Re: Usernames?
On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Adam Turoff wrote: Early versions of unix supported monocased terminals. I remember a professor telling me that if you logged in and your username was allcaps, the tty would go into a compatability mode AND DISPLAY EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE, EXCEPT FOR CAPITAL LETTERS LIKE \A AND \B WHICH WOULD APPEAR WITH A PRECEDING BACKSLASH. VMS isn;t quite that nasty (although it fills my days with a constant nagging pain), but it has no idea of case, does most everythign in caps, and ignores illegal characters typed in passwords without giving you a warning, as well as ignoring case in passwords... supamonkey SupaMonkey suPa Monkey s u P aM o n KEy are all the same lovely it does have built in file versioning and an advanced beard growing plugin though... billy -- The sky was the colour of television, tuned to a dead whelk Billy Abbott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Usernames?
On Wednesday, November 06, 2002 10:04 AM, Billy Abbott [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Adam Turoff wrote: Early versions of unix supported monocased terminals. I remember a professor telling me that if you logged in and your username was allcaps, the tty would go into a compatability mode AND DISPLAY EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE, EXCEPT FOR CAPITAL LETTERS LIKE \A AND \B WHICH WOULD APPEAR WITH A PRECEDING BACKSLASH. VMS isn;t quite that nasty (although it fills my days with a constant nagging pain), but it has no idea of case, does most everythign in caps, and ignores illegal characters typed in passwords without giving you a warning, as well as ignoring case in passwords... VMS++ I heart; VMS It also uppercases the echoing of characters, when the application program wants uppercase data. Nice. You do get some interesting effects when VMS connects to an NFS mount on a Unix box. IIRC they use $ signs in the filespec to indicate a case override (such as an upper case character on the Unix side). it does have built in file versioning and an advanced beard growing plugin though... Some Unixes , AIX I believe, have file versioning that can be enabled as a feature. But this is usually turned off for compatibility. I remember what it was like to have many versions of a file - What did it look like before I started fiddling with it ;-), Let's see if we can track the last version that worked. Lazy practices admittedly, but it saved me needing to go back to backup on many occasion. I also remember that VMS files have more date/times on them than on Unix - Created date, Modified date, Date last backed up. /reminiscence
Re: Usernames?
* Billy Abbott ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: it does have built in file versioning and an advanced beard growing plugin though... VMS is wonderful, i first learned to write multiuser applications on VMS, writing a shared diary facility in Pascal[1][2]. However I seem to recall the best feature (apart from maybe the file versioning) was the phone utility[3], which IIRC used the terminal's bell to reproduce the sound of a ringing phone. Greg [1] Before everyone goes ``Eugh Pascal'', i had to write another multiuser diary a few years later using Motif and ML (a functional language, i.e. it has no variables/state), after this exercise Pascal looked like a wonderful language for the task. However sometimes when I'm running a really high temperature i look back and think that ML is actually a great language for doing user interfaces and I tell this to Mr Socko, the sock puppet, who only talks to me when i'm in these states. [2] Ok, it didn't need to be multiuser I just got a bit carried. [3] Equivalent to UNIX's talk command. It was particularly exciting as this was the first time i used a multiuser computer. -- Greg McCarroll http://www.mccarroll.org.uk/~gem/ jabber:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Usernames?
On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 10:24:42PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: The traditional restrictions on web usernames are things like only alphanumerics, and usually lowercase to reduce user confusion/burden remembering. That seems reasonable to me. If users can remember their username, they are more likely to return, won't go setting up new accounts every time, and will bother the support staff less. I was wondering, why? They seem quite arbitrary in the modern day world. Why not allow (embedded) whitespace, punctuation, and so on? The only thing I can see so far being a problem is if the username was later used for an email address. But, taking that possibility out, what other reasons are there for these restrictions? Stupid programmers forgetting to appropriately quote/escape data before stuffing it into a database. INSERT INTO users (userid, username, passwd) VALUES (usersequence.nextval, '$username', '$passwdmd5hash') Admire the fun you have when the username contains '. Or the more fun when the username is ... a','a');DELETE FROM users; Bwahahaha Even if you can assume that the programmers are blessed with Clue, I think that the earlier reasons are sufficient. -- Grand Inquisitor Reverend David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation. -- Johnny Hart
Re: Usernames?
Ivor Williams wrote: VMS++ I heart; VMS ITYM I #x2665; VMS. ;-) -Dom -- | Semantico: creators of major online resources | | URL: http://www.semantico.com/ | | Tel: +44 (1273) 72 | | Address: 33 Bond St., Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1RD, UK. |
Re: Usernames?
