Cheap, fast, or good? Choose two.

Getting my head around Cocoa

2009-11-15T10:53:00.001-08:00

I needed cvs on my new macbook, so I installed xcode, so I didn't have to figure out how to use macports.

I had xcode, so I cracked it open. And for the first time, I'm noodling a bit with a compiled version (I've compiled java from time to time, but was never sucked into actually playing with it the way I have with perl & javascript).

As always with a new toolkit, the radical differences are jumping out at me.

Messages! what a trip! [Receiver message]. So yes, I get that foo.bar() is basically, in many ways the same thing as [foo bar] (tell foo that it should "bar()". Somehow more elegant.

The other thing is passing named values is the default. Yes, you can make the default value an array, but now that I'm constantly context switching, I really can't remember what goes where in an array, so I really appreciate:

[foo bar:baz silly:YES]

And of course it's odd to be so illiterate that I can't even type two lines without generating warnings and errors. I'm such a noob!

Adventures in Vista Land

2009-06-13T18:27:00.001-07:00

So I finally bit the bullet a few months back and bought a computer w/ Vista when the old home server running XP pro died.

First priority was to install itunes and get everything moved over. That took a bit of fiddling as I tried over and over to convince Vista that I wanted to be able to have access to all the CDs we worked so had to rip. Eventually i got the library moved over, and then I had to figure out how to keep the playlists, and evenutally I had that done as well. Some xml files I had to copy over or something like that.

At which point we just used it as DVD player and itunes server for a while. Everyone knows you can’t use vista for anything, so trying to use it as a computer seemed unrealistic.

Finally I really bit the bullet this week and dove in. Since Vista Premium isn’t premium enough to let me use remote desktop, I had to figure out how get VNC setup. TightVNC seemed to have trouble refreshing (wouldn’t show me the start menu when I opened it, for example), so I ended up with ultraVNC, which does everything you’d expect. And I don’t have to give M$ more money, that’s a nice thing.

Next was setting up all the shares I used to have set up on the XP box. That actually turned out to be super easy. I’d actually had the easiest printer setup ever a couple months back, when I’d just plugged it in and been able to use it. So maybe Vista isn’t evil?

Then today it was time to edit an old ASP site. Did IIS still exist? Did it still support ASP? As it turns out, IIS is still part of Windowsland, and it appears that my old ASP pages will eventually work. I’m not sure I’ve actually used active server pages this century, but interesting to see that its all still there. Key things I had to figure out:

I don’t like using inetpub, so had to set up permissions for IIS to use one of my document directories as root. Both IIS_IUSRS and IUSR needed to have read access to my site
Once a local browser could access the site, I had to open a hole in the Vista firewall on port 80. Didn’t seem to be pre-defined, so I had to create a custom firewall rule that I decided to call “Port 80”

Makes me wonder if there’s some button somewhere I could have pushed to enable anonymous web access to this directory? But mostly it makes me wonder if I really want to mess with old crufty ASP pages. I already know how to edit Apache conf files. I don’t want to learn how to use a whole new interface.

Thinking about it, the thing that really gets me is that I don’t much care for learning new operating systems. I’m comfortable with XP (I use an XP laptop at work). I can get Linux to run all the web servers I need. And none of that seems to be much help with Vista, where whenever I need to do something new I find myself using google to find answers to newbie questions.

Another Blue Screen

2009-03-20T07:17:00.001-07:00

When I opened my laptop this morning, the blue screen was counting down as it stored some kind of information on my hard drive. Evidence, should I need it, that the operating system had lost its bearing and collapsed suddenly.

I am struck suddenly by the realization that the computers I've been living with these last fifteen years are far less reliable than the VW bus I owned in the early '90s, an antique that stripped a spline on its drive wheel in the middle of death valley once, and another time stopped running on the freeway because the fuel hose had slipped off the carburetor and was merrily spraying gasoline across the entire engine compartment.

This thing, this machine, on which my livelihood depends, these contraptions that so many of us spend our days fiddling with, constantly grappling with mechanical and software failures of one kind or another. Somehow to realize that these ubiquitous computational devices are far, far less reliable than thirty-year-old VW buses fills me with wonder. The incredible patience of millions of computer users. The unfounded optimism that today's task will somehow be completed even as thousands of us are stranded on the side of the road, wondering how to bring the contraption back to life.

