So I went on record recently at a Game Day as saying that I saw no reason to use Perl in modern times - that Perl had been supplanted by Python or Ruby. After spending all day yesterday getting my head back into "Perl mode" - I've got both the Llama and Camel open on my desk right now, I'd like to amend my statement. Amongst the many perfectly valid reasons to use Perl you might end up needing a CPAN library to get something done. If the Irony Gods are listening I'm sorry and I'll try not to tempt you again!

Perl's syntax is twisted, and it's made even worse by my insistence on use strict; And of course everything I wanted to do was crazy syntactic juju. "OK, so we've got a reference to a hash of arrays of hashes. And what we want to do is iterate through one of the arrays, and store each hash in a DIFFERENT array, in a different order." You can make that work in one compact foreach although Perl will complain about using a hash value as an array index, but it looks ridiculous. At one point I seriously wrote $rows[%{$item}->{sequence}] = {$item}; And that made sense. And it still does this morning, but give me six months of non-Perling and it will be gibberish. And don't get me started on the fact that you don't declare $rows, but really declare @rows (and in fact you can declare $rows - which will bear no relation to $rows[0], which any sane language would write as @rows[0] anyway). I also quite enjoy the fact that the "reference to a hash of arrays of hashes" came out of a library that calls itself (with a straight face) "XML::Simple". What could be simpler really?

So yeah. All these because the Ruby port of the WriteSpreadsheet module writes out Excel 95, and I need Excel 2000 format. So I also blame Excel.

technorati tags:Perl, programming, Excel

So I was gonna blog about reading some Christopher Moore books recently, but I discovered that I did blog about him here. Which is handy, because I was trying to remember how I found Chritopher Moore in the first place. Hey thanks for the historical info Tim-from-the-past. I'll totally go put the keys beside the police station for you!

Anyway, Amazon a while back had wanted to me buy You Suck at some crazy 30% discount. I meant to, but I was vaguely aware it was a sorta-sequel to another book I hadn't read, and we were hip-deep in Christmas stuff so I was busy anyway and so on. Then Karin went to the bookstore and brought home a copy of Bloodsucking Fiends that she had gotten on a sale table. So I told her "y'know that's a sequel right?" (Yeah I was confused. And now my overly literal chronological nature has passed the confusion onto you! Here at HiddenJester we work in confusion WHOLESALE!) So once that got all straightened out I ordered You Suck, as well as A Dirty Job - one part Amazon's "Buy this with that" program and one part because I already had that on my "to-buy" list. Which turns out AGAIN to be serendipitous because the two recent books overlap a bit. So my suggestion is to A) read these books, and B) read them in this order: Bloodsucking Fiends, A Dirty Job, and lastly You Suck.

Christopher Moore is an odd author. To my mind he is clearly writing science fiction - there are angels, vampires, people who can control whales, etc. (not all in the same book thank goodness), but he's not in the SF section. I think the literary fiction people would call it "magical realism, but as far as I can tell "magical realism" just means "this is sci-fi or fantasy but we want to read it so it's something different". But his books are light fun, so I can put down the chip about him not being filed properly in the Sci-Fi ghetto and just read them.

technorati tags:fiction, ChristopherMoore

I just saw this video over at Wonderland. It's about the web, and "Web 2.0" and Flickr, and del.icio.us and . . . just watch it.

technorati tags:web2.0, hypertext, tags, folksonomy

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A while back I started reading a humor blog called The Sneeze. I don't remember how I found it now, but I put in my RSS feeds and went on about my business. Today it came up with pictures of some really cool sculptures and a link to the sculptor's blog as well. Worth checking out.

And on a still somewhat sculptural note - I love some of these tiki mugs. I'm not sure if I like Radar Vic or Malicious the best, but I'd be happy to drink out of either. Is it too blatant to point out my birthday is next month? No, I don't think it is!

technorati tags:sculpture, tiki, art

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I got a new computer this week. I had known for a while my Windows box wasn't cutting it anymore, but I wasn't doing any heavy Windows development so I let it slide. That's no longer true, and it took very little pushing for me to go "OK that's it."

My old box was pretty old - 1 Gig of RAM and a Athlon 2 Ghz single core. The video card wasn't bad - I had upgraded that last year to a GeForce 7300, but it was AGP bus, not PCI-E.

The upshot of this is for a long time I used to upgrade my PC rig every year or so, and on given year I could recycle a lot of components, but this time I haven't upgraded the core components since . . . 2003? Maybe 2004. It's been a while. So this time there was nothing other than the sound card and the DVD burner I would have been willing to migrate. Since I have to buy everything, might as well get a preassembled box, right?

Here's the kicker. Ask me what the best Windows development box is these days?:

Mac Pro Box.JPG

Yes that's right. I bought a Mac as my Windows box. Crazy? Like a fox I tell you. These days, with Boot Camp (and Parallels Desktop! OMFG - how insane is this software?) So first off, what did I buy? It has 2 dual-core 2.66 Ghz processors, 2 Gigs of RAM (1 Gig default from Apple and 1 Gig bought from a third party vendor), a 500 Gig SATA drive and an ATI Radeon X1900. Kept the two LCD monitors, naturally. It came with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, but right now I'm using my old faithful MS Natural Keyboard and the wired Mighty Mouse (so they play nicely with the KVM switch as well).

If you're not up on all the Apple stuff, Boot Camp is the software that lets you dual-boot between OS X and Windows XP. I partitioned the drive into a 200 Gig NTFS partition and a 300 Gig HPFS+ partition for OS X. I installed XP Professional on the Boot Camp partition, but I haven't really used it for anything yet. That's where Parallels Desktop comes in. I expect I'll use Boot Camp a fair amount for gaming and working on heavy 3d apps. But for basic "let's do the security patch update shuffle" Parallels lets me run the *same XP install* virtualized onto my OS X System. At the moment I have XP running in a window, VPNed up and running the big Perforce "suck all the data down" task. (Looking. Parallels seems to consume about 20-30% of one core to do that. Leaving me THREE cores faster than than my old Windows box completely unloaded, plus 70% of the last core for XP to waste doing dumb crap.) Now RAM is a bit skinty - and the XP box only has a half gig of RAM allocated and that probably won't fly for development. I might go ahead and bump the RAM up to 4 Gigs. We'll see. Parallels can even do this crazy mode where the XP desktop disappears and the Windows apps just run straight on the OS X desktop. When I do that I end up with the OS X dock and menubar on the left monitor and an XP Start Menu on the right taskbar. It's cats and dogs, playing together! It's crazy I tell you!

So anyway, introducing TinyGod:

The name is a reference to a very old Penny Arcade strip. It humors me to A ) reverse the Mac/PC polarity of the "Tiny God" reference and B ) call that behemoth of a box "TinyGod". But I'm a geek like that.

technorati tags:computer, TinyGod, WindowsXP, Parallels, OSX

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