Mmm… Eurofoo. At what other technical conference could you spend an afternoon in an improvised comedy workshop, marvel at the bandwidth of five guys from Fotango toting a terabyte from London to Amsterdam in 45 minutes, gasp at the audacity of the BBC’s Creative Archive project and rave about a favourite tech book before discovering that said book’s editor is sat next to you?

EuroFoo was the European iteration of the Friends Of O’Reilly Camp first held at the O’Reilly offices in Sebastapol last year and jolly good fun it was too. On the evidence of this conference there’s a good deal to be said for getting a bunch of smart people into a conference centre and divvying up the program on the first night. The improvised comedy workshop got on the program because, as we went round the room introducing ourselves a couple of people mentioned that they did improv and a bunch of us yelled out for a session. I missed them, but everyone who went to the lockpicking session really enjoyed them (and, owing to a slight cockup with a car key, a Guildford Perl Monger’s pocket and the train to Schipol. Well, let’s just say that the acquired skills came in handy – last I heard they were stalled at the steering lock).

At twelve minutes past noon today, my stepdaughter Iona gave birth to a 7lb 2oz son, Isaac Stamper.

I never expected I’d be a grandfather by 36…

I’ve been reading Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything, a history of the Oxford English Dictionary and, whilst I find his style somewhat annoying, the story is fascinating. In the first chapter, Winchester discusses the history of earlier English dictionaries (a subject which is covered in far more detail in the excellent Chasing the Sun if you’re interested). One thing I find strange is that it took so long for dictionaries to progress from lists of ‘hard’ words to becoming the all inclusive things we know today. Early dictionary makers were happy to simply list and define the kinds of words that I imagine you’d find in a Readers’ Digest Word Power column whilst ignoring the nuts and bolts of the language. Maybe they just assumed that everyone already knew them.

Focussing a large format camera can be a tricky process if you’re not used to it. Unless you have a remarkably simple scene there’s usually a period of frantic adjustment of swings and tilts to try and get the plane of focus running through the most important elements of the scene. Most large format photographers will have heard of the Scheimpflug Rule which says that the plane of sharp focus, the film plane and the lens plane must all intersect in a single line. This is one of those useful in theory but useless in practice maxims.

According to a quick search of groups.google.com, I’ve been using the same email address for almost exactly 9 years now and in that time I’ve never succumbed to the temptation to monkey with my mail headers and start hiding my obscured email address down in my sigfile beneath a sign saying ‘Beware of the leopard’.

Why? Because, if someone wants to respond to something I’ve said, it seems to be the height of rudeness to expect them to do anything other than simply hit the reply button of their mail client – generally people (well me for certain, I can’t be sure about everyone else) don’t bother.

You probably don’t know this yet, but I’m in the process of preparing a course on Test Driven Development & Refactoring with Perl which I hope will find me some favour and income.

One of the trickier aspects, daft as it sounds, is finding a good problem to use for the course. Ideally you need something that you can see measurable improvement in as the code is developed, and a well defined set of requirements. One of the standard problems I’ve come across is that of scoring 10-pin bowling.

Remember boys and girls, always, always, always have a backup.

One of my earliest memories is of standing on a low stool, stirring a teaspoonful of sugar into fresh yeast to wake it up while mum heated a pan of milk to blood heat before everything all got mixed together to make a lovely, enriched bread dough that, now I think about it, I could probably make tomorrow without recourse to a recipe book.

She’d cover it with a teatowel and set it to rise, until the dough would be lifting the centre of the towel slightly. Once it was risen she’d tip the dough out and knock it back before dividing it up into buns and plaits (if I’d been good, I was allowed to do some plaiting…). She’d lay ’em out on baking sheets to recover slightly, then, just before they went into the oven they’d get a quick egg or milk wash and a quick sprinkling of poppy seeds.

How long did it take me to finally get my finger out and move this blog over to the new box?

I think the only answer that makes sense is “Too long”.

Now I just have to wrestle the godawful CSS into submission.

