(no subject)

I was just looking through the job adverts in our local weekly rag, more for fun than anything else. One of them was a pharmaceutical company looking for "healthy men between 18 and 45" for tests... one of my first thoughts was "we're always looking for healthy men because we run out of them so quickly; after we've given them a couple of chemicals they're not healthy any more" :)

Poll answers

OK, here are the answers to the poll I had recently about how you perceive me (as well as the companion poll).

1. What sex am I?
Correct answer: You all got "male" correct.

2. How old am I?
Mean: 26.40 Median: 26
Correct answer: 28

3. How tall am I (in cm)?
Mean: 176.50 Median: 176
Correct answer: 179 (70.5" or 5'10.5")

4. How much do I weigh (in kg)?
Mean: 77 Median: 79
Correct answer: before Christmas - 79. Now more like 81. (174-178 lb)

5. What is my native language? (Choose as many as you think apply.)
Correct answer: English and German. (Again, all of you got that right.)

6. What colour are my eyes?
Correct answer: Brown

7. What colour is my hair?
Most people guessed some shade of brown.
Correct answer: Brown with a bit of red. When I had a beard for a while, it was quite reddish but I don't think it shows in my hair.

8. What is my favourite colour?
Two votes for green, two for blue, and one for blue/black.
Correct answer: I don't know! I was curious to see what people think. But I never know what to answer when people ask me whether I have a favourite colour or favourite number. Stella thinks that green is my favourite colour, though, so those who voted for that can feel they've got it right :)

9. What style clothes do I wear?
Most people guessed something like "Casual slacks and shirt".
Correct answer: Usually jeans, a T-shirt, and a (casual) shirt on top of that. I love shirts because I need pockets to carry a calender, pens, and note cards for random scribblings in! When it gets warmer, I drop the T-shirt underneath my shirt, rather than the shirt over the T-shirt. (What are "slacks", though, and how do they differ from "pants/trousers"?)

10. What is my job/profession?
Most people guessed something with computers or "being smart".
Correct answer: I'm a software developer for a fairly small company that makes custom software for other companies.

11. I am currently...
Correct answer: Married. All those who answered this one got it right.

12. I have ... children...
Correct answer: 0. Same here.

Thank you to those who had a go at answering the questions!

(no subject)

Sometimes it bothers me when I'm at work and I want to see whether someone has written to my home address; most commonly this is when some website where I registered using my home address wants to send me something such as a password reminder and I can't access it until I get home, or when I want to sign up with a web site and they require confirmation.

So yesterday I had a go and wrote a little POP3 client using Net::POP3 and Mail::Internet (for message header parsing, to display From and Subject headers).

I'm sure that wheel's been invented hundreds of times before, but I didn't want it to do a lot; displaying an overview, reading messages, and deleting was enough.

(Maybe I could have used Mail::Box and friends since that suite of modules seems to do message parsing and POP3 as well, besides a host of other things. But it looked too complicated for a quick hack.)

( Read more... )

So, not particularly elegant but it works. And since it's in a password-protected directory of my webserver, it should be moderately safe.

Digitised bird

I saw recently that someone named Shae Erisson has an email address with domain "ScannedInAvian.com". I thought that name was pretty cool :)

Rebooting your toothbrush

Found this message via alt.humor.best-of-usenet.

Bizarre.

Decline and Fall of Dr. Dobb's Journal

Quite a while ago, I thought it would be interesting to subscribe to Dr. Dobb's Journal, since I'd heard good things about it. I wasn't sure what things were like now so I asked someone when the topic came up somewhere. He said he wasn't sure since it'd been a while since he had read it and suggested I get a trial subscription.

Turned out they don't have trial subscriptions, so I went ahead and subscribed for a full year. This was around January 2002, IIRC.

Months went by and no DDJ arrived. Finally I got around to both (a) finding the old credit card slip where they had taken my money and (b) complaining to the publisher. Even though it'd been months and they only had my word for it that the journal never arrived, they refunded my money in full. (Well, I got less out since the dollar-to-euro rate was more unfavourable.)

But still, I could use the money since while $79 (IIRC) was slightly painful when I paid for it, we've since had to budget more and since this was coming out of my personal allowance it was quite a bit of money.

Then today in alt.humor.best-of-usenet I came across a funny article about rebooting a toothbrush (which I mentioned earlier). Since then, I had a look at the thread in alt.folklore.computers and they started to talk about DDJ... and what I saw wasn't particularly fun. Try starting at this link and reading the thread from there (click "see this message in context" and then start reading in the right-hand frame). Here's just one quote: "Each issue gets thinner and has less material in it."

Sounds a bit like what happend to The Perl Journal, which also belonged to CMP for a while (if I understood correctly) and was published as part of SysAdmin magazine until they discontinued that (just after I had renewed my subscription for another year -- darn it) (though it's since been "resurrected", if one can call it that, as a PDF magazine available by download; it still costs money).

So this kind of makes me glad that I didn't subscribe to DDJ if it's only a shadow of its former self -- and especially if, as people say in that thread, the editors deliberately stripped it of what made it readable because their target audience has changed (probably to "those who control the budgets"). Ach, for the good old days.

I can't believe I just did this!

I just said "Weil es an zu schmelzen fing?" in response to Stella's saying "Da waren wir ja gerade rechtzeitig auf dem Eis -- die Polizei hat das Eis um 17:30 Uhr gesperrt."

Weird grammatical construction. But she immediately understood me.

(no subject)

Exploring a little of alt.folklore.computers after I found those articles about Dr. Dobb's Journal was interesting. I read a couple of threads in their entirety and all posts by Dennis Ritchie and /BAH (jmfbahciv at aol.com) -- when I could still read Usenet at work (before the firewall blocked that port), alt.folklore.computers was one of the newsgroups I read there and I had Watched /BAH after seeing that she wrote a fairly large number of posts with interesting information about how things were "back then". I'm not sure exactly what she did but I think it was at DEC.

Interesting to read experiences people had with old line printers, IBM machines and terminals I'd never heard of, and so on.