Quick! To the emails! To the presentations! To the spreadsheets! Before the next blue screen stops us in our tracks!

Javascript Cheat Sheet

2009-01-08T07:34:00.001-08:00

Cause I don't write js often enough to remember its syntax

Add js file to a page

var s=document.createElement('script');
s.setAttribute('src','http://foo.com/bar.js');
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);

Add jQuery to a page

http://www.learningjquery.com/2008/06/updated-jquery-bookmarklet

Append js to a node in DOM w/ jQuery

$("#tab4").append("<script> alert("hello!") </script> ");

IT 2.0

2008-09-10T10:59:00.001-07:00

After working in technology since 1994, my biggest impression is this: IT costs too much.

This won't change overnight, but 50 years from now, companies will be budgeting, per user, much less for IT. And they'll get a whole lot more value.

I've very little idea of how this will happen. But for the time being, I've got a ringside seat, working for the IT department of a fairly large company.

This week, economist wrote about how AdventNet is trying to play a role in the next IT revolution:

http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12052307&fsrc=rss

It Depends

2008-09-09T06:40:00.001-07:00

I live in a land of partial questions, where folks are constantly asking me how long it will take to build a web site or a page weeks or months before we've figured out what that site or page should consist of.

So my answer to most questions is some variation of it depends, usually dressed up a little, as in "we typically like to schedule this sort of change 2-6 months ahead of time, depending on the number of integration points, reliability requirements, and impacted processes." Big words like that convey the impression that I'm paying close attention (which in fact is something I try to do), and I've found with experience that if I just say "It depends" folks will think I'm one of those annoying tech types who refuses to give a straight answer.

Or maybe I'm just a windbag with a rationalization? Some of both I suppose.

Of course some of the reasons that things depend have little to do with the difficulties folks have in understanding that for me to build something, they need to know what they want to build. For example:

http://www.webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

Because web browsers are wacky. Not in a way that I've figured out how to easily explain to folks who fall asleep the minute the gory details come up, and who never had to learn how hideous Netscape 4.7 was, or of the torture of working with browsers from Redmond. Browsers are strange and twisted little things because they were coded by humans who had to make the best of of a bad set of options while on a ridiculous timeline.

So it goes.

Time

2008-08-25T16:21:00.001-07:00

Somehow, this afternoon at least, there seems to be a connection between turning 40 and realizing how little time there are to attend to the myriad opportunities each day brings.

I stumbled over some nice writing on this topic today:

Accept that your workload exceeds your resources — that you are the first and last filter for what deserves your time — and you’ll already be better off than you were even two minutes ago.

Merlin Mann, http://www.43folders.com/2006/03/13/philosophy

Where am I?

2008-04-14T21:59:00.001-07:00

Ok, windows knows where perl is now. But my htdocs is in a completely different place. And the hostname changes too.

No idea if this will stand the test of time, but here's my figure out where I function right now, which appears to work on both my windows XP laptop and the linux host I use most often:

(my $script, my $path, my $script_url, my $script_url_path, my $host) = figure_out_script_and_path();

sub figure_out_script_and_path{
my $script, my $path, my $script_url, my $script_url_path, my $host;

    if ($0 =~ m#^\w:#){ # should be true on a windows host
        $script = $0;
            $script =~ s#^\w:.*\/##; #remove path
        $path = $0;
            $path =~ s#(^\w:.*)\/[^\/]*$#$1#; # remove name of script
    }
    else { # assume path starts with a slash:
        $script = $0;
            $script =~ s#^\/.*\/##; #remove path
        $path = $0;
            $path =~ s#(^\/.*)\/[^\/]*$#$1#; # remove name of script
    }

    $script_url = $ENV{"SCRIPT_NAME"};
    $script_url_path = $script_url;
    $script_url_path =~s#(^\/.*)\/[^\/]*$#$1#;
    $host = $ENV{"SERVER_NAME"};

return ($script, $path, $script_url, $script_url_path, $host);

}

Would you believe that windows live writer doesn't have a "code" option in the format menu? And I'm afraid I'm too lazy to edit the source. :)

#!/usr/bin/perl on windows

2008-04-14T21:42:00.001-07:00

Thankyou perl monks for your wisdom:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=167481

I installed activestate in c:\usr, and now I can use the same shebang line on my windows laptop as on my linux box.

