Lonely Lion

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I started reading Higher Order Perl again this morning. I forgot how versatile Perl can be, and how easy it is to write poor code. Chapter one, on recursion and writing functions that allow for reentry, made me want to re-do two projects I recently finished at work. Sadly, I fell for the trap of using a big list of global variables in both projects. I really should have written them a bit more functionally. I guess it’s good though, as it gives me a potential target for future refactoring.

Chapter two, on dispatch tables, fired off a bunch of ideas for a future someday / maybe sort of project that I have on a back burner. I’m desperate to write a domain specific language for something. Dispatch tables, and HOP’s specific examples to illustrate them, fit into that idea pretty well.

So, all in all, in about 45 minutes of train reading, HOP proved to be a great read.

Will Class::DBI fork?

brian d foy’s write up on the recent Class::DBI “war”. This has been chatted about at work, I’m not really sure who’s right, but I’m pretty sure the way this is being handled is totally wrong. It’s a sad situation. I’ve been through similar personality conflicts with the CiN board, and it never helps the overall product.

Hopefully all involved parties will cool out for a few days.

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I wrote a review of Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel for the chiPy reviews page. It’s an excellent book, and a great way to get started with Lisp. I highly recommend it.

Wired News: Decoding Bees’ Wild Waggle Dances

Very cool…I might look into getting a copy of that Nature. My Bee project is buzzing along nicely. This morning on the train, I got the Bees to find flowers and bring nectar back to the hive. I’ll try and do a check in soon.

I think I’m going to build a Cocoa interface to the library, just to sort of monitor stuff. I still haven’t decided what I ultimately want to do with the library, most likely it will just be a fun OO Perl exercise, but there’s some potential for more fun with it. It is super slow right now. The map is one big array of location objects. All map “math” is done by traversing that array, which is sort of ridiculous, given each location has it’s own x,y coordinate. I did the array thing because it was easiest to get started with. If I can optimize that a bit, I’ll be in much better shape. I’ve read a teeny tiny bit about representing chess boards in memory, I’m not sure if this is a situation that that sort of idea could be applied to.

I’m really not sure what the industry standard way to represent “space” in memory is. Fun fun.

My first public Backpack page: Backpack: Bee Sim Project.

Not much up there, but it’s a start. I’ve been tinkering with the package here and there over the past couple of train rides. I can create a world, and am working on the stuff to populate it. I’m going to put my design cards into some sort of UML and pop a picture up on the Backpack page. For now, it’s all on index cards.

Also, I’ve been working on it on my laptop, and haven’t added it to my public Subversion repository just yet. I will. Get ready.