Re: Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]

[Steve Keay]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 03:58:25PM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> > I'm sure there are plenty of lurkers on this list who would fit in

It is quite a difficult thing to walk into a pub and land in a room
full of strange people (people you don't know) who are all engaged in
varying levels of intense conversation.

I advocate more speeches involving the whole crowd - even if they're 2
minute efforts along the lines of, "Buy a tee shirt." or, "Come to the
next technical meet." or, "Here's our new fearless leader to say a few
words about what we're here for."

IMHO those moments give people a sense of, well, all coming together
to suffer the same thing and do a great deal for actually meeting
people you don't know.  And let's face it, everyone gets a kick out of
it anyhow.  Just so long as it doesn't drag out.

Or somthing.

Re: Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]

[Paul Makepeace]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 12:23:44AM +, Struan Donald wrote:
> is a good idea too as it's a bit weird to walk up to a bunch of
> strangers and offer to buy them $alchohol but buying your own drink
> and then sitting nursing it in the corner isn't all that social. on
> the other hand if you get bought a drink it tends to draw you in.

There's a social night in SF where you can't buy a drink except for
someone else, ideally someone you've not met before. It's amazing what
little excuse people need to meet one another, but for some reason they
need *some* excuse -- and this seems to work as well as any.

Paul

-- 
Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/

"If we could fly to the moon, then you've got another thing coming!"
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/

Re: Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]

[Struan Donald]

* at 19/02 22:16 + Kate L Pugh said:
> 
> * "Social meets aren't the best way to recruit newbies."
> 
> Pah, that's where you got me from, and aren't you glad you did.

i think the key difference is that people who come to social meets are
more likely to participate actively rather than just lurking which is
why social's are good.
 
> * "Circulating was difficult at the Cittie of Yorke last month."
> 
> I agree, and this is another reason why I'd like to try to fill the
> whole bar; we'll get a lower density overall.  We maybe also need to
> have oldbies who are focussing on making sure nobody gets left out.

circulating in almost any pub becomes difficult with more than 10
people so i don't think you can level that at the CoY exclusively. I
don't see having our own bit of the pub as a neccessary thing
_provided_ that the bit that isn't ours doesn't result in conversation
being difficult. i.e. it is a quiet pub.

one thing about the have a big meeting and get all the lurkers in is
that some people find large groups of strangers a bit intimidating so
it might put some people off.

s

Re: Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]

[Struan Donald]

* at 20/02 00:02 + David Cantrell said:
> > On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Kate L Pugh wrote:
> > > * "How about offering a free pint to first-time attendees at the social?"
> 
> That was originally my silly suggestion, but I'll stand by it.  I'll buy
> a $drink_of_choice for a few new faces.

is a good idea too as it's a bit weird to walk up to a bunch of
strangers and offer to buy them $alchohol but buying your own drink
and then sitting nursing it in the corner isn't all that social. on
the other hand if you get bought a drink it tends to draw you in.

now we just need the i am not a new member tattoos to prevent abuse ;)

s

Re: Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]

[David Cantrell]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 11:42:49PM +, the hatter wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Kate L Pugh wrote:
> > * "How about offering a free pint to first-time attendees at the social?"
> Hurrah, make that 10.

That was originally my silly suggestion, but I'll stand by it.  I'll buy
a $drink_of_choice for a few new faces.

-- 
David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

This is a signature.  There are many like it but this one is mine.

Re: Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]

[Paul Makepeace]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 10:16:35PM +, Kate L Pugh wrote:
> >> [...] to bring Perl programming friends along, maybe to encourage old
> >> members of the list who don't turn up that often to come along [...]

Well, I'm one of the oldest members and don't turn up that often (altho'
living 6,000miles away for three years must be *some* kind of excuse),
so if this is <8th March I'll certainly come along!

I'd endorse the rest of what you said, especially dancing Leons. (more
than one??)

> I should possibly explain why I think this is so important.
> 
> I'm sure there are plenty of lurkers on this list who would fit in
> very well with the general core of people who come to all or most of
> the social events.  I was subscribed to the list for ages before I
> came along to anything (though admittedly this was partly due to not
> having moved to London yet).  Meeting people in London is difficult in
> general; meeting people who fit your mindset is harder still.  I think
> Greg's suggestion is an excellent catalyst for getting the people who
> are still wondering about whether to come along and meet us, to
> finally take the plunge.

