I do enjoy taking a ferry in the middle of a long drive. It's a chance to pause, to think, to relax, to eat; I find the "relax" part sadly lacking when I fly.
I'm seated in the Cafe on the "European Highlander", outbound from Larne to Cairnryan, and due there just before 10 p.m. There's quite a ....
Familiar names - Crossmaglan and Hillsborough, Divvis and Falls - all signposted off the road as I drove from Dublin to Belfast to Larne last night - a course ended at Dublin at 4pm with an airport running dropping off a customer for his flight to Copenhagen, then on through Ireland and Northern Ire ....
One of those weeks where I seem to be sleeping in a different bed(room) every day ... and what a contrast.
From the height of luxury in London to a nice berth on a ferry ...
.... then on to a hotel room, mid-market, Dublin.
Tonight, Kilmarnock! Very late arrival ...
....
When you open a file in Perl, you should ALWAYS check the return status to see if your open function worked. If it can't open the file you've requested it won't print out an error - the failure is silent unless you check for it.
Thus:
open (FH,"abc.txt") or die ("Cannot open abc.txt\n");
Perl wil ....
[Written last Sunday morning ... and JUST posted on Wednesday!]
Internet access from Well House Manor will be free, easy, and reliable. But accidents do happen and service can be lost. We will go one step further and monitor the service to ensure that we become aware of any problems and can fix the ....
Many languages have printf statements ... and yet from a computer scientist's viewpoint, printf is a flawed function. In order for code to be clean and re-usable, functions should be designed to perform a single task. Alas, printf performs two tasks - it both formats the information that's entered ....
When I use a swimming pool, I'm always very conscious of the safety equipment and lifeguards, and also of the other pool users and what they're doing. I have an especial eye for the quiet ones and any places out of common / easy view. Am I odd in this approach when I'm just out for a bit of exercis ....
Dublin, Ireland, 07:30. The security guard greets me like a long lost friend and asks after the Taxi that I used to drive with a big Well House Consultants logo on the side.
I've arrived early for a course - the ferry from Liverpool docked half an hour early at 05:30 and there's - how do I put it ....
My boat docked early this morning - 05:30 - at Dublin Port and I'm back on line after an absence of 48 hours which is unheard-of for me. Further posting (including some note already waiting on my laptop!) later today.
Perl course starts in about 10 minutes ... I'm all set up and ready to go! ....
Well - that's been one heck of a week and I don't know if I'm coming or going!
Excellent course in Gloucester - a great group of delegates and a real opportunity to show another 9 people what a fabulous language Perl is, and how it can be really useful in what they're doing. To give them some pract ....