Perl course - hashes

The examples of the phone numbers are not good enough and they are confusing when it comes to trying to carry out the has exercises.

The exists keyword is not included in the text and neither is their a description of referencing. It needs more if hashes are going to be used properly and understood.

Perl Programming

The key is the structured examples - questions that ask you to write a piece of code that builds on the previous steps by adding to the complexity. This is the perfect directed exercise.

I always forget to put the sem-colons at the end of the lines and vim is not perhaps the most supportive of editors until it works out that you are typing code and adds the colours, but it does tell you when you have the brackets all wrong.

Students should work in linux as this is the only sane programming environment and this allows them to deal with a proper filesystem and to have the opportunity to experience more languages once they have a grasp of Perl.

Doing my own course - Learning Perl 1

There is too much screen reading - your attention drifts quite quickly when you are reading information from the screens. It is much easier to read the accompanying book for information.

Two interesting sites:
http://www.pm.org
http://www.perlmonks.org

Using vi on linux for Perl scripting (actually Vim) on Fedora 9
Typos are fun.
Making sure all the brackets are in the right place.

NB The backquote is ` on the key with ¬ and ¦ and not the ' on the key with @.
 
The warnings flag is essential but diagnostics might be more useful. For this you add;

use diagnostics;

Two and a half hours is as much as I can do at a time, without feeling I am doing too much. Writing the code from the book helps as well.

Blogging and Tweeting in Lectures

We had a long discussion about the impact of blogging and tweeting during conferences at the Biochemical Society and the society is developing a policy to say what participants will be allowed to do. There was a strong feeling from the academics present that they did not like it and found it disrespectful to the speaker.

I find when people take photos of every single slide with flash photography annoying but people certainly do it and often because they are attending a meeting in a language that is not their first language. They take the pictures so that they can try and understand the talks later. So we have to think about inclusion and participation.

The academics are also worried about intellectual property, but if you are publishing there is no patent and copyright always remains with the authors. We just have to sign away those rights to journals so why do we object to people who are attending our talks. We have to accept that they will do it and this might change the way we present our work slightly. Academics are not rewarded by money. They live off ego and kudos (see the arguments over open source software by Eric Raymond for the same view in programmers). IT IS AN OBLIGATION to make research PUBLIC. Einsten did not make a fortune out of copyrighting relativity. He became famous because of relativity. So I do not think the I.P. arguments have any sense.

What does make sense is not distracting the speaker and being careful about personal comments like ratings of talks. These can cause offence and so should be done carefully (although I did this myself at a conference). So long as you sit at the back and do not annoy too much with the sound of the keyboard I think we have to accept this is going to happen more often in the future. If the BBC uses it at the World Economic Forum at Davos then why are we being so high-minded in restricting it in scientific meetings?

Blogging and Tweeting in Lectures

We had a long discussion about the impact of blogging and tweeting during conferences at the Biochemical Society and the society is developing a policy to say what participants will be allowed to do. There was a strong feeling from the academics present that they did not like it and found it disrespectful to the speaker.

I find when people take photos of every single slide with flash photography annoying but people certainly do it and often because they are attending a meeting in a language that is not their first language. They take the pictures so that they can try and understand the talks later. So we have to think about inclusion and participation.

The academics are also worried about intellectual property, but if you are publishing there is no patent and copyright always remains with the authors. We just have to sign away those rights to journals so why do we object to people who are attending our talks. We have to accept that they will do it and this might change the way we present our work slightly. Academics are not rewarded by money. They live off ego and kudos (see the arguments over open source software by Eric Raymond for the same view in programmers). IT IS AN OBLIGATION to make research PUBLIC. Einsten did not make a fortune out of copyrighting relativity. He became famous because of relativity. So I do not think the I.P. arguments have any sense.

What does make sense is not distracting the speaker and being careful about personal comments like ratings of talks. These can cause offence and so should be done carefully (although I did this myself at a conference). So long as you sit at the back and do not annoy too much with the sound of the keyboard I think we have to accept this is going to happen more often in the future. If the BBC uses it at the World Economic Forum at Davos then why are we being so high-minded in restricting it in scientific meetings?