Two of this year's chicks, who fledged four days ago, can fly pretty well now for short bursts, but they tire very quickly and can't stay up for a long flight.

Just now, at sunset, Oak (I'm naming them for to the trees they ended up in when they fledged) flew from the oak over to the back porch roof and spent ten or fifteen minutes begging from there, in nice view of my office window. He was EEPing louder than the other chicks, and both parents were feeding him as fast as they could find bugs. Oak is as big as a towhee, and fat and fluffy, with a spotted breast and a short stubby tail less than two inches long. He still has some of that scrowly wide yellow bill that says "Feed me, mama!"

At one point a parent showed up with a pyracantha berry, but Oak was already being fed. The parent tried a little squawk, maybe to see if Cedar wanted anything, but almost dropped the berry in the process. So with an air of "oh, what the heck!" it swallowed the berry.

Then Cedar started crying from the chinquapin (or whatever the weird tree in the backyard is) and drew the parents' attention away from Oak. After another few minutes of fruitless eeping Oak decided to get some of that action and joined Cedar. Then they both flew down to the lawn, where for the first time I could see both at the same time. Cedar is a lot slimmer than Oak, but with a longer tail, maybe half the length of an adult's.

Oak was in the wildflower bed, actively hunting for food and occasionally finding something to swallow, though I don't have a lot of confidence that they were insects rather than dirt clods. Cedar wasn't hunting for food very actively, but took a few desultory pecks at the pavement and once picked up and swallowed something (a piece of a leaf, I think). Every now and then one parent would glide in from the front yard, and whichever chick noticed it first and eeped would get fed.

I haven't seen Holly today. I thought I heard some eeping from the direction of the holly in the front yard, but never definitely located the third chick.

The evening wore on, though, and the chicks have found trees to roost in for the night and have finally stopped eeping. Mom is taking a well-deserved break while Dad sings the family a lullaby.

This is inspired by brian d foy's post asking why people are passionate about Perl. I can't speak for everyone, but I'll share some things I've picked up from others along the way.

Mainframe programmers. We were invited to present to the Capacity Management Group in Sydney, Australia a couple of years ago. Basically they wanted to know what Perl was, and whether it could be useful. They were completely blown away by the fact that it was free (in their world everything has to be paid for) and had filters for EBDIC systems automatically integrated! The idea that they could download thousands of libraries on demand also for free was an added bonus. With thanks to the passion of at least the organiser we've been given a few more speaking opportunities with them.

Shell programmers. We've had some die-hard shell programmers being sent to our courses, and some of them have fallen in love with Perl. They've been used to everything being much more verbose than shell and were delighted that you can get so much done in so little code in Perl.

I am passionate about Perl because it's an easy language to work with. I first learned it because I needed it for a job, and I was delighted at how powerful, simple and often intuitive it is. I like the english constructs: unless, and, not, or. I like the short-circuiting nature of the operators: my $foo = $a || $b || 0; - that saves me so many lines I always have to do in other languages. I appreciate its variable scoping and I like strict. I love the DBI, and even more so the abstraction classes (DBIx::Class, Class::DBI etc). How could I not mention the CPAN? Perhaps Perl's biggest answer.

I know, and program in, several other languages, but they don't compare well. I do a lot in PHP, but there are so many little things that get in my way and slow me down. I also keep littering my code with mys. I do a little in C, but I think most people would prefer Perl to C when speed wasn't an issue, so that's not saying much. I write bash occasionally, but past a few lines I can't stop myself returning to Perl for better error handling and real lists. I have never encountered anything that compares to Perl's testing frameworks.

We taught a friend of ours Perl, he is a very experienced Java programmer. He still writes a lot of Java but he uses Perl to script all the repetitive stuff. ;) I can still remember the expression on his face when we showed him "Hello world". Where was all the rest of the code? He's not passionate about Perl, but he's not passionate about Java either. Maybe programming doesn't inspire him with passion, but I always smile when I he asks me "so how would I do X in Perl?" and I show him a simple, elegant, and short way of doing it; followed with him showing me the awkward, cumbersome way he's been trying in order to get it to work in Java. Sometimes I'm able to offer better Java solutions, but not as often as he's able to improve my Java code.

Applications for women students to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Colorado in October are open.

See http://gracehopper.org/2008/participate/student-scholarships/

read more

This is inspired by brian d foy's post on "What do you hate most about your language?". Of course I love Perl. I program in it and teach it for a living. Still I hate....

1. eval. Block eval should be spelled "try" and should have a "catch" instead of an ugly unreadable if statement following. Block eval should not be called the same thing as string eval - which is very, very different.
2. symbolic references. You should have to *turn on* this functionality if you want it, rather than having it on by default. Trying to convince self-taught programmers who refuse to use strict because it breaks their code and don't want to know that hashes are a better solution, is a challenge in self-control every time. In fact, although I hardly ever use strict in my command-line one-liners or my temporary stuff; it shits me that strict isn't on by default.
3. bad legacy stuff. In particular things like "reset", which makes some sense in the context of lazy programming, but which just screams out to be abused in "job secure" code.
4. inconsistent whitespace rules.

   print $foo->{blah};  print $foo -> {blah};  print "$foo -> {blah}";

   I get why the last one fails, but why allow the second one to succeed if you can't be consistent?
5. no way to take a slice through arrow-notation. If it wasn't for this, we could teach our students arrow notation exclusively and they'd never need to know about the uglier form of dereferencing.

Whipped this up in under an hour (mostly simmering time) using nothing but pantry items. Alternate name would be “Simple Weeknight Chili”.

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 14oz can kidney beans
• 1 28oz can diced tomatoes
• 1 tbsp butter
• Medium white or yellow onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tbsp chili powder (the Penzeys stuff is really good)
• Pinch dried oregano
• Salt + pepper to taste

Method

1. Brown ground beef over medium heat in a medium stockpot, drain and rinse. Drain and rinse beans. Put empty pot back on the heat, add butter, onions, and garlic. Saute for 5-6 mins. Toss in chili powder, oregano, salt + pepper and continue frying for a couple of minutes. Stuff will stick to the bottom a bit, but that’s ok — it will come off later.
2. Add browned meat, beans, and tomatoes (including juices). Stir and heat until simmering. Turn down the heat to low and simmer for 25-35 minutes (or longer if you want — the longer you simmer, the more the tomatoes will break down). Done.

Serve with crusty bread and a beer.

• Not all who wander are lost. - J.R.R. Tolkien
• Luck never gives; it only lends. - Ancient Chinese proverb
• Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday. - Anonymous
• Can you make yourself love? Can you make yourself be loved? - Lena Kaligaris
• There is no such thing as fun for the whole family. - Jerry Seinfield
• Love is like war: easy to begin, hard to end. - Proverb
• Rule#1: The customer is always right. Rule#2: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule#1. - Duncan Howe
• When life hands you a lemon, say, "Oh yeah, I like lemons. What else ya got?" - Henry Rollins
• I have seen the future and it's like the present, only longer. - Den Quisenberry
• Sometimes you're the windshield; sometimes you're the bug. - Mark Knopfler
• If you feel like you're under control, you're just not going fast enough. - Mario Andretti
• The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem. Got that? - Coach Brevin
• If you don't find it in the index, look very carefully throughout the entire catalog. - Sears Roebuck catalog
• Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them, and you have their shoes. - Frieda Norris
• Time tells the truth. - Fortune Cookie
• Of the thirty six ways of avoiding disaster, running away is best. - Anonymous
• Life is so... whatever. - Kelly Marquette
• You will make all kinds of mistakes: but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. - Winston Churchill
• Wish for what you want. Work for what you need. - Carmen's grandmother
• My karma ran over my dogma. - Bumper sticker
• You can take a road that gets you to the stars. I can take a road that will see me through. - Nick Drake
• What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday. - James Joyce
• Is there world enough for me? - Jane Frances
• In your eyes I am complete. - Peter Gabriel

Kurinji raga is derived from the 29th melakarta Sankarabharanam. It is a sampoorna raga with vakra sancharas (needs a separate post) in the arohana and avarohana.

A: s r g m g m p d n s
Av: s n p n d d p m g r s
The notes taken by the raga besides Shadjam and Pancham are :: R2-Chatusruti rishabham, G2-Antara gandharam, M1-shudha madyamam, D2-Chatusruti daivatam and N2-kaishiki Nishadham. Jiva and nyasa swaras are G, P, N. The phrase “snNS” has N as tevra swara and the upanga raga has all the notes rendered with gamaka.

Since the svara sanchara is limited, it is sung in madhyama (slow tempo) shruti in vilambit laya to enhance feelings of compassion. Kurinji is actually a Tamil folk tune adopted into Karnatic music.

[1] Kshirabdi Kanyakaku | KhandaChapu (29MelaJanyam) | Annamacharya | Telugu |
[2] Muddugare Yashoda | Adi | Annamacharya | Telugu |
NotreBene : Time permitting, I shall add data, so consider the raga-series a perpetual work-in-progress. Thanks for using a track-back to this original blog entry instead of copying!

This is brenda's rant on this you should do

1. Functions (or subs) should be small, concise, and to the point. Don't write functions that are > 100 lines.
2. declare your variables. use strict; E_STRICT;
3. put your virtual host config in seperate files, in sites-available. Don't appeand to existing files.
4. Give code enough db and os permissions to do their job and no more. the postgres users connecting from php does not need to own the database and every table. It should have things granted that it needs to do. The apache running as www-data should not have write permission anywhere unless it needs to have it.
5. use transactions!!!!! if you need to insert to 3 tables to save something, put it into a transaction so you don't end up with half of it failing and leaving the DB as a mess.
6. Put your data integrity rules into the data schema. It'll also be in your code, but having it in the database as well with means less bugs, and never more. You'll notice that you screwed up.
7. turn error_logging on, and CHECK YOUR ERROR LOG well before you deploy to staging. Don't wait until it's on production before realising that it's spewing errors at us.
8. don't copy paste similar things over and over in code. MAKE A SUBROUTINE!
9. name your methods properly.. A function called exists() on it's own, not inside a class, is just WRONG!
10. Use comments. Both inline as you go, and a doxygen to describe each function, define, class ... everthing needs describing.
11. GLOBAL variables are wrong. Use a static class or a define.

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