JFDI!

Paul

-- 
Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/

"What is a mote? An abominable pimple on the face of God."
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/

Re: Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]

[the hatter]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Kate L Pugh wrote:

> * "Let's discuss social things on IRC rather than the list; all of the
>social types are on IRC anyway."
>
> I disagree with the latter assertion, and even if it were true, nobody
> watches IRC all the time.

Agreed, maybe they mean 'all the types who socialise with london.pm
already' but even then, that's stretching it.  Won't catch me on irc, if
you want to talk to me online, there are Better Ways.

> * "Social meets aren't the best way to recruit newbies."
> Pah, that's where you got me from, and aren't you glad you did.

Mmmm, kake.  Oh, just a sec, it's cake I mmm for, I've little idea what
kake is.  A social gives people more time to find some people they like,
I'd think.  Though I've managed a whole tech meeting already, I don't
think they're where perl becomes a community, it's more about community
education, by definition.

> * "How about offering a free pint to first-time attendees at the social?"

Hurrah, make that 10.

> * "Let's have dancing girls at the next social."

Or can I trade pints for dancing girls ?  If we can't get the girls, I'm
not so sure about a dancing leon.  How about those dancing mice from the
aero adverts ?

I do like the "if you come to one social this year, make it this one"
idea.  Having not made it to one yet, when it was first suggested I
thought I really should try and attend, out of some bizarre illogical
loyalty.  Maybe there are more newbies and lurkers thinking the same.


the hatter

Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]

[Kate L Pugh]

Long mail; bear with me.

On Fri 15 Feb 2002, Greg McCarroll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I'd like to suggest that we make this a special social meeting. Lets
>> take the whole of the cellar and make it a challenge for us as a group
>> [...] to bring Perl programming friends along, maybe to encourage old
>> members of the list who don't turn up that often to come along [...]

On Mon 18 Feb 2002, Kate L Pugh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This does sound like a good idea in general; anyone else up for it?  I
> need to know by Thursday whether we're going to go for it, [...]
> I will want to have heard from at least two or three people who
> are actively prepared to do some of the encouraging, by then.

So far I have had a resounding silence.  Some opinions raised offlist:

* "Let's discuss social things on IRC rather than the list; all of the
   social types are on IRC anyway."

I disagree with the latter assertion, and even if it were true, nobody
watches IRC all the time.

* "Social meets aren't the best way to recruit newbies."

Pah, that's where you got me from, and aren't you glad you did.

* "blech should advocate it; he's the glorious leader."

One person wanting or not wanting a fab special social event in March
is only going to be significant if the number of others wanting the
same thing is so small as to make the whole thing impractical anyway.

* "How about offering a free pint to first-time attendees at the social?"

An excellent idea, and I am happy to buy these pints if someone who's
been around for longer than me (anyone who's been around for more than
six months will qualify) is willing to identify the newbies for me.
Point not being to spot scammers but to keep an eye out for people who
are new and make sure they're welcomed -- I'm so new that I won't know
people who've not come to anything in the past year.

* "Let's have dancing girls at the next social."

I vote Leon to organise this, or at the very least to provide a
dancing Leon.

* "Circulating was difficult at the Cittie of Yorke last month."

I agree, and this is another reason why I'd like to try to fill the
whole bar; we'll get a lower density overall.  We maybe also need to
have oldbies who are focussing on making sure nobody gets left out.
(Leon was v sweet at the last one and came to talk to me when I was
sulking into my beer (nothing to do with london.pm, I hasten to add,
*men*, bah.  But that kind of thing.))



I should possibly explain why I think this is so important.

I'm sure there are plenty of lurkers on this list who would fit in
very well with the general core of people who come to all or most of
the social events.  I was subscribed to the list for ages before I
came along to anything (though admittedly this was partly due to not
having moved to London yet).  Meeting people in London is difficult in
general; meeting people who fit your mindset is harder still.  I think
Greg's suggestion is an excellent catalyst for getting the people who
are still wondering about whether to come along and meet us, to
finally take the plunge.


