Hello, Planet! (Thanks to lamby for adding me to Planet Debian.) If you don't know me... I'm not surprised. I do some occasional pkg-perl work, but I've really been slacking (and changing jobs, and moving halfway across the UK). Last week I fixed one RC bug, in libgnupg-interface-perl. Better than none, I suppose. It turned out to be quite interesting; the tests failed when the package was built on the buildds, but not locally. Other people had done the hard work, and figured out that this was happening when there was no tty; I just had to debug why the particular perl variable was getting unset. ...

Part one of an occasional series about SmoothWall Express (SWE). The SmoothWall Express source tree contains two NTP daemons - both ntpd and OpenNTPD. SWE uses the openntpd daemon, but installs the ntpdate and ntpq utilities from the ntpd package. This is justified because openntpd is apparently more lightweight than ntpd. But note that ntpq does not work with openntpd. On my machine, the saving in memory is not massive. As observed in the thread, openntpd needs to run two processes (with one running as root), while ntpd can use Linux capabilities. From a cursory look at the Debian bug tracker, ntp has more bugs, but they don't seem as important as openntpd's. I suspect ntp gets more testing. The latest portable release of openntpd was in May 2006. ...

I spent the weekend in Rugby, not doing very much. I had this morning off work to travel back to Southampton, and it was surprisingly busy. This afternoon I put the transaction scope guards I'd researched on Saturday into my project at work, and then refactored bits of it. According to the project plan I'm meant to be finished soon, but I keep finding more important things to do than implement the final SQL functions. ...

While depositing a cheque using the machine at my local Nationwide branch yesterday, a remarkable thing occurred; the machine looked at the cheque and told me how much it was for.

I've been writing some Perl DBI code which involves some fairly involved error handling; I've been looking for a way to roll back transactions neatly when certain errors happen. I very nearly reinvented the concept of a 'transaction scope guard' which I now find is implemented in DBIx::Class (with Scope::Guard implementing a more general version). A lexical variable can be used to detect in which cases a transaction should be ended, because the object it points to will get DESTROYed when it goes out of scope. Some rough code to illustrate the concept is below. ...

I just signed up to a petition about postcodes. The context is that Royal Mail asked someone to stop giving not-for-profit websites access to postcode data. From a database copyright perspective, Royal Mail is within its rights to do this; but it seems wrong that socially useful non-commercial sites are unable to make use of postcodes without paying a high license fee. Compare this to the US, where this data is freely available. ...

At work, I have been refactoring old Perl code. Part of me feels that this was tangential to the main aims of the project I've been assigned, but another part of me can list all the bugs I've found/fixed and the advantages in terms of maintainability, so on balance I think it was a good idea. Something I like even more than tidying code is reducing the amount of code required. (I've been doing a lot of that as well.) Breaking code into reusable modules is the essence of what I'm trying to achieve - later projects within the company (and perhaps beyond) should not have to reinvent what I'm writing. I'm attempting to replace boilerplate code with existing modules from CPAN where I can - I'm fortunate in that this seems to be possible licensing-wise within our product. ...

I am no longer going to tag my blog posts with Planet {WUGLUG,UWCS}. As I don't even lurk in the IRC channels any more (or read the mailing lists), and as of recently don't even live near enough to campus to visit, I think it's time to stop imposing my ramblings on the respective groups. :) You can still read my blog directly, or on Facebook, if you are so inclined.

I spent the last day and a half writing a vaguely interesting Perl module for testing some code which gives a subtly different answer each time (i.e. incorporates data from time() and /dev/urandom) and has side effects (i.e. writes to the file system). By overriding Perl's built-in 'open' function, it is possible to prefix each filename with the location of a temporary directory, effectively emulating chroot(). I also replaced Perl's time() with one that always returned the same answer. This meant that the login code I was testing would return a reliable result. ...

I have changed jobs, and now live in Southampton, working for SmoothWall. This week I have got married on Facebook, and went out to an "alternative" club until 1am on a weeknight. (Normally it plays heavy metal, but Wednesday night is cheese night.)