Reflections on the Perl6 logo

She: Oh… uh, isn’t that new?
He: Yes it is. Do you like it?
She: Well… what is it?
He: Uh… “New Young American Primitive”.
She: I have a new young American sister. She’s only three and her stuff is really primitive.

—Joan Chandler and John Dall, Rope (Alfred Hitchcock)

It would appear that Larry Wall has (his heart) settled on a logo for Perl6, and he’s been thinking about it for quite some time.

I would also like to make it clear that I’m a just a little tired of these “rounds”; more importantly, that I’ve been mulling over this particular issue for many years.

Which brings us to:

Does the flap of a butterfly's wings set off a tornado?

Woah, my eyes, talk about Angry Fruit Salad. Of course, this comes from the man who considers chartreuse to be a suitable background colour for a web page…

There is a textual representation of the logo as well, and in fact, it’s only after seeing the text version that the above makes any sense at all:

»ö«

Or if you have Unicode and decent typesetting software:

Now the meaning becomes clear, it’s meant to be a riff on Perl6’s hyper-operators. Well, fair enough, but really, those bug eyes, that crooked smile, the P and 6 in the wings, that’s supposed to be what? And what will that look like to a colour-blind person? Is this a peculiarly American need, to have a mascot? I’m baffled.

But seriously. In the 10th State of the Onion, Larry suggested that Perl 4 was a pre-teen, and Perl 5 was an adolescent. Perl 6 is when Perl grows up and becomes an adult. And the language is coming along nicely. There are lots of lovely features going into that is going to make it a fascinating language to work in over the next couple of decades. And now this curiously infantile regression.

The biggest problem is that I would have a hard time advocating the language without people snickering at me. I am reminded of Jamie Zawinskie, when he announced his resignation from Netscape, some months after the company was bought out by AOL.

…someone from the New York Times asked me what it would be like working for AOL, given that they represent (in her words) “all that is cheesy and mainstream about the net.” She asked if AOL had lost that stigma. I disengaged my brain and answered,

I think AOL still has all the stigma that it always has, as far as image goes. My friends keep saying jwz@aol.com and then laughing uncontrollably…

I envisage a conversation at work when I would suggest that Perl6 would be a secret weapon that would boost programmer productivity and give us the edge that allows us to roll out new applications faster and better, and the other people in my team rolling their eyes and laughing. “Hey guys, let’s break out the acrylic paints and do some fingerpainting!”

The language scene is a lot more crowded these days. Perl is going to find the going a lot harder this time around. Not to mention the rise of worse is better and the likes of PHP.

I can’t see how this is going to help matters.

I just can’t take any of you seriously
Fire up the batmobile, ’cause I gotta get outta here …

—Liz Phair, (Fire Up The) Batmobile

So please, anyone, anywhere, come up with a better one, before it’s too late, ok?

Scoop, by Woody Allen (2006)

Looking for clues

Finally managed to see Scoop a while back. A good film, in many ways a revisiting of Manhattan Murder Mystery.

The real let-down was the feeble third character in the film, the English aristocrat played by Hugh Jackman. I don’t know whether this is because he’s just a really bad actor who happens to have a clean jaw, or that Woody was too enamoured with Miss Johansson and just wanted to have fun, to pay sufficient attention to the directing of the third part of the trio that forms the basis of the film.

Given that Jackman has played in some pretty crappy films, not the least of which would be “Australia”, I suspect it’s more of the former than the latter. Still, Allen and Johansson create a strong enough dynamic between them to carry the film.

William Gibson, Spook Country

Just finished the latest from Gibson (or at least the latest as far as I am concerned). I started a couple of months ago and got stuck on the first chapter and put it down again. I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago this time it caught, and I fairly raced through it.

It follows the standard Gibson convention of having N independent players doing their thing on separate paths, and then converging linearly to the story’s climax. In this case it’s a riff on the Repo Man suitcase-in-the-trunk-of-the-car, and no-one’s really quite sure what’s in it. There’s the inevitable omniscient puppet-master with unlimited deep pockets (and a mag lev bed). There’s no sex on the bed, but then again, I don’t read Gibson to read love stories.

Technology is still present, although in a much more muted form than his earlier works. The cyberpunk theme has been stripped out, and the result is a fairly sharp social commentary.

Two things really annoyed me. The first was the ease with which the various characters in the book managed to snag open wifi networks. These days they’re rarer than you think. I’ve even reconfigured my own router at home to lock down my network. And from what I’ve read, free municipal wifi isn’t very widespread in America. The second plot flaw was an accident where a car crashes at high speed into a lamp post outside a bar… and the two occupants more or less walk away unhindered.

That said, it’s an entertaining yarn with lots of wry observations of 21st century life done with Gibson’s razored turns of phrase. And when the mysterious secret is finally revealed, it’s not so much of an anticlimax as in All Tomorrow’s Parties or Idoru. In fact, it’s quite credible. I give him credit for taking a fairly simple plot and weaving a couple of hundred pages around it.

Using Perl to scan a Lotus Notes database quickly

I had a couple of hundred messages lying around in the depths of my work e-mail account. They were old Majordomo subscribe/unsubscribe alerts for a mailing list I managed (until we switched over to Mailman). I had kept them around because one of these days I figured I’d load the information into a database to track the evolution of the subscriber base.