Your loyal pub minion,
Kake

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, jo walsh wrote:

>
> > There must be easier ways than this :-)
>
> why don't you just throw hardware at the problem? :)
>

Yeah, lets hand out loads of kit to early adopters of Perl 5.8.0 :)

/J\

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Richard Clamp wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 03:31:17PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> >  However perlbench went slower because I'd made
> > /(.{1,76})/ slower (used in string/base64.t). How many people use {} in real
> > regexps?  IIRC There are almost none in any script used to build perl.
>
> I think I used {} for the first time in anger yesterday.  I'm
> currently finding it hard to grep for regexes, but I'm fairly certain
> I've not used it before.
>

I tend to use {} when I do have a fixed number of things in a regex to
match - sometimes when I am particularly lame I will use it instead of
unpack() 


/J\

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Nicholas Clark]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 07:15:03PM +, jo walsh wrote:
> 
> > There must be easier ways than this :-)
> 
> why don't you just throw hardware at the problem? :)

Because there's this little label on it marked "product warranty will be
void if label on the top cover is removed or if the drive experiences
shock in excess of 60 g's"

Or alternatively, because the thing in question is part of the time it
takes bleadperl (allegedly 5.7.3 will be out within 2 weeks) to build,
so on any given hardware however fast I'm not happy waiting for it.
[Or with the thought of everybody else waiting for it and thinking "sod this
I'll build "]
[Or with the fact that it will reduce the number of permutations of perl I
can smoke test on any given machine in 24 hours]

[I think I've got another 5% or so off one of the code paths without really
having any sensible amount of profiling yet. Devel::SmallProf doesn't work
with 5.7.1 or later. Grr]

Nicholas Clark

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Paul Makepeace]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 07:15:03PM +, jo walsh wrote:
> 
> > There must be easier ways than this :-)
> 
> why don't you just throw hardware at the problem? :)

I have an old crappy keyboard with a sticky Shift key you're welcome to
throw at any other hardware.

Paul

-- 
Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/

"If they can play too, then all the world would be my soup."
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Tom Hukins]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 03:31:17PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> How many people use {} in real regexps?  IIRC There are almost none
> in any script used to build perl.

I've used it quite often for validating input, for example to check
the user entered a number containing y digits/letters.

Tom

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[jo walsh]

> There must be easier ways than this :-)

why don't you just throw hardware at the problem? :)

z

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Nicholas. Clark]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 10:05:36AM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 03:31:17PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> > How many people use {} in real regexps?
> 
> s/(.{1,72})(\s+|$)/$1\n /g;
> 
> (Wordwrap for my sigs.)

D'oh!

   $definition =~ s/(.{74,77},)/$1\n/g;

That bit of wordwrapping was part of one of the optimisations *I*'d already
done. So, er, yes, I've used them in the past week too.

Nicholas Clark
-- 
EMCFT http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/CV.html

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Paul Makepeace]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 03:31:17PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> How many people use {} in real regexps?

s/(.{1,72})(\s+|$)/$1\n /g;

(Wordwrap for my sigs.)

Paul

-- 
Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/

"What is Clark Kent without a telephone booth? Another chance to get an
 ice cream."
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Richard Clamp]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 03:31:17PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote:
>  However perlbench went slower because I'd made
> /(.{1,76})/ slower (used in string/base64.t). How many people use {} in real
> regexps?  IIRC There are almost none in any script used to build perl.

I think I used {} for the first time in anger yesterday.  I'm
currently finding it hard to grep for regexes, but I'm fairly certain
I've not used it before.

This is worrying code, but not for the usual reasons:

my $store = pack 'u', freeze $data;

# two magic numbers, 4+8 == 12 and 128. constraints of the XXX table
my $i;
for my $value ( $store =~ m/.{1,128}/g ) {
my $variable = sprintf('perm%08d', $i++);

$set_sth->execute($userid, $variable, $value)
  or die $set_sth->errstr;
$set_sth->finish();
}

I hate not being able to just create database tables that fit the
needs of the application.

