here are some paths that are good to know (Apache on CentOS):

Executables /usr/sbin

Config /etc/httpd

Logs /etc/httpd/log

Web Root /var/www/html

Thursday, March 25, 2010

CSS resources

SohTanaka

Kuler by Adobe

Kuler is an excellent app from Adobe for color exploration.

Try Create->From an Image...

Saturation is a free iPhone app for exploring existing themes.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

HTML::FormFu select

When using a FormFu select for a simple relation it is easy to display other item names than the default:

The element looks like:

{

label => 'collection',
type => 'Select',
name => 'collection_id',
options => [ map { [ $_->id, $_->collection . ' - ' . $_->product->product ] }
$c->model('PB::Collections')->search( {}, {order_by => 'product.product, collection', prefetch => 'product'} )->all() ],
constraints => [ 'Required' ],
},

But when using a many to many relation in the listbox it becomes trickier, you have to add an accessor to the result class:

The element looks like:

{

label => 'items',
type => 'Select',
name => 'items',
db => {
model => 'PB::Items',
label_column => 'description',
m_to_m_column => 'item_id',
attributes => { prefetch => [ {book => 'title' }, {book => 'collection' }, {book => 'format' } ] , order_by => 'title.title, collection.collection, format.format ' },

},
multiple => 1,
size => 20,
},

And the following sub has to be added to the items resultset:
sub description {
$_[0]->book->title->title . ' - ' . $_[0]->book->collection->collection . ' - ' . $_[0]->book->format->format . ' - ' . $_[0]->isbn;
}

Thanks to Wolfgang for explaining this.

DBIx:Class debugging

If you use DBIx::Class and you want to see what the SQL generated looks

like, you can set the environment variable DBIC_TRACE.

% DBIC_TRACE=1 my_programme.pl

And all the SQL will be printed on STDERR.

If you give a filename to the variable, like this

DBIC_TRACE="1=/tmp/sql.debug"

all the statements will be printed in this file.

I got this info from i'm a lumberjaph which is a great blog about web programming in general and also have quite a few posts about perl and catalyst.

HTML::FormFu resources

HTML::FormFu (CPAN)

HTML-FormFu

html-formfu (listserv)

Integrate HTML::FormFu with DBIx::Class :

DBIx::Class::HTML::FormFu (CPAN, depracated, the one we are using)

Catalyst::Controller::HTML::FormFu (CPAN)

HTML::FormFu::Model::DBIC (CPAN)

COALESCE

Since I've got back to SQL recently it's nice to learn new tricks. COALESCE is great for defaulting to a value after for example a left join.

SQL

SELECT bindings.*, COALESCE( ft.binding, bindings.binding ) AS sortable_binding
   FROM bindings
   LEFT OUTER JOIN ( SELECT binding, binding_id FROM bindings_translated WHERE language = ? ) AS ft ON ( ft.binding_id = bindings.id )

DBIx:Class

        $c->stash->{collections} = [ $product->collections( 
 { 
  language   => $c->stash->{language} 
 },
 { 
 '+select'   => \'COALESCE(translations.collection, me.collection) AS  translated_collection',
 join        => [ 'translations' ],
 order_by    => [ 'translated_collection' ],
 }
        )->all() ];