Re: Ob-buffy

[David Cantrell]

Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote:

While Twin Peaks was pretty good, (and I enjoyed the companion movie as
well), I don't think it has the same level of achievement and
homogeneity than Buffy and the Prisoner. It's more like a testbed for
Lynch's next movies. Hopefully Lynch hasn't completely given away the
idea of coming back to TV...
I couldn't stand Twin Peaks, thought it was utter dross.  Same goes for B5.

--
David Cantrell |  Reprobate  | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
  While researching this email, I was forced to carry out some
  investigative work which unfortunately involved a bucket of
  puppies and a belt sander
-- after JoeB, in the Monastery

Re: Ob-buffy

[David H. Adler]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 06:29:26PM +0100, Nigel Rantor wrote:
> David H. Adler wrote:
> >On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 05:37:45PM +0100, Nigel Rantor wrote:
> >>Buffy the TV series is a far too pale imitation of the movie to ever 
> >>really make me watch it.
> >
> >You realize, of course, that the movie was completely changed from its
> >original concept and that the tv series is much closer to what the
> >creator envisioned, right?
> 
> Well, to be honest, when all is said and done I can only comment on 
> whether or not I liked the finished product. Which I did.

Granted.  I was just having trouble with the "pale imitation" part of
your argument. :-)

dha
-- 
David H. Adler - <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.panix.com/~dha/
Religious zealots have a tendency towards mental illness.  You really
shouldn't expect much more from people who spend that much time trying
to prove that their imaginary friend is the *only* imaginary friend.
- Mark Rogaski

Re: Ob-buffy

[David H. Adler]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 05:58:18PM +0100, Roger Burton West wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 12:55:14PM -0400, David H. Adler wrote:
> >On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 05:28:34PM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
> >> Anyway if we are ruling out comedies, then Northern Exposure was the best 
> >> TV series ever made. Or Dr Who