Science can answer moral questions

Listened to this on my iPod yesterday. Watched it on YouTube today. Very powerful if you let it sink in.

Science can answer moral questions

I like this piece a lot more than when he spends most of his energy attacking religion. I already agree with him on most of that material, so it's far less interesting to me and too aggressive for my comfort.

Far better to focus on positive changes in science rather than "that over there is patently stupid."

Wind tunnel workplace

Arrived at work this morning and the front doors were locked (odd) and one of them was propped open with a sign (odder). The lobby was filled with a loud metallic rattling / vibration sound. I stared up towards the noise as other slightly confused people wandered around also wondering what was going on. Both elevator doors were slightly open even though the elevator cars were not on this floor. (Someone could have fallen into the shaft if they decided to try a little?)

An annoyed management type appeared and told us that the power company had done something this morning (this wasn't our fault, she assured us defensively) which knocked out the "air handlers." She didn't seem to know really what that meant and wasn't in the mood to try to explain anything to the likes of me.

Attempting to head to my office the next security door had a green light (unlocked), but still wouldn't open. It took some serious tugging to gain entry. The hallway was like a mild wind tunnel. Not enough pressure to really effect people, but plenty to effect the doors on both ends. One held shut, the other held open by the pressure. In the next hallway, directly connected to my office, was more whistling of air in a hurry to get elsewhere. Many office doors propped open with trash containers. Home remedy attempts to lessen the noises?

Outside there's only a slight breeze today.

I obviously have no idea how modern architecture works. This is not a special air pressure building as far as I know. I had no idea buildings of this size (8 stories) need powered "air handler" units or the whole building goes a little wacky.

Portland's marketplace of ideas... in Omaha

In Portland tomorrow night:

Robert Buels presents "The Amazing Miracle of DBIx::Class"

Rob will give an introduction to and overview of DBIx::Class. It's an object-relational mapping framework, much better than the old Class::DBI, and it will make your life easier if you are currently writing a lot of SQL in your Perl.

In Omaha tonight:

Randal "merlyn" Schwartz (who lives in Portland) presents "Forget the ORM! Persistent Data with non-traditional databases."

What an Object-Relational Mapper is, why it sucks, and a couple dozen alternatives (most open source, many with Perl bindings).

Gratuitous Moosey ego stroking

The Godfather of Moose gave me mad shout-outs on his blog for some minor tweaking I did to the Moose website.

Later I expressed some of my recent concern about academia, and he offered this sage advice:

11:37 <@stevan> jhannah: go into their lab, climb up on one of the work benches and yell "ANY OF YOU NANCY BITCHES STEAL MY CODE AND I WILL CUT YOU INTO LITTLE PIECES"
11:37 <@stevan> then kick over a few bunson burners and walk out
11:37 <@stevan> they wont bother you in the lunch room anymore
11:38 <@perigrin> stevan did something like this in Art School
11:38 <@perigrin> 'cept s/bunson burners/cerulean blue/
11:38 <@stevan> I offcentered their pots on the wheel

Gource: Programmers as action heroes

Check out the history of Perl development 1988-present. As you can see, when you speed it up enough and use lots of colors and movement suddenly programming is exciting to watch! (For a few minutes.) :)

They created that with Gource (watch other, even prettier videos).

At $work[0] we have CVS + SVN history back to 2000. It'd be neat to throw Gource against that and see what I (and my coworkers) have been doing with our lives for the last 10 years.

Catalyst::Plugin::AutoCRUD is a sexy beast

Wow. It took me about 30 seconds to add AutoCRUD to my existing Catalyst application. And now I've got a very shiny web 2.0'y CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application for all my databases. Double clicking pulls up the edit window.

Yes, this wheel has been invented scores of times over the last 10 years. But boy is this one shiny.

Firefly shot me 51 days into the future

I feel pretty good about my project this weekend. I used the University of Nebraska Firefly Cluster for a real project for the first time, completing 51.6 DAYS worth of data crunching while I slept between 3am and 9:30am this morning. The code I ran is my fork + branch of a bunch of Perl from Harvard against the latest human genome from UCSC. Masochists can read all the gory details (username: guest password: guest) and suggest improvements.

Computers are pretty cool sometimes. :)