“Faces”

—plicease at 19 May 2012 12:35

“Just watched Tobik the cat open a bedroom door and it totally reminded me of when that Utah Raptor opened the door in that movie.”

—plicease at 19 May 2012 08:27

“I am on the metro headed for New Jersey”

—plicease at 18 May 2012 17:50

“On the platform”

—plicease at 18 May 2012 17:50

“It's big, it's heavy, it's wood.”

—plicease at 13 May 2012 11:33

“@plicease http://qalib.ru/a/chto-takoe-podshofe”

—drkryl at 28 April 2012 22:27

“Lena says there is no way to say "tipsy" po-russki.”

—plicease at 28 April 2012 18:58

“Played subroc on Coleco Vision @yestercades in Red Bank.”

—plicease at 28 April 2012 14:31

I have an overseas coworker named Ivan, and yes he is terrible. I have another overseas coworker named Alexander and he's great. That is all for now.

“Windows, Shockwave and Chrome seem to be engaged in a contest among themselves as to who can leak more memory on my PC right now.”

—plicease at 23 April 2012 10:26

On Saturday we had a very nice picnic in Rock Creek Park. Sunday it rained. All Day Long.

“Cracked my FRIZ today which I got in high school and has been across the Pacific twice with me.”

—plicease at 21 April 2012 11:22

“I didn't hide them. I put them in a safe place in case I was searched.”

—plicease at 19 April 2012 19:04

“Yes. There weren't enough lifeboats. I know. Can we stop talking about it now?”

—plicease at 15 April 2012 15:36

“I found another rusty old box”

—plicease at 15 April 2012 11:19

“I found a rusty box”

—plicease at 15 April 2012 10:34

“brand new unicode code”

—plicease at 14 April 2012 11:10

“I am going to be a Perl nerd today.”

—plicease at 14 April 2012 07:47

“Also: mango margarita is not bad”

—plicease at 13 April 2012 21:02

“Ribs + Fajitas + me = fullness + contentment”

—plicease at 13 April 2012 21:01

“Happy Friday everyone :)”

—plicease at 13 April 2012 09:42

Defending Washington from the South.

“ruby gem hell: it's like dll hell only not as intuitive and with fewer useful error messages.”

—plicease at 10 April 2012 17:03

“2x new 2TB HD. 1TB on each is for photos + mirror of photos. 600GB for backuppc. Rest is for random VMs.”

—plicease at 9 April 2012 20:36

“Welcome to our new downstairs. Er. Really?”

—plicease at 9 April 2012 19:19

“We drive by baseball stadium and Lena wants to watch cricket.”

—plicease at 7 April 2012 13:01

“I am unsure if it is portable power or some other kind of power.”

—plicease at 7 April 2012 08:51

“Now your playing with power.”

—plicease at 7 April 2012 08:44

this:

• www.facebook.com/BeautifulandBaldBarbie

reminded of of her:

• en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Ilia

They were talking about the beautiful and bald Barbie campaign on NPR.

“The fish sits on the mountain top as the wind blows.”

—plicease at 6 April 2012 07:46

Here is an excerpt from a recording my mum made for nanna and grandpa in 1980 when we were living in Connecticut. It is a moment in time shortly after arriving in the United States and long before I ever came to terms with the fact that in English there is a name to meaning hash collision with my name.

I got some

Hello I mean

Hello folks!

I got Graham Crackers I had them for lunch

(mum) Breakfast.

Break- break- breakfast and lunch

(mum) We don't have them for lunch, Graham Crackers are for Breakfast cereal.

I was really talking about Graham Cracker biscuits.

(mum) Oh, that's right, they do have Graham Cracker biscuits too, don't they.

(mum) There's lots of Graham Crackers in America in all sorts of different shapes and sizes aren't there.

Yeah

(mum) I wonder why they named them after you?

Yeah. I wonder.

That's my name.

AND I LIKE YOU AND THIS IS THE POINT I LIKE YOU.