On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 06:24:31PM -0500, Adam Turoff wrote: On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 10:24:42PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: The traditional restrictions on web usernames are things like only alphanumerics, and usually lowercase to reduce user confusion/burden remembering. Why not allow (embedded) whitespace, punctuation, and so on? Characters like . cause problems because they've always been illegal. For example, chown accepts a syntax of 'chown user.group' because . is illegal. So chown breaks when you have a username like s.avery or m.thibaut. The shell has certain expectations about when and where # will be used, too. Err, these only seem to apply to situations where a web user maps down to an underlying *nix user. FWIW, I'd never allow users of any system anything other than whatever is considered current for *nix login names, just because of the possibility (read: likelihood) that my system would get maintained by someone who I wouldn't trust to Do Things Properly wrt char escapes, etc. Ben
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 10:30:19AM -, Ivor Williams wrote: VMS isn;t quite that nasty (although it fills my days with a constant nagging pain), but it has no idea of case, does most everythign in caps, and ignores illegal characters typed in passwords without giving you a warning, as well as ignoring case in passwords... VMS++ I heart; VMS I despise VMS. My employer still uses it. All our custom configuration management and proprietary language compilers are written to run on it. I don't like DCL and my admins don't have enough clue to have installed any decent editors so I'm stuck with eve or edt (yuck!!!). Arse to DCL! (Now I want to be ill all over the keyboard (yuck, yuck, yuck!)) andrew -- 'I only managed to make it run down the main (for us) road and then on down Lover's Lane. (That was deliberate, as it was then trapped.)' - Marc talking about his adventures with a sheep. Addendum: 'They're from the city - they don't understand' msg08993/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Usernames?
* David Cantrell ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: INSERT INTO users (userid, username, passwd) VALUES (usersequence.nextval, '$username', '$passwdmd5hash') Admire the fun you have when the username contains '. Or the more fun when the username is ... a','a');DELETE FROM users; Bwahahaha I see your Bwahahaha and raise you Muwhahahahaha. I was recently reading[1] old vunerabilities[2] for ASP/ODBC/Jet and came across an interesting one. Now we all know that as good little programmers we should always check the incoming data, but let us just imagine that some ASP programmers haven't done so. So its of course the programmers fault, however looking at it closely there are several ``features'' introduced by microsoft that make this sloppiness worse on the ASP/ODBC/Jet platform. I've marked them with a '*'. First, enter the special '|' charcter, it allows bits of VBA to be run as part of the query (I'm not even going to mark this with a '*' as its about to get worse). VBA includes many interesting functions, such as let me see, ah yes shell(*). Oh and did I mention that '|' have special obscure quoting rules(*) that don't seem to be widely known? Oh well, looks like they can read/delete anything in your web tree then, maybe credit card details if they are readable by the web server process owner. Err no, and here is the best bit All ODBC functions are happening as, wait for it . system_local(*). So after the wiley hacker has read the credit cards he can do something like http://www.host.com/script.asp?foo=|shell(format c:\)| Now i'm sure this has been all cleared up, however would you trust a company who had put out shit like the above again quickly? Greg [1] It was a rfp (rain forest puppy) article. [2] They may be patched by now, or maybe not. I don't use ASP/ODBC/Jet so I don't keep up to date with these things. -- Greg McCarroll http://www.mccarroll.org.uk/~gem/ jabber:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Perl and RTF
Hi, I have a client who wants output from a reporting system in word format (Yuck!!). I've told them that we can out put it as RTF format. (We really just wanted to do an HTML report, but his boss doesn't like HTML!) This will be a fixed format report so seems to be a good idea to use TT2 or such like. I've had a look around CPAN for a RTF module and there are a couple. I need one that can generate tables - I don't think that RTF::Document doesn't - so I've opted for using RTF::Writer. Basically just wondering if anyone has any stories (good or bad) about using this module or combining it with TT2. TIA Andy
Re: Usernames?
On Wed Nov 6 10:33:28 2002, Greg McCarroll wrote: [1] Before everyone goes ``Eugh Pascal'', i had to write another multiuser diary a few years later using Motif and ML (a functional language, i.e. it has no variables/state), after this exercise Pascal looked like a wonderful language for the task. However sometimes when I'm running a really high temperature i look back and think that ML is actually a great language for doing user interfaces and I tell this to Mr Socko, the sock puppet, who only talks to me when i'm in these states. I've been playing with OCAML recently. It is a clear leader in the Programming Language Shootout, so I got curious. It has some imperitive features so I don't have to understand monads to print Hello World. I like it. -- Marty
Re: ADSL Help
I've now ordered my D-Link router thingy for ADSL, and am about to sign up,and a thought struck me. I have two phone lines at home, one for voice and one for my normal analogue modem. Should I switch my main voice line to ADSL and cancel the other account? The ADSL line can handle voice and data at the same time yes? But if there was a power cut, or the ISP I'm using are down for some reason, can I still make normal BT calls on the line? I don't suppose a converted line can handle 2 voice calls at the same time, which I can currently do with the 2 lines. sorry for the random questions, I've got a bit of a cold today and my head feels a bit like cotton wool. /Robert
RE: Usernames?
On Wednesday, November 06, 2002 11:39 AM, Andrew Wilson [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: I don't like DCL and my admins don't have enough clue to have installed any decent editors so I'm stuck with eve or edt (yuck!!!). Arse to DCL! (Now I want to be ill all over the keyboard (yuck, yuck, yuck!)) You don't have to be a privileged user to install and set up your own editor, just write permission to a disk. A vi emulator called vile is available on Decus - Emacs has also been ported to VMS. In terms of DCL - I have abandoned this in favour of Perl ;-) The VMS port works quite well, once you have got to know the few gotchas: long lines, binmode, flock, no symlinks, %ENV, etc.