My new firewall seems to have forgotten all about port forwarding rules for a week or so. Which isn’t good when that’s how this site is served.

All better now. I hope.

Once upon a time, when the world was still enormously old but I was a good deal younger, a friend with whom I played D&D pressed a copy of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic on me, telling me it was the best thing ever. So off I went and read it and it was indeed the best thing ever.

Well, I was 14 at the time.

And there’s nothing new in this post really. I’ve been indulging myself in a gadget buying spree including finally getting myself a decent film scanner and starting to get some of my old negatives and slides scanned in. I’ll be putting more stuff online as time goes on, but for the time being here’s a few photos from Silverstone a couple of years ago.

I’ve also finally bought myself a digital camera, in theory so I can’t use the ‘but film/dev costs so much!’ excuse. Asking how much the camera, power grip and decently short lens are going to cost me is, of course, beside the point. Here is an album of photos that will mostly be be of interest to my family. The last one is probably decent even if you’re not related to the subject though.

Our experience as contractors, engineers and architects during the last 15 years has proved one thing over and over again: The things placed on drawings are inevitably - always - wrong in many particulars. Drawings serve as an important rough sketch of something that will be built, but must be executed with constant attention to room shape, light, wall and ceiling detail, openings - above all to the feelings which arise in each place, in the construction, as it is taking shape. These feelings are too complicated to predict and cannot be predicted. When a building is built from plans that are conceived on the drawing board and then simply built, the result is sterile at best - silly most of the time - and sometimes unthinkably bad. This is something familiar in virtually all large buildings that have been built since 1950. It is inevitable, given the process of construction used to build them. And it is inevitable that this process must lead to unsatisfactory results.

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”        – T.H. White, The Once and Future King

I really don’t have time for those complete and utter arseholes who abuse trust. In my narcissistic way I was going through my referer logs to find out who was linking to me and what they were saying about me, as I’m sure everyone does. Anyhow, I came across one URL that looked slightly out of place, claiming as it did to come from a php programming site…

I’ve bounced off writing this article several times in the past and I’m still trying to find a good way into it. Here’s the (n+1)th take on it anyway.

Trust is everything. Trust is what keeps the wheels turning. Trust is when all parties are pointing in the right direction and nobody’s playing CYA games. Trust is opening a joint account and moving in together. Trust is when you stop using contraception…

A couple of articles back, I reviewed Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns and mentioned that it’s a book that concentrates on the tactics of programming rather than the big strategic stuff. Beck even takes his life in his hands and lays down a set of patterns for laying out code. The (very short) set of patterns he comes up with do seem to generate remarkably clear code.

I’m a big fan of this book, and I’ve lifted many of the ideas about how to structure Smalltalk code and used them when I’m writing OO Perl (to the extent that I sometimes find myself wishing that Perl had Smalltalk like message selectors), so now I’m toying with the idea of using Beck’s rules, or something like them, for laying out my Perl code.

As most of you probably know, unless you’re one of the people who came here via a link from java.net, I write a summary every week of the ongoing developments on the Perl 6 development mailing lists. Which means, if nothing else, that my review of Perl 6 Essentials by Randal, Sugalski & Tötsch might be just a little partial.

One of the less satisfying sessions/panels at OSCON this year was the ‘Perl Certification’ Panel, in which a panel of various luminaries, moderated by Tim Maher of the Seattle Perl Users’ Group spoke inconclusively about whether there was a need for Perl Certification. It seems to me that, if you’re going to have a panel on this kind of topic, you must make sure that your moderator is impartial (but not disinterested). Tim Maher, for all his many virtues, was not impartial.

Picture this: A magician sits in front of you with a pack of cards in his hands. He turns over the top card, it’s the Two of Hearts. He has you sign it. He then turns the card back over then takes the top card from the deck and pushes it home somewhere in the middle. He asks you to snap your fingers, then he turns over the top card of the deck again. It’s your signed Two of Hearts.