Tags’re great aren’t they? Yet another way of slicing through the thicket of information. The only problem with adding tagging support to your blog is deciding if you can be bothered to go back through the archives adding tags to everything.

I’m leaning towards the ’not adding tags’ option.

There’s a print hanging above the reception desk at the place where I’m temping. It depicts a line of silhouettes of poplars. It bears the title Southern Trees

I’m finding it very hard to resist the urge to add a couple of bodies hanging from one of them. I wonder if the artist and whoever bought this print realised what they were evoking.

Shakespeare describes the Globe Theatre in one of Chorus’s speeches from Henry V, so it’s no great surprise that, when the newly rebuilt Globe opened its doors for the first time, Jane Lapotaire strode out between the two great columns and declaimed

O! For a Muse of Fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention.
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the setting scene

One of the great things that the internet allows us all to do with music is to share it. I don’t mean ‘sharing’ copyrighted material that we have ’liberated’ from the media we purchased it on - I know enough struggling folk musicians to realise how important royalties are to those people.

What I mean by sharing is sharing the music we make ourselves.

A definition before we start:

intentional, a. (n.)

1. Of or pertaining to intention or purpose; existing only in intention. intentional fallacy: in literary criticism, the fallacy that the meaning or value of a work may be judged or defined in terms of the writer’s intention

2. Done on purpose, resulting from intention; intended. Rarely of an agent: Acting with intention.

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed

If you’ve eaten with me, you might be aware that I’m not a big one for chili heat. I don’t mind it, but you won’t find me chopping up the Scotch Bonnets for a mole or ladling out the chili oil in a Chinese restaurant.

If you’d suggested that I would cook something that involved 3 tablespoons full of chili oil, complete with the sludge of seeds from the bottom of the jar, in a dish for two people I would have thought you had gone mad. If you had then suggested that I’d love the resulting dish with a passion that made me want to rush off and blog about it…

I just got mail to let me know that my copies of Perl Best Practices and Perl Testing: A Developer’s Notebook are in the post. Yay!

Best Practices runs to 500+ pages, so there’s unlikely to be a review up here really quickly, but I just thought I’d give you a heads up. If it’s anywhere near as good as Damian’s last book[1] it’ll be essential.

The testing book should be good too, but I would say that, if only because one of the authors, chromatic, is my editor at perl.com. That might get read and reviewed faster; it’s a good deal shorter.

I can’t remember when Adam Turoff pointed me at Ruby On Rails, but I’m still grateful. Blame Adam for the fact that this weblog is no longer running on Movable Type, but on Typo. My initial plan was to roll my own blogging software on top of Rails, but by the time I got my act together it just made sense to grab an existing package and extend it as required.

I first heard about Ruby when I read Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas’s excellent book The Pragmatic Programmer. I thought, “that looks interesting”, so I read the first edition of Programming Ruby aka the Pickaxe Book, learned the syntax and some of the idioms and then sort of forget about it. As a programming language Ruby pushes a lot of my buttons: it has closures, objects all the way down, dynamic typing and its refreshingly concise. However, I never quite got round to writing anything in it (not the language’s fault, I wasn’t writing anything in anything at the time).

Ooh look. Google ads. The mercenary git. Next thing you know he’ll be doctoring the RSS feeds so they don’t carry whole articles.

So, I just read the latest phishing attempt. Someone purporting to be Paypal tells me that someone else has sent me £12. Which would be lovely, if true.

However, a cursory inspection of the HTML source shows that it’s a scam site. Lovely.

Interestingly, the mail refers to images served by Paypal. If I were paypal, or any of the other online money handlers come to that, I’d be seriously considering tweaking my image servers to return “The page you are currently looking at is probably a scam” type images to any request that doesn’t come with the appropriate referer and/or cookie. Sure, it uses up processor cycles, but I’m guessing that processor cycles are cheaper than fraud.

Remind me. How long has Nina Simone been dead?

