Cat vs Baby

As one astute observer noted: I haz saem prolem, kitteh!

Robert Jordan, 1948 - 2007

I read that Robert Jordan has also passed. Jordan leaves his epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, unfinished, with the 12th and final book having been scheduled for a 2009 release.

The first book in the series, The Eye of the World, was originally published in 1990, and I read it the following summer when my dad brought it home from the book-mobile. Somehow the book captured my 14 year old imagination, and although I no longer read much fantasy, I always buy the new Jordan book on the day of its release. I'm not the only one to be excited about the new Jordan book: at the library we get multiples upon multiples, and the furor on release day is second only to that engendered by Harry Potter.

A recent blog post (which seems to have disappeared from the blog?!?) indicated that before he died he shared his vision for the final book of the series, A Memory of Light, with his wife and brother, and I've read elsewhere that he left notes as well. I have no doubt that his publisher, Tor, would choose to publish his final book, finished by someone else, posthumously--there's a lot of money to be made there--but I wonder what decision his wife will make.

In any case, a huge fan community has grown around Jordan and his books, and although I wouldn't consider myself part of this community, it's apparent from my infrequent perusals of Dragonmount and Jordan's blog that Jordan himself played an active positive role in the community. He will be missed by his fan community and by his family.

Practical Extraction & Reporting Language or Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister

Perl, that is.

So I'm spending the weekend taking a two day course in Perl. The course is taught by John Durno of my Alma mater, U.Vic, and Mark Jordan of SFU. I took a course from Mark at SLAIS called Developing Digital Collections, which was excellent.

My programing skills are old, insignificant and highly imperfect, so I'm finding the course challenging, but stimulating. Here's one of my first programs:

#Define an array of 5 words
@fruit = ("apple", "orange", "banana", "grape", "kiwi");

foreach $item (@fruit) {
$string = &my_subroutine ($item);
print "$string\n";
}

#For each word, upper case the first letter
sub my_subroutine {
my ($string) = @_;
my $uc_string = ucfirst($string);
return $uc_string;
}

Cool, eh?

The thing is that I've got a direct application for this stuff. What I'm going to do is write a script to parse an SQL report (tab delimited text) and reformat that report into an html document. Basically all I have to do is output existent data with HTML tags. Simple for someone who knows what they're doing, but hard for me... Nevertheless, it's a tenable project, and I should learn a thing or two along the way.

If you're interested in this course, here's the course website.