Tom Moertel's Weblog: Category talks

Talk: Fun with Numbers: R and Perl (and IMDB data)

Tom Moertel — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:38:00 -0400

Last week I gave a talk on the R statistics system and Perl for the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers. The example that threaded through the talk was something I have written about here before, extracting useful information from the Internet Movie Database. If you’ve read my earlier blog post or have used the Grand Unified IMDB Movie Rating Decoder Ring, you might find the slides from the talk interesting. They provide some more details about the R and Perl code used to analyze the IMDB data and create the decoder ring.

You can get the slides here:

LectroTest: new release, new talk, and the new LectroTest Emporium!

Tom Moertel — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 14:21:00 -0400

I have a bunch of LectroTest news. LectroTest, as you may know, is a specification-based, automatic testing system for Perl. It may look like Haskell’s QuickCheck, but it tastes like sweet, sweet Perl.

LectroTest 0.3500 was released

This version adds automatic tools for recording and playing back failures. Using them, you can automatically build regression-testing suites and incorporate them into your testing plan. All it takes is one new line of code:

use Test::LectroTest
    regressions => "regressions.txt";   # <-- that's it!

See the docs on CPAN for more.

My thanks to Steffen Müller, who suggested the feature and is already using it in cool stuff such as Number::WithError.

Slides from “Testing Tips with LectroTest” are now online

You can get the slides from my talk to the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers on 2006-06-14 here: Talk / Testing Tips with LectroTest. In the talk, I covered some of the newer LectroTest features, such as regression testing and Test::LectroTest::Compat, which lets you mix LectroTest with other Perl testing modules.

The LectroTest Emporium opens!

I have very little artistic ability. Nevertheless, alarming numbers of people seem to love the fiercely metallic mascot I created for LectroTest.

At the last Perl Mongers meeting, for example, people actually told me (somewhat sternly) I should put the adorable LectroTest Robot on t-shirts. I am now delighted to announce that I have taken their advice:

Introducing: The LectroTest Emporium

Some important points:

Yes, it’s a CafePress store
I’m not making any money on these things
I’m using direct printing, not heat-transfer printing, so the Robot won’t crack, feel stiff, or suffer from a yellowish transfer background. (CafePress has a comparison of the methods if you want the full details.)

Some items I have moral reservations about offering:

LectroTest Robot Teddy Bear - Who would be so reckless as to allow something as fierce and as powerful as the LectroTest Robot to come into direct contact with a defenseless, cuddly teddy bear?
LectroTest Robot Baby Bib - Actually, this is a great idea: your infant and the Robot exist in a symbiotic relationship. When your baby gets food all over the bib, the Robot will consume it (using a electrochemical process not entirely dissimilar to our human concept of “digestion”). Thus is the baby cleaned and the Robot fueled. It’s win-win.
LectroTest Robot Dog T-Shirt - I am fairly certain that the immense weight of the Robot would easily crush any smaller animal. This product strikes me as a very bad idea.

The T-shirts, on the other hand, are the robot’s meow. Check out the full collection at The LectroTest Emporium.

Two good talks on software and freedom

Tom Moertel — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 13:29:00 -0400

At the 2006 Red Hat Summit, Eben Moglen and Cory Doctorow gave interesting keynote talks on freedom and software. Videos of both talks are available from the Summit’s video-download page.

Eben Moglen’s talk was like a locomotive, starting slowly but building to an impressive momentum. He argued (effectively) that free and open-source software are not expressions of strange, un-American ideas, as vendors of proprietary software would have the world believe. Rather, he argued, the ideas behind free software – in particular the harnessing of “individual ingenuity” – are the same ideas that made America so successful.

Cory Doctorow’s talk put DRM into perspective. Starting in the past with sheet music, he traced how each generation of the entertainment industry fought to preserve its dying business models in the face of the emerging competition, often by labeling the new competition as “pirates.” These “pirates” eventually became the new entertainment industry, which in turn labeled future-competitors as – you guessed it – “pirates.”

For example, the phonograph-record people were said to “pirate” sheet music because they would record live performances, frequently of published sheet music, and sell the recordings, making sheet music largely unnecessary. While this situation was indeed bad for the publishers of sheet music, the phonograph “pirates” launched a new, larger, more-profitable industry – the record industry – which copyright law was eventually adjusted to recognize. And so on for radio, broadcast television, cable television, the VCR.

But Cory warned that DRM is not merely the next step in that progression but a whole new evil that threatens to eliminate free and open-source software as a way to interact with media. In fact, he argued, DRM ultimately threatens to control how we live. (He gave some interesting examples.) How to fight it? Cory asked that you join the EFF.

Both talks are worth checking out. If you’re short on time, play them back at 200-percent speed; both are understandable at that rate.

Talk: Embedded domain-specific languages for Perl

Tom Moertel — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:39:00 -0500

Last week I gave a brief talk for the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers about embedding domain-specific languages into Perl. The slides from the talk are now available: Embedding an XHTML template language into Perl.