the first cyber-dojo Raspberry Pi

Here's the first Raspberry Pi raised from cyber-dojo donations :-) Everything works so it's off to my old school in the morning.

In case you're thinking "where is it?" (it's only credit-card sized) it's to the right of Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater, between the keyboard and the monitor with an aptly raspberry coloured ethernet cable attached. Here's a close-up.

And here's cyber-dojo running in Midori. More Pies have been ordered and should be arriving in the next few days. Many thanks for your donations. Keep them coming!

Cadora salmon

Today I have mostly been fly fishing for salmon on the River Wye at the Cadora beat. I missed a good take on Cadora pool on my fifth cast! About half and hour later I had another take. This time on Little Run. Didn't miss this one :-) Cock fish, quite thin, measuring 34 inches from nose to tail. I'm guessing 13lb ish. After taking my hook out (a Cascade) I noticed another fly hook with some line attached! It took a while to recover before swimming away - perhaps it had just smashed someone else up!?

holes

is an excellent book by Louis Sachar (isbn 0-439-12845-5). If you've not seen the film the story revolves around a boy called Stanley, whose offered the choice of going to jail or going to Camp Green Lake. He chooses the lake. Each day he has to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet in diameter.
As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages, particularly the ones about digging the holes. They remind me of refactoring, and the pain of introducing a test-seam into legacy code:

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.

Using all his might, he brought the shovel back down onto the dry lake bed. The force stung his hands but made no impression on the earth.
...
He noticed a thin crack in the ground. He placed the point of his shovel on top of it, then jumped on the back of the blade with both feet. The shovel sank a few inches into the packed earth. He smiled. For once in his life it paid to be overweight. He leaned on the shaft and pried up his first shovelful of dirt, then dumped it off to the side. Only ten million more to go, he thought, then placed the shovel back in the crack and jumped on it again. He unearthed several shovelfuls of dirt in this manner, before it occurred to him that he was dumping his dirt within the perimeter of his hole.

The digging got easier after a while. The ground was hardest at the surface, where the sun had baked a crust about eight inches deep. Beneath that, the earth was looser.

Though he tried to convince himself otherwise, he'd been aware for a while that his piles of dirt were too close to his hole. The piles were outside his five-foot circle, but he could see he was going to run out of room. Still, he pretended otherwise and kept adding more dirt to the piles, piles that he would eventually have to move. The problem was that when the dirt was in the ground, it was compacted. It expanded when it was excavated. The piles were a lot bigger than his holes were deep. It was either now or later. Reluctantly, he climbed up out of his hole, and once again dug his shovel into his previously dug dirt.

Stanley kept digging. His hole was almost up to his shoulders, although it was hard to tell exactly where ground level was because his dirt piles completely surrounded the hole. The deeper he got, the harder it was to raise the dirt up and out of the hole. Once again, he realized, he was going to have to move the piles.

As he dug he was careful to dump the dirt far away from the hole. He needed to save the area around the hole for when his hole was much deeper.

"Well, the first hole's the hardest," Magnet said.

"Well, the first hole's the hardest," said Stanley. "No way," said X-Ray. "The second hole's a lot harder. You're hurting before you even get started. If you think you're sore now, just wait and see how you feel tomorrow morning, right?" "That's right," said Squid. "Plus, the fun's gone," said X-Ray.

"You're right," he said to X-Ray. "The second hole's the hardest." X-Ray shook his head. "The third hole's the hardest," he said.

That meant he'd dug forty-four holes. Stanley dug his shovel into the dirt. Hole number 45. "The forty-fifth hole is the hardest," he said to himself. But that really wasn't true, and he knew it. He was a lot stronger than when he first arrived. His body had adjusted somewhat to the heat and harsh conditions.