So frustrated with my iPhone 3 (which I bought refurbished 2.5 years ago) I finally broke down and bought new iPhone 5. Wow. Wow wow wow. So this is the Mobile Experience everyone keeps talking about. I can actually read a web page and use the maps app and Do Things. Reminds me of the first Mac G3 I got after using a LC for several years (yes, I am that old).
I am reading Charlotte's Web, the classic E. B. White children's novel,
to my kids for about the 10th time. I don't know if it is the 10th time or not. After about four readings I lost track. Let's just
say it is as familiar to me now as any book I have ever read.
I mention this book today because tomorrow, September 7, is a significant day in the story. It is the day when
Wilbur wins his medal, when he cajoles and bargains with Templeton to save Charlotte's egg sac, and he leaves
Charlotte alone, at the Fair, where she will die.
The book is 60 years old, the best-selling children's book
of all time (according to Wikipedia), and though I have now read it more times than I can
keep track of, I do not tire of it. Garth Williams' illustrations still amuse and enlighten.
White's prose still sparkles. I still cry at the end, which my children did not understand the first few
times but they do now. Malcolm swears off bacon for a few weeks after each reading.
So I hereby declare September 7 to be Charlotte's Web Day.
Here are some quotes I love.
"I was just thinking," said the spider, "that people are very gullible."
"What does 'gullible' mean?"
"Easy to fool," said Charlotte.
"That's a mercy," replied Wilbur, and he lay down in the shade of his fence
and went fast asleep.
"Have you heard about the words that appeared in the spider's web?" asked Mrs.
Arable nervously.
"Yes," replied the doctor.
"Well, do you understand it?" asked Mrs. Arable.
"Understand what?"
"Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider's web?"
"Oh, no," said Dr. Dorian. "I don't understand it. But for that matter I don't
understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the
words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that
the web itself is a miracle."
The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot
last forever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year--the days when
summer is changing into fall--the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and
change.
"We can't tell what may happen at the Fair Grounds. Somebody's got to go along
who knows how to write."
-- Charlotte
libswish3 is at the core of multiple Swish3 implementations, and has reached a
stable enough API that a 1.0.0 release seems appropriate.
From the README:
libswish3 is a document parser compatible with the Swish-e 2.4 -S prog API.
libswish3 is a C library for parsing documents into a data structure that can
then be stored and searched with a variety of IR backends.
There are currently four different implementations available of Swish3.
swish_xapian (C++ using libxapian, included in libswish3 distribution)
SWISH::Prog::Xapian (Perl using Search::Xapian)
SWISH::Prog::Lucy (Perl using Apache Lucy)
SWISH::Prog::KSx (Perl using KinoSearch)
All the Perl implementations are available from CPAN.
They each rely on SWISH::3 (the Perl bindings to libswish3) and the core SWISH::Prog project, a Perl
rewrite of the swish-e 2.x C binary and accompanying helper scripts. The
SWISH::Prog distribution includes a 'swish3' command line interface with options
very similar to the swish-e 2.x command line tool.
Xapian, KinoSearch and Apache Lucy all offer robust UTF-8 and incremental
indexing support, as well as the ability to scale to many millions of documents
across multiple servers.
I've loved the Beatles since the summer of 1983, when I was 11 and my aunt introduced me to their
records (including some rarity vinyl iirc). The first record I ever bought was the blue greatest
hits double record. I played the first side of the first record (Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, Sergent Peppers, Day in the Life) over and over in 6th and 7th grade.
But it's taken me nearly 30 years to identify my favorite record. I've had lots of favorite songs,
but Rubber Soul is now officially my favorite record. I realize no one but me cares, but it feels important
somehow to have identified an actual studio record, rather than a greatest hits compilation, as my favorite.
For all of us interested in what being/been proposed/planned for Indian Mounds Regional Park here is a link to "City of Saint Paul – Indian Mounds Regional Park Master Plan" page. It includes an overview, meeting agenda, notes, presentation along with the Indian Mounds Master Plan Concept.
My laptop started making a Very Bad Noise on Tuesday morning, the kind of whirring creak
I usually associate with the death throes of a hard drive. It didn't sound exactly like
a hard drive, which often clicks or knocks, and the whir was rather slower paced than
the high RPMs of a hard drive. But as I didn't think this Macbook Pro had a fan, since I had
never heard one, I just assumed the only moving part was the hard drive and so I ordered
a new one online using my wife's computer.
When the drive arrived today, I opened the laptop to swap out the hard drive,
and lo! there was a box elder bug caught in one of the two small fans on the logic board.
Yes, my computer had a bug in it. I pulled out the lifeless, hard little black and orange-striped carcass,
and put the cover back on. Started without problem or Very Bad Noise.