> There must be easier ways than this :-)

I think I said that too :)

-- 
Richard Clamp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Paul Johnson]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 01:05:29PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote:

> However, I think I'm at the limit of things I can learn from DProf.
> What other techniques can I use to figure out where and why it is slow?

Devel::Cover now does time coverage, aka profiling.  It's pretty basic
and pretty new, and I've not even got around to comparing its results to
those of DProf, but it is another technique that might prove useful.

But then again, it might not.

Actually, you could hack it to find out how long was being spent in each
opcode.  That might be useful.  Hmmm.

-- 
Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pjcj.net

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Nicholas Clark]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 02:22:09PM +, Jonathan Stowe wrote:

> Build the Perl with the gcc option -pg and then run gprof, and then get
> jiggy in pp_hot.c ;-}

Mmm. Not tried that. I did try using gcov a while back, and found that if I
re-ordered the switch statement in rexexec the regression tests and install
man went a bit (<2% faster). However perlbench went slower because I'd made
/(.{1,76})/ slower (used in string/base64.t). How many people use {} in real
regexps?  IIRC There are almost none in any script used to build perl.
Anyway, I found a compromise rearrangement that still seemed to make
installman marginally faster without slowing perlbench. But 2% is less than
5%, and less than 5% feels like it could just be noise.

There must be easier ways than this :-)

Nicholas Clark
-- 
EMCFT http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/CV.html

Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Nicholas Clark wrote:

> I have a slow perl script that is currently annoying me.
> I have run it under Devel::DProf, and from that have already identified 2
> places where it could be accelerated.
>
> [4.5% by replacing explicit loops with join ",", upack "C*", $foo
>  7.5% by replacing recursion with a loop]
>
> However, I think I'm at the limit of things I can learn from DProf.
> What other techniques can I use to figure out where and why it is slow?
>
> (For information, the script is not one that I wrote - it's the compile
> script for Encode in bleadperl. And it's doing M25 impressions)
>

Build the Perl with the gcc option -pg and then run gprof, and then get
jiggy in pp_hot.c ;-}

/J\

How to optimise slow perl scripts?

[Nicholas Clark]

I have a slow perl script that is currently annoying me.
I have run it under Devel::DProf, and from that have already identified 2
places where it could be accelerated.

[4.5% by replacing explicit loops with join ",", upack "C*", $foo
 7.5% by replacing recursion with a loop]

However, I think I'm at the limit of things I can learn from DProf.
What other techniques can I use to figure out where and why it is slow?

(For information, the script is not one that I wrote - it's the compile
script for Encode in bleadperl. And it's doing M25 impressions)

Nicholas Clark
-- 
EMCFT http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/CV.html

[schwern@pobox.com: Make Schwern poor in just 20 easy steps!]

[Nicholas Clark]

I think that he may be violating the Trades Descriptions Act, or something
like that. Either that or Websters has some definition of "easy" that the OED
doesn't. Go on, prove me wrong!

Nicholas Clark
- Forwarded message from Michael G Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

Mailing-List: contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]; run by ezmlm
list-help: 
list-unsubscribe: 
list-post: 
From: Michael G Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Make Schwern poor in just 20 easy steps!

Here's the current list of untested modules.  The magic number is 20.

B::CC
B::Disassembler
B::Lint
B::Stackobj
B::Xref
Byteloader
CPAN 
CPAN::FirstTime
Dynaloader
ExtUtils::MM_NW5 
ExtUtils::MM_VMS [exists, but needs some lovin'] 
ExtUtils::Install 
ExtUtils::Liblist 
ExtUtils::Mksymlists 
Net::Cmd
Net::Domain
Net::POP3
O
Pod::Html 
Pod::Select


-- 

Michael G. Schwern   <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
Perl Quality Assurance  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kwalitee Is Job One
 Hey Schwern! honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk,
honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk,
honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk,
honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk,
honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk!  

- End forwarded message -

Re: [JOB] Oxford area, menial packing work in exciting IT company

[Lucy McWilliam]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Ok, I don't *expect* anyone will be interested in this, but if anyone
> does want to spend two days packing CDs into boxes (or whatever) for
> 5ukp/hour in Abingdon, let me know :)

Try s3ending ti to oxford.pm.  Or am I confused?


