Kevin's Compendium of Useless Fantasia

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• I finished up with my userpic script mentioned in the previous issue. I ended up stopping at around 25,000 users in the database. It takes enough time that it's probably not too much of a load on the servers. I wonder if it would be okay to post it in the LiveJournal community for nifty LiveJournal things. I'll have to think about that. I am also considering writing it up for The Perl Review.

• Speaking of The Perl Review, my Jotto article was finally published. I am now a published author! The way I found out that the issue had come out was that I received an email from someone in Germany telling me about a potential security problem (quickly fixed) with one of the programs that was listed with the article.

  I am happy with the article and the response I've gotten from it. I'm not so happy with the code printed with the article, since it was written as I was learning Perl, so it's not very good.

• Speaking of Perl, I made my first post on PerlMonks, a Web site where people discuss various Perl issues and ask Perl questions. They have a system where you can vote on someone's post, either up or down. My first post was a comment on someone else's post, using some knowledge I had picked up from Mastering Regular Expresions. It got voted up by a few people. Since then, I've made more posts, most of which have gotten up votes from people.

• Inspired by a friend, I made barley salad for the first time. Pearled barley, black olives from a can, green onions, lemon juice, salt, and olive oil. Very good. And very easy to take to work for lunch.

• I told a friend that I was planning on making Irish soda bread, and that I was considering making some mango-hot-cherry-pepper jam to go on top of the bread. She said that sounded a little weird, since soda bread has raisins in it. My soda bread recipe doesn't include raisins, but it got me thinking. I decided to cut up some mangoes and put them in the dough. It turned out well. I brought one of the loaves to a brunch party, and I got several compliments on it.

• I had dinner with a friend, and she brough over lamb chops to cook. I cooked those in a little olive oil, topped with salt and garlic. After they had been cooking a while, I added some red wine. We ate the chops with some of the barley salad mentioned above.

• I finished making a fabric origami box that I had started a long time ago. I made it as a Christmas gift for a friend, but I haven't given it to her yet. I should really consider making more fabric origami boxes to give as gifts. Maybe I can consider some fabric unit origami, too.

• I made salmon for dinner, topped with salt, Frank's Red Hot Sauce, a cut-up mango, black pepper, and some more Frank's Red Hot Sauce. I loved how the baked mango tasted with the Frank's Red Hot Sauce on it. Yum. This inspired me to make a mango side dish with cut-up mangoes, salt, black pepper, and Frank's Red Hot Sauce, all baked in a casserole dish. The mangoes on the fish had a chance to cook longer, so they were nice and firm. The mangoes in the side dish were a bit softer, but they were still decent. I served the side dish to friends, and they liked it, as well.

• I made dinner with a friend. I made salmon topped with salt, garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice, at her suggestion. I made some spelt spaghetti, and she added garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, garbonzo beans, and diced hot cherry peppers to it. A very nice meal, and cooking together worked well.

• I rewrote my Jotto Perl module based on some comments I had gotten on it because of the article. Of particular note, the function used to score Jotto words got about 5 times faster. This was particularly useful in speeding up my Jotto utility, which will tell you how many words are still possible based on the guesses and scores so far in a game. (It can also list all of those words for you.) The speed-up allowed me to use the Jotto utility on my full dictionary for the first time, enabling me to use it for games of X-Jotto. It may also motivate me to go back to trying for an improved Jotto AI, since the calculations will be much faster now.

• I made turkey soup with onions and celery in olive oil, 8 cups of water, 3 hot cherry peppers, fresh parsley, salt, black pepper, and leftover turkey. I also made some rosemary drop biscuits from Betty Crocker, but I added more rosemary.

• Some bitterly cold weather combined with me waiting for the bus outside to produce a haiku.

• I cooked two things one evening, some of which I ate then, and some of which I took with me for lunches at work. I made chicken sausage (flavored with chipotle), onions, garlic, olive oil, 2 cans of garbonzo beans, cumin, coriander, and chili powder. Very good. I really like the cumin-coriander-chili powder spice combination. I also made my traditional cream of mushroom soup and tuna (drain the tuna, and don't add water to the condensed soup), but I sauteed some hot cherry peppers in canola oil for a while before adding the tuna and the soup. I also added some Frank's Red Hot Sauce. Very good, as well.

• I made a Perl program to generate some exercises for work (I work for a textbook publisher in the mathematics department). I used it to find "good" numbers to use as sides of right triangles, rounded to tenths. The exercises have two side lengths given, and the student has to find the third. An example of "bad" numbers are legs of 3 and 3. The hypotenuse, rounded to the nearest tenth, is 4.2. However, if you try to use 4.2 and 3 to try to find the length of the other leg, you end up with 2.9. The problem comes in with the rounding. So, I made a program to take a triple as input and find some "good" numbers with (approximately) the same ratios.

• I wrote a program to solve the Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle. You were supposed to find a breakfast food in 7 letters that, if you added an f, had an anagram in 8 letters that was a dinner entree. There are a lot of 7-letter words out there that have 8-letter anagrams with an f added, so my program was taking a while to run. While it was running, I took my dictionary list of 8-letter words that had an f (gotten very quickly with a quick grep command) and scanned it for entrees. I found it much quicker that way than I would have waiting around for my program. I really need to work on my "easy" dictionaries for the longer words, so that I can have nice, short dictionaries when I only need to work with common words.

• I made a Perl program that gets the contents of the Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle Web page and writes it to an RSS file. I still have a bit more work to do, but, once it's done, it will be set up so that, once per week, it updates the RSS file with the current puzzle. As I'm writing this, I recall that some of the puzzles run every two weeks. I guess I should probably just check for a change in the puzzle once per week, so that it doesn't do duplicate entries for two-week puzzles.

• I made a Web page to score Jotto guesses. Thanks to how my scoring algorithm in my Jotto Perl module works, it can score X-Jotto (target and guess can be different lengths) as well. I may release other Jotto programs as Web pages.