Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something

Touching the camel

Paul asked about getting back
to maintaining some Perl code after an absence of a few years. Since I
do a lot of Perl, here are some of the time-savers that I can’t live
without:

  • search.cpan.org allows you
    to search all the publicly-available modules on CPAN. There are few problems in Perl that
    haven’t been at least partially solved by a CPAN module. At the very
    least, make sure any web scripts use CGI.pm appropriately. I still see
    hand-rolled code that parses CGI arguments, never as well as CGI.pm would
    do.
  • PerlMonks is where you go
    to ask about your Perl problems, and find solutions. It’s worth
    learning a bit about the search options so you don’t ask a very old
    question again. This is me on
    PerlMonks, incidentally.
  • The Perl FAQ,
    included in the documentation as /perlfaq[1-9]?/. The Perl Cookbook is
    basically just the Perl FAQ on paper. Nice to hold, but you can’t
    search it the same way you can with perldoc -q <keyword>.

I would always advise Perl programmers to be
lazy. Not slothful, but spend a little time seeing if someone
has solved your problem before. Thus you can turn many routine
programming jobs into a small matter of configuration.

I would also advise learning some of the idiomatic Perl tricks,
like ‘... or die ...‘, inline
if/unless, careful use of
undef, and list operators like map and
grep. It’s not just because you’re likely to meet them in
everyday code, but they’re very convenient. Once you start to miss
them in other languages, you’ll know that you are One Of
Us.

Catching up with words

While I was back in Scotland, I met up with many of my old colleagues from Collins Dictionaries. We had a very pleasant evening with Ian Brookes, who is now the editor-in-chief of the Chambers dictionary.

Chambers is an unusual dictionary, in that it has a sprinkling of amusing definitions. One of these is mullet, defined as a hairstyle that is short at the front, long at the back, and ridiculous all round. There are also rare definitions, such as:

paneity n the state of being bread 

After reading that, I knew I had to buy the latest edition. Does this make me a word nerd?

Chambers publish a booklet on their dictionary, which is available online: Words, Wit and Wisdom (or local copy, since it’s fallen off their site: wit_wisdom).

Phó frenzy

pho xe lua

I love Vietnamese noodle soup. I love Vietnamese “cafe sua”, or coffee with condensed milk. But what I really like is filling in the order card. Everyone gets to squabble over what they want, what size, and what it all totals to.

But the food is so good.

learning about wind turbines

If you want to learn about wind energy, you might want to visit the Danish Wind Energy Association, the British Wind Energy Association, the American Wind Energy Association, the Centre for Alternative Technology, or the Canadian Wind Energy Association. All these folks have been proposing and living energy generation solutions for years.

wind-farm.org, however, is a hilarious mess of nonsense. It has been put together by a very few antis who managed to scrape up hosting and a CMS package. They also use that Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world… Margaret Mead quote that coincidentally appears on many pro-renewables sites. I’m half tempted to post to the forums under an assumed name, but I’m minded what Big Fred N. said: Battle Ye Not With Monsters, Lest Ye Become A Monster.

malicious deomnibusation of maternal relative’s maternal relative strictly forbidden

culled from memory, and several versions floating about on the net:

YE CANNAE SHOVE YER GRANNY AFF A BUS

Tune: She’ll be coming round the mountain
Lyrics: possibly by Matt McGinn, or Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor

Oh ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus,
Oh ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus,
Ye cannae shove yer granny
For she’s yer mammy’s mammy,
Ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus.

chorus:
Singing: I wull, if you wull, so wull I
I wull, if you wull, so wull I
Singing: I wull, if you wull
I wull, if you wull
I wull, if you wull, so wull I

Ye can shove yer ither granny aff a bus,
Ye can shove yer ither granny aff a bus,
Ye can shove yer ither granny
‘Cos she’s yer faither’s mammy
Ye can shove yer ither granny aff a bus.

Ye can shove yer Uncle Wullie aff a bus,
Ye can shove yer Uncle Wullie aff a bus,
Uncle Wullie’s like yer faither
A harum-scarum blether,
Ye can shove yer Uncle Wullie aff a bus.