L.

Re: Bolloxia

[Tony Bowden]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 01:37:17PM +, Simon Wistow wrote:
> That's just an indication of ignorance. See also Pret a Porter -> Ready
> to Wear.

cf. "The Madness of King George" 

Tony

[JOB] Oxford area, menial packing work in exciting IT company

[anthony . fisher]

Ok, I don't *expect* anyone will be interested in this, but if anyone
does want to spend two days packing CDs into boxes (or whatever) for
5ukp/hour in Abingdon, let me know :)

Tony

On 19/02/2002 10:38:22 Ed Birney wrote:

>Morning all
>
>Do you have a loved one sitting at home rotting away? Do they feel they
have
>nothing to live for? Do you have friends who have adopted an apathetic
approach
>to life and who are currently between jobs? If so then I would love to
hear
>from you! Here in Sophos Stores we offer a two day course to help those
kind of
>people get back on their feet again. It's called the 'sophos anti-virus
monthly
>update run', also known as 'sweep'.
>
>Simply put, the course involves the shipping of our monthly updated
anti-virus
>cd to our expectant customers. Work is light and refreshments provided
for.
>How much does this cost I hear you cry. Nothing! In fact Sophos will pay
>participants £5 per hour for the pleasure of their company.
>
>
>If you know of anyone who may be interested, then please let me know.
>
>Many thanks for your time.
>
>Ed ;O)





--
Anthony Fisher, Web Developer, Sophos Anti-Virus
Real Business/CBI Growing Business Awards: Company of the Year
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Tel: 01235 559933, Web: www.sophos.com

Re: Bolloxia

[Simon Wistow]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 10:22:12AM +, Greg McCarroll said:
> Bringing this all back to computing, John Sculley, who worked for
> Pepsi and was CEO of Apple for a while, was very keen on the taste
> test challenge between Pepsi and Coke, the simple reason was that cos
> Pepsi was sweeter it won in a "1 sip" taste test. 

I did the Pepsi challenge once. They used those teeny taster cans. The
Pepsi ones were taken out of the fridge and popped open for you. The
Coke ones had been lying around open in the warm.

Nice.

One of my Math's projects at school was that we had to go and get a
hundred people to taste Pepsi and Coke in a double blind test.

Of all 40 people in my class (and this had been done for several years
with the same results) there was no statistical proof that anybody could
identify Coke or Pepsi definitively nor that, given a stated preference
the person would choose that brand as the nice tasting.

Go figure.

In other parts of this thread :
Globalisation may benefit the consumer in the short term but is long
term damaging. Look at Microsoft and the desktop.




--
: it's pretty hard to look miserable when you're spinning on your head

Re: Bolloxia

[Greg McCarroll]

* Peter Sergeant ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Roger Burton West wrote:
> 
> > Actually this is first-year Economics (or was on my course anyway).
> > Paul's suggestion works in a situation of perfect competition and
> > homogeneous goods - e.g. 2 litres of Coke is just as good as 2 litres of
> > Pepsi. When you introduce advertising and branding (two facets of the
> > same thing, I think), you destroy the substitutability and therefore
> > it's silly to use the equations that describe perfect competition.
> 
> Even without advertising and branding, I'd say you're going out on a limb
> by declaring Pepsi and Coke to be homogeneous. Coke isn't *just* more
> popular than BrandX Cola because of advertising - it genuinely tastes
> better too. There is a noticeable taste difference between Pepsi and Coke
> - I buy Coke because I prefer the taste. 
> 

Bringing this all back to computing, John Sculley, who worked for
Pepsi and was CEO of Apple for a while, was very keen on the taste
test challenge between Pepsi and Coke, the simple reason was that cos
Pepsi was sweeter it won in a "1 sip" taste test. They then used this
"evidense" as the basis for their advertising, and stupidly Coke tried
to fight this battle[1], by making Coke sweeter, which meant they
almost lost their market until they saw sense and started a "classic"
coke marketting campaign to avoid the backlash.

