A month or so ago, the long under-construction Opa! opened its doors on Lincoln Ave in downtown Willow Glen. Wanting to try it for a while, we walked down on Friday night for dinner. And we were not disappointed.
The menu is straightforward and has a good variety of Greek food. We ordered the Keftedes (Greek Meatballs) as an appetizer. The dish consisted of two well prepared meatballs and an excellent sauce.
For the main courses, we selected a Beef Souvlaki Pita (hers) and Seafood Souvlaki (mine). Both came with the most excellent Opa! Fries. (Think: garlic fries with a twist.) The food came in a reasonable amount of time and our waitress was very friendly and helpful. It was very tasty and portions were not excessively large either.
Their drink menu contains a selection of beers and a good selection of Greek wines as well. The wine we sampled was quite good and is apparently available at Costco. Needless to say, we're going to have to verify that for ourselves. ;-)
The interior is well decorated. I especially like the large TV monitor that shows what songs are playing over the sound system.
Pricing was reasonable. Dinner for two with drinks, an appetizer, and desert (Baklava!) was about $50. Not the sort of thing we do often, but definitely not out of line with other favorite eating establishments.
Opa! is a small sit down restaurant with tables for 2 and 4 (mostly) that also handles to go orders. It's often very full and could definitely benefit from more space inside. As a result, the tables are fairly close together and the waitresses occasionally bump into customers. But space isn't easy to come by in Willow Glen's downtown.
Opa! has over 60 ratings and reviews on Yelp and is also discussed a bit on Willow Glen 2.0.
If you're looking for good Greek food in the area, I'd highly recommend giving Opa! a try.
I recently had a need to add some error checking to a bash script that runs multiple copies of a Perl script in parallel to better utilize a multi-core server. I wanted a way to run these four processes in the background and gather up their exit values. Then, if any of them failed, I'd prematurely exit the bash script and report the error.
After a bit of reading bash docs, I came across some built-ins that I hadn't previously used or even seen. First, I'll show you the code:
This is the bash script that runs the parallel processes and gathers up the exit values.
And here's the Perl script that I wrote in order to test the functioning of wait.sh. It accepts to arguments. The first is the number of seconds to sleep (to simulate the delay associated with doing work) and the second is the exit value it should use (any non-zero value indicates a failure).
New to me was the use of let to do math on a variable so that I can count up the number of failures. Is there a better way? There's no native ++ operator in bash. Similarly, using jobs to get a list of pids to wait on provided to be a very useful idiom.
The code is straightforward and works for my purposes. But since 99% of my time is spent in Perl rather than bash, I wonder what I could have done differently and/or better. Feedback welcome.
And, if this is at all useful to you, feel free to take it and run...
Finally, I'm starting to really dig gist.github for showing off bits of code. It's good stuff.
In one of those "well, duh!" moments the other day, I came across a headline on Slashdot that said Unhappy People Watch More TV. Given that I mostly stopped watching TV quite some time ago and consider it to be one of the more rude devices in our culture, I clicked thru to read about how others have discovered what I'd already guessed was true...
A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as 'very happy' spend more time reading and socializing. 'TV doesn't really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,' says researcher John P. Robinson. 'It's more passive and may provide escape--especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself.
Imagine that... Stagnation and exposure to negative information leads to sadness. It goes on...
The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise.' Unhappy people also liked their TV more: 'What viewers seem to be saying is that while TV in general is a waste of time and not particularly enjoyable, "the shows I saw tonight were pretty good.
Another shock. TV provides only a short-term reward (kind of like a drug hit).
If this resonates with you a bit, or you suspect deep down that there's more going on with the influence of TV in our culture, I highly recommend reading Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman if you have not already.
It's too bad this stuff doesn't get taught in school--where, I'm told, teachers are using PowerPoint more and more.
*sigh*
I recently found myself wishing for an async library for MySQL. My goal is to be able to fire off queries to a group of federated servers in parallel and aggregate the results in my code.
With the standard client (DBD::mysql), I'd have to query the servers one at a time. If there are 10 servers and each query takes 0.5 seconds, my code would stall for 5 seconds. But by using an async library, I could fire off all the queries and fetch the results as they become available. The overall wait time should not be much more than 0.5 seconds.
While I found little evidence of anyone doing this in practice, my search led me to the perl-mysql-async project on Google Code. It's a pure-Perl implementation of the MySQL 4.1 protocol and an asyncronous client that uses Event::Lib (and libevent) under the hood.
The code contains little in the way of documentation or examples, aside from the simple bundled test script. After a bit of mucking around with it, I managed to cobble together a working example. It looks like this:
Sure enough, that code runs in just a bit more time than the longest query it executes, rather than the sum of all the query times.
What still surprises me is that this code doesn't appear to get a lot of use (or at least discussion) in the real world. In the PHP world, the mysqlnd driver offers async queries.
So count this as my contribution to demonstrating that Perl can do async MySQL queries too.
I'm happy that Barack Obama won the election. I think it's time to stir things up a bit.
What really bothers me is that fact that we still don't have equal voting in this country. We certainly have the technology to share vote counts quickly and efficiently, so who not just do that? Why screw around with an electoral college anymore?
It seems disingenuous at best and an outright lie at worst to call Obama's victory a "landslide" when the actual percentages of the popular vote (the only vote that should count) were so close. Yet the large difference in electoral vote counts is supposed to make us believe that something very different happened. And the media was more than happy to play along with that deception (what a surprise, huh?).
It should not be possible to lose by having more votes than your opponent, but it is. Why does nobody seem to care? (See: electoral college, specifically this.)
Of all the countries that have tried to copy our model of democracy in the last 200 years or so, can you name a single one that adopted the electoral college as a piece of their political infrastructure?
I'd love to have my vote count as much as everyone in all the other states.
Why is that so hard?
