Okay, Liz typed out The List and sent it to me. You can read it here. But a small disclaimer she wanted me to pass on: these may not be the best films of all time, nor the films I would pick if I was stranded on a desert island. But they were compiled based on the fact that they are good films, and worth seeing for some reason or another.
Dave James had a few comments and suggestions about the list. Please use the comments facility to post things if you have ideas! :)
The changes for regular expressions in Perl 6, outlined in Larry Wall's Apocalypse 5 completely blew me away. A lot of things are being removed, but I think the new system is going to be very flexible, and very cool. (Okay so I stole this one from Dave's blog as well...)
I went to dinner at City Extra in Parramatta tonight. It was not such a pleasant experience, in terms of service, but I suppose that you get what you pay for. Even so, I consider serving customers in the order that they arrive a practice that should be universal.
Anyway, it started me thinking about the issues with running a restaurant that is open 24-hours. It would actually be fairly challenging to keep things running smoothly. Staff changeovers would happen endlessly; there would be no closing shifts or opening shifts. There is the issue of cleaning, where you can never be sure of having no customers in the store when you clean it.
There are lots of tricky problems that go along with it, I think, and they're not so dissimilar to the problems associated with keeping computer systems running 24/7/365. You need to take into account that the "cleanup phase" will have to occur while the system is running, and ensure that all the changeovers in management happen flawlessly, lest the system grind to a halt.
