SF Opera: Peter Grimes

Peter Grimes is set in a fishing village in the 40's, this alone made it much different from the previous operas of the season. In addition it was sung in English, and had noticeable modernity of plot, and lack of desire to stick to opera conventions.

When Rosalina was first heard in a fragment, instead of in an Aria, in The Barber of Seville, it was noticeable to me (and caused a major stir at it's first performance). Peter Grimes, left intermissions in silence - not with a resounding chorus. This made it hard at times to realize one was at an intermission. It was also unrelenting, song after song , scene after scene, it had little down time. And almost no comic characters/relief. It was almost like a depressed and depressing, modern musical. But it stayed enough with the conventions to be clearly an opera.

This particular production was well done. It got out of your way - and let the story lead you, the singers sing, and act. The acting was important and well done - this was nice as often acting is an afterthought in opera. As always the music was excellent. The lead in particular was stunning. On the whole it was very different, very well done, but in the end not really my cup of tea. This was mainly down to the depressing nature of the story and the subject matter (mob rule). Good - but not for me.

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SF Opera: Barber of Seville

This production was excellent. The set, the costumes, the directing worked, but where not flamboyant - there was nothing too interesting about them, they just got out of your way. And let the acting, the signing, and music do there thing. And there was acting, which was cool and fun. Also the plot being light and funny was a good way to end a long week.

Very entertaining with several good preformances both on the comic side, and most certainly on the singing. A fun night.

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Espresso

On Sunday we were in Santa Fe as always. And we walked over to Borders to pick up the new Harry Potter, but got distracted along the by the Cookworks going out of business sale. Which sucks as they where a rocking store. But which rocks as we got a "La Pavoni Europiccola" at a massive discount. Which is to say we have an amazing espresso machine, and got it for the cost of an espresso machine.

We took it home, after shopping futilely for good espresso cups -- but actually getting Harry Potter. We pulled some shots on the porch. And had dinner. The next morning I jammed my burr grinder - and had to disassemble it to unjam it. And then I got it unjammed but pieces went flying, and I lost a spring in the process. It was stressful -- but we pulled some shots off of some blade ground coffee. At lunch we found some springs at the Los Alamos Hardware store, so it's back in operation.

So as you might imagine, we've been impressively caffeinated since Sunday. Like 5 shots a day. Heck this morning I've had 4 already. A very sour shot to start off the morning. And then the best shot I've pulled yet - and a longo to boot (I bet you didn't think the too could go together). It was really quite good. And this is becoming an addictive hobby :)

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Car

I got a notice in Saturday's Mail -- and this morning before work we went down to the Post Office, and picked up my title. The car is now mine! I'm a happy camper!

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SF Opera: Lucio Silla

Last nights opera was Mozart's Lucio Silla, and it showed. The music was stunning. The singers where often used as musical instruments - No need for words just have them sing. But the singing was truly the focus, even though there where many places for the symphony to shine -- including a long opening number with no one on stage. In particular Celena Shafer was amazing as our heroine Gunia

The thing was that the plot on the other hand was very thin on the ground. In opera it can take a full minute to sing a line - so most operas like to fit 2 plot twists in, this one could barely get half an idea out. This meant that much much was left, to the director. And he did quite a lot. The main actors where dressed in a Baroque fashion - except way way over the top. The we had the a set of 4 dancers who provided comic relief - and acted as a silent greek chorus, all dressed in suites. As was the actual chorus. And the action all took place on a very modern set - that reminded me of a sci-fi movie -- huge moving black walls, and a tree here an there. In addition there where projected movies - an interesting an kinda cool touch. Anyhow it the was plenty of stuff to keep your eyes occupied - even if there was no action happening vis a vis the plot. And since the it lasted over 3 and a half hours that was important. Surprisingly the disparate settings, the Roman setting, the Baroque Music and costuming and the modern set (and costuming) all worked well enough

On the whole an excellent night out. The Music was amazing, the rest enjoyable, and on the whole I had a lot of fun.

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DHS, Terror and our failure of imagination

This is just right. Bruce Schneier and Richard Forno.

The first comment is also right - failure of imaginations, failures to be proactive only go so far. We need to also look at the cause of this, from both angle of what does an attack gain the terrorist, and why do these terrorists exist in the first place ? Our actions show these analyses have little or no place in our strategic thinking. Although London seem to be pay attention to the first and 'back to work as usual' seems to be the norm. See also: London bombs need calm response

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SF Opera: Turandot

Last night was our first opera on the season, Puccini's Turandot. It was fabulous. Possibly the best opera I've seen to date - the performances where amazing.

Turandot is one Puccini's asian flavored opera's. Set in the Imperial Palace of China, at some date far far back into mythological times, it feels more modern and fun due to the Asian touches, while still have the classic operatic touches, the insane plots most notably .

This staging was excellent. I was particularly impressed with the performances of Serena Farnocchia as Lui and Dongwon Shin as Calaf. The stage design was interesting, with lots of transparency - almost every thing was clear or translucent. Lots of light play. The costuming was way over the top, but that merely made it feel at home with the plot. And it certainly helped the comic characters - a mere nodding of the head became funny, in those wacky hats.

