paul.j.fenwick
Freedom Loving Scientist
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
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*
(read more...)
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.
(read more...)
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.
(read more...)
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).
(read more...)
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. :)
(read more...)