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:09:28PM -, Ivor Williams wrote: On Wednesday, November 06, 2002 11:39 AM, Andrew Wilson [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: I don't like DCL and my admins don't have enough clue to have installed any decent editors so I'm stuck with eve or edt (yuck!!!). Arse to DCL! (Now I want to be ill all over the keyboard (yuck, yuck, yuck!)) You don't have to be a privileged user to install and set up your own editor, just write permission to a disk. A vi emulator called vile is available on Decus - Emacs has also been ported to VMS. In terms of DCL - I have abandoned this in favour of Perl ;-) The VMS port works quite well, once you have got to know the few gotchas: long lines, binmode, flock, no symlinks, %ENV, etc. Thanks for the heads up. Unfortunately, they're also anal about installing software on their network. I can't see them giving me permission to install it and I suspect that if I just installed it and they found it I'd be out on my ear. We don't have perl istalled either unfortunately. andrew -- Sagittarius: (Nov. 22 - Dec. 21) You will be the first person in almost three millennia whom the gods see fit to punish for an astounding lack of hubris.
Re: ADSL Help
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:11:25PM -, Robert Shiels wrote: The ADSL line can handle voice and data at the same time yes? Yes. But if there was a power cut, or the ISP I'm using are down for some reason, can I still make normal BT calls on the line? The microfilter is powered from the phone line. I.e. yes. I don't suppose a converted line can handle 2 voice calls at the same time, which I can currently do with the 2 lines. Correct. (Unless you do voice-over-IP of course.) Roger
Re: Perl and RTF
On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 11:55, Andy Williams wrote: so I've opted for using RTF::Writer. Basically just wondering if anyone has any stories (good or bad) about using this module or combining it with TT2. I don't have any experience of RTF::Writer but TT2 does have a LaTeX filter that can convert to postscript, dvi or pdf. It doesn't look like it would be too had to patch it to handle another type of conversion [1] A quick google suggests txt2rtf [2] which I've never used but it looks like it might do the job. Not exactly what you wanted but it might be an alternative route ? Simon. [1] Look in Template::Filters [2] http://www.wxwindows.org/tex2rtf/index.htm
Re: Perl and RTF
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 11:55:13AM -, Andy Williams said: Basically just wondering if anyone has any stories (good or bad) about using this module or combining it with TT2. Could you output as html and then use html2rtf to convert it? Simon
Re: ADSL Help
On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Robert Shiels wrote: I have two phone lines at home, one for voice and one for my normal analogue modem. Should I switch my main voice line to ADSL and cancel the other account? yes. The ADSL line can handle voice and data at the same time yes? yes But if there was a power cut, or the ISP I'm using are down for some reason, can I still make normal BT calls on the line? yes I don't suppose a converted line can handle 2 voice calls at the same time, which I can currently do with the 2 lines. it cant handle 2 voice calls. sorry for the random questions, I've got a bit of a cold today and my head feels a bit like cotton wool. and dont forget to get your microfilter. /Robert -- Bob Walker http://www.randomness.org.uk/ Help! Mutated Tigers from the Antartic are invading Outer Mongolia. Send the Mashed Bunnies of Perpignan to defeat them.
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 11:13:43AM +, David Cantrell wrote:
On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 10:24:42PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote:
The traditional restrictions on web usernames are things like only
alphanumerics, and usually lowercase to reduce user confusion/burden
remembering.
That seems reasonable to me. If users can remember their username, they
are more likely to return, won't go setting up new accounts every time,
and will bother the support staff less.
The other restriction I meant to mention was length - this seems
the daftest and most arbitrary of all, these days. The other is
lack of spaces.
E.g., how much easier is jonathan davidson to remember than jdavid69?
(Assuming the latter isn't the usual login in use everywhere, and that
your name was Jonathan Davidson, heh)
As it happens I went for up to 64 chars, lowercased, allowing [\w ]; the
latter only so far as not having to explain in small font next to the
text field exactly what *is* allowed :-)
Stupid programmers forgetting to appropriately quote/escape data before
stuffing it into a database.
INSERT INTO users (userid, username, passwd) VALUES
(usersequence.nextval, '$username', '$passwdmd5hash')
Why would anyone not use bound variables?
=for MySQL
insert_users_name_username_password_email = qq{
INSERT INTO users (id, name, username, password, email)
VALUES ('', ?, ?, PASSWORD(?), ?)
},
=cut
Paul
--
Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/
If he were here now, then it's all a stupid game of monopoly.
-- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:47:09PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 11:13:43AM +, David Cantrell wrote: Stupid programmers forgetting to appropriately quote/escape data before stuffing it into a database. INSERT INTO users (userid, username, passwd) VALUES (usersequence.nextval, '$username', '$passwdmd5hash') Why would anyone not use bound variables? not only do such beasts as Stupid programmers exist, but sadly some are employed as programmers. Before I start sounding horribly arrogant, as if I know everything, I ought to make it clear that there is a distinction between stupid and ignorant I'm an ignorant programmer. But I'm not stupid, in that I try to keep learning things to reduce my ignorance of topics I currently know little about. And I try to avoid doing things in areas while I am ignorant. Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl and RTF
Andy Williams wrote: I have a client who wants output from a reporting system in word format (Yuck!!). I've told them that we can out put it as RTF format. (We really just wanted to do an HTML report, but his boss doesn't like HTML!) Don't forget to make the output read only... This will be a fixed format report so seems to be a good idea to use TT2 or such like. I've had a look around CPAN for a RTF module and there are a couple. I need one that can generate tables - I don't think that RTF::Document doesn't - so I've opted for using RTF::Writer. Basically just wondering if anyone has any stories (good or bad) about using this module or combining it with TT2. You might want to talk to Sean Burke. I've seen from his use.perl.org that he's being doing a lot of RTF output recently. He also wrote RTF::Writer. http://use.perl.org/~TorgoX/journal/ http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/~sburke/ -Dom -- | Semantico: creators of major online resources | | URL: http://www.semantico.com/ | | Tel: +44 (1273) 72 | | Address: 33 Bond St., Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1RD, UK. |
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:47:09PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 11:13:43AM +, David Cantrell wrote: Stupid programmers forgetting to appropriately quote/escape data before stuffing it into a database. INSERT INTO users (userid, username, passwd) VALUES (usersequence.nextval, '$username', '$passwdmd5hash') Why would anyone not use bound variables? I've seen quite a few who honestly believed that using explicit values was faster, because in their minds it must be easier for the DB to process. Not only are they emphatically *not* easier or faster, but some databases (notably Oracle) can suffer serious performance problems because of this. Always use bind variables seems to me to be one of those things that should be included in every basic reference of how to interface with an SQL database. It's been sadly lacking in a couple I've seen recently, however. It was a carelessness I occasionally succumbed to myself, but then I saw how much impact it could have on a Oracle installation. Non-bind SQL: Just Say No. Ben
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Ben wrote:
Non-bind SQL: Just Say No.
And that would make an excellent lightening talk. Anyone (who's not
already doing one, this includes Ben) want to give it?
Mark
(who's just about to email announce)
--
s'' Mark Fowler London.pm Bath.pm
http://www.twoshortplanks.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
';use Term'Cap;$t=Tgetent Term'Cap{};print$t-Tputs(cl);for$w(split/ +/
){for(0..30){$|=print$t-Tgoto(cm,$_,$y). $w;select$k,$k,$k,.03}$y+=2}
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Ben wrote: On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 06:24:31PM -0500, Adam Turoff wrote: On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 10:24:42PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: The traditional restrictions on web usernames are things like only alphanumerics, and usually lowercase to reduce user confusion/burden remembering. Why not allow (embedded) whitespace, punctuation, and so on? Characters like . cause problems because they've always been illegal. For example, chown accepts a syntax of 'chown user.group' because . is illegal. So chown breaks when you have a username like s.avery or m.thibaut. The shell has certain expectations about when and where # will be used, too. Err, these only seem to apply to situations where a web user maps down to an underlying *nix user. Or anything else built assuming it would map down to an underlying *nix user. The main reason I restrict usernames to this namespace is because sooner or later, either a service they use, or a client used to access it, will have a different set of unusual characters that are allowed. Though the support issue of users remembering case, whitespace, etc, and the possibility of someone else working with my code and not escaping things are also factors. Oh, and I tend to replace the 8 char limit with something longer (somewhere between 16 and 64, depending on my mood) as I've yet to come across anything which retains the length restriction. the hatter
Re: Usernames?
Ben wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:47:09PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 11:13:43AM +, David Cantrell wrote: Stupid programmers forgetting to appropriately quote/escape data before stuffing it into a database. INSERT INTO users (userid, username, passwd) VALUES (usersequence.nextval, '$username', '$passwdmd5hash') Why would anyone not use bound variables? I've seen quite a few who honestly believed that using explicit values was faster, because in their minds it must be easier for the DB to process. Not only are they emphatically *not* easier or faster, but some databases (notably Oracle) can suffer serious performance problems because of this. Informix, in certain circumstances, appears capable of doing more subtle optimisation given literals: SELECT ID, Ego, SuperEgo FROM People WHERE Name = Smith ... will cause Smith to be checked against the distribution, and finding a huge number of smiths, a sequential scan will be used. SELECT ID, Ego, SuperEgo FROM People WHERE Name = ? ... will go for index path every time. However, I suspect that cases where the former behaviour of the optimiser is actually desirable and yields a useful performance improvement are as rare as Nigella Lawson's steak. Most of the time, the overhead of reparsing and reoptimising statements overwhelms any benefits, so I'd mostly be endorsing Ben's Always use bind variables with a small caveat. Another weird case: SELECT Subconscious FROM People WHERE ID IN (1, 666, 732) [where that's a variable-size but not-so-big-it-overwhelms-yer-buffer set] You don't wanna be using things like that with prepare_cached without caution, now, do you? Well do you, punk? *click* -- Tim Supposed former badass Informix DBA
Re: Perl and RTF
- Original Message - From: Simon Wistow [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2002 12:30 PM Subject: Re: Perl and RTF Could you output as html and then use html2rtf to convert it? I've had a look at html2rtf and the support for tables is dubious at best. Andy
[JOB] I Need One
I've been sacrificed on the altar of Bibliotech's no-term (hah!) survival. Anyone who thinks they can offer my skills a good home should check out http://www.mag-sol.com/CV/Data/CV.html. Permie or contract both considered. Dave... -- .sig missing...
