dopplr
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Edinburgh, United Kingdom from May 24th to 31st
last.fm
David Bowie – Under Pressure
http://www.last.fm/music/David+Bowielast.fm
Dexys – I'm Always Going to Love You
http://www.last.fm/music/Dexyslast.fm
The Imagined Village – Sweet Jane
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Imagined+Villagelast.fm
OST – Strange Thing Mystifying
http://www.last.fm/music/OSTlast.fm
Stealing Sheep – Paper Moon
http://www.last.fm/music/Stealing+Sheep
cpan
Number-Fraction-2.00
=êå{^ȨÚ&¡×¥~¶¶*'
books read
A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2)
author: George R.R. Martin
name: David
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/05/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:
books read
The Poisoned Island
author: Lloyd Shepherd
name: David
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/05/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:
perl hacks
What New(ish) Perl features Do You Use?
Over on LinkedIn, someone asked me “What core PERL[sic] features do you use regularly that are new since 95?” It’s hard to be sure as the perldelta files only seem to go back to 1997 (for example, when were qw(...), q(...) and qq(...) added?), but here’s a quick list off the top of my head.
- my was, of course, added in 5.0. But 5.004 added the ability to use it in control expressions – while (my $foo = <>) – and in foreach loops – foreach my $foo (@foos)
- use VERSION
- Regex extensions – (?<=RE) and similar. Oh, and qr/.../
- Data::Dumper (added in 5.005)
- Unicode support – first added in 5.6.0 and improved in every release since
- our
- Three-argument open
- Omission of intermediate arrows in data structure lookups – $foo[$x][$y] instead of $foo[$x]->[$y]
- use warnings
- Memoize
- Test::More and Test::Simple
- say
- defined-or
- use base (or, more recently, use parent)
- yada-yada operator
Have I missed anything obvious? What new Perl features do you use most?
books read
A Universe from Nothing
author: Lawrence M. Krauss
name: David
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/05/02
shelves: currently-reading
review:
perl hacks
Articles
I’ve been writing articles about Perl for a number of years. Because I have written for many people, the articles are currently spread out over a lot of different sites. I’ve decided to do something about this.
There’s now a new articles section on the site and over the next few weeks I plan to pull all of my Perl articles together in that section.
Currently, it just contains the seven articles that I wrote for perl.com. If you read them, please bear in mind the fact that they are all around ten years old and may well no longer reflect current best practices.
This coming weekend is a long weekend in the UK. This means that I may well find the time to republish a lot more articles.
perl hacks
Moose Course This Saturday
I’m running another Perl School this Saturday (6th April). This time the subject is Object Oriented Programming with Perl and Moose. I ran a two-hour taster version of this course at the London Perl Workshop back in November, but this is the full six-hour version. Tickets are £30 each.
The course is run at Google Campus on the outskirts of the City of London. There’s a full list of topics and a booking form over on the Perl School web site.
davblog
Liverpudlian MPs
Back in the day, when I grew up on my Liverpool council estate every member of Liverpool City council was Conservative. The city had eight Conservative MPs.
This is Nadine Dorries writing on Conservative Home a couple of days ago. She should really learn that if she doesn’t check her facts, then someone else will. You’ll be shocked, I suspect, to hear that this information is less than completely true. To me, it looks like Liverpool never had more than six Tory MPs while Dorries was growing up there.
Dorries was born in 1957. So let’s look at the 1955 general election and see which MPs were elected in Liverpool then. Liverpool has nine MPs, six of which are Tory. None of the seats changed hands in 1959. In 1964, however, the Tories lost four seats, taking their total down to two. This number remained constant in 1966 and 1970. The Tories lost another seat in February 1974 and remained steady on only one seat in October. Finally, in 1979 (when Dorries is 22 – so I’m not sure it still counts as while she was growing up) the Tories doubled their number of seats to a rather unimpressive two.
So Liverpool never had more than six Tory MPs – al least not while Dorries was growing up there. But she thinks that she can just throw a fact into an article like that and people will just accept it’s true.
You should never trust a word that Dorries writes. She has frequently been proven wrong on details like this.
p.s. Tim Fenton has run this analysis too and has reached similar conclusions. And, surprise surprise, he finds that her claims about the council are nonsense too.
davblog
Doctor Who News
I’m getting bored of the number of media outlets who are taking the slightest of comments that someone makes about the upcoming Doctor Who anniversary special and spinning it into a story packed full of completely unsubstantiated nonsense. Headlines like “No Doctors To Return For 50th Special” which, when you read them turn out to be based on the fact that Colin Baker hasn’t had a phone call from Steven Moffat.
Obviously it’s good for the show that it gets all of this publicity and I don’t, for one second, expect the production team to do anything to put a stop to it. They’ll tell us what they want us to know when they want us to know it. Not a moment sooner.
But in the meantime, anyone who has ever appeared in Doctor Who has to watch what they say for fear of it being overhead by a tabloid journalist and being used to reinforce what ever story the journalist wants to write.
In an attempt to counter this, I’ve set up whonews.tv. The plan is that I’ll read these stories, extract the actual facts that they are based on and explain what we can actually believe based on those facts. Forensic analysis of entertainment news, I suppose.
I’ve also got a page where I list the best current information we have about what is actually happening for the show’s 50th anniversary. I’ll try to keep that up to date as more details emerge over the coming months.
Oh, and there’s at Twitter account too – WhoNews50. You might want to follow that.
Let me know if you find it useful.
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