How many of me?

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 216 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Docile!

From Paul Graham's What You'll Wish You'd Known:

Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.

I got a few yuks out of the quote, and the article.

docs.python.org lays an egg

Want to learn how to install or build a Python "egg" file? Don't bother looking on docs.python.org:

My cat gets around

Amazing--this LOLcat looks just like my Gladys!




... and with a guinea pig no less!

MySQL stored procedure to generate "safe noise"

I'm playing around with stored procedures, and thought I'd try my hand at creating a function used in various capacities at work. Here it is.

USE test;
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS safe_noise;
DELIMITER $$
CREATE FUNCTION safe_noise (n INT UNSIGNED)
   RETURNS VARCHAR(100) NOT DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
   DECLARE x CHAR(100) DEFAULT
      "bcdfghkmnpqrstvwxzBCDFGHKMNPQRSTVWXZ23456789";
   DECLARE y CHAR(100) DEFAULT "";
   DECLARE i INT;
   WHILE n > 0 DO
      SET n = n - 1;
      SET i = 1 + FLOOR(44 * RAND());
      SET y = CONCAT(y, SUBSTR(x, i, 1));
   END WHILE;
   RETURN y;
END
$$
DELIMITER ;

-- Sample output:
--    mysql> select safe_noise(50);
--    +----------------------------------------------------+
--    | safe_noise(50)                                     |
--    +----------------------------------------------------+
--    | 96Pw5CKDPW4g5pv984DSdp4VfpXvtK3KpDR6KfSp9tHVkFbKXp |
--    +----------------------------------------------------+
--    1 row in set (0.01 sec)

Aside: I'm really surprised that blogger.com can't handle verbatim text excerpts. There's more to life than chin music, people! God forbid I should post some Python...

Compiling DBD::SQLite 1.14 on cygwin

When trying to build DBD::SQLite for Cygwin I ran into test suite errors:

Failed Test Stat Wstat Total Fail Failed List of Failed
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
t/06error.t 0 139 2 2 100.00% 2
t/07busy.t 0 139 8 8 100.00% 5-8
t/08create_function.t 0 139 18 26 144.44% 6-18
t/70schemachange.t 9 1 11.11% 8
Failed 4/29 test scripts, 86.21% okay. 19/463 subtests failed, 95.90% okay.

Here's how I fixed or worked around them.

Solution Part 1: USE_LOCAL_SQLITE

Delving into Makefile.PL prompted me to try this command:

make clean; perl Makefile.PL USE_LOCAL_SQLITE=1

This didn't take care of all the errors, but it was a start:

Failed Test Stat Wstat Total Fail Failed List of Failed
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
t/70schemachange.t 9 1 11.11% 8
Failed 1/29 test scripts, 96.55% okay. 1/463 subtests failed, 99.78% okay.

This doesn't really make sense to me, since I have a local SQLite installed in /usr/lib/, and this command appears to rebuild the SQLite library from the source included in the DBD::SQLite distro.

Solution Part 2: The patch

Looking at the other bugs on rt.cpan.org I came across http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=29519, which contained a patch that made the t/70schemachange.t test pass:

% patch t/70schemachange.t sqlite.patch
patching file t/70schemachange.t
% make test
/usr/bin/perl.exe "-MExtUtils::Command::MM" "-e" "test_harness(0, 'blib/lib', 'blib/arch')" t/*.t
t/00basic...............ok
t/01logon...............ok
t/02cr_table............ok
t/03insert..............ok
t/04select..............ok
t/05tran................ok
t/06error...............ok
t/07busy................ok
t/08create_function.....ok
t/09create_aggregate....ok
t/10dsnlist.............ok
t/11unicode.............ok
t/20createdrop..........ok
t/30insertfetch.........ok
t/40bindparam...........ok
t/40blobs...............ok
t/40blobtext............ok
t/40listfields..........ok
t/40nulls...............ok
t/40numrows.............ok
t/40prepcached..........ok
t/50chopblanks..........ok
t/50commit..............ok
t/60metadata............ok
t/70schemachange........ok
t/90cppcomments.........ok
t/99cleanup.............ok
t/ak-dbd................ok
t/dbdadmin..............ok
All tests successful.
Files=29, Tests=465, 25 wallclock secs ( 5.80 cusr + 4.18 csys = 9.98 CPU)

And that is all. I'll follow up here or on use.perl should I learn more.

Delicious camping!

Here's a link to my del.icio.us links related to camping: http://del.icio.us/jtrammell/camping

Hopefully I won't forget anything too important as I pack...