I haven’t managed to get around to doing that yet, but I did want to get rid of the messages. All I needed was the subject line of the mail (which contained all the necessary info) and the date the message was received. The idea of doing it manually would have been a nightmare. I searched around a bit for a way of automating the task, and discovered that it could be done through OLE.

So I wrote a quick Perl program to do it. It went like this:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32::OLE;

my $Notes = Win32::OLE->new('Notes.NotesSession')
    or die "Cannot start Lotus Notes Session object.\n";
my $db = $Notes->GetDatabase("MyServer/MyDomain", "mail/mymail.nsf")
    or die "Could not open database.\n";
my $all = $db->AllDocuments;

foreach my $n (1 .. $all->Count) {
    my $doc  = $all->GetNthDocument($n);
    my $item = $doc->GetFirstItem('Subject');
    if (!$item) {
        warn "doc $n has no subject\n";
        next;
    }

    my $subject = $item->{Text};
    next unless $subject =~ /^(?:UN)?SUBSCRIBE my-mailing-list/;
    print $doc->GetFirstItem('DeliveredDate')->{Text}, " $subject\n";
}

and presto, the deed was done. This saved me I don’t know how many hours of mind-crushingly boring and RSI-inducing cutting and pasting. It’s so trivial it’s not even worth bundling up, so this is probably the best place for other people to stumble across it in a search (hi!).

I’m not sure if Strawberry Perl is bundled with Win32::OLE, but this works straight out of the box with ActivePerl.

Breastfeeding: the good, the bad and the ugly

No, nothing to do with Mme Marceau today.

I just watched a 4-video interview from The Atlantic on the question of breastfeeding, where 4 women discuss their experiences in breastfeeding and what it all meant. I found it really bizarre. But then again I find modern America profoundly bizarre. I forget that the richest, most powerful country on earth can’t get its act together sufficiently to offer a woman a year off work to introduce her child to the world.

They discuss the pros and cons of breast versus bottle, which seem to boil down to what’s in it for the child, and the mother. (well duh!)

I have difficulty coming to terms with the mindset that makes people care to hypothesise over whether there is a tangible, measurable clinical health benefit that may accrue to a breastfed infant and then complain about the difficulty of drawing reliable inferences from the available statistics. Different social classes make different choices about breastfeeding (well duh! redux). And it messes up the stats! It’s hard! Not fair!

Nor should it be a problem that women could be engaging in some narcissistic feel-good behaviour at the same time. Those sneaky women! They’ve just gone through nine months of all sorts of ups and downs, and you would begrudge them that? If they draw some physical or psychological pleasure from the act, well, think of the savings in medication!

And people give you filthy looks when you say you don’t breastfeed. That’s okay, people give you filthy looks for all sorts of things. It’s in our nature. Whatever gets your child fed is fine by me.

But what really got on my wick was the futility of the exercise. Because the whole issue is moot! How long has the choice been available? By a rough calculation (based on consulting a couple of Wikipedia pages), formula in the present form only kicked off after the World War II, when complex industrial society really took off. Breastfeeding has been around for, hmmm, 300 000 000 years. So, here’s a question: which one will go away first? And even if I’m wrong in those numbers by an error of four orders of magnitude, evolution is still looking pretty good. (Sidelink: an article on how mammary glands may have evolved).

The question, if a bald, clinical question is to be posed, is:

On the one side we have an assembly line requiring formula foodstock, water, electricity and a bunch of specialist technicians to keep the thing tuned. And a largely petroleum-based delivery mechanism to bring it to you. On the other side, we have a woman, who is just hungry. And an infant.

When does it become more energetically interesting to just get some food to the mother, and let her produce the milk? When does the costs-benefits analysis go positive? I think that the fact that we can do without formula means that at some point in the foreseeable future, we probably will. So if in the meantime, formula does it for you and the water’s pure, go for it, end of story.

It’s another one of these things that we will just continue to do until we can’t, and then we won’t.

Tulips in spring

We bought a bag of mixed tulips when we were up in Amsterdam at Christmas. The label said there was red, orange, yellow, blue, white and purple flowers in the packet.

There’s an alley along side a canal that has shop after shop selling all sorts of bulbs. Both they and Amsterdam residents must laugh at the silly tourists who come and allow themselves to be ripped off. We bought a packet of fritillaria that contained about 30 bulbs. Two have sprouted. And a couple of calla bulbs, which are I suspect are quietly composting themselves. Not to mention a gigantic cyclamen bulb that has about as much biological activity as an abalone shell.

So back to the multi-coloured tulips… the results were not what we expected; we were hoping for a few more colours, that’s what the label said. Oh well, uniform colours are okay too in their own way…

In looking very closely at the leaves, we discovered that one bulb was in fact slightly different: it’s leaves had a faint yellow striping along the edge. Bonus!

I remember looking for a long time at a packet of agapanthus. Now I don’t feel so bad. You didn’t get all my money, you scummy retailer!

Although we did have a bunch of hyacinths that came up, with an absolutely heavenly perfume.