Long enough for the advertisers to start dancing on her grave apparently. At the moment there’s a Muller Lite advert on heavy rotation that uses I Aint Got No - I Got Life. Except, as is the common operating practice of advertisers, they’ve taken a part of the song and farmed it out for a cover version with - god help us - whistling, and all the ‘crunchiness’ removed.

So, in my quest to get Amazon links working I’ve been spending time hanging out on the #rubyonrails irc channel asking dumb questions and generally liking the place, when someone[1] asked “Are you the famous Perl Programmer, Piers Cawley?”

What’s the right answer? Sadly, I wasn’t shameless enough to simply answer “Yes.”

Coincidence is good isn’t it? A couple of hours earlier, I’d been reading Mary Branscombe on the talk Danny O’Brien gave at this year’s OpenTech about ‘geek micro celebrity’ or some such topic. How very odd.

After much poring over The Truck Wheels pdf[1] and the Pickaxe book, accompanied by a certain amount of waving of dead chickens[2], I’m pleased to direct your attention to the sidebar where you will find a selection of relevant links to Amazon. If your interest is piqued, maybe you’d like to toddle over there and spend your hard earned cash on these and other fine books, enabling me to live in the lap of luxury on kickbacks from everyone’s favourite book pimp.

So, typo, the tool this runs on is undergoing some major (and good) changes. The only catch is, my deployment script consists of ‘doing it by hand and forgetting stuff’, which isn’t ideal.

Hopefully, next time there’s a change I’ll have a sensible deployment scheme in place (it won’t have to be very sensible to be more sensible than the one I have at the moment).

I remember, from about the age of 9, setting out from our tall Georgian terraced house with the green door and the brass lion knocker to walk the mile or so to choir practice. Through the park in the middle of the square, past the Gaumont Cinema (the last of its chain to bear the name – it became the Odeon only when the headed paper ran out) and on down Hall Gate past Barker & Wigfall with its bewildering window display of bicycles, televisions and furniture. Past the godawful concrete arcade that still contained the Pilgrim Bookshop, Doncaster’s only specialist bookshop. Past the Odeon arcade and right into Silver Street passing the High Class Butchers and Dad’s tailor, then through Bowers Fold, the little pedestrianized snicket that leads through to the market place with a little toy shop in the middle.

It’s two in the morning, I can’t sleep and someone’s attempting to commit an outrage upon my ears. According to the BBC’s website, I have been watching

Myth and Music

Open University. Composer Judith Weir explains why she wrote a series of works based on Scottish folktales about people who have disappeared mysteriously.

Which sounds like it might be interesting. And it is interesting – people slow down to look at traffic accidents don’t they?

There were many things I didn’t like about working in London: the long commute, the bloody tube, the long commute home, the expense…

But then there are the things I miss. Here’s a small example.

Okay, you can all tell me how wrong I am, but didn’t anyone else feel the tiniest sense of relief that finally the other shoe had dropped on Thursday. I feel like we’ve been waiting for this to happen ever since 9/11.

In 2003, the company I was working for down in London had a funding squeeze and had to make some people redundant. I jumped at voluntary redundancy because the commute from Newark was killing me. To my surprise, a lot of my colleagues mentioned that they thought the reason I’d taken voluntary redundancy was because of the dangers of working in London and so close to the American Embassy at that. I mentioned this to Gill and was surprised to discover that she too had been worried about that as well. It wasn’t something that had really occurred to me consciously before, after all, I’d been working in London during the IRA’s bombing campaign as well and that really had been worrying. But, on reflection, the worry had been there; a low level, background worry, but a worry all the same.

Welcome to my shiny new weblog engine. I’ve ditched Movable Type and switched over to Typo, but I’ve also put stuff in place to make sure that all the old URLs will work. Which is nice.

Who knows, maybe I’ll start writing stuff again soon.

Coo… it’s been a long time since I said anything here hasn’t it? The plan was I was going to write myself a weblog engine as a way of learning Ruby on Rails and have it up in no time flat. Then I got sidetracked by something, I can’t remember what. Then I started getting active on Flickr and… well. I rather neglected this place.

Expect a couple of new book reviews in the nearish future and who knows, I might even implement the new backend. Watch this space.