I sound almost wistful when I say “Yeah. I wonder.”

The theme of my liking my grandparents is common throughout the tapes. The significance of this passage is that in Australia they don't have Graham Crackers (or Dr Pepper) whereas they do exist in America (but they don't have Vegemite)^[1]. I believed for a long time when I was younger that my parents had made a terrible mistake in naming me Graham because kids used to tease me calling me by calling me Graham Crackers. Things were happier when I figured out that kids teased me because they could get a rise out of me, and the best thing was not to let their jeers bother me. Now of course I love my name and you couldn't pay me enough to part with it. Even in Australia it is not common amongst people my age.

Mum was here for the weekend. We talked about a lot of things. We talked about the bullying culture in Australia. My mum says that Australia has a bullying culture. I mentioned the film that has been released here lately without a rating: Bully. One of the people involved in the film said that in New Jersey (for example) they have very comprehensive set of laws and procedures to stamp out bullying in the schools, but they are not (in the film makers eyes at least) effective. He said that you need to get the kids themselves to police themselves. For bystanders to say “dude, that is not cool.” It sounds like the right goal, though I am not sure how you get from here to there. Mum described how she was trying to change the environment in her organization to one based on teamwork rather than every-man-for-himself.

The idea is that you don't make a comprehensive list of rules about how you should or should not behave, but you instead take a couple of steps back and remind yourself that we're on the same side here, how can we work together. It's not easy accomplishing that. A few weeks after starting at NetCon, PHP Guy said something disparaging about Women and Perl. I take offense at both, but I should have at least said something about his being demeaning of women, because it is comments like that which contribute to a hostile work environment. When I was working on my presentation recently, one of the Professional Services guys tried to bully me, but I didn't bite. I told my boss about it and he of course completely dismissed my concerns because my boss is a jerk. Interestingly, the guy who tried to bully me was an Australian, so maybe my mum is right.

1. it's also worth knowing that in Australian English the word biscuits is used when in American English you'd say cookie

Well played Google and Square, but I am pretty sure there should be more desert in Australia.

“Delta has great service. LOL APRIL FOOLS.”

—plicease at 1 April 2012 15:53

“Nice meal and good service at Sam Harry's almost makes me forget how bad Delta's service is. Almost.”

—plicease at 1 April 2012 15:42

“Attention Delta employees: no passport required when flying from Washington to Salt Lake City.”

—plicease at 1 April 2012 15:04

“Delta has the worst service. Do not fly Delta. That is all.”

—plicease at 1 April 2012 14:46

There are three things on my bumper. The Penguin represents the cool collected logic of winter, the Onion represents home cooking and a sense of family, the Dirt represents mother earth from which all things are formed. Well, actually the Penguin is named Tux and is the spokesbird for the Linux kernel, the Onion is a reference to the Perl programming language^[1] and the dirt is simply because I am too lazy to clean my car. The only thing missing from my bumper are Decepticon and NPR logos. My mum is visiting and she noted the differing organizational structure that Lena and I employ with regard to our desks in the computer room. I favour the “strata” or “geologic” organizational scheme, while Lena prefers a more structured approach. Mum and I are going to the Smithsonian tomorrow to maybe play Pac-Man and maybe Flower. Lena and I went to The Art of Video Games exhibit a few weeks ago. All of those games I grew up with^[2] are now in a museum.

1. just as an aside, depending on context a onion, a camel or a butterfly can represent Perl, but I have never seen a pearl representing Perl
2. well at least some of them

I needed an equivalent to Perl's FindBin in ruby. The usual explanation given by rubiest is thus:

File.dirname __FILE__

This badly misunderstands the nuance of FindBind, and is wrong in two important details for my needs:

1. I want to find the directory for which the program is, not the current ruby source file (hence equivalent to FindBin).
2. I am sending this path to another program and relative paths will not do, which this construct could easily generate depending on how the program was run (again, FindBin handles this).

