lehser

Back before perl became such a big part of the web, the Perl book started out with several introductory chapters, all dedicated to Job (the Biblical character) and his resource-management problems.  So you got ways of writing small text-based databases, tracking children, camels, etc; there was the clay-tablet printer command, there were the pigeons carrying messages.  It was cute, well-done, and (relatively) memorable--I can't quite quote it verbatim any more, but the book has been out of date for nearly 10 years now.

Around perl 5, all that stuff vanished from the book.  Perl had become a Real Tool For the Masses, and I guess levity wasn't allowed anymore.


Luckily, the GWT isn't all that old yet.  From Add CSS Styling:

"Well, it turns out there's a special type of secondary style called a dependent style. Once you learn about dependent styles, young Padawan, you will understand."

 

It's awfully good for making unpronounceable acronyms suddenly pronounceable.  In particular, as used casually by a CA-based colleague, "the G. W. T." becomes "the goot" (rhymes with "boot").  Thank you, Welsh, for that vowel.  I know it'll save me precious microseconds in my speech.

...is what you get when you recieve 4 months' worth of data files in 2-3 days, with a new file available every 5-10 minutes. 

As I await election results, I'm flashing back to the first time I watched election returns on the web, in 1994.  I'm pretty sure it was the very first chance; DEC (remember them?) partnered with the California Secretary of State's office to pioneer putting up election results (governor, mostly, but also ballot propositions and Congressional seats) as soon as they came in.  (I found a post-mortem article; I'd forgotten they had a gopher feed, too.)  Sadly, the results generally derailed that kind of civic-minded innovation--it was the beginning of the Contract [preposition] America.  I'm pretty sure we watched the Secretary of State who'd made the whole thing possible lose, and badly; we commented on it at the time.  Made for some *really* depressing watching. 

( The technology was primitive as heck... )

( but the interface was awfully similar to today's. )

But we kept wishing we had a web site that would let us see the rest of the country.  Now, of course, we do.  We've come a long way, baby.

So if you get an alert saying that your train is running 20-25 minutes late, and a while later you get another that says, in its entirety,
"Framnghm/Worc inbound train#506 (6:25am) annulled," do you interpret it to mean that
a) the previous alert is annulled
b) the train is canceled, or
c) that the MBTA can't compose a coherent email to save its life?

I went for option a, and was correct, but for heaven's sake!  And the text message version didn't even show up all the way on my phone: that comes out as
"Framingham/Worc inbound train#506 (6:25am)A"

(Well, OK, I think option c is also correct.)

ETA: apparently, I need option d) all of the above.
The Worcester-based person I often walk in with said that, from her point of view, the train was canceled.  I guess they laid on another train in Framingham or something. 

Y'know, maybe the SMS could be that terse (or even terser), and the email could spell out what's going on.  Except that that would require, like, actual programming....  Sigh.

To complement the new walking directions in Google Maps, I'd love to have a query for walking directions from Springer Mountain, Georgia to Mount Katahdin, Maine give you the Appalachian Trail.  (Right now, it gives you a backroads route.) 

I've been wanting to tell this story for a while, but it's taken a while to get a good picture.  Many of you already know it.

This winter, I made a scarf (below) for catalpa92.  When it was done, he took it into work, hung it near his desk, and eventually suggested that people figure it out.  Many of his coworkers did, taking from a few seconds to minutes (or even longer) to get the answer.    It apparently took over an entire afternoon.  When I came to lunch there for the first time, a week later, I got a sense of it all.  My officemate impressed everyone nearby by getting it within a minute.  And someone I met in the lunchroom said, after a bit, "Are you the one who made the scarf?  You know that stock dip last week?  That was you."

 
Now, my elder child had fairly recently finished reading (and very much enjoying) a certain book (thanks again, saxikath!).  Upon hearing about all this, J was very excited and amused, and then became thoughtful.  He looked at us, and asked an excellent question,  

That wasn't a flood, it was a "water incursion". 

Apparently my area will be closed for the next few days. 

Still need to get my backpack.  Whee.

We're getting a set of steps and decks installed in the back yard, to make it possible to get down the steep hill to the nice bit at the bottom.  We've run into an issue, though, that it looks like we need lots more railings than initially planned. 

The irony, to a software developer, of finding your spouse saying to a contractor "keep it simple" (with the unspoken "stupid" of "KISS: keep it simple, stupid" echoing in your head), and "do the simplest thing that works", is impressive.  (Software development was traditionally thought of as a building project, where requirements have to be nailed down first, resulting in a design that's carved in stone. So you get a plan that's as feature-rich as possible, from the start.  Agile software development processes brought in both sayings quoted above, as part of a rebellion against that building-project mindset.  Only, it doesn't work there, either....)

(Our contractor was also saying, again, that a project like this requires substantially more flexibility than he would have hoped, and repeatedly expressed gratitude that we're willing to work with him on sacrificing features, simplifying design, and staying flexible.  I wonder if being agile-oriented software developers helps. 

I'm also amused that I think (think?) we've FINALLY got them taking out a bench we never wanted but the designer put in.  This, I suspect, is very much like managing software developers.   sigh.)

I got a link to the Forecast Advisor from the Freakonomics blog.  Wow!  You have the forecast for today and the next few, but much more data as well.  Clicking on a day allows you to see previous days' forecasts for that day (indicating stability of forecast).  It also lets you know how accurate various sites have been for the last month and year.  And that's not all. There's all kinds of cool discussion on their FAQ. 

Data!  Geekery!  Wow!