On the whole a great evening !

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Car Loan

So yesterday I woke with a start, realizing that we'd paid again last month for our car insurance, and hence were covered for another 6 months. Good, except that about 1/2 the time my credit union claims it was not notified that the policy had been renewed, [100% of the time when I make a policy change]. It matters not if I have notification explicitly faxed to them, nor which insurance company I'm using as both Progressive and Gieco have the same track record.

When they claim not have been notified of a change, they assume that I just cancelled my insurance, and slap me with a 2000$ charge. And then I get to call them, then their insurance clearinghouse who will not talk to you other than to provide a number for your insurance company to call (which is not the number you called). At which point my insurance company can call them, then fax them the info. And I can wait 2 weeks for the credit union update my account.

I hate this, I hate that it takes 1/2 day out of my life at least once a year, sometimes more often than that. So yesterday sent off the large payment required to pay off the car loan. And hopefully within a month I will never ever have to deal with them again.

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BBQ Meatloaf

Last night we had healthy part turkey grilled hamburgers that turned out quite well. But at the same time we slapped together a meatloaf in tinfoil, and BBQ's that till like 11, when I got out of bed to retrieve it.

This meant that today we had cold meatloaf sandwiches for lunch. And the where amazingly good. Cold meantloaf is an idea summer food -- if you don't have to heat up the house to get it. And this particular loaf, with it's low fat content, and fine grained turkey meat in the mix in was particularly excellent. A fabulous find.

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4th Party

So on this long hot 4th weekend we're not doing too much, mainly hanging, BBQing etc. But we started the weekend off by going to Hadley and Robert's 4th party which was excellent. They held it at their beautiful house and it's newly reopened pool. There was good food, chef made ice cream, and watermelon water polo. Which was great fun, and quite a bit more difficult than one might image. More like water rugby -- which is where the problems lie, and why Rachel was sidelined early on by a watermellon to the face, a bloody nose. All was well after some advil and time - and I think she suggested as we were leaving that she'd be game next year. On the whole a great time, and a good way to start he holiday weekend.

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YAPC: The Sessions

DAY 1

This con was huge for a YAPC - 400 people not this big since 1999. Maybe 2x last year's size.

Larry Wall, opened with a speech on building communities, which was (intentionally) long on questions and short on answers. I read it as a comment on the Perl6 / Perl 5 interaction and how the community was taking it. Though from my perspective that has been getting better with every patch pugs gets. Regardless a good speech from someone who has though long and hard on this.

This was followed with Alison Randal, of TPF fame who gave her State of the Carrot speech, mainly pugs, the new onion logo, and her signature poetry. Also mentioned was the 8 summer of code grants.

After that I did a talk by Peter Scott, of The Perl Medic fame. Lots of modules for testing and refactoring, but also some controversial statements along the lines of "Rewrite - it's your time", "It runs - BIG DEAL". Basically focus on the maintenance times - if rewriting saves you time do it. Of course all of the refactoring, or even maintenance follow the creation of a comprehensive test suite in his view, so this is less risky advice than it sounds. He also recommended a $SIG{__WARN__} that mails warnings to you for production code. And he suggests that use fatal is a useful debugging tool.

Next up was Ingy's speech on Kwiki. It was more a tour of his brain than a speech, but as it turns out that is what I needed. It was truly helpful, and I think Kwiki plugins, and modifications will be much much more useful. And beside you can read the slides, to actually learn about kwiki.

Next up I went to Geoffery Young's speech on the finally production worthy mod_perl 2. Very good and I'll seriously consider it on future projects.

Day 2

Autrijus on pugs, his perl 6 interpreter. An interesting speech - every one attended, so when he made digs about design - you could watch Larry who mainly laughed, and heckled a little. Basically pugs is Autrijus's toy. He makes the calls - and that means that is full featured, and fast to develop on. But it's not helping out parrot too much (though moving that way), and it's not fast. But it ain't bad and on some benchmarks it beats perl5. But unspec'ed features like Perl5 interop got in before macros and other hard stuff. Still useable today - and though he stepped back from Alisons 90% of it works number -- she was right in the 90% of what you want to use works sense. It's useful today for throw away scripts - and a good bit faster to write than even perl 5 for some of tasks.

Also the community is huge 5 months since the start, 100 commiters, 5000 commits, and something that works. Wowzah

P6 the language was next up this can't be summarize so read the p6 bible, this was followed by a some stuff on the parrot vm. Basically it's fast. It handles a lot and optimized for dynamic languages. It's starting to get stable. TCL, PGE, and pugs all target it. And speaking of PGE (perl6 grammar engine), it works. Missing some features and a little slow, but if you are looking for a heavy weight, unicode aware parser, that does all the tricks this is a good bet. It can switch out parsing strategies mid rule, and go from recursive-decent to shift-reduce, just like that. Bunches of tricks, and very nice.