[ANNOUNCE] Lightening Talk Tech Meet, Thursday 21st November
With pleasure London.pm announces:
ALL LIGHTENING TALKS ALL THE TIME
This is the official announcement of the long awaited November Tech Meet,
taking place at 7pm on Thursday, 21st Novemeber 2002, being held at
Profero's UK offices.
Q: Er, when?
A: You lot don't half get confused about dates do you? That's not
tomorrow (that's the 7th, when the social is,) nor the next Thursday after
that (that's the 14th) but the Thursday after that (the 21st.)
Q: You mean it's going to be *all* lightening talks?
A: Yes! This month, rather than doing long twenty minute talks we're going
to bow to the MTV generation and have just lightening talks. As you know,
a lightening talk is a quick talk that only lasts five or so minutes, so
we can fit a lot of them in.
Q: What's the point in that?
A: As an attendee this has several advantages:
1) If you find the subject matter boring, or too technical, or not
technical enough, you don't have to listen for too long till the next
subject comes along.
2) You get a wide varied range of subjects discussed, so you get to learn
a little bit about a lot of things.
I've been saying this all along, but if you've never been to a tech meet
before, this would be an ideal introduction as you get to see a lot of
interesting stuff without having to think too hard ;-).
Q: Okay, but what will the talks actually be on?
A: We've got a range of subjects covered, from day to day operational
stuff (for example how to set up and install mod_perl on FreeBSD,)
though discussions of interesting and exciting modules (like Simon's talk
on his dynamic website) up to quick primers on hot subjects related to
Perl (for example, Information Architecture and Bioinformatics.) Oh, and
a lot moreAt last count we had 14 people due to give talks.
Q: Crikey, won't that take a long time?
No, not really, well, about two hours (estimating it taking about ten
minutes to present each five minute talk.) Which means we should be in
the pub by half nine ;-), giving us plenty of time for casual questions
to be put to the speakers.
Q: Okay, I'm coming already. Where's the venue?
A: The meeting will be held at the UK offices of Profero
(http://www.profero.com) located half way between Angel and Highbury and
Islington tube stations. An address and streetmap URL:
Ground Floor,
134 Liverpool Road
London
N1 1LA
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?G2M?X=531422Y=183954A=YZ=1
The entrance to the office is set back off the east side Liverpool road,
and to get to it you need to go down a passageway between a corner shop
and a laundrette, roughly opposite the bar Stone, which can be easily
spotted due to the large lizard climbing up the corner of the building.
There should be someone at the door to meet you. If there isn't, hit the
buzzer marked Profero and ask for me. We're on the ground floor, so we
shouldn't be hard to find. For security reasons we'll be getting people
to sign in, but you'll find it's generally quite a relaxed place.
Q: And what time should I show up again?
A: Talks will start at 7pm, and so we don't annoy the Profero staff
members you should show up no earlier than 6.30pm. Did I mention that
there's a bar called Stone opposite? There's also a proper pub called
Houricans next to that that serves drinks other than Stella and
Hoegaarden.
Q: Anything else I need to know?
A: Not really, I guess I should reiterate this meeting's zero heckling
policy that I promised the speakers though. The talks should only take
five minutes, so you can ask questions at the end, and if there's not time
for that then I'm scheduling a lot of time for talking in the pub
afterwards.
Hope to see you there, if not at the social meet before.
Mark.
--
s'' Mark Fowler London.pm Bath.pm
http://www.twoshortplanks.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
';use Term'Cap;$t=Tgetent Term'Cap{};print$t-Tputs(cl);for$w(split/ +/
){for(0..30){$|=print$t-Tgoto(cm,$_,$y). $w;select$k,$k,$k,.03}$y+=2}
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 01:20:12PM +, Mark Fowler wrote: On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Ben wrote: Non-bind SQL: Just Say No. And that would make an excellent lightening talk. Anyone (who's not already doing one, this includes Ben) want to give it? Errr. I thought I was doing 'When Not to Use mod_perl'. I have a smallish chunk of AxPoint assembled along those lines Ben (cc: to london.pm in case direct mail is somehow not getting to you - I definitely confirmed this last week or the week before...)
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 11:44:17AM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: Now i'm sure this has been all cleared up, however would you trust a company who had put out shit like the above again quickly? And as important, would you trust an NT shop to have applied the patches? -- David Cantrell | Member of the Brute Squad | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david Nuke a disabled unborn gay baby whale for JESUS!
