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.

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.

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.

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.

The Quality Without A Name is a phrase coined by Christopher Alexander in The Timeless Way of Building to describe the feeling of satisfaction and contentment engendered by good building. He later went on to call it ’life’, but a friend of mine described it as ‘The Tao of Building’, which seems rather appropriate too. The Timeless Way of Building is a fantastic, if somewhat overwritten book, introducing Alexander’s themes and ideas about how modern architects and builders can recapture the qualities inherent in great (usually old) buildings.

Somewhat to my own surprise, I’m at YAPC::Europe in Paris. I pitched up to the early birds session and offered a talk if they’d had any people pull out and it turned out that they had – Ronan Oger was due to give a half day tutorial on SVG-based GUIs on the first afternoon of the conference, but he wasn’t going to make it in time, so the organizers swapped his talk with Dave Cross’s talk on Tieing and Overloading Objects in Perl.

Bah! The only trouble with being in full control of a website is that you’ve got nobody to blame when you screw up.

I was talking to Gavin Estey on iChat about the problems inherent in interviewing a new programmer. The cost of screwing up can be enormous. How do you find out whether the candidate is for real? How do you do it quickly?

A good time was had by all