Greg

[1] I'm sure Sun Tzu says something about choosing the battlefield if
you can.



-- 
Greg McCarroll http://217.34.97.146/~gem/

Re: Bolloxia

[Struan Donald]

* at 18/02 17:57 -0600 Chris Devers said:
> 
> But what then? The more I study this, the more all the sides just sound
> hopelessly naive & wrongheaded, but I can't offer any better suggestions. 

we should all just rememember to be nice to each other and get along :)

s

Re: New list: [Bots]

[Newton, Philip]

Paul Mison wrote:
> * If you think the new list is an amazingly good/bad idea to stop
>   a lot of posts boring people/cause fragmentation, say so here.

I think we need a [Bolloxia] list.

And I think I regret having posted the original link :)

Cheers,
Philip
-- 
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
All opinions are my own, not my employer's.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

RE: ANNOUNCE: Pod::Coverage 0.10

[Tels]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-

Moin,

On 18-Feb-02 Richard Clamp tried to scribble about:
> There's a new release in town.  It scratches off one of the oldest
> TODO items, that of counting the docs in the base class(es) towards
> your packages coverage.

Thanx, much appreciated.

Cheers,

Tels


- -- 
 perl -MDev::Bollocks -e'print Dev::Bollocks->rand(),"\n"'
 continuously extend second-generation data

 http://bloodgate.com/perl   My current Perl projects
 PGP key available on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or via email

-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)

iQEVAwUBPHAsS3cLPEOTuEwVAQESMwf+KRxFs38jRInVyXc6zrnuEYFmch+5Bgnu
60xdNK4n4UghaELbBw736z5wWNtB4UMCWW8Ss29T6k+LICLrMaEyZm/9Fth3Dr6k
i8BxXHtMC1QzzAeuHtIzv0RhigqXyzF4XtRL6YySRcrhzOo5sYonZ7trOOFbbl9B
8KlACtOl7e9dbZpEgzDyxzIrvNPIUR4AIZmbtVAZxjTD0cm78yB9wBkA1hIG93U4
DiEiZfx5Qr8iGrbV7AD/9rW191fZw9nKqvQpxHqVJ/QZJO7Ig8iE6B6wAKjlFDjG
YXyFa4Td/MmEr87dzsZTJU7ZVnOUrIxafPGbRUieXl+P6UqhF51pAQ==
=tsmN
-END PGP SIGNATURE-

Re: Bolloxia

[Peter Sergeant]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Roger Burton West wrote:

> Actually this is first-year Economics (or was on my course anyway).
> Paul's suggestion works in a situation of perfect competition and
> homogeneous goods - e.g. 2 litres of Coke is just as good as 2 litres of
> Pepsi. When you introduce advertising and branding (two facets of the
> same thing, I think), you destroy the substitutability and therefore
> it's silly to use the equations that describe perfect competition.

Even without advertising and branding, I'd say you're going out on a limb
by declaring Pepsi and Coke to be homogeneous. Coke isn't *just* more
popular than BrandX Cola because of advertising - it genuinely tastes
better too. There is a noticeable taste difference between Pepsi and Coke
- I buy Coke because I prefer the taste. 

+Pete

New list: [Bots]

[Paul Mison]

Hmm, where to start? Well, at the emergency social with Simon Cozens,
there seemed to be quite a lot of talk about IRC bots, and how dipsy
should do things. A couple of people suggested that it would be a good
idea to have a list to discuss them on, so I (finally) set one up
yesterday. If you want to join, go and have a look at:

http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/bots/

However, once I'd mentioned it on IRC, Greg wondered why people didn't
want to talk about bots on list (since, generally, they're written in
Perl, and people on #london.pm IRC tend to be on the list, it's not
really any more off-topic than a lot of stuff here), and suggested the
list would have a burst of activity and then die.

I suppose the point of this email is:

* If you're interested in (IRC) bots, get thee to the new list.
* If you think the new list is an amazingly good/bad idea to stop
  a lot of posts boring people/cause fragmentation, say so here.

blech: Or something.
dipsy: Something is probably up.

-- 
:: paul
:: the future has been and gone