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:53:58PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote: And I try to avoid doing things in areas while I am ignorant. Or at least try to avoid delving in ones ignorance on production systems :-) -- David Cantrell | Benevolent Dictator | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:47:09PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 11:13:43AM +, David Cantrell wrote: Stupid programmers forgetting to appropriately quote/escape data before stuffing it into a database. INSERT INTO users (userid, username, passwd) VALUES (usersequence.nextval, '$username', '$passwdmd5hash') Why would anyone not use bound variables? Stupidity and/or ignorance. I used to do that, and I plead ignorance. -- David Cantrell|Degenerate|http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david When a woman has a man on a string, controlling his every thought and motion, backbone in said man is not a requirement. -- Ken, in alt.2eggs.sausage.beans.tomatoes.2toast.largetea.cheerslove
HTML to PDF
What are the options for HTML to PDF conversion, preferably batchable? By HTML I mean that which is understood by modern browsers, namely up to XHTML 1.0 + CSS(at least)1.0, rather than HTML 3.2 or something outdated like that. Just to be even more tricky, the HTML isn't being generated *from* anything like LaTeX so can't be eliminated as a step. As far as I know, there isn't an open source answer - the best I've seen is OS X's ability to save as PDF. What else is there? Can it be automated? This question may boil down to does anyone know Distiller?. Adobe provide some handy services to do the conversion the other way, http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html Cheers, Paul -- Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/ If dreams come before Spain, I will support you, then we should sit very quietly until it passes. -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/
Re: HTML to PDF
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 02:26:22PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: What are the options for HTML to PDF conversion, preferably batchable? http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc It's in Debian package htmldoc, too, and therefore probably in other distributions. Roger
Bind Variables in DBI
David Cantrell wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:47:09PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 11:13:43AM +, David Cantrell wrote: Stupid programmers forgetting to appropriately quote/escape data before stuffing it into a database. INSERT INTO users (userid, username, passwd) VALUES (usersequence.nextval, '$username', '$passwdmd5hash') Why would anyone not use bound variables? Stupidity and/or ignorance. I used to do that, and I plead ignorance. One programmer that I know had the slightly reasonable excuse that it makes it easier to do debug prints of the SQL. I showed him the DBI trace facility, which will provide the output required, but only at level 2, which makes it a bit of a mouthful. I didn't say it was a *good* reason. :-) -Dom -- | Semantico: creators of major online resources | | URL: http://www.semantico.com/ | | Tel: +44 (1273) 72 | | Address: 33 Bond St., Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1RD, UK. |
Re: [JOB] I Need One
At 13:39 06/11/02, Dave Cross wrote: I've been sacrificed on the altar of Bibliotech's no-term (hah!) survival. Anyone who thinks they can offer my skills a good home should check out http://www.mag-sol.com/CV/Data/CV.html. I didn't know that we were allowed to do that on this list. Ok. I'll bite. I'd like a job too. Permie or contract, or part time, or whatever. http://www.OWAL.co.uk for company details - and my CV is there somewhere. If any perl/web people don't mind working for free, I am putting together a weblog system for authors. I intend to market it to publishing companies but no money comping in means no salary. I could do with another self starting linux techie / graphic designer / salesman to help. Alex McLintock Openweb Analysts Ltd, London. Software For Complex Websites http://www.OWAL.co.uk/ Open Source Software Companies please register here http://www.OWAL.co.uk/oss_support/
Re: HTML to PDF
Paul Makepeace wrote: What are the options for HTML to PDF conversion, preferably batchable? By HTML I mean that which is understood by modern browsers, namely up to XHTML 1.0 + CSS(at least)1.0, rather than HTML 3.2 or something outdated like that. Just to be even more tricky, the HTML isn't being generated *from* anything like LaTeX so can't be eliminated as a step. As far as I know, there isn't an open source answer - the best I've seen is OS X's ability to save as PDF. What else is there? Can it be automated? This question may boil down to does anyone know Distiller?. You might want to look at a few XSLT stylesheets combined with FOP (an XSL-FO processor). That's in Java, but it'll do the job. I'm not sure whether or not you can get pre-written XSLT stylesheets to do that, although I'd be surprised if there's not some out there. http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a/2698 Doing things this way will give you lots of flexibility, but it will probably also take a long time to get setup. You might be better looking at htmldoc if you've got little time. -Dom -- | Semantico: creators of major online resources | | URL: http://www.semantico.com/ | | Tel: +44 (1273) 72 | | Address: 33 Bond St., Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1RD, UK. |
Re: HTML to PDF
On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, at 02:39 pm, Roger Burton West wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 02:26:22PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: What are the options for HTML to PDF conversion, preferably batchable? http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc It's in Debian package htmldoc, too, and therefore probably in other distributions. I second that suggest. Works well. GPL licence. Adrian
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Ben wrote:
And that would make an excellent lightening talk. Anyone (who's not
already doing one, this includes Ben) want to give it?
Errr. I thought I was doing 'When Not to Use mod_perl'. I have a smallish
chunk of AxPoint assembled along those lines
Yes you are. I meant you were included in the people who were already
doing a talk. Sorry for the confusion, and looking forward to seeing your
talk.
Mark.
