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.

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"?).

It's tough to say something EVERY WEEK

Man! This is harder than I thought. I don't have any trouble blogging about my racing pigeon training or my catch-all blog (that has revolved around beekeeping lately) . I've got ideas for a couple of other blogs too. But, what to say about my baby-talk Perl that won't be ridiculed? Well, one thing, in response to the co-workers who said "Perl is dead", I thought this news about the new Android phone using Perl spoke for itself!

Am I the only one NOT using "strict"?

An old friend came to town the other day. He's quite a Perl guru. Like me, he was a Perl user prior to Perl 5 and I figured he'd be someone who, like me, NEVER uses 'use strict'; in their code. I was wrong! Man, that's one of the things I like about Perl. It'll let me ride a motorcycle without a helmet. Drive without a seat belt. Go swimming in less than 30 minutes after I've eaten or even run with scissors! I know! I know! These are not good ideas - but short cuts seldom are. It's the price you pay and as long as you know the risks, it's nice that Perl lets you use a variable that has not been declared or invoke $_ with the notion that both Perl and yourself know what you're talking about (in that context). I like that freedom. I guess the other side of the coin is you're also allowed to add "use strict" and "use warnings". I'm just glad it's not the default (yet).

"Parrot even runs BASIC programs"

This might be old news but I was recently told "Parrot even runs BASIC programs". However, when I went looking for examples - I found none. All of the references were from 2002 or so. Then I ran across this: "Parrot BASIC — For the Parrot virtual machine; V 1.0 is modeled on GW-BASIC, V 2.0 is modeled on Microsoft QuickBASIC version 4.5." (see Parrot BASIC under the list of BASIC dialests on Wikipedia.) Wow! I'm probably the only one who would think that was really, really cool! I switched TO Perl from QuickBASIC 4.5! Does anyone know of some good examples of running BASIC programs through Parrot?

Perl 6 ponderings

I wonder when the new Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials will come out? It was supposed to come out yearly. I guess that didn't turn out to be very practical. I'd like to see a "Perl 6 for Perl 5 programmers". The examples I have run across are pretty generic Perl. I guess I should be glad. Perl 6 isn't as scary as it is played up to be.

Finally installed Perl 6

Tried Pugs - had a difficult time with the development framework required. Rakudo Perl 6 went on pretty smoothly once I added the --gen-parrot parameter to the "perl Configure.pl" command. Made a hello.pl6 program that used Perl 5.10's "say" command (without the usual preface in the code to invoke 5.10 stuff). Yeah, pretty weak. Need to look at some more interesting examples. (and now I can!)