Author: Mark

Happy New Year!!

If you are watching this site to keep track of the pregnancy, there have been a few happenings in the last week or so..

When Bern went in for her checkup on Christmas Eve her protien levels were up a bit, and, combined with her slightly high blood pressure and swollen hands and feet meant that she probably has pre-eclampsia. This means she has to rest a lot and I have to do all the work :(.

We are now seeing the doctor every couple of days, and it is fairly likely that things will be accelerated a little and the baby born well before it’s due date. Even from 36 weeks (this Saturday), there is a very good chance that the baby will be born strong and healthy, though it may need to spend a day or two in the nursery. More as it happens..

If you haven’t put your guess in yet, there is still time (but maybe not much..)

I’ve finally put together the Baby Guessing competition that I’ve been meaning to do for ages. This allows you to guess what sex the baby will be and what date/weight the baby will be born, and it also creates a list of email addresses that I can use when the baby is born to notify everyone.

Note: Only one guess is allowed per person. I will only accept the first guess from each person. Entries close whenever we leave to go to hospital. There is no entry fee, but there may well be a prize.

Here is the link.

Okay, so I should have done it this way first (thanks Jase), but at least now I can say that I’ve done some work in Perl.

Here is the web based version that anyone can use. I needs some more documentation, but at least it does what I wanted it to do.

Baby Name Shortlister

It also saves lots of cutting and pasting with text files on unix boxen. 🙂

No, We are not calling our Baby Perl!

Perl is the name of the programming language I used to write this script which took all the first names we were looking at, and all the second names, and made them into a real name, with initials. That way we can weed out all the name and initial combinations we don’t like.

I’m no great programmer, but I love a challenge. Here is the script I wrote, which works rather well, and even takes out duplicates. I’m sure it could be better, but I’ve never really written anything in perl before….(and it only took 20 minutes)

#!/usr/bin/perl
open(FIRST, first_name_list”) || die “”Could not open $filename…\n””::
@first_name=&lt::FIRST>::
foreach $fn (@first_name)
{
chop ($fn)::
open(SECOND, “”second_name_list””) || die “”Could not open $filename…\n””::
@second_name=&lt::SECOND>::
foreach $sn (@second_name)
{
$fi = substr($fn, 0, 1)::
$si = substr($sn, 0, 1)::
chop ($sn)::
if ($fn ne $sn)
{
print “”$fn $sn Snell $fi $si S\n””::
}
}
}
close(FIRST)::
close(SECOND)::

I got all my info from these two sites: www.spu.edu/help/tech/basic-perl/ & www.pageresource.com/cgirec/index2.htm