--
s'' Mark Fowler London.pm Bath.pm
http://www.twoshortplanks.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
';use Term'Cap;$t=Tgetent Term'Cap{};print$t-Tputs(cl);for$w(split/ +/
){for(0..30){$|=print$t-Tgoto(cm,$_,$y). $w;select$k,$k,$k,.03}$y+=2}
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Lightening Talk Tech Meet, Thursday 21st November
On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Mark Fowler wrote:
With pleasure London.pm announces:
Yes, I know there are a million and one spelling mistakes in this.
D'oh.
Let's just say there was a little botch up on the approval system which
causes this to slip though un-proofread and leave it at that.
Mark.
--
s'' Mark Fowler London.pm Bath.pm
http://www.twoshortplanks.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
';use Term'Cap;$t=Tgetent Term'Cap{};print$t-Tputs(cl);for$w(split/ +/
){for(0..30){$|=print$t-Tgoto(cm,$_,$y). $w;select$k,$k,$k,.03}$y+=2}
Re: [JOB] I Need One
* Alex McLintock ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: At 13:39 06/11/02, Dave Cross wrote: I've been sacrificed on the altar of Bibliotech's no-term (hah!) survival. Anyone who thinks they can offer my skills a good home should check out http://www.mag-sol.com/CV/Data/CV.html. I didn't know that we were allowed to do that on this list. Ok. I'll bite. I'd like a job too. Permie or contract, or part time, or whatever. http://www.OWAL.co.uk for company details - and my CV is there somewhere. I too am in the market for a new job, I am interested in either contract work, training gigs, fixed rate work or permanent - however if its permanent I'd prefer a role where me working damn hard for the company will actually benefit them financially in a fairly direct manner. i.e. Greg does good stuff, Company does well financially, come bonus time everyone is happy. My CV is at, http://www.mccarroll.org.uk/~gem/cv/cv.doc I don't mind doing Perl hacking, project management, team leading or even things as alien to the average programmer as technical sales. Greg -- Greg McCarroll http://www.mccarroll.org.uk/~gem/ jabber:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: HTML to PDF
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 02:39:14PM +, Roger Burton West wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 02:26:22PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: What are the options for HTML to PDF conversion, preferably batchable? http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc It's in Debian package htmldoc, too, and therefore probably in other distributions. Thanks, but I wonder if my CSS requirement, and the overall sentiment of rendering what people are used to seeing in their modern browsers, wasn't clear: By HTML I mean that which is understood by modern browsers, namely up to XHTML 1.0 + CSS(at least)1.0 I've played with htmldoc before but it doesn't honour CSS (which even IE3 six years ago at least had a shot at). Unless I'm missing something? Paul -- Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/ What is the point of this daily sunrise thing? A doctor should never apologise. -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/
RE: Usernames?
Title: RE: Usernames? Or the bug in DBD::Ingres ( or in ingres itself ) which make prepared statements fail randomly -Original Message- From: David Cantrell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 06 November 2002 14:21 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Usernames? On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:47:09PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 11:13:43AM +, David Cantrell wrote: Stupid programmers forgetting to appropriately quote/escape data before stuffing it into a database. INSERT INTO users (userid, username, passwd) VALUES (usersequence.nextval, '$username', '$passwdmd5hash') Why would anyone not use bound variables? Stupidity and/or ignorance. I used to do that, and I plead ignorance. -- David Cantrell | Degenerate | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david When a woman has a man on a string, controlling his every thought and motion, backbone in said man is not a requirement. -- Ken, in alt.2eggs.sausage.beans.tomatoes.2toast.largetea.cheerslove ** This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses. www.mimesweeper.com **
Re: HTML to PDF
At 14:26 06/11/02, Paul Makepeace wrote: What are the options for HTML to PDF conversion, preferably batchable? I can talk to you about FOP and XSL:FO if you want, but of course that takes XML as its input - much more sensible than HTML.. Nothing to do with perl though. There are HTML-XHTML-XSL:FO converters out there but I suspect them to be buggy and the XSL:FO may not be perfect. Alex McLintock
Re: HTML to PDF
Alex McLintock wrote: At 14:26 06/11/02, Paul Makepeace wrote: What are the options for HTML to PDF conversion, preferably batchable? I can talk to you about FOP and XSL:FO if you want, but of course that takes XML as its input - much more sensible than HTML.. Nothing to do with perl though. There are HTML-XHTML-XSL:FO converters out there but I suspect them to be buggy and the XSL:FO may not be perfect. And, as I realised after posting, are unlikely to be able to deal with CSS. -Dom -- | Semantico: creators of major online resources | | URL: http://www.semantico.com/ | | Tel: +44 (1273) 72 | | Address: 33 Bond St., Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1RD, UK. |
Re: HTML to PDF
Paul == Paul Makepeace [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Paul What are the options for HTML to PDF conversion, preferably batchable? Paul By HTML I mean that which is understood by modern browsers, namely up to Paul XHTML 1.0 + CSS(at least)1.0, rather than HTML 3.2 or something outdated Paul like that. Just to be even more tricky, the HTML isn't being generated Paul *from* anything like LaTeX so can't be eliminated as a step. ImageMagick does this, but it's merely a wrapper around the html2ps delegate, followed by Ghostscript to do ps2pdf. With all the right parts installed, you can do this: convert http://www.stonehenge.com/index.html my_home_page.pdf It's ... Magick! :-) Paul As far as I know, there isn't an open source answer - the best I've seen Paul is OS X's ability to save as PDF. What else is there? Can it be Paul automated? This question may boil down to does anyone know Distiller?. Distiller can be approximated by Ghostscript. -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 [EMAIL PROTECTED] URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/ Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!
