Archives for 2008 (Lifestream)

• Sep 8, 2008, 11:39 PM -04:00

  Comments and Trackbacks Have Been Deactivated

  When I started this blog, I didn't expect very much in the way of comments or trackbacks. I also didn't expect any spam, which means I didn't take any precautions. I mean, how would anybody even know about this blog?

  Silly, silly me.

  So, I have turned off comments and trackbacks until I figure out a reasonably reliable way of separating the spam from the ham. This will probably entail a bit of a rewrite of YAWT as I figure out a way to do this in a clean and modular manner. Why make it easy on myself when I can make it hard?

  Read more »

• Jul 6, 2008, 7:00 PM -04:00

  Error Handling in Perl

  Okay, this won't be the most exciting entry in the world. There are several different ways of logging or recording errors and warnings in perl, and I find I easily get confused. So this entry will serve as a very, very basic reference for me. Other people may find it useful. Or not.

  Read more »

• Apr 22, 2008, 4:34 PM -04:00

  Hockey and Looting

  This will be a short entry. The Montreal Canadians won the playoffs last night and some fans took this as an excuse to act like criminals.

  I just wanted to voice my extreme displeasure, for what it's worth. It's a game people. Get a fucking clue. And we won, morons.

  Read more »

• Apr 9, 2008, 1:50 AM -04:00

  French as an Emergent Property

  In a previous blog entry, I described various solar system simulations I played around with in high school. These were perhaps more properly termed "gravity simulations" since what I simulated was not a solar system per se but rather Newton's laws of gravity and motion as applied to a bunch of swirling rocks, which would produce a solar system if the conditions were set up correctly. The orbits that you saw in these programs appeared naturally out of the math, as emergent properties of the equations - they were not explicitly programmed.

  Read more »

• Apr 6, 2008, 8:00 PM -04:00

  New Blog

  So I got myself a new weblog, hosted on Netfirms. I'm not particularly enjoying the Netfirms experience, but it was only $10 for a year and I get SSH access. They're quite skimpy with the perl modules, forcing me to install a bunch of stuff in my home directory.

  I'm using a homemade blogging program because I got tired of blosxom's ugliness and I didn't really like what I saw of Bryar. I'm calling it YAWT in my head - short for Yet Another Weblog Tool. I'm hoping to extend it at some point to handle photo galleries in a seamless and efficient manner - my last attempt to write an online photo manager was quite slow. We'll see.

  Read more »

• Feb 27, 2008, 2:52 PM -05:00

  Why Watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Is Not a Waste of Time

  I've been recently spending a significant amount of my free time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" on DVD. I never watched them when they were on the air, but now I'm catching up.

  This has earned me accusations of being hypocritical, since I apparently tend to be critical of people who spend (what I consider to be) too much time watching TV.

  Read more »

• Feb 13, 2008, 4:31 PM -05:00

  Scoping in Perl

  I just read a very clear tutorial on Perl scoping mechanisms:

  http://perl.plover.com/FAQs/Namespaces.html

  I often get bitten by scoping issues but unfortunately (or fortunately?) it's usually easier in Perl to work around your problem than to understand the reasons behind it.

  One part I found interesting was the section labelled "The Current Package" which explains the use of the package command in Perl. There is a tendency (or, at least, I have a tendency) to conflate the use of the Perl package command and, say, the use of the Java package declaration because they are often used to achieve the same effect, namely the separation of namespaces, and also because, by convention, they are used in a syntactically similar way. Because of this, it is easy to forget that the package command in Perl is just that: a command. You can call it from anywhere, multiple time from the same file even, and the effect is simply to change the current package - which in itself doesn't have a huge effect on how you write your code, just the way to access your variables.

  Read more »

• Jan 6, 2008, 8:26 PM -05:00

  Solar System Simulations

  When I was in high school, I used to program two dimensional solar system simulations for fun (as you can surely tell, I was extremely popular and desired by all the ladies far and wide). I would put a "sun" in the middle of the screen and I'd spin "planets" around in simulated orbits.

  Read more »