Thursday, September 10, 2009

Off Topic Post Today

It's also a bit of a cross-posting. I'm a UNIX systems administrator - a computer geek. I also raise and race pigeons. So, this article really grabbed my attention! It was an article about racing pigeons on SlashDot. Evidently, someone wrote an RFC for the Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. That is, sending data using racing pigeons! Of course, this has been done (for a couple millennium) but they are now applying the standards of TCP/IP (the Internet Protocol) to the data. That is, how do you handle packet loss? (Such as interception by Prairie Falcon). Although, it was meant as a joke, they were able to use it. In one example they sent a 4GB SD card by pigeon in 48 minutes.

Okay, I posted this to my pigeon blog but it was not well received. Confused people asked me what it meant. I found the results of this years race on BBC this morning which state it more plainly:
Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.
Okay, it's got nothing to do with Perl but my racing pigeon buddies don't see the humor in the RFC for TCP/IP using Pigeons so I had to post it here. :-)

Wait - I've got it. This blog is for the Perl Ironman - right? That reminds me - "Ironman" Mike Tyson raises pigeons. [sound of crickets] That's all I've got.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Cheap Books!

Wow! This is pretty neat! Too bad I already own both of those. If you didn't catch it - use Perl; says O'Reilly has dropped the price of Learning Perl and Mastering Perl to $9.99 - before other discounts! I have all of the Learning Perl editions! Some are signed by the Author(s). :-p

So what does this mean? I hope it means a 6th edition of Learning Perl is coming out and not something else (remember "cut-out albums"?).