Lev Lafayette's journal

In the past several days I've been working on numerous writing projects. which is not so unusual for me. The first is a compilation of transcript and notes from my presentation at the University of New South Wales on cryogenic electron microscopy. The second is an article for Isocracy on a "parliamentary path" for the abolition of economic classes - not that I actually think it would happen, but rather it serves to identify what are the legal privileges that allow for such classes. These two are complete; the third is a major revision content on regular expressions in high performance computing, as I have a training course to deliver on that subject next week, mainly grep, sed, awk, perl, and running such things in parallel. Then there's an increasingly large two-part article for RPG Review on Housing, Food, and Clothing In Imagined Worlds, which sort of combines real-world history, geography, but also adds fantasy and science fiction options. It's pretty much a broad sweep on the sociology of everyday life in many ways.

But it's hardly been all work and no play; not in the literal sense. On Sunday a regular gaming group had 'session 0' of the new Alien RPG, based on the famous film series. It's a pretty simple system, with a highly coarse-grained skill system, but it has flavour and of course, the quotes will come thick and fast. Our ship captain is an android, so what could possibly go wrong? It was the second game for the week, with Thursday evening witnessing the regular Cyberspace game with the usual shenanigans of aliens and corporate espionage in the Stalker zone of central Australia. In my long-running HeroQuest Glorantha game, I have just introduced a chaos version of The Great Dragon. Glorantha never mucked around with dragons, so it is worthwhile to apply the biggest beast of all as the story nears a close.

As we've stepped out of lockdown in Melbourne, I've had additional visitors through my door in the past week. Jac and Damien were guests in a housewarming of sorts, and we managed to down a very good portion of a surprisingly good Aldi brandy for quaffing. I rather wish their mobile phone customer service was of better quality, however; after three months of various calls not getting through (including Net Banking!) with little responsibility I've had to switch to iiNet who offered a good deal and now, of course, the calls are functioning. I've also had a visit from former work (VPAC, UniMelb) colleague Martin during the weekend when we ventured with his family and friends to a New Zealand specialist cafe (yes, there is such a thing) and to the South Melbourne markets. Finally, I had a visit from Bryan K, of the Georgists. His work on land valuation spans decades and for those interested in the economics of such things. "Economics as if location matters", is quite a witty by-line.

For a good portion of the past few days I've been working on a workshop on Regular Expressions, which are truly one of the greatest things imaginable when one starts with plain-text data and wants to build information. The workshops starts with a bit of the historical-mathematical aspects, revising some of searching with grep, subsitution with sed, and reporting with awk before moving into incorporating these in shell scripts. This is all parts of my introductory and advanced Linux workshops, which is what most people need. Then one delves into things like POSIX basic and extended regular expressions, grouping, backreferences, alternation. Then there's perl's own regular expression syntax which includes features like lookarounds, backtracking, named capture groups and even more - but for a four-hour workshop there are limits. The further one goes down this path the more complex the syntax becomes and more is tempted by the verbose, but clear, Simple Regex Language.

Naturally enough in the excess of spare time available, I've been continuing my studies and research. Research-wise there is another paper in the works for the HPC Certification forum in the Journal of Computational Science Education, plus there will be a BoF at the International Supercomputing Conference. Study-wise, most of the work has been in economics, but with a moderate amount for the higher education and information systems course. For the latter, I received a mid-term grade back this morning which I am less than happy with - it's a solid pass and all, but it's several percent below what I am used to and mainly because the tutor has assessed me on their criteria, rather than the advertised criteria. I will be putting in an appeal at the end of the course, regardless of what my final mark is. That sort of mistake needs to go on their record.

Speaking of records, last weekend was Record Store Day and caseopaya and I took the oportunity to visit Dutch Vinyl. There was quite a good selection of collectibles there with a moderate price-tag. I fell down the prog-rock path and picked up Hawkwind's Space Ritual, a truly great album for the original space rockers, and The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony, an early multi-media effort (art, book, music). It dove-tailed quite well with the weekend's session of Eclipse Phase which mostly involved debates of what to do about an increasingly powerful hive-mind of scientists and technicians who have acquired psychic powers and a double-agent within the group.