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.

I have been using dailymile as my fitness training log since 2010. I have now logged over 1500 entries and 6600 miles total. I don't want to lose that information. I would like to be able to do more advanced anlalytics on my personal fitness data than the dailymile web app provides.

The built-in dailymile.com export feature is abysmal. The file generated includes only a small number of fields (date, activity_type, distance, time, felt, elevation_gain).  Seriously, they include elevation gain but do not include the name of the workout or the description?

Because of these limitations, I contacted dailymile support. The response was something along the lines of "you could always write your own tool using the API." So I did.

Announcing v1.1 of my dailymile export tool. The current version is written in Python.  The software archive can be downloaded from:

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

The github repo for the project is located:

https://github.com/danstoner/dailymile_export

Here is the basic usage info:

$ python dailymile_export_to_tsv.py -h
usage: dailymile_export_to_tsv.py [-h] [-d] [-g] username

Script to download entries from the dailymile API for a particular user into a
tab-delimited file.

positional arguments:
  username     The dailymile.com username of the account to export.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help   show this help message and exit
  -d, --debug  Enable debug level logging.
  -g, --gear   Retrieve gear data also.

 

Here is some sample output of the running script and the generated output file: