canspice.org

• From my #yapc notes: "jesus christ he just made SQL create a mandelbrot set fractal graphic" #
• Why is the History Channel showing a show about what'll happen in the future assuming humans vanish in a poof? #
• 6am is way too early to be up. #yapc #
• $8.50 in fees on top of a $26 Pirates ticket? RE. TAR. DED. #
• Pirates down 5-0 going into bottom of 9th, leadoff homer, a few doubles in a row, bases loaded with 2 outs, 3-2 count was crazy. They lost. #
• And now it's time for bed. I'm tiiiiiiiiiiiired. #
• RT @drjonboyg #f1 – Peace deal has been agreed between FIA and teams to end breakaway threat. Details on http://www.jamesallenonf1.com #
• Hooray for fire alarms at 3am. #yapc #
• Oh no, Billy Mays died! Will this bring down Twitter like MJ's death did? #

Brad Tweets

I admit, I originally thought this talk was titled “You can do THAT with Perl?!?” and got kind of annoyed when I didn’t see any Perl at all. You see, this talk was about new features in SQL, specifically their implementation in Postgres.

The coolest thing in this talk (and at YAPC so far, in my opinion) was creating a graphic of the Mandelbrot set in SQL:

WITH RECURSIVE
Z(Ix, Iy, Cx, Cy, X, Y, I)
AS (
    SELECT Ix, Iy, X::float, Y::float, X::float, Y::float, 0
    FROM
        (SELECT -2.2 + 0.031 * i, i FROM generate_series(0,101) AS i) AS xgen(x,ix)
    CROSS JOIN
        (SELECT -1.5 + 0.031 * i, i FROM generate_series(0,101) AS i) AS ygen(y,iy)
    UNION ALL
    SELECT Ix, Iy, Cx, Cy, X * X - Y * Y + Cx AS X, Y * X * 2 + Cy, I + 1
    FROM Z
    WHERE X * X + Y * Y < 16::float
    AND I < 100
),
Zt (Ix, Iy, I) AS (
    SELECT Ix, Iy, MAX(I) AS I
    FROM Z
    GROUP BY Iy, Ix
    ORDER BY Iy, Ix
)
SELECT array_to_string(
    array_agg(
        SUBSTRING(
            ' .,,,-----++++%%%%@@@@#### ',
            GREATEST(I,1)
    ),''
)
FROM Zt
GROUP BY Iy
ORDER BY Iy;

I think I got that right...

Brad YAPC 10 david fetter, mandelbrot set, sql

This wasn’t really a talk, it was more “ask Schwern questions and he’ll answer them and maybe go off on a tangent about something else.”

First question was a two-parter: what do you want to work on next year and what don’t you want to work on next year?

First answer is for the second question: PHP. Second answer for the first question: he wants to be (or make) the Red Hat of CPAN. He wants to take the 5000 modules and 2000 developers and have one front-end where things just work. When you’re using a module from CPAN you don’t know what you’re going to get, as modules change all the time with new releases. Schwern wants to change this somehow.

Regarding PHP, Schwern is working with PHP full-time. He says that the good thing about PHP is that when you download it, it just works right out of the box. You don’t have to worry about modules and plugins and whatnot. This leads to PHP’s bad side: global namespace pollution. There are 75 built-in functions to deal with arrays and 13 different sort functions. Crazy!

He wants to declare ExtUtils::MakeMaker finished. Go use Module::Build instead!

A while back Damian Conway said something about Perl 5 + i, which was kind of a joke in that Damian way, but Schwern went and created perl5i. It modifies perl5 “so it fits how it works in [Schwern's] imagination” by enabling a bunch of modules automatically, like Modern::Perl, Time::Piece and autobox.

Then there was something about how being polyamorous is like Agile software development.

Brad YAPC 10 michael schwern, perl, php

YAPC 10 kicked off Monday morning. Two of the organizers (Casey West and Dan Wright) started things off by regaling us with their tale of getting to and from YAPC::NA 2005 in Toronto. The take-away message was when you’re travelling to a foreign country, take appropriate travel documentation. A drivers license doesn’t count.

After the opening spiel came Richard Dice, the president of The Perl Foundation, gave us an update on TPF and Perl over the past year. From someone who doesn’t follow TPF it looks like financially it’s doing fairly well. It’s a $200,000 donation from Ian Hague in May 2008, it received a $50,000 donation from booking.com, and received another $70,000 from other donations. It has given out grants to help support Perl 6 development, to Nick Clark to release Perl 5.8.9, and to David Mitchell to release Perl 5.10.1.

In March 2009 The Parrot Foundation was spun off from TPF.

TPF gave out five grands in each of the second and third quarters of 2008, two in the fourth quarter, and one in the first quarter of 2009. It’s sponsoring nine Google Summer of Code projects, up from five last year.

Over the past year, Perl 5 has moved to git for version control. Strawberry Perl, for running Perl on Windows, was released. Various Perl groups were formed, such as the Japan Perl Association and the Enlightened Perl Organization.

There were many Perl-related events over the past year, from OSCON to workshops and hackathons around the world.

After Richard, Larry Wall gave a keynote about error messages and how he’s making the ones in Perl 6 chatty.

After Larry, Jerry Gay from The Parrot Foundation gave a talk, and after him came Yaakov, telling new YAPCers to go talk to people.

Brad YAPC 10 jerry gay, larry wall, perl, richard dice, the parrot foundation, the perl foundation, yaakov

I arrived in Pittsburgh at some ungodly hour (something like 9:30am) after seventeen hours of travel. Unfortunately this ungodly hour meant that when I got to my hotel it was much too early for check-in, so I got to wander around town. I discovered the University of Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Museum of Art (I’ve seen better art museums before, but hey, Pittsburgh), the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and a nice coffee shop.

But I’m in Pittsburgh for YAPC|10 (or the 10th Yet Another Perl Conference, which may or may not actually be the 12th or 13th, depending on who’s counting) which is being held at Carnegie Mellon University, which I completely failed to discover while walking around.

“But Brad,” you say, “I’m looking at the map for that coffee shop and CMU is right across the street!”

Well, yes, I realize that now, but I’m used to universities with giant welcome signs and not these urban setting universities. A building looks like any other building, put a damned CMU sign on it!

Oh well. Eventually I figured it out after heading back to the hotel and looking things up on the Google.

Dinner was buffet and beer at Beer Emporium, part of Sharp Edge. Not bad, but I didn’t get value for money on the food.

Brad YAPC 10 beer, carnegie mellon university, pittsburgh, university of pittsburgh, yapc10

• "An error occurred during installation." Thanks, OS X. Real helpful there. #
• Dammit, I'll be in Pittsburgh a week too late. Just once I'd like to see a Stanley Cup parade. God knows the Canucks will never have one. #
• Sucks that they're selling the Albion Ferries. :-( #
• Welp, looks like this reduction is going to finish well after I've left for the day. #
• Hey iPhoto, before I upgraded you I told you to not start when I plug in my camera. Now you start when I plug in my camera. STOP IT. #
• Why the hell do I need to restart my computer to install a Safari update? It's only from 4.0 to 4.0.1! #
• When people are expecting a killer whale and they see a human, they get spooked. Spooked. #
• Volleyball time! #
• Show support for democracy in Iran add green overlay to your Twitter avatar with 1-click – http://helpiranelection.com/ #
• Weather in Pittsburgh seems good for #yapc. Shorts it is! #
• Made it to Pittsburgh after a zillion hours travelling. Okay, seventeen hours. Only got about two hours of sleep, though. #

Brad Tweets

• I think I’m the only one alive who doesn’t give two shits about WWDC. #
• Also, I probably shouldn’t be swearing on the computer with a baby on my lap. #
• Time to go do a few laps of Queen Liliuokalani Park with Elizabeth! #
• Nature paper submitted, and I’m a co-author in a cast of thousands! http://is.gd/UhXo #
• Disappointing turnout for volleyball. Only JAC people showed up! #
• GO PENS GO #
• “Have you ever been told that you look like a llama?” #
• I wish there were a way to see chapters of a podcast in iTunes without having to play it. #
• Hey yeah Twix are only the most popular chocolate bars in the machine, I can see why you’d want to replace them with granola bars. #
• What to pick for facebook, brad.cavanagh or canspice? #
• Went with brad.cavanagh. I don’t have panache. :( #

Brad Tweets

From Australia comes the story of two parents convicted of manslaughter for killing their daughter. How? They “treated” her eczema with homeopathic remedies instead of conventional medicine.

This is an extremely sad and disturbing case. Gloria Thomas, nine months old, suffered from eczema, a skin condition that is treatable with medical creams. Instead, her parents decided to treat her with homeopathic remedies, even skipping a scheduled visit to a dermatologist so they could fly to India. Her body required more nutrition than her mother’s milk could provide because it was busy trying to fight off the infection.

By the time she died, she was the weight of an average three-month-old, her body was covered with angry blotches and her once black hair had turned completely white.

Nine days after returning from India, where the father’s brother “prescribed” homeopathic remedies, they took her to the hospital:

Nine days after they returned from India, Thomas and Manju Sam finally took Gloria to hospital for an eye infection they thought was conjunctivitis, and she was immediately rushed into emergency to be treated by a team of medical experts. It turned out her cornea was melting.

Dr Susannah Cunningham, who was then a pediatric emergency registrar, said Gloria was among only a handful of children whose cases she had been unable to forget.

“I think it’s the pain that has made this case stand out for me in my memory,” Dr Cunningham said.

“I can vividly recall where she was in the emergency department. I remember the 6½ hours I was involved very clearly. She was in a lot of pain and had been suffering and that’s something that doesn’t sit well with any pediatrician.”

She eventually died in hospital of sepsis which had caused bleeding in her lungs and airways.

When anyone asks “what’s the harm in homeopathy?” remember Gloria Thomas. Remember the suffering she went through for half of her short life because of homeopathy. Imagine the little girl screaming in pain for hours and hours because of homeopathy. Remember her death because of homeopathy.

Homeopathy kills.

Brad Medicine & Health, Skepticism gloria thomas, homeopathy

I admit, I was lazy last week and didn’t write a Bad Baby Names post. I did write down the Bad Baby Names, though, and that means it’s a lucky two-week smorgasbord of Bad Baby Names! Let’s go!

Starting off with last week’s, we have Lyric. I guess that’s not really that bad a name.

However, Rhaejah (I assume this is Pidgin for “rager” in the same way that bruddah is pidgen for brother), Mykie (I assume this is Stupid for “Mikey”), and Cheyson (also Stupid for “Jayson”) are all Bad.

I’m not really sure what to make of Kayin or Zayne.

Now last week I had a bit of a conundrum: which Bad Baby Name was to be the big loser? I couldn’t choose between Na`leiyah or Sarenity. Readers, would you like to weigh in?

Topping off the list for this week are the “-en/-yn” gang: Deslyn, Kaylyn, Shaycen, Zaylen, and Xayceten. I have no idea what that last name is supposed to be, other than bad. I think you have to pull your tongue out and stick it in your eye to pronounce it properly, and then you might accidentally summon one of the Outer Gods.

Zaylie is pretty bad. So is Shellsea, which I could have sworn I’ve made fun of before.

However, neither of those is as bad as A’Lycea. I think this qualifies as a crime against apostrophes.

Brad Bad Baby Names

• Always nice to see this comment in production code: /* not really sure what I’m doing here… */ #
• Reducing 12CO with 13CO makes MAKECUBE cry. #
• Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: http://bit.ly/eqonY #
• Finally updated ORAC-DR installation instructions like I said I was going to do two weeks ago. #
• Yay, MAKECUBE is using 185% of my CPU! #
• I set my hotmail IM privacy setting to “allow anyone” and within 30 minutes I get a spam IM. Back to “only contacts on my contact list”. #
• Oh man, David Eddings died. :-( http://tinyurl.com/qwdu52 #
• Dammit, forgot a change of clothes for volleyball. #
• French Canadian electronica. Sweet. #

Brad Tweets