in a project and watching as 1000s of successful tests scroll
by, culminating in the
All tests successful.
message, gives me the same thrill
of satisfaction as when I used to paint houses, and having finished a long day of sweaty labor
at sanding and chipping old paint off, I could stand back and survey the structure,
primed and ready for a fresh coat of paint. It's the anticipation that thrills, in the
same way that a trip to the grocery store and a full fridge, or several loads of clean
laundry folded and stowed safely away in drawers, thrills me. The knowing that I am prepared,
belt cinched tight, all tests successful.
So if we're feeling assaulted or overwhelmed by a proliferation of personal narratives,
it's because we are; but the greatest profusion of these life stories isn't to be found
in bookstores. If anything, it's hard not to think that a lot of the outrage directed
at writers and publishers lately represents a displacement of a large and genuinely
new anxiety, about our ability to filter or control the plethora of unreliable
narratives coming at us from all directions. In the street
or in the blogosphere, there are no editors, no proofreaders, and no fact-checkers--the
people at whom we can at least point an accusing finter when the old-fashioned kind
of memoir betrays us.
My work colleagues and I just spent an intense day and a half effectively locked in a room, talking
about our work together and vision for where we want to be. I was reminded
of this piece
by Ken Auletta on the current state of the media vis-a-vis President Obama. A lot of what he has to say
about the impact of the internet, the pace of the news cycle and the breakdown of the 20th century business
model around journalism is part of my daily grind.
David Owen's piece The
Dime Store Floor is a bit of nasal nostalgia. The sense of smell is a vivid memory evoker. A couple
of summers ago I walked into a lumber yard's warehouse and had a sensory hit so vivid that for a moment
I was 8 years old in my great-grandfather's woodshop/garage next door to the house where I grew up.
Something about the old wood and sawdust and heat. The force of that memory surprised me. Owen's piece is like that too.
E. O. Wilson's fiction piece in the New Yorker reads like a National Geographic article, not the kind of fiction I expect from the
New Yorker. But then, that makes it the kind of thing I expect to read in the New Yorker, which is a wide-ranging
publication. I liked the piece.
I was at the Apple Store just now getting a bad RAM chip replaced in my MacBook.
All in all it was a very pleasant experience, and aside from the inconvenience
of having to drive 40 minutes round-trip for a 20 minute errand, pretty painless.
I took the bad RAM chip, which I had identified and yanked from my machine a couple
of weeks ago, in an anti-static bag I had in my desk drawer. My desk is full of them,
along with spare parts and adapters and such, many for machines that haven't been
manufactered or supported for over a decade. I'm a packrat for old computer junk,
though to my credit I have tossed/recycled lots and lots of old "beige" computer parts in the
last few years, especially now that the city/county has good recycling for that kind
of thing.
Anyway, when I handed the bag with the bad chip in it to the young man at the Apple Store,
I didn't think anything of it, but on returning the bag to me he joked that it was a
vintage piece. I chuckled and replied, Well, I'm feeling kind of vintage these days.
The bag had the original label attached: 32MB Apple Quadra and Centris Series.
The chip I had replaced was a standard-issue 2GB size, roughly 1000x more memory than
the bag had originally held.
You know you're getting old in this business when you can distinctly remember the thrill
of a 32MB chip of RAM and how much pure computing power it held.
It's been a long week, culminating today in Frozen Perl 2010, a Perl conference for and by Perl hackers, here in the Twin Cities. I gave two talks at today's conference,
one on Swish3 and
the other on Devel::NYTProf and
Search::Tools. Both talks seemed well-received.
In the process of preparing the talks I also released a few new, related
modules to CPAN this week:
Search::Query now has support for SQL and SWISH Dialects. I hope to add
KinoSearch and Xapian dialects soon. The Search::Query::Parser now has
(undocumented and experimental) support for range queries, so that you can say:
foo=( 1..4 )
and that'll be expanded to
foo=( 1 OR 2 OR 3 OR 4 )
when the Dialect query object is stringified. Handy for things like ranges of
dates, which is how I am using it as $work.
Search::Tools, SWISH::API::*
New releases of these older modules as well, with some bug fixes and
refactoring to support the Search::Query.
So, yes. A busy week.
I enjoyed hearing other folks' talks today at Frozen Perl. There was a good
variety: pack/unpack, Unicode, i18n and best practice-related presentations. I
met some new people, renewed friendships with folks I already knew, and drank
lots of free coffee. The cookies were good too.
So I don't surf youtube very much. Or rather, only when my kids are wanting to watch
Wallace and Gromit trailers. So I'm always waaaay behind the times. That said, this video
is a riot.
For the last ten years I have used the color #E3BF70#fddc8e (hex) as my terminal background color. It's a darkish amber color
that is very easy on the eyes. I'm recording it here because every year or so I have to set up a new system
and always have to eyeball the settings till I get something close to what I am used to.
Update: 26 Jan 2009
Here's my .Xdefaults file for my xterm under X11 on OS X.
Contextual Query Language is defined
by the Library of Congress. I discovered it via CQL::Parser.
Brian Cassidy is involved, so it must be good.
I immediately thought "oh shit. Now my new Search::Query module feels late-to-the-party." But on further reading,
I think a CQL dialect in Search::Query makes some sense.
Search::Query is a SQL::Translator-like module for free-text search. I coded it up this week after brewing the idea for some many months. I'm imagining it now as a next-generation Search::QueryParser::SQL, for contexts beyond SQL. Example: I have a query string that works with Xapian and want to convert it to one that works with Swish-e 2.x or KinoSearch. Just parse it with Search::Query::Parser and assign it a target dialect and then call $query->stringify to get the translated version out.
Saw David Rawlings and Gillian Welch in concert just before Christmas.
Heard this interview just now. I like
the record even more after hearing Dave talk about it.
I know the people who read this blog generally do not care about Perl at all (hi Mom!)
but I spend a great deal of time writing code in the language and talking with other
members of the Perl community about our common projects, and so like anyone who has lived
in the Perl world for any length of time, I have an opinion about Perl6. For those not
in the know, Perl5 is the current version of Perl and has been around for over 10 years.
Perl6 is the next major version evolution, but it has been in development for nearly the same
length of time. The problem is that 10 years is a long time for a computer language release
to gestate and many folks whose opinions count (i.e. managers) see that lack of a release
as a sign that Perl Is Dead and not a good choice for their next programming project. So (the
argument goes) Perl6's vaporware status makes it hard for Perl5 programmers to find jobs, because
the "if it ain't new it ain't sexy" ethos of technology counts for more than it should with those
making the money decisions.
The real problem isn't that Perl6 hasn't been released. The real problem is the name Perl6. Perl6
is not a single executable "thing" like Perl5 is; it's an umbrella for several different projects. Right
now I can sit down at just about any modern Unix-like computer and type 'perl' and write some code
that runs. Perl6 doesn't work quite that way. It's a whole new language, not just a major revision to
an existing language. So the version number 5 vs 6 is misleading. That's the problem. Perl is alive and well.
Perl5 continues to be maintained and developed. I get lots of work done every day using it.
Reading through Matt Trout's blog
just now I found this wonderful quote:
Because in free software a question in the form of a well thought out patch is one that almost always gets a constructive answer.
Yes. That's just it. A patch -- real, applicable code -- indicates genuine forethought and effort and I will reward
that kind of conversation every time with equal effort.
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