The last time I updated my resume I decided that it needed some major revisions. I didn't want to use a WYSIWYG editor anymore and I wanted to start tracking changes to my resume with git. After looking at various plain text file formats and markup options, and even though I have a fondness for the txt2tags syntax, I decided on Markdown. For better or worse, and I suspect due mostly to the popularity of GitHub, Markdown has become a de facto standard syntax for geeks writing documents that other people might read.

With Markdown as a source format I experimented with pandoc - a universal document converter to generate output files.

With the pandoc workflow, it is possible to write a document in plain text and then generate other types of documents such as HTML, Word processor formats (Microsoft Word docx) and PDF (via LaTeX).

So for people who insist on having a resume in Comic Sans:

or perhaps Game of Thrones is more your style (via the Artificial Uncial font):

pandoc has you covered.

The most challenging thing was figuring out the names of the fonts available, the packages needed to use them with pandoc, and the pandoc command-line syntax for activating them.

I gathered my notes and sample outputs in a github repo:

https://github.com/danstoner/pandoc_samples

I can spit out a new PDF of my resume by editing the Markdown source in my favorite text editor (emacs), commiting the changes to git, and running one command:

$ pandoc --latex-engine=xelatex -V geometry=margin=.75in -V mainfont="TeX Gyre Heros" -o danstonerresume.pdf danstonerresume.md

 

I wanted to buy two laptops, one for me to run Linux and an identical one for a family member who needs to run Windows. We didn't want Windows 8 with a touchscreen, we wanted a regular laptop with Windows 7. If I were only buying a single laptop for myself I would very likely try to support one of the pre-installed Linux laptop vendors such as System76.

I found a really great deal on a refurbished Dell Latitude E7240 at Amazon.com that included 8GB of RAM and 256 GB SSD. (It appears that the price on this item fluctuates, I paid under $600.) Windows benefits tremendously from having the SSD, especially when running Windows Updates.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) worked great with no tweaking.

I am really enjoying the long battery life and the overall performance of the hardware under Linux.

I prefer Lubuntu, so I tried Lubuntu 14.04. On this hardware, Lubuntu 14.04 had some issues. I didn't get sound or WiFi out-of-the-box and the touchpad was a bit jumpy. I tried Lubuntu 15.04 and it worked great, except I didn't get any sound.

The audio hardware in the Dell Latitude E7240 looks like this to lspci:

I first announced my dailymile export tool in February 2015.

Announcing v1.2 of my dailymile export tool

In this most recent release of dailymile_export I have included a Perl 5 version of the script. The download bundle is available:

https://github.com/danstoner/dailymile_export/releases

The basic usage info of the perl script:

 

$ perl dailymile_export_to_csv.pl --help

Description:

  Script to download entries from the dailymile API for a particular user into a CSV.

Usage: dailymile_export_to_tsv.pl [OPTIONS]

  Parameters:
    --help, -h         Display this usage help.
    --username, -u USERNAME
                       The dailymile.com username to export (Required).
  Options:
    --debug, -d        Enable debug level output.
    --gear, -g         Enable download of gear info (not yet available)
    --maxpages, -m MAX
                       Maximum number of pages to fetch (to limit http requests during testing)

 

The github repo for the project is located:

https://github.com/danstoner/dailymile_export

If my dailymile export tool is useful to you, or you have suggestions or feedback, please leave a comment here or as a github issue.

 

The goal of this blog post is to document the steps needed to install and run Rakudo Perl, which is a "useful and usable distribution" of Perl 6

The #perl6 IRC channel on freenode has been very active the few times I popped in with questions and I was able to get them answered very quickly. Larry Wall announced that he wants to release Perl 6 by Christmas 2015 ( http://http://blogs.perl.org/users/shadowcat_mdk/2015/02/fosdem-2015-its-christmas.html ) and at this point it seems like the Perl 6 community is moving along on its merry way towards that goal.  The Perl 6 design documents are interesting ( http://design.perl6.org/ ), especially the Apocolypse docs which talk about the various aspects compared to Perl 5 and nice tidbits such as "Larry's First Law of Language Redesign."

Perl 6 even has its own logo:

Ubuntu and Debian already contain Perl 6 in their repositories. The 'rakudo' package description on Ubuntu 14.04 is "Perl 6 implementation on top of Parrot virtual machine".  I did not test this but it should be easily installable via:

I found two useful websites the other day while cleaning up some code that deals with various HTTP responses and status codes.

The first web site is HTTP Status Codes, which as you might be able to guess provides documentation about the various HTTP status codes:

http://httpstatus.es/

Screenshots:






The second site is the HTTP Client Testing Service, or httpbin. The httpbin site provides endpoints that return all of the various HTTP status codes as well as particular content type responses.

http://httpbin.org/

Screenshots:





Both websites have an accompanying github repository (you can find links on the sites themselves) if you would like to contribute or see the source code.