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paul.j.fenwick

Welcome to my home on the internet! Everything here is free under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license unless marked otherwise.

This site contains various pieces of writing across my various interests, and spanning several years. You can fork this site on github if you wish.

Life

Life
Been very busy. Gwen (Jacinta's sister and our housemate) is now engaged. I've probably been playing a little more ADOM than normal, and this has affected my usual hobbies of writing in my diary and getting my Diplomacy moves in on time. The weather has been polishing up quite nicely here in Melbourne, and I've been spending more time in the garden. I'm once again reminded how much I'd like some more land to grow things.

Finance::Quote drives artwork
A few bugfixes and minor releases because of that. The most interesting thing to eventuate is the use of Finance::Quote to drive a dynamic art piece, the write-up of which can be found here. The "stock-puppets" dynamically change depending upon the mood of various world markets, and to be honest I'm quite happy about this use of the module. :)

Work
Scott is away skiing and so I've been fielding most of his work as well as mine. This has made me incredibly busy during work hours.

My discussions with Dan about me moving to a nine-day fortnight seem to have broken down, and I'm rather dissapointed by this. Admittedly this is partially because we've both been so busy, but the attitude seems to have gone from "should not be a problem" to "we need you too much". *sigh*

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Weekend

Weekend
What a great weekend. Beautiful weather, warm sunlight and blue skies, which is unusual for winter. Spent a lot of time in the garden, used much compost, mulched many things, admired our earthworms, and planted more than a dozen sunroots. Made a yummy dandelion ommelette for breakfast, and the excess sunroot and silverbeet that was growing made quite a nice curry. I'm looking forward to spring and the growing things that come with it.
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Genetic Engineering

Genetic Engineering
Dancer raised in his diary the question of how is genetic engineering different to what we've been doing to plants and animals for years? (Selective breeding and such.)

I feel that the main difference between GE and selective breeding is that GE can introduce genetic material into organisms which would never have evolved naturally, no matter how much selective breeding was used. An example would be introducing anti-freeze genes from arctic fish into strawberries.

Do I think that GE is bad? In many cases I do, because I feel that it's being used as quick-fix to many problems and hasn't been thought through properly. A few examples:

  • GE "Round-up ready" herbicide resistant plants are engineered. These plants can withstand large dosages of herbicides without dying. The advantage is that you can spray your fields with herbicides and only kill the weeds, not the crop. The downside is that the resulting crop will have an increased amount of residual herbicides, and that any weeds that survive are probably naturally resistant, and will reproduce to give stronger, more resistant weeds next year.
  • Plants are GE'ed to make them stronger, tougher, frost-resistant. If these plants inter-breed with wild plants, we can potentially end up with superweeds, which are also tougher and stronger. This is a real possibility with plants like brasicas (spel?) (cabbages, brocolli, mustards) which have a variety of domesticated and wild strains.
In many instances, GE is no different to inventing a new pesticide or herbicide. It works for a few years, but eventually resistant strains result.

If we're using GE to modify micro-organisms to produce useful substances, then that's fine, most of those things won't survive in the wild anyway. If we're using GE so we can spray even more chemicals on our crops, then that's just downright foolish.

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DVDs

DVDs
I noticed that Dancer is lamenting the region restrictions on DVD players. I've heard a rumour that the players in New Zealand do not come with region restrictions as the NZ government classifies such stupidities as a trade restriction, anti-competitive, or something else it believes is illegal. Yay NZ if this is true. Anyone care to confirm/deny the rumour?

Work
Pain. Deep pain. Working on a bug in some archaic code that seems to have been invented before anyone heard of encapsulation or local variables. It hurts.

Finance::Quote and GnuCash
Will be looking at tinkering GnuCash to use the new release of Finance::Quote. This should make people very happy.

I'm also thinking of writing a C interface to the library (yes, you can do this with perl).

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Finance::Quote v1.00 at last!

Finance::Quote v1.00 at last!
At last Finance::Quote 1.00 has been released and is available for public consumption. Along with the new release I've also updated the Finance::Quote website so that it's not quite so content-poor.

Scotty is right that it takes a fair bit of time to release a project. I spent the better part of an hour or two uploading changelogs and writing announcements.

I guess now it's time for me to chase down Jon about that Perl Journal Article.

Roguelike games
Lost my extremely-good monk in ADOM because I wasn't thinking. If you ever come across a level filled with corpses, you should be thinking "why are all these monsters dead?" instead of thinking "buffet dinner" and waiting for a banshee to sneak up and wail at you.

Work
I've been most proud of young TIm, who's started the conversion to full geekdom. Tim's been staying back at work much too late so that he can hack with his Linux boxen. There's been some talk of moving him into systems to replace Ross. I'm hoping to throw Tim with a few programming texts before that happens. :)

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