The correct appears answer is:

File.dirname File.expand_path $0

There are probably some caveats and it probably isn't portable (FindBin is), but it will be good enough for my needs.

Developing the same library in two separate languages is interesting, as you see relative merits of each. I miss this construct from Perl:

sub foo {
  local $0 = 'some test value';
  ...
}

local is used less often in modern Perl than my, but it still has utility, here I am temporarily assigning a value to $0, and don't have to worry about forgetting to restore the value. This is critical if foo is a non-trivial subroutine and returns from multiple locations. I personally find the scoping rules in Perl to be much more powerful than those in Ruby, and more expressive of intent if used carefully. Ruby's scoping rules are certainly less complicated, and thus easier to learn.

C Ruby 1.9.3 has a slightly less rubbish garbage collector than in previous versions. Unfortunately it is still not copy-on-write friendly. C Ruby has proper OS level threads, but they do not utilise more than one CPU core because of the GIL. Perl threads are pretty rubbish as well because each thread is its own interpreter, and this wastes a lot of memory, but at least they are properly concurrent, and at least forking lots of Perl workers is a real option on UNIX because the kernel support copy-on-write.

I really like blocks, closures and meta programming in Ruby, they remind me of some of my favourite features of the Perl programming language.

“Lena plays Flower”

—plicease at 17 March 2012 12:05

“...and now it's in a museum.”

—plicease at 17 March 2012 12:05

“At the smithsonian”

—plicease at 17 March 2012 11:35

“It's like that episode where soundwave has a goatee and the Autobots are evil.”

—plicease at 17 March 2012 10:32

“Idea for solitare app: only deal a winnable hand once the user upgrades to "pro".”

—plicease at 7 March 2012 14:18

“I will not tell you who I voted for in the primary, but I will repeat the talking points like a parrot for my candidate.”

—plicease at 24 February 2012 08:21

“@lenviol er”

—plicease at 17 February 2012 10:22

“Log onto google plus and it says g+ is more fun with friends. Guess they are telling me I don't have enough friends.”

—plicease at 15 February 2012 08:27

“Would people would be up in arms if it were Muslim orgs that were asked to play by secular rules when they operate in secular contexts?”

—plicease at 5 February 2012 11:47

“RT @wilw: If your pro-#SOPA argument starts out, "I don't know anything about this, but..." just stop right there. Your argument is invalid.”

—plicease at 25 January 2012 23:42

“Doing my taxes and weirdly enough can't get my rate down to 13.9%.”

—plicease at 26 January 2012 20:32

“If Newt Gingrich becomes president and Tony Abbot becomes PM, where do we go then?”

—plicease at 24 January 2012 19:59

“Happy New Year to all Water Dragons like my parents and everyone else from a Fiery Dragon.”

—plicease at 23 January 2012 12:55

“They just played a chiptune from original NES TNMT on Kojo Nnamdi for no apparent reasons sans explanation.”

—plicease at 19 January 2012 12:23

“Going outside now and I realize strangely I can't wear shorts and a t-shirt.”

—plicease at 8 January 2012 14:57

“Last lunch down under: forgot nobody opens for lunch before 12 here.”

—plicease at 6 January 2012 20:54

I don't think I have ever looked forward to going to Australia so much. I think maybe because this is the first time I was coming back since living here for four years. Living here wasn beutiful, but sometimes not quite right. I told my mum that I wanted to live in Australia for three months of the year with more conviction than usual. Maybe in a year or so I can make an arrangement with NetCon for this. Ideally it would be before my mum sells grandma's house so I'd have a place to live. I think we'd keep the house so long as there was someone to live there. I was living there until I moved back to the states.

I have a few more days left down under. I've done everything that I wanted to do on this trip and I have enjoyed every day here. I'll be ready to go back when it is time.

“Tomorrow rain.”

—plicease at 4 January 2012 02:56

“So far the New Year has brought Lena and I three glorious days at the beach and four swims in the ocean.”

—plicease at 4 January 2012 02:56