afongen

Seems the parent company for publishers Glasshaus and Friends of ED has been declared insolvent, so everyone’s shutting down. Damn shame. Wrox, too. Yikes.

It hasn’t appeared on their home page or available through Amazon yet, but it looks as if O’Reilly has published the second volume of the “Best of the Perl Journal” trilogy: Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk. Woo-hoo!

Among those critical of President Bush’s unilateral action against Iraq is the other President Bush.

In an ominous warning for his son, Mr Bush Sr said that he would have been able to achieve nothing if he had jeopardised future relations by ignoring the UN. “The Madrid conference would never have happened if the international coalition that fought together in Desert Storm had exceeded the UN mandate and gone on its own into Baghdad after Saddam and his forces.”

I was out sick on Friday, but it’s not like I stayed offline over the weekend, so I don’t know how I missed it. Larry Wall’s released his latest Apocalypse, covering subroutines in Perl 6.

My father refuses to connect his computer to the Internet. Not for email, not for the Web, not for anything. Because he’s computer-ignorant? Hardly, he was a programmer for many years. In that time, though, he developed a healthy paranoia about networking. Maybe because he worked on a lot of highly sensitive military projects, which skewed his perspective (or enlightened it, depending on your perspective). Donno. Either way, the only time we had his blessing for a computer in our house to connect to an external machine was when I was a little kid and he connected to the mainframe at work to do work-related things and to let me play games. (That, by the way, is how I learned to type, read, and play blackjack all at the same time.)

Mind you, we did it anyway. My younger brother ran a BBS or two on the sly (housed at a friend’s place), and I spent a whole lotta time on local BBS, Usenet, and Fidonet. We just did it with our own computers late at night, when Dad wouldn’t notice the phone line tied up.

All that was years ago, before the Internet exploded into public consciousness, and my dad still doesn’t connect up. Considering this is how I make my living, I view this with an odd mixture of bemusement and respect.

When I read this email message from Nathan Steiner’s father, I thought that maybe it’s a very good thing that my dad remains an Internet hermit. At least I don’t get email like this. Just the occasional weirdly erudite voicemail, quoting from Genesis to support or criticize something or other. Then I got to thinking that my dad would never write email like that. It’s more like something I would do.

Oh god. I’m going to write things like this to my son.

This photo of Owen and me reading is one of my favorites. He loves so much to be read to, and I love reading with him. I think it really comes across in that picture.

Apparently others agree. It’s now on the home page for St. Cloud State University’s Department of Child and Family Studies.

A couple months ago I started using Smarty, a templating system for PHP. It’s something that I’d meant to do for a long time but kept getting distracted by other things, namely an overwhelming workload. Finally, an opportunity to work with a student intern gave me the excuse I needed to make the time. It’s been an interesting ride.

Read more about Smarty… I moved this entry there because I was tired of futzing with the markup within Movable Type.

Not what you think.

I am visiting artima.com more frequently. I’m particularly fond of the great interviews, such as the latest, an interview with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, authors of The Pragmatic Programmer. I am enamored with their broken window analogy: if a little something is broken and not fixed or flagged, it sets in motion a cascade of disrespect and carelessness.

It comes down to showing that you care. Take for example some code that is kind of shared among the team, but primarily is mine. There’s some code in there that is obviously bad, but it doesn’t look like I care about it. I’m just leaving it bad. Anybody else coming into that module might say, “Well, Dave doesn’t care about it. It’s his module. Why should I care about it?” In fact, if you come into my module and do something else that’s bad, you can say, “Well, Dave doesn’t care. Why should I care?” That kind of decay happens to modules as well as apartment buildings.

On the other hand, suppose I notice an edge condition that doesn’t work in my code. I know it’s a bug, but the bug is not critical to the application today and I don’t have time to fix it. I could at least put a comment in there. Or, even better, I could put assertion in there, so that if the edge condition ever hits, something’s going to happen that shows I’m on top of it. By doing that, first of all I make it easier to identify the problem. But I also show other people that I care about that enough that they will fix problems too when they encounter them.

This man is talking to me.

Email’s been down at work the past day or so. If you’ve been trying to reach me there, I’m not ignoring you. I’m just enjoying the feeling of being out of touch, tinged with the dread of what awaits me when the server’s restored.

The oddly named Nemesis Project looks like something to bookmark: a good collection of information and links for CSS and XHTML.