Garden Of Blog

I made Day 3 my “future of Perl” day. Last year I was impressed by Patrick Michaud’s session on the Parrot Compiler Toolkit and decided to sit in for him again. I’m not sure whether I wasn’t paying attention last year, or if Parrot has come along a lot since then, but I almost felt like I could start writing my own language using Parrot. That would be neat. They seem to have lowered the barrier to entry by abstracting away some common portions of compiler writing.

Then Damian Conway and Larry Wall did a short update on the latest design changes for Perl 6, some of which seemed kind of neat. Then Patrick Michaud again, this time with Jerry Gay to talk about Rakudo which is the Parrot implementation of a compiler for Perl 6.

All of this and more, and this evening I am a bit tired.

The highlight of Day 2, for me, was certainly Damian Conway’s “Perl Worst Practices” presentation, which was as funny as it was challenging. Damian spent several hours deconstructing his own SelfGOL program, written as an entry to a Perl obfuscation contest. It was nothing short of brilliant: an object lesson in what not to do when writing software for readability and maintainability, and simultaneously a work of art.

In the afternoon was the Catalyst session, which only left me pensive as to whether I have made the correct choices in my work.

Here I am at OSCON in Portland, Oregon… a programmer’s gathering more massive than the Perl-specific YAPC::NA I traveled to Houston for last year. I was still able to fill the entire week with Perl-related sessions to attend here at OSCON. I am currently in the Perl Security tutorial which started as a review (for me) of Perl’s “taint” function and is ending with a whole bunch of stuff I’ll most certainly need to review in the coursebook later.

It was a pleasant surprise that this morning’s “Mastering Perl” was mostly a review of concepts I was already familiar with. I decided to implement one of them, DBI profiling, in the app I’m currently working on, to see how long each database call is taking. Performance really isn’t an issue at this point, but it’s nice to have the hooks in place, especially in my common modules, to check things out anytime I need to. Now I can turn this on easily in all my apps.

Portland, incidentally, kicks Houston’s ass. While Houston is a disaster of urban sprawl, Portland seems just the opposite; just a mile or two out of town and you are back in a rich rural environment that seems intentionally underdeveloped. Perhaps the dry Texan landscape just didn’t inspire its settlers to preserve much of what they found. Portland’s rain forest vegetation seems more worth protecting at some level, although I know that logging in the northwest is a constant controversy.

What next? Better safe than sorry I guess. We ought to throw the rest of our public money at permanently banning the letter “F” from license plates nationwide. That will surely fix this and other potential problems.

… these. What does that say about us? Thanks to Dave for the pointer!

[note: one, mine, is in the shop and may have seen its last action... after much abuse from me.]

[note #2: okay we actually have two 96 Camrys, not 1990-1994s, but they're just as boring I assure you.]

The Celts did it! They staged the best season-to-season comeback ever, and won it all last night. Ray Allen kicks ass. They all kick ass.

These are always the sweetest victories. At the beginning of the season, the future of the team was quite uncertain. The team had regrouped and reformed, coming off a horrendous record in the previous year. Only with that kind of a recent past could they emerge the triumphant underdogs, putting the “best basketball player in the world” in his rightful place: on an early plane back to L.A.

My marriage is kind of like that. We’ve hit some epic lows that have threatened to define us. But they really don’t. We’re always making comebacks. Nothing feels better than a comeback.

Jessica is my sweetheart, the fated mother of my children, my living archetype of femininity, the person who makes me feel whole day after day. She goes out of her way to make me happy in countless ways, accommodating my every eccentricity. And most of all she makes me proud (how could I land such a lady?), giving me a constant +10 buff to Self-Esteem (imagining, for a moment, my psyche as a cluster of World of Warcraft statistics)…

I’m hoping we can get free for dinner and movie soon. Anyone want a couple kiddos fo a night?

Hope you like the new look of Garden Of Blog. Thanks to Ed for discovering what turned out to be a hack on the vulnerable PHP template I was using. No Garden for awhile there.

I also realized that I didn’t necessarily want everything I post here on gardenofblog.com to propagate to mindmined.com, although I thought the idea was nifty a few months ago. I only want to cross-post in some instances. I’d like the freedom to write complete drivel in the Garden without always defacing the community site with my garbage. I’ll send this one over there however.

I’m actually pretty pleased with the new version of WordPress, because I can add ‘mindmined’ as a tag without promoting it to a category, yet the tags show as category objects in the RSS feed. So I can detect that on the mindmined.com side and only pull the ones I tag for cross-posting. Thanks to the author of XML::FeedPP.

Let’s see, what’s coming up. Justin’s birthday is coming up! What does he want?

Sorry, but I haven’t felt like talking much. It’s not just that I’m lazy. I’m not sure if it was Larry Wall who first said that a programmer should be lazy, but there it is. It’s a good lazy. You spend some time thinking things through before working, and end up needing to do far less. You program away your own work. So I’ve just been thinking things through before writing to you.

What else have I been up to? Chillin’ with the fam. Playing World of Warcraft. Organizing my music collection in iTunes and tagging everything correctly. Banging on my apps for work. But mostly I’ve been lazy. Thinking things through. I have noticed my material ambitions waning sharply over the past several years, partially due to feeling more secure in my job. I’m allowing myself not to have any kind of backup plan. A professor told me confidently today that UNH is recession proof. A jaded corporate refugee like myself has a hard time really believing that, but I’ve nonetheless grown pleasantly complacent in the moonlighting department. Contract work has lost its appeal. I’m preaching the Lazy.

Don’t count me out for Great Things in the future, but right now I’m going to pop another album in the iTunes and kick back. Let’s see… it’s going to be David Bowie “The Singles”, if you want to join me.

This has been your Garden of Blog update.

I failed the Robot Test.

Created by OnePlusYou

via Pun Salad, who passed the test.

Looks like the silliness here is mostly over.

The judge took away their name, but we’ve still got their number. Support the WikiLeaks defense fund; set data free.

…. as I am.

Here are some great images echoing the sentiment.