Re: [JOB] I Need One
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 03:31:30PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: * Alex McLintock ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: At 13:39 06/11/02, Dave Cross wrote: Anyone who thinks they can offer my skills a good home I didn't know that we were allowed to do that on this list. Ok. I'll bite. I'd like a job too. I too am in the market for a new job Well, while we're at it... Oh, in my case there are those damn immigration people to deal with. Damn them. dha -- David H. Adler - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.panix.com/~dha/ You don't have to be a hippie to believe in peace. - Joe Jackson
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:47:09PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: As it happens I went for up to 64 chars, lowercased, allowing [\w ]; the We've just been completely screwed by a dev-environment (Uniface as it happens, which is shame because I reckon it's the best of the dbms-backed 4GLs) which set a 64 char limit on usernames. This was OK until we wanted to use the LDAP for id's so students could authenticate with the same password everywhere ... but our dn-s are 65 characters long. Fortunately Compuware have produced a patch. Student info-system goes live shortly with the testing reduced to hours instead of weeks :-( Learn the IPv4 lesson: bugger short-term performance/storage issues, take the biggest sensible size ... and make everything 4x bigger! -- Chris Benson
Re: [JOB] I Need One
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 01:23:00PM -0500, David H. Adler wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 03:31:30PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: I too am in the market for a new job I'd like a new job Would you like fries with that? :-( Well, while we're at it... Oh, in my case there are those damn immigration people to deal with. Damn them. It works both ways. When we visit your fine country we get your damn immigration people. And from my limited experience of visiting your fine country, your immigration people are just as displeased to see US passport holders as us non-US passport holders. IIRC 90% of US citizens don't leave the US, therefore they seem to be taking the line that any US citizens who did leave are abnormal. Whereas our immigration people usually let us in without even having to queue up. (and anyone else with EU, Swiss, Norwegian or Icelandic passports, IIRC. I may have missed a country from that list) And why would you want to work here? I thought jobs were an equally endangered species both sides of the Atlantic. aside: Someone I know works in London, in the same office as an ardent Scottish nationalist. He asked the Scottish nationalist given his opinion of England, why on Earth he wasn't working up in Scotland. Answer: Every Scotsman working in London is an Englishman out of a job Well, you can't argue with that logic :-) Nicholas Clark PS Last I knew I didn't need a new job. -- Brainfuck better than perl? http://www.perl.org/advocacy/spoofathon/
Re: [JOB] I Need One
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 10:26:14PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 01:23:00PM -0500, David H. Adler wrote: On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 03:31:30PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: I too am in the market for a new job Well, while we're at it... Oh, in my case there are those damn immigration people to deal with. Damn them. It works both ways. When we visit your fine country we get your damn immigration people. And from my limited experience of visiting your fine country, your immigration people are just as displeased to see US passport holders as us non-US passport holders. IIRC 90% of US citizens don't leave the US, therefore they seem to be taking the line that any US citizens who did leave are abnormal. I was actually thinking of the people who you have to make peace with to *work* elsewhere, rather than just visit. But yes, we have our share of annoying functionaries. Maybe more. And why would you want to work here? I thought jobs were an equally endangered species both sides of the Atlantic. Well, after NYC, my preferred city is London. I'd rather be in London than, say, Detroit. dha -- David H. Adler - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.panix.com/~dha/ Freedom ain't nothing but a word, ain't nothing but a word. Let me see your ID. - Gil Scott-Heron, Johannesburg
Re: [JOB] I Need One
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 10:26:14PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote: And why would you want to work here? I thought jobs were an equally endangered species both sides of the Atlantic. http://jobs.perl.org/job/513 And that's in San Jose, which is one of the most expensive places to live in the USA - and has too much traffic to boot. PS. Gis a job. Go on. I can do that. Go on. Gis it! (In Zürich please) -- Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pjcj.net
Re: [JOB] I Need One
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 05:45:52PM -0500, David H. Adler wrote: I was actually thinking of the people who you have to make peace with to *work* elsewhere, rather than just visit. You don't wanna do that you don't... unless you have enormous sums of cash. At least to get an H1-B which is quite some substantial number of golf course subscriptions. I mean, lawyer fees. And why would you want to work here? I thought jobs were an equally endangered species both sides of the Atlantic. Nah, many more jobs in the UK, far as I can tell. P -- Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/ What is my deal? A BILLION times that! -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/
Re: (bund variables and Ingres) [Was: Usernames?]
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 02:26:59PM -, Mark Buckle wrote: Or the bug in DBD::Ingres ( or in ingres itself ) which make prepared statements fail randomly Ouch!!! That murt my bad consciense. I'm still trying to chase that one down. My suspicion is that the bug is somewhere dark and murky in Ingres, but I can't narrow it down enough to bug anybody. -- Henrik Tougaard, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - trying to make DBD::Ingres work (better?)
