Mark's Blog

I got b2evolution 0.9.0.10 installed tonight. It looks pretty good to me. I'll probably need to make a couple of little tweaks over the next couple of days but I think I'm basically where I was before. Two little glitches: one was totally my fault and very dumb -- FTPing everything in ASCII mode, which of course broke all the images.

The other glitch was in the upgrade program. I ran the installer, which broke on a SQL command. I went to the forums and found a solution. The only problem was that the script was in the middle of a bunch of database operations, so when I re-ran the script it broke again, since it was expecting to create tables that were already there from the first unsuccessful run. So, I deleted everything, restored my original version, ran the modified (as per the forum) script and everything worked fine. A bit of template fixing and it's all good. Estimated time: 2 hours.

I went to a most interesting talk tonight at University of Ottawa, Quantum Superpositions, by Damian Conway. I was a little worried, not being a physics type, but he held everyone's attention for nearly 3 hours, which is quite a feat. He threw in a large number of jokes and references that required an agile mind to keep up with. I'm sure I missed a few things too.

It's always inspiring to listen to someone who has a total mastery of a subject.

The first part of the talk was on quantum physics, at a very abstract level. Then he moved into discussion of this Quantum::Superpositions perl module that he has written and different problems that could be solved with it. The module introduces a couple of new operators to perl, "any" and "all". Each takes a list as its argument. any returns true if any of its values make the statement true, so any(1,2,3) == 1 is true. all returns true if the statement is true for all of its values, so something like 0 <= all(1,2,3) is true. These operators are (by the sounds of things, knowing zilch about physics myself) abstractions of a quantum superposition.

The operators are also useful for non-physics-related problems and thus they will be included in Perl 6, along with a couple of other operators, none and one, which are true, respectively, if zero or one of the items in the list make the statement true. I have a feeling that these operators will become a regular part of my regular Perl 6 vocabulary, whenever that comes out.

Anyway, a most enjoyable evening, and I would highly recommend this talk to anyone who has a chance to see it.

Went to see Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban tonight. I rated it a 7, after giving the first one an 8 and the second a 7.

I haven't read any of the books, so I can't really judge its faithfulness to the series, but from reading some of the comments online it appears that this one deviated a lot more from the books than the first two. It's not necessarily a bad thing, since one of my complaints about the first one is that I felt there were too many little artifacts that they had to show for the sake of completeness.

As for the movie, there were definitely a number of cheesy parts, such as the werewolf, which was not very wolf-like. They did handle a time-travel sequence rather cleverly though (minor spoiler ahead). It was revealed, in the time travel, that previously unexplained actions were actually the result of a time-travelling Harry and Hermione.

Anyway, I put this movie firmly the category of see-it-if-you-were-going-to-see-it, don't-bother-if-you-weren't-going-to-see-it-anyway (I really need an acronym for that).

A couple of unrelated things: first I'm going to shill for Bloglines.com, a web-based news aggregator that is amazing and a regular part of my web surfing. It lets you easily view new stories in RSS-enabled web sites and they just did a very slick re-design. Highly, highly recommended. It also has a feature to manage your blogroll, so I just hooked that up to the side menu, so you can see the feeds I'm currently watching.

I joined a lob-ball team with work and have been playing that once a week. It's been fun, but it seems like whenever I hit the ball hard, it gets caught, and when I hit the ball weakly, it falls in. I assume that will turn around with time though. We lost 15-13 tonight, but it could have been a lot worse since we started off with only 7 players. I think we're 2-6, but it's still a lot of fun.

A few movies seen recently (and my IMDB rating for them)
* Cidade de Deus (City of God) (10: amazing cinematography, moving story of a boy who escapes the violence of the Rio de Janeiro favellas)
* Paycheck (7: interesting concept but mundane execution)
* Shrek 2 (8: fun summer movie, similar to the first one)
* Spider-Man 2 (8: very good, maybe a bit better than the first but I enjoyed the first more since it was new)
* Super Size Me (8: moronic experiment and dubious science but punctuated with a number of good points about our fast food culture and obesity in general)

Time to delete the porn referrer spam...