Life can be so extremely good!

8% slower

2008-03-31T09:54:00.000-07:00

Breaking news, as I approach my 40th birthday. I'm slow, and getting slower:

"a 40-year-old user will take 8% longer than a 30-year-old user to accomplish the same task. And a 50-year-old user will require an additional 8% more time."

This, it turns out, is perfectly natural:

"The human aging process starts around age 25 and causes erosion of cognitive resources, loss of visual acuity, degraded reaction times, and reduced dexterity. People need more time for the same mental operations; they have less memory capacity and take longer to process the same perceptual input."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/middle-aged-users.html

Javascript is Taking Over the World!

2007-11-15T10:26:00.001-08:00

John Resig just created a map of the campaign so far:

Wireshark

2007-11-12T11:22:00.001-08:00

I just spent a few minutes playing with wireshark, and definitely want to spend more time noodling with it next time I need to understand what's happening on the wire:

http://www.wireshark.org/

Money isn't everything

2007-11-01T08:52:00.001-07:00

A recent economist article reviews some research McKinsey did on education, where, unsurprisingly, how schools are managed has a great deal to do with how they perform (How to be top, October 20, 2007):

"the best performing countries do much better than the worst and ... the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea."
Schools "need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind."

My favorite part of the article was a discussion of being selective when hiring teachers (which matters a lot, as opposed to class size, which doesn't after primary school). Being selective isn't about paying people more. It's about being selective.

This is one of the critical issues in management: blinded by a simplistic view of the efficiency of markets (and so thinking that when it comes to hiring you get what you pay for), organizations fail to devote sufficient attention to being selective, which is crazy stupid. The best people are attentive with regards to money, but compensation is one factor among many. Many, for example, will reject a 50% raise in compensation that would require them to work with ineffective bores.

Singapore and Finland are extremely selective, so that in both countries "teaching is a high-status profession". Effective and high-status does not correlate with highly paid!

Anecdotally, I can confirm this with regards to the team I work on. We can't pay people extravagantly, but we can be very selective, and we are. The results are a team that is effective and has earned the respect of the various teams we collaborate with.

Windows Live Writer

2007-10-25T15:09:00.001-07:00

Is it ridiculously web 1.0 of me to wonder if a desktop blogging client would be worth using?

Check it out. I took a screen shot of the post I'm writing, and pasted it into the post! I love recursion.

Mini Blogging is the new black

2007-10-18T14:29:00.000-07:00

The cool thing about mini-blogging is that I was actually doing it on facebook before I read an article comparing different mini-blogging sites.

But mostly it just makes me feel old. Where did all of these sites come from? When? Why so many of them?

The web has clearly morphed from a place where I sort of had a sense of how technology worked and had a small sense about how it worked into yet another unfathomably large intractable human mess of activity.

The web isn't a black swan any more. It's freaking flock of swans, all flying in different directions. My head can't take it any more.

not such a nice view

2007-10-05T06:53:00.000-07:00

I had my first close encounter with Vista this weekend on a laptop that my father-in-law purchased recently. He hates it with a passion, and it's pretty easy to see why. So far as either of us could tell, it's a lot like XP, except a zillion times slower. It's like back to the 1980s, where you have to go get a cup of coffee after you start an application and before it actually comes up.

He's an avid musician, and starting to look at using different music software and hardware. And he keeps tripping over the fact that he's got Vista instead of an older version of windows.

Since I work in technology, I of course don't know anybody else who'se using Vista. I guess we all know to stay away from new Microsoft operating systems for a couple of years.

Joel Spolsky, a tech writer who doesn't hate microsoft, agrees: "I've been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system -- it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled)."

I avoided XP for a while, and now am completely happy with it. And I expect Vista to be a fine operating system when I start using it around 2009 or 2010, when all the software and peripherals I need will have worked out the rough edges.

closures

2007-09-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

I'm still a little annoyed that we haven't figured out how to download knowledge the way Neo learned kungfu while reclining in a dentist chair in the Matrix.

