Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Someday I'll be Saturday Night....

But currently it just feels like an eternal Wednesday - humpday - where it's almost painful.  One day Eppendork will be Saturday night, but that day is not today or within the next two months - why?  Because her lab - love it tho she might - isn't quite set up yet so she cant just jump in and lay down some blazing hot burn ya grandmother's knickers off science yet.   



Figure 1: Yup still smoking hot as the day I first realised you existed age 10 and 3/4's

I spent today reading manuals - for a loverly robot that when working properly will just be smoking hot and plow through the buzzkill work that I need to get through to get my data. Another part of my day was spent trying to get another robot to work properly - this was done in collaboration with sexy scientists A (who really knows who stuff) and B (who like me is in awe of scientist A).  Main thing I came away with was robots are like kids - they wont do what you want them to do unless you make it so damn clear that its crystal and squeaky.    Have also taken up programming (very slow progress here) - am officially uber-geek.  

Last time I checked it's still Wednesday - it may Thursday in two or three months.

E.

5 comments:

Toaster Sunshine said...

What programming language are you working with?

I have so far gotten through 3 chapters of The Llama Book (also known as Learning Perl). I hope to one day use it for mathematical modeling of biology.

Code for you:

_________________________

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "How does Eppendork feel today? (good/bad/great) \n"
chomp($reply=(less than)STDIN(greater than))

if ($reply=good){print "Today is Thursday.\n"}
if ($reply=bad){print "It is still Wednesday, maybe even Tuesday.\n"}
if ($reply=great){print "It's Saturday!\n"}

__________________________


To run it, save the above code into Notepad, save it as "filename.pl" (the .pl extension is important), and you can run it from your command line by typing "perl filename.pl". If you're running Windows there probably isn't a Perl shell already installed (one can be had for free from CPAN), but if you're on a Unix system (e.g., Mac OSX) then it should already be there and ready to go.

Toaster Sunshine said...

Note:
Blogger wouldn't accept the notation around the STDIN function. Please replace (less than) with < and (greater than) with > if you want to run it, otherwise it won't work. The parentheses need to go away too.

Anonymous said...

TS: SQL which is babysteps I know :-p I started to learn PERL but that was on my own time (OMG that sounded geeky).

E

Toaster Sunshine said...

Why do you worry about being geeky? Your handle is, after all, "EppenDORK". The Venn Diagram of Dorks and Geeks and Nerds has a much greater common area than any of the individual areas.

As for Perl, yeah, I'm learning it on my own time and for fun.

I have a MySQL book sitting on my shelf at home, but I have yet to read it because I don't have access to a server to practice scripting and don't want to install a dummy server shell on my computer just yet. Why are you being asked to learn it?

Anonymous said...

I have a lot of database work to do in my thesis - think a big number and double it - I need to be able to access any data I want when I want quickly :) And to be honest not really worried about being a geek - am way past that point but every now and again I say something that makes me even think now that's just a bit geeky :)