Day 3

Started with Dan Sugalski's speech on memory leaks. Basically 5.7 started a massive leak hunt, and though that's wrapped up people are still hunting. Upgrade if you have a problem. But also IO::Handles are huge but rarely used. A Strings are almost always the problem. Big strings, in long running processes - since perl almost never returns memory to the OS. Slurped Files in list context cause many problems. Arrays alloc to the ending index. Lots of other trivia.

Then there where lots of little speeches, lightning talks till the keynote. The highlight where mainly module recommendations, though also of note:

• Extending the debugger could be very cool.
• Yuvals speech said basically if you want it robust, build a framework, and keep the biz logic code small.
• Portable programming is dang hard - even if perl is a great choice to do it in. VMS, swahili, user permissions models, gads ....

The Keynote was not much of a keynote, but it did get slashdotted. Then a brief Q&A and it was done.

On the whole an excellent technical conference, amazing people, amazing speakers. It was also the best organized YAPC I've been to. On the whole very, very impressive.

Day 4 -- Post YAPC

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YAPC: Modules

So here's a list of modules I collect over my time at YAPC NA 2005. Some pretty cool stuff!

Development Aids:

• Module::Starter a replacement for h2xs, et all.

  module-starter --module=Foo::Bar,Foo::Bat \ --author="Andy Lester" --email=andy@petdance.com

  And you are off and running with a new module. Templatized, with a dot file for preferences, this thing was the most hyped thing at the con. Also I've been using it for a while now and loving it.

• CPAN::Mini::Inject - Inject your modules into the local cpan repo you created using CPAN::Mini* Devel::Refactor - Refactor perl, useing perl tools. Plugs in to Eclipse/EPIC .
• Devel::Size - track the size of your constructs in ram, helps you find a memory leak or just see what is eating space.

• Devel::Command - write new commands for the perldebugger. Embrace and Extend I say :)

• Apache::Test - A Harness for testing apache - brings it up, and down and runs tests against- very nice for mod_perl moudule development.

• Test::TAP::Model and Test::TAP::HTMLMatrix - produce clean easy to read results for very large Test Suites. Probably useless for small numbers of test but once you get to 1000 tests in a system something needs to be done, and this looks like a good thing to do.
• Test::MockObject and Test::Mock* these modules let you fake out perl. Very useful for testing things that consume resources from Database, networks etc. Fake thase resurces , and you can run your tests with out the Net. And so easy to use that you'll save time by doing it. Very nice.
• Devel::Cover - Coverage metrics!!!

To get a job down:

• Readonly - a much better "use constant".
• Spiffy - a base class, with utilties for code cleanliness, mixins, and appropriate exporting.
• Module::Refresh - Does as Apache::StatINC, but for your own long running server. Nice
• WWW::Mechanize::Pluggable - Plugin to Mech, screw with anything. I think of it as Greasemonkey for mech, but it has infinite uses.

Utilities:

• DBI::Shell - a database shell for any database. I should not that I tried this out maybe a year ago -and was less than thrilled. But things change, and it looks like I'll be trying it again.
• Pod::Webserver - Browse your local installed modules perldoc's in a webbrowser. Reduce search.cpan.orgs bandwidth bills.
• SQL::Translator - Translate MySQL sql to Oracle sql and back, or any number of other dbs, (sqllite, postgress. etc) as well as ouput to Diagrams and HTML. Apparently works wonders. Schemas only - no inserts, deletes, etc.

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YAPC: Social

So the final day of YAPC wrapped up with a Keynote by Chip Salzenburg, that was not a keynote, and depressing to boot. That was followed by a Townhall that was interesting - but focused on monetary issues, and in a needlessly down way. That coupled with an early flight had me less than upbeat way when thinking about the social aspects of what was an excellent technical conference.

Obviously the perl community is often dysfunctional, and loves to point at other dysfunctional parts and tell them to clean up - and that sucks. But my main take away hear was on the social aspects of small cons in general I think.

YAPC feels a lot like a youth hostel on a major circuit. You show up, meet new people, hang and talk, and drink and drink. You become "friends" with people (because) you 90% never expect to see again, and the jet on to the next locale. This is dysfunctional -- though infinitely preferable to the alternative of living in a little shell and doing jack all. And perhaps the next year/city you see them again, and hang or not. Perhaps some small percentage of people, who show up enough and are actually interesting, etc become real friends, or (in the case of cons) at least email correspondents.

On the whole it feels unreal.

And I'm very, very happy to be home to the casita, the cat, and the girlfriend!

So it does occur to me that maybe this is exactly how naturally gregarious people do things -- lots of contacts, whom they weed down to the really people though more constant contact. Maybe this is all just that I'm too much of an introvert to enjoy it.

And of course this was the down side -- there was lots of good stuff, meeting up with old friends, and interesting acquaintances. Eating well -- and particularly on this trip drinking well( at Smokeless Joe's)

Update: As I note deep in my next entry, I composed this sucker on a day when I had to 3 hours sleep, woke up with a cold and feeling rather surly. Ooops.

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