In the meantime, the next best thing for understanding javascript closures may be this post:

http://jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/closures.html

I'm not ready to claim that I totally understand closures, or scope, or exactly what js objects are. But I will assert that I've read most of this page slowly and carefully, and suspect that I will be less likely to get create closures by accident or stub my toes on scope.

Baby steps!

thinking inside the box

2007-09-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

Something called an active directory migration (AD is a tool for managing windows login accounts) has made it impossible for me to boot my computer unless I am connected to the corporate network. So much for telecomuting.

But XP is pretty stable, so I just need to not reboot while away from the office. The kicker was that somehow my laptop has decided recently that it can't recognize my home wireless network unless I reboot when I get home. So after I came back from the office Friday, I wasn't able to get back online until I went in again this morning. Ridiculous!

Until I realized that I still have a stack of ethernet cables that would be perfectly happy to connect me to my wireless router, and then to the Internet. So here I am, 1990's style, with a 25' cable running across the living room. And it took me less than a week to remember that I had this obsolete technology available as a failover.

I don't even want to think about what I would do in a blackout. mindlessly sit at the door, flipping the light switch on and off, over and over again?

ny to paris

2007-04-24T13:47:00.000-07:00

Technology really does make the world better. See for yourself.

addons

2007-04-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

Setting up my new laptop with:

The new delicious toolbar from mozilla wants to take over my bookmarks. Hopefully I won't regret handing over the keys to some yahoo subsidiary:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615

Web Developer, of course, although I wonder how long until it is completely subsumed by firebug:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Firebug. Gosh I like firebug. When I grow up, I want to be smart like Joe Hewitt.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

I have to use greasemonkey if I want to see what Nathan's been up to:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

If you have to use FTP, doing it from firefox is nice:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/684

IEtab. Still trying to figure out whether or not this one is must-have. Still on the list for now:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419

Beyond rounded corners

2007-02-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

A nice video overview of web 2.0

Envy

2007-01-06T22:05:00.000-08:00

I was in a meeting yesterday with a couple of the guys on the intranet team, and asked them about the process they have for user experience (UE) changes: collecting requirements, creating designs, getting signoff, etc...

Their answer is that basically they've done a sufficiently good job on this that asside from a couple of sign-offs from the brass they're pretty much free to do things that seem to make sense. For the latest round, it took two people 7 months to come up with requirements for a new set of designs, and that this felt like a long time.

wow.

We just updated the UE of our external site. I'd estimate it took at least an order of magnitude more human months to figure out and document what it was that we were going to do do. Not implementing a single line of code, mind you. Just deciding what it was that we were going to do: what would the new home page look like? what should our other page templates look like?

A lot of this makes sense. The brand of the company is involved. There is a lot of mission critical business on the website, with potential customers, existing customers, investors, etc... The intranet by its nature is internal, so the marketing, support, and product teams don't really want to be part of the conversation every step of the way.

How much effort should we be putting into tracking the effort we put our UE requirements and design? Are there any industry benchmarks for this kind of thing that would be relevant?

finding includes in html

2006-11-19T22:12:00.000-08:00

For the second time in the a few months I've wanted to be able to fish through the includes in an shtml file in perl.

This while statement will itterate once for each time it matches a pattern for a virtual include, letting me check to see if the include is there, slurp it up, whatever:


    while ($file_contents =~ m{<!--#?include\s+virtual="([^"]*)"\s*-->}gis){
        # do something with $1 (a path)        
    }

bidi fun

2006-11-19T08:24:00.000-08:00

‮ and ‭ entities can be use to give browsers instructions on what order to display characters:


<div>&#8238;Left-to-right</div>
<div>&#8237;Right-to-left</div>

‮Left-to-right

‭Right-to-left

"dir" attribute can be used to provide block or page level direction on direction of the page:


<div dir="ltr">Left-to-right</div>
<div dir="rtl">Right-to-left</div>

Left-to-right

Right-to-left

A good overview:

w3c tutorial: http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/

when you need more ports

2006-11-10T15:21:00.000-08:00

So I'm guessing there's more than one way to tell apache to listen beyond port 80. Here's what I figured out:


Listen 81
Listen 82
Listen 83
Listen 84
Listen 85


<VirtualHost _default_:81>
DocumentRoot /srv/www/port_81
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost _default_:82>
DocumentRoot /srv/www/port_82
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost _default_:83>
DocumentRoot /srv/www/port_83
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost _default_:84>
DocumentRoot /srv/www/port_84
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost _default_:85>
DocumentRoot /srv/www/port_85
</VirtualHost>

line breaks

2006-11-02T09:21:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to try to put together a full set of notes on line break wierdness for years. This isn't it. But it might be a start.

