John Bokma
freelance Perl programmer

Hacking and Hiking in Mexico

Xalapa, Veracruz | 15 comments

My name is John Bokma, and this is my web site. I am a freelance Perl programmer, born in the Netherlands, but currently living with Esme and our daughter Alice in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico.

Two mysql tips

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Today, while working on a Python project that uses a MySQL database, I was wondering if there was a way to execute the SQL statements in a text file from within the mysql client program. And yes there is.

While searching for a solution using Google I also stumbled on how to change the mysql client program's prompt, for example to also make it show the currently selected database.

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Alice broke her arm

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Today I was woken up by Esme calling my name several times out loud. I jumped out of bed and learned that Alice had broken her arm while jumping down the stairs! Panic at first, but shortly after we were on our way to the hospital.

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Books and baby scorpions

Monday, July 20, 2009
Two Vaejovis cf. punctatus scorpion babies.

In the afternoon Esme spotted the mailman at our gate. We still have no doorbell, so a good thing she did. I went down and he told me that a package had arrived for me at the post office. Soon after Esme went out to do some shopping and to pick up the package, which we both assumed to be more books.

When she came back it turned out we were right: six more books from my wish list; thanks to my Perl help in exchange for books service. Maybe some ideas for your own book wish list?

In the evening I again checked the terrarium of one scorpion, Vaejovis cf. punctatus, that had gone from view shortly after we arrived in our new house in Coatepec over a month ago. I suspected that it was gravid, and was gone from view to give birth. And when I accidentally moved a stone I had avoided to move the past week, it turned out that I was right; a much thinner adult scorpion ran away from under the stone, and I saw several tiny scorpions crawling around at the underside of the stone I just had lifted...

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Teleworking

Thursday, July 9, 2009

A project I am currently working on requires me to connect to a remote subversion server using a fixed IP address on my end. Since I can't rely on my internet service provider, Megacable, to always hand me the same IP address when I turn on my cable modem (unless I pay for it) - yes, I turn off my computer at night - I needed a solution involving a proxy with a fixed IP address.

I do have a fixed IP address: the IP address of this site, currently hosted with Slicehost on a 256 slice; a virtual private server (VPS). And I can set up a SOCKS5 proxy using ssh on my end on this VPS. Since it's possible to configure a proxy in the configuration file of the subversion client on my development computer it sounds like this solves the problem, which it most likely does. But I didn't want to modify this configuration file, and having to add exceptions which shouldn't be proxied, etc. because it sounded like something that would bite me one day. So after a bit more reading I found a solution to my liking: proxychains.

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Python calling

Monday, June 29, 2009

Today I needed a quick solution for displaying an image from a Python program and allowing a user to enter a description of the image. The easiest way to do, or so I thought, was to spawn an external image viewer program and kill it after the Python program had received the description. The spawning was easy: I used the subprocess module. But killing took some testing and reading ...

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Software and the Internet

Nature

Miscellaneous

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