Hmmm...quiet today. Everyone must be reading Harry Potter.
Like droves of other people around the country, Emily and I went to our local Barnes & Noble last night to get a copy of the latest in the Harry Potter chronicles. Almost instinctively I wandered over to the nerd section where I looked at every spine on the shelf, a few of which managed to catch my eye.
First I picked up and flipped through Wicked Cool(tm) Shell Scripts. I learned a little shell syntax and some tricks that would really add to my shell scripting. The book had a few cool ideas about handling backups and replacing the rm utility to add functionality. Unfortunately, what followed the early chapters was material that simply screamed Perl -- especially the web page scraping stuff. I might pick up this up as a style guide and reference, as Dave Taylor really knows his sh.
Next I flipped through Steal This File Sharing Book. As a kid who entered college just as Napster bit the dust, I'm pretty aware of all of the fire-sharing tools out there. This book, however, provided me with an interesting history of all the networks and clients that are out there. Props for including Bill Gates' infamous piracy letter and the post announcing alt.rock-and-roll.
Finally I settled on the latest edition of Programming Ruby and read up to the creation of classes and objects. It's perfectly designed for folks coming from the Perl world and it does a great job at introducing the language. It's interesting to see all of the things that Ruby borrowed from other languages and how the community is moving away from certain Perlisms, such as relying on side-effects.
Now to totally switch topics. McDonald's overmarketing of their stupid new salad is getting more invasive. After stepping out of my apartment I was immediately confronted by a plane dragging a McDonald's salad advertisement through the Boston sky. If I hear anyone say "fruit buzz" on the street, I will immediately tar and feather them.
Quick fact: That salad has a gram of fat more than a regular burger and as many calories as a cheeseburger. Read more at McDonald's disturbing list of nutritional facts.
Re:Eclipse
eclip5e on 2005-08-11T00:03:02
I don't know how this comment got attached to this post, it was supposed to go with the poem about the OSCON. This website kinda blows, the navigation is all wierd.