Script works on PC but not UNIX

It took me way longer than it should of for me to figure out what's wrong with this interpreter path today:


    #! /perl/bin/perl

I'd look at the line in vi. It looked fine. Then I'd go to the command line and type:


   %/perl/bin/perl

which would give me the interpreter (wierd path to match where perl is on my windows box, ln'd over to /usr/bin/perl)

And eventually it dawned on me that since I'd never run this script on a unix box, it probably had PC line breaks. In the old days, I would have seen this:


   #! /perl/bin/perl^M

But I guess vi or vim or whatever is on the box is smarter than it used to be. Not me though. How many times have I stubbed my toes on this?

At least I'm smart enough to use Textpad. Save As, select Unix as the file type, and I'm up and running again. In utopia, there will only be one kind of line break. That's all I'm saying.

perl array cheat sheet

2006-11-01T20:52:00.000-08:00

How long is my array?


my @hw_array = ("hello","world","wassup?");

print "<br>size: ", scalar @hw_array;     # 3
print "<br>size: " . @hw_array;           # 3, scalar is implicit
print "<br>index of last: ", $#hw_array;  # 2

At least it's not raining rotten blubber

2006-11-01T15:32:00.000-08:00

Nathan reminded us in a meeting today that no matter how grim things may seem, at least it's not raining rotten blubber.

A great way to take a meeting off on a tangent

It's the request, stupid!

2006-10-30T16:35:00.000-08:00

Just tripped over a nifty article 'Optimizing Page Load Time' that suggests that thinking about HTTP makes a great deal of sense when thinking about performance.

As an example, here's one of the cookies on the site that I work on:

SMIDENTITY=0gzinsuUJJp+/tRSC5ZaV0WudjvPIRSZc06S2wfBFp39qMk3IbwLjlr1yo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;

Now multiply that times the 44 http requests it takes to load one our most popular pages! That's 30K worth of cookies! sweet!

YUI Graded Browser Support

2006-10-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

The YUI article on graded browser support is a nice overview of the nuts and bolts of browser support in a world where different browsers provide different levels of support for web content. It links to a chart that shows how different browsers are currently supported.

Browser support is a nice example of a class of strategic issues that are surprisingly prevalent on web projects. This is small 's' strategy: web developers don't need to understand your business model or care about financial engineering, we just need to know which users we _must_ support, a business/technical question that will determine which browsers we need to support well, which browsers we should support on at least a rudimentary level, and which browsers we shouldn't worry about.

The standard scenario is the business owner (aka stakeholder) of a project asks for tricky functionality (and this could be something as simple as fly-down menus or precise layout of text and images on a page) and, when asked about browser support, asserts that 'all browsers' or 'all major browsers' should be supported. This is usually about ten minutes before the business owner expects to head out of the office on vacation for two weeks, and before she goes she wants a firm commitment that the project will be completed or at least well underway when she gets back.

My job is often to try to figure out how to share the unwelcome news that there are some basic business questions that need to be thought about fairly carefully in order to make sure expectations are met when the site is completed. They involve thinking about people who turn of javascript (no fly-downs), accessibility (how should keyboard navigation work? Where do we need alternate content), maybe even localization (You can bet that somewhere on the carefully laid out page, localized text just won't fit without blowing something out or wrapping in a surprising way).

And of course there's the unwelcome news that we don't plan to test on IE 5 and a number of other browsers, and that people using these are likely to have difficulty with the page in proportion to the complexity of the page.

This problem is about to get worse, not better: with IE 7, Firefox 2, Ajax, and Web 2.0 we've got a new generation of browsers, some wonderfully tricky client-side technology, and rising expectations from stakeholders as to the kind of experience we can deliver.

This means a lot more conversations ahead about which browsers we need to support and which browsers we will disregard to some extent.

Quick Tabs are nifty

2006-10-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

Hey look, IE7 has something called quick tabs that lets me see thumbnails of all my open windows.

OK, so I'll probably only use as often as the powerpoint slide sorter (which I did use once), but it's nifty. How many years has it been since anyone has been able to looke at IE and notice anything nifty? Hint: you were still building web sites to support Netscape 4.7.

Moving files from ibook to macbook is sooo easy!

2006-10-19T13:32:00.000-07:00

I can't believe how easy it was.

OK, so the part where the ibook stopped booting sucked. And getting the hard drive out was bizarely hard (50 screws? 10 pieces to remove first? something like that).

But once that was done, I booted up the new macbook, connected the drive using a USB enclosure I picked up at fries a while back, and an hour later all of my wife's files and applications were migrated over. iTunes. Email. Word & Mozilla. Palm desktop. user accounts and passwords. The ssid & key for our wep network. Probably other stuff I can't think of right now.

Collaboration is tricky

2006-10-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

Bruce Schneier's article about opposition to Facebook news feeds tells the story of how Face book introduced a new feature to automatically log changes in feeds -- and the masses were not happy.

It's one thing to know intellectually that the kind of privacy folks could enjoy in the twentieth century is pretty much gone if you want to participate in 21st century society. It's another to realize that what a wrenching transition it will be as various technological forces inexorably chip away at the masks we present to the world. Increasingly, strangers and co-workers will be able to google our secrets.

Head Shot

2006-10-10T16:39:00.000-07:00

I've decided to put my picture in my profile. So have uploaded one as part of this post. The process is marvelously user-unfriendly:

Load a photo using the upload widget, which is cryptic, but not so bad

Find the url of your photo in the code:


<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" 
href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3099/3814/1600/elijah_lovejoy.jpg"
><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" 
src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3099/3814/400/elijah_lovejoy.jpg" 
border="0" alt="" /></a>

Then take the photo url (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3099/3814/400/elijah_lovejoy.jpg) and paste it into the proper field on the profile page.

Why can't there just be an upload button on the profile? Why are computers so gosh-darned hard to use?

6 months without perl

2006-10-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

My memory is that I reimaged somtime around march, and I haven't installed activeperl until now. Scary thought.

Anyhow, as usual, I'd completely forgotten how to setup perl cgi on Apache (which for whatever reason did not take 6 months to install, so maybe I can still call myself a web developer...), but a quick google diggs up a page on a site called the site wizard that provides much of the information that I need, with apache error logs providing the rest.

Folks who wrote the error handling code for apache deserve major good karma, and probably more credit than they get for the success of this application. Amazing how often you can find the information you need in the error log.

So the steps I took, so I can look here next time I do it:

create super simple CGI.pm script
use CGI qw/:standard/; print header, start_html('A Simple Example'), h1('A Simple Example');

Add Handler directive so apache knows that .pl means cgi script
AddHandler cgi-script .pl

set +ExecCGI permission on the relevant directory (I turn off apache when I'm out in the wild).


<Directory "C:/htdocs">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Tell apache where to find perl, so my script now looks like this
#! /Perl/bin/perl use CGI qw/:standard/; print header, start_html('A Simple Example'), h1('A Simple Example');

Voila. apache is up and running. Now to see if I can remember why I installed perl in the first place.

Someday

2006-09-17T21:01:00.000-07:00

It was probably in 2004 that my friend Nathan briefly set up his signature so that it said something along the lines of the title of this blog.

Up until I heard this, I'd spent years explaining to people that the tradeoff between quality, budget, and schedule as a sort of triangle where unfortunately, in the real world, in my experience, to the best of my knowledge, etc. ... building web sites / applications / yada yada required people to make decisions they'd rather not make about what it was that they wanted versus what they wanted to pay for it and how long they were willing to wait for it.

I've never had the guts to actually tell a client or stakeholder that they could have fast, cheap, or good if they could only bring themselves to accept that they could only get two. My theory is that one of the reasons that I have a job doing web stuff has something to do with my intermittent efforts to be diplomatic, even helpful.

But someday I'm going to crack, and I'll probably snarl something to someone that they just need to decide which two they want. Which will no doubt be the end of that particular opportunity.