Brad Arsenault (dot com)
The Blog of Brad
Days of Code: A Perl Uploadr // Day 3
Jan 17th
Today was rather hectic; exam preparations (actually, there was some Perl and Apple Script involved there!), some homework, and …. life…. I will return to Perl code tomorrow. Just thought I’d update to say that there was no update.
Tomorrow will be back to routine of my Mon->Fri-ness so there will be ample time to spend in front of Espresso… even better if it’ll be with espresso!
Book: Disclosure by Michael Crichton
Jan 17th
I read this book over the course of xx days on Kindle for iPhone… There seems to be a pattern in Michael Crichton books: they have a moral. I haven’t read a book with a very clear (almost obnoxiously obvious!) moral since I was in (as Americans call it, Kindergarten) primary. Yet again, true for this book. This book’s moral? Sexual equality, sexual harassment (see the subtitle, “sex is power”).
I should also mention that I read this book from:
to
I am now 100% done Disclosure by Michael Crichton on #Kindle for iPhone. (After ~8 hours of reading today) http://yfrog.com/33nd3aj
The for the ~5 days I was reading this, it provoked a lot of interesting discussion as to whether a man and a women do have equal rights and convictions. Ultimately, whether your feminist, anti-feminism, or of another side of this debate, there needs to be reform in sexual harassment law. As the book made clear (but not the movie so much, but I’ll get to that in the next paragraph) sexual harassment charges are a weapon in the business world; charges pressed, intent, result of trial, or evidence don’t matter, what matters is that your reputation would be forever tarnished.
I should mention that there is also a movie for this book. Starring Demi Moore as Meredith (main antagonist) and Michael Douglas as Tom (main protagonist)…. and yes, there is a sex scene (as portrayed in the book). The movie compacted the story line well, and seems like a person who hadn’t read the book would understand the plot, there were a lot of elements wrong: important undertones to the book and pivotal events in the plot missing, and most of all, Michael Douglas should never be in a sex scene. Regardless of my opinion, IMDB has a user average rating of 5.8/10 (average). The movie was released in 1994.
I paid $8.39 USD for this book on Kindle.
You can get this book from Amazon; links to paperback, hardcover, and move there. As with all Kindle books, it was delivered instantly… and that made me happy.
From Crichton’s website:
At the center: Tom Sanders, an up-and-coming executive with DigiCom in Seattle, a man whose corporate future is certain. Until: after a closed-door meeting with his new boss — a woman who was his lover ten years before, a woman who has been promoted to the position he expected to have — he is accused of sexually harassing her. Now he finds himself trapped between what he knows to be true and what he knows others will assume to be the truth. And, as he uncovers an electronic trail into the company’s secrets, he begins to grasp just how cynical and manipulative an abuse of truth has actually occurred…
Quick Self-Exam of Writing Syntax
Jan 16th
I was writing my update to my Perl uploader project for today when it dawned on me that my writing syntax has evolved. I saw that in place of the usual -- I began to use almost a year ago has been replaced by // which isn’t just present in my Tweets and blog posts, but also my SMS’. Also looking at my old (PHP) code I’ve noticed that my variable names have progressively gotten shorter; for example, in my first (fully functional) PHP project, a simple URL shortener, a typical variable had a name like
$urls_database_connection_handler
, whereas in my latest incarnation of it (it’s somewhat integrated into the Uploader), it’s simply
$qh_urls
(for query handle for urls database). Two factors are at play: 1) The names are now much shorter and 2) I’m using caps instead of underscores to delimit words for my readability (it makes me think of Obj-C best practices, but I don’t know). Just a thought.
Days of Code: A Perl Uploadr // Day 2
Jan 16th
Today was an unproductive day, as you can see from my submissions of the day, or lack there of. The sum of all the time I’ve been able to allocate to this has been about an hour, but I’m in no hurry to rush this. Later will be the testing time when this file probably be a real SOB as it uses all three databases, and some functions and features of Perl which I’m not 100% familiar with. (see, lwn.net, it’s not Wranklage!)
However, I did sketch out the basic code for the file.pl. Take a look.
file.pl as of tonight in Espresso by MacRabbit.