I had thought that the term "bug" used to describe a computer glitch was coined after someone
found a moth in an early computer. But according to
the all-knowing Wikipedia I was wrong. Nonetheless, I was relieved to discover this bug
and to fix the problem so easily.
And now I have a spare drive for that time when my hard drive really does die.
One of the three virtues of programming is Laziness. Beware
of false laziness. Andy Lester writes
on the problem aptly when he describes an interaction with another programmer:
This person was one of those programmers who tried for the premature optimization of saving some typing. He forgot that typing is the least of our concerns when programming. He forgot that programmer thinking time costs many orders of magnitude more than programmer typing time, and that the time spent debugging can dwarf the amount of time spent creating code.
I can vouch for the writer's experience, though for me it has been less about back pain
(though I have that too) than eye strain (going on 7 years now). Biggest of all though
has been having children and working from home: that is the interruption formula in a nutshell.
Update: finally found a fix for this. The problem is that Perl has its own
my_setenv() function that interferes with the native setenv() called by
libswish3.c. The fix was to set the magic Perl var PL_use_safe_putenv as
shown here.
This took many hours and googling to track down. Glad to be done with it (I
hope!).
This is a really good op-ed.
Mayhill Fowler gets just the right amount of "philosophical and epistemological" in her reflections on the recent
McChrystal blow-up.
The storyteller changes reality, because the story changes our memory, personal and collective. It's always that way.
It's the great lesson of the Deconstructionist school.
All narrators are untrustworthy -- or rather, trust is not the same as fact. And faith is an act of trust, not fact.
There's been a ton of work on Swish3 in the last year. I've actually started planning a 1.0 release,
after 5 years of work.
Lately I've been focusing on three things: (1) making the Perl bindings easier to install; (2) indexing
of compressed documents; and (3) supporting XInclude of document fragments. The first is accomplished: you
can install the entire library via CPAN. The last two are aimed at large
doc sets where I want to keep the XML compressed on disk for space reasons, and where I want to re-use
subsets of the document collections in building multiple indexes.
So if we're feeling assaulted or overwhelmed by a proliferation of personal narratives,
it's because we are; but the greatest profusion of these life stories isn't to be found
in bookstores. If anything, it's hard not to think that a lot of the outrage directed
at writers and publishers lately represents a displacement of a large and genuinely
new anxiety, about our ability to filter or control the plethora of unreliable
narratives coming at us from all directions. In the street
or in the blogosphere, there are no editors, no proofreaders, and no fact-checkers--the
people at whom we can at least point an accusing finger when the old-fashioned kind
of memoir betrays us.
in a project and watching as 1000s of successful tests scroll
by, culminating in the
All tests successful.
message, gives me the same thrill
of satisfaction as when I used to paint houses, and having finished a long day of sweaty labor
at sanding and chipping old paint off, I could stand back and survey the structure,
primed and ready for a fresh coat of paint. It's the anticipation that thrills, in the
same way that a trip to the grocery store and a full fridge, or several loads of clean
laundry folded and stowed safely away in drawers, thrills me. The knowing that I am prepared,
belt cinched tight, all tests successful.
My work colleagues and I just spent an intense day and a half effectively locked in a room, talking
about our work together and vision for where we want to be. I was reminded
of this piece
by Ken Auletta on the current state of the media vis-a-vis President Obama. A lot of what he has to say
about the impact of the internet, the pace of the news cycle and the breakdown of the 20th century business
model around journalism is part of my daily grind.
David Owen's piece The
Dime Store Floor is a bit of nasal nostalgia. The sense of smell is a vivid memory evoker. A couple
of summers ago I walked into a lumber yard's warehouse and had a sensory hit so vivid that for a moment
I was 8 years old in my great-grandfather's woodshop/garage next door to the house where I grew up.
Something about the old wood and sawdust and heat. The force of that memory surprised me. Owen's piece is like that too.
E. O. Wilson's fiction piece in the New Yorker reads like a National Geographic article, not the kind of fiction I expect from the
New Yorker. But then, that makes it the kind of thing I expect to read in the New Yorker, which is a wide-ranging
publication. I liked the piece.
I was at the Apple Store just now getting a bad RAM chip replaced in my MacBook.
All in all it was a very pleasant experience, and aside from the inconvenience
of having to drive 40 minutes round-trip for a 20 minute errand, pretty painless.
I took the bad RAM chip, which I had identified and yanked from my machine a couple
of weeks ago, in an anti-static bag I had in my desk drawer. My desk is full of them,
along with spare parts and adapters and such, many for machines that haven't been
manufactered or supported for over a decade. I'm a packrat for old computer junk,
though to my credit I have tossed/recycled lots and lots of old "beige" computer parts in the
last few years, especially now that the city/county has good recycling for that kind
of thing.
Anyway, when I handed the bag with the bad chip in it to the young man at the Apple Store,
I didn't think anything of it, but on returning the bag to me he joked that it was a
vintage piece. I chuckled and replied, Well, I'm feeling kind of vintage these days.
The bag had the original label attached: 32MB Apple Quadra and Centris Series.
The chip I had replaced was a standard-issue 2GB size, roughly 1000x more memory than
the bag had originally held.
You know you're getting old in this business when you can distinctly remember the thrill
of a 32MB chip of RAM and how much pure computing power it held.
It's been a long week, culminating today in Frozen Perl 2010, a Perl conference for and by Perl hackers, here in the Twin Cities. I gave two talks at today's conference,
one on Swish3 and
the other on Devel::NYTProf and
Search::Tools. Both talks seemed well-received.
In the process of preparing the talks I also released a few new, related
modules to CPAN this week:
Search::Query now has support for SQL and SWISH Dialects. I hope to add
KinoSearch and Xapian dialects soon. The Search::Query::Parser now has
(undocumented and experimental) support for range queries, so that you can say:
foo=( 1..4 )
and that'll be expanded to
foo=( 1 OR 2 OR 3 OR 4 )
when the Dialect query object is stringified. Handy for things like ranges of
dates, which is how I am using it as $work.
Search::Tools, SWISH::API::*
New releases of these older modules as well, with some bug fixes and
refactoring to support the Search::Query.
So, yes. A busy week.
I enjoyed hearing other folks' talks today at Frozen Perl. There was a good
variety: pack/unpack, Unicode, i18n and best practice-related presentations. I
met some new people, renewed friendships with folks I already knew, and drank
lots of free coffee. The cookies were good too.
So I don't surf youtube very much. Or rather, only when my kids are wanting to watch
Wallace and Gromit trailers. So I'm always waaaay behind the times. That said, this video
is a riot.
For the last ten years I have used the color #E3BF70#fddc8e (hex) as my terminal background color. It's a darkish amber color
that is very easy on the eyes. I'm recording it here because every year or so I have to set up a new system
and always have to eyeball the settings till I get something close to what I am used to.
Update: 26 Jan 2009
Here's my .Xdefaults file for my xterm under X11 on OS X.
Contextual Query Language is defined
by the Library of Congress. I discovered it via CQL::Parser.
Brian Cassidy is involved, so it must be good.
I immediately thought "oh shit. Now my new Search::Query module feels late-to-the-party." But on further reading,
I think a CQL dialect in Search::Query makes some sense.
Search::Query is a SQL::Translator-like module for free-text search. I coded it up this week after brewing the idea for some many months. I'm imagining it now as a next-generation Search::QueryParser::SQL, for contexts beyond SQL. Example: I have a query string that works with Xapian and want to convert it to one that works with Swish-e 2.x or KinoSearch. Just parse it with Search::Query::Parser and assign it a target dialect and then call $query->stringify to get the translated version out.
Saw David Rawlings and Gillian Welch in concert just before Christmas.
Heard this interview just now. I like
the record even more after hearing Dave talk about it.
I know the people who read this blog generally do not care about Perl at all (hi Mom!)
but I spend a great deal of time writing code in the language and talking with other
members of the Perl community about our common projects, and so like anyone who has lived
in the Perl world for any length of time, I have an opinion about Perl6. For those not
in the know, Perl5 is the current version of Perl and has been around for over 10 years.
Perl6 is the next major version evolution, but it has been in development for nearly the same
length of time. The problem is that 10 years is a long time for a computer language release
to gestate and many folks whose opinions count (i.e. managers) see that lack of a release
as a sign that Perl Is Dead and not a good choice for their next programming project. So (the
argument goes) Perl6's vaporware status makes it hard for Perl5 programmers to find jobs, because
the "if it ain't new it ain't sexy" ethos of technology counts for more than it should with those
making the money decisions.
The real problem isn't that Perl6 hasn't been released. The real problem is the name Perl6. Perl6
is not a single executable "thing" like Perl5 is; it's an umbrella for several different projects. Right
now I can sit down at just about any modern Unix-like computer and type 'perl' and write some code
that runs. Perl6 doesn't work quite that way. It's a whole new language, not just a major revision to
an existing language. So the version number 5 vs 6 is misleading. That's the problem. Perl is alive and well.
Perl5 continues to be maintained and developed. I get lots of work done every day using it.
peknet is Peter E Karman
musing on 
syndicate this site
I mention this book today because tomorrow, September 7, is a significant day in the story. It is the day when
Wilbur wins his medal, when he cajoles and bargains with Templeton to save Charlotte's egg sac, and he leaves
Charlotte alone, at the Fair, where she will die.