Just because I can draw on my Palm doesn’t mean I should:
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| a ram in a v-neck | badly drawn bob (the angry flower) |
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| fish best heart protector | stewart’s view of norvin |
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| critter asleep under snow | stewart fell downstairs |
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| heid! | whose leg is this? |
We were talking about Leonhard Euler, the 18th century polymath, who pretty much covered calculus, economics, music, solid mechanics and graph theory. There just aren’t generalists like that any more.
To the discussion Chris (not the arena racer Chris Florian, but his OANDA namesake) added: “… and he also stopped things squeaking!”
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:
/perlfaq[1-9]?/. The Perl Cookbook isperldoc -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.
… calculate the number of seconds in the current year using JavaScript:
function seconds_in_this_year() {
// get length of this year by subtracting "Jan 1st, /This Year/"
// from "Jan 1st, /Next Year/"
var now = new Date();
var current_year = now.getFullYear();
var jan_first = new Date(current_year, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0);
var jan_next = new Date(current_year + 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0);
return (jan_next.getTime() - jan_first.getTime()) / 1000;
}
There will be no more after today. A strange feeling, like half-hearing The Polyphonic Spree from someone’s window.
For the first time, my entire sympatico Inbox was spam this morning. How depressing.
Am I glad I’ve installed MT-Blacklist. I’m getting several denied comments a day. Most of these are from IP addresses 213.91.217.*, which if traceroute is to believed, are in Bulgaria.
Another weird thing is that someone’s been searching for bigha
on my site. Now, I occasionally have bike things on it, but I’ve never written about Bigha, the recumbent that emerged from the wreckage of BikeE. Is this some form of super-stealth advertising?
I guess I can pull this résumé from toronto.craigslist.org, then:
From early April, I will be a contracting engineer for Zephyr North, a wind consultancy in Burlington. It’s taken me 7 years to get back into wind energy, but it’ll be good to be back.
Oh yeah, I’ll be working in Fortran again. Strange to think that my dad was also a Fortran programmer…
Do you think we should tell Travellex that there hasn’t been a currency called Scottish Pounds since the early 18th century?
I met a big dog today. Thor is a 2½ year old english mastiff, and weighs nearly 110kg. I’ve seen smaller Shetland ponies.
I like mastiffs, despite my paperboy experience. One of the houses of Blackfarm Gardens had a huge mastiff, who would lurk under the window until she heard me coming. Then she’s leap up against the window, scaring the living crap out of me every day.
Glass has a limited fatigue life, though. One day, she tried her stunt, and the window gave way, showering me with glass and cutting her quite badly. We both recovered better than the window did.
Uhoh, my sister’s joined a prog-rock band: Tr3nity. Is there any hope of deprogramming? ☺
The Epson R-D1 Digital Rangefinder Camera. Yes, I can use my existing lenses on it.
If you have multiple documents open as tabs in the one Mozilla window, you can bookmark the group of tabs if you right-click over the tab bar, and select Bookmark This Group of Tabs
.
Next time you open that bookmark, you’ll get all the pages opening in the one window, exactly as they were. Neato mosquito!
At a Green Economics meeting last night, we heard from councillors Paula Fletcher and Glenn De Baeremaeker about the Toronto Computer Leasing Inquiry. It seems that the city is stuck with approximately 14000 Windows-NT class machines that it can no longer use, as Microsoft will not support its operating system.
I need to find out more on the specs of these machines, but I think it would be fair to say that they would be functional for most office applications with Linux. This has only been hinted at by other writers, but at least it could provide working, virus-proof computers to city staff at very little extra expense.
This could be something that the Toronto Linux User Group could look at.
Despite what I hoped when I said Don’t be dead, Mr. Spalding
, it has been confirmed tha Spalding Gray’s Body Found Washed Ashore on Brooklyn Waterfront.