Ye can shove yer Auntie Maggie aff a bus,
Ye can shove yer Auntie Maggie aff a bus,
Auntie Meg’s yer Faither’s sister,
She’s naethin’ but a twister,
Ye can shove yer Auntie Maggie aff a bus.

But ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus,
Ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus,
O ye cannae shove yer granny,
‘Cos she’s yer mammy’s mammy,
O ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus.

Glossary
blether: gossip
harum-scarum: scatterbrain, random
twister: liar
ither: other
naethin’: nothing

tearin’ out a tonsil

My throat may never recover, but it was fun to almost completely lose my voice last night at a singing circle. Yep, we’re a bunch of hairy old folkies, clutching our battered copies of Sing Out!. I don’t care what you think.

I did introduce two songs to the group, I wish I was a Mole in the Ground (Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s subterranean wishes explained in a how-not-to lesson about the subjunctive), and the perennial Glasgow favourite, Ye cannae shove yer Grannie aff a bus. I kind of had to busk it with the lyrics for the latter one.

4 beeeeeeeeeeeellion dollars?!

Yup, it’ll cost $4,000,000,000 to restore the Pickering nuclear power station to full operation. Oh, and five years, too. And all because of bungling management.

This isn’t just a day late and a dollar short. In 1997, the refurb was estimated at $780m and five years. Now, they’re saying more than 5× the cost and twice the time. Someone please nominate ousted OPG chair Bill Farlinger — author of such classics as The Commonsense Revolution and How to Privatize Hydro for Fun & (my) Profit — for the Giller Prize, since it’s Canada’s Premier Literary Prize for Fiction.

Look, I’ll make Ontario a deal. Give me the CAD 4bn, and I’ll give you enough renewable energy to make Pickering history. And I’ll only bungle on my own time. Deal?

mid summer, 1987

In UK exams, a “No Mention” was basically where you did so badly in an exam that they didn’t bother to mark it, and you weren’t actually listed as ever taking it.

I got a No Mention for my A-Level Special Maths. I got talked into sitting it by my mate Matthew, who is a maths genius. It was on my 18th birthday, my last day at school, and a gorgeous day.

When I opened the exam paper to see proofs of things involving frictionless pulleys and light, inextensible strings, something snapped. I wrote my name, then:

1) I refuse to answer this question on the grounds that it is silly.

I sat for a few minutes, watching the dust motes groove about in the light from the library windows, then walked out.

Matthew got a special distinction, by the way.

I would have liked to add that I went home and listened to “A Can of Bees” by The Soft Boys on my brother’s hi-fi. But I think he’d already left home by then, taking his record collection with him.

car free in canada

It’s fairly easy to do without one if you make your housing and
working arrangements around it. I’ve been car-free since 1996, but
we’re mostly urbanites, so this may not work for everyone.

Most of my ideas come from a great UK magazine called AtoB.

  • We live very near a TTC subway station
  • I cycle during the summer, take transit at other times. A TTC
    pass for $90/month for an annual subscription just can’t be
    beat.
  • I have a Brompton folding bike (amongst far too many others, to
    Catherine’s eternal dismay) which rides well, and plays well with
    others on crowded transit.
  • Catherine can use rental cars (I don’t have my Canadian licence
    yet, for various annoying bureaucratic reasons). They’re cheaper
    than running a car if you only need them now and again.
  • Taxis work for getting big stuff from stores. (Unless you’re
    buying an eMac computer, which comes in a box too big to fit in a
    taxi …)
  • All of our furniture was delivered, at less cost per trip than
    even hiring a U-Haul.
  • We get most of our groceries delivered from Grocery Gateway
  • We’ve considered signing up for AutoShare, a car sharing service in Toronto. A few of our friends use it, and find it convenient and
    reasonable.

pathologically polite

It’s 9am, TTC subway southbound at St George. The train is packed (the crowd roared like a lion… no, wait, that was Wesley Willis). It’s the usual crowd — UofT students, Queen’s Park parliament types, downtown suits — not an elderly, infirm or pregnant person in sight. Everyone’s muffled in their winter gear, and there’s no room to move.

And there are two empty seats. No-one will sit in them, ‘cos they’re too polite, or too passive-aggressive to let anyone sit in them.

To compound this, they are window seats, and there’s someone in the aisle seats. AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

Am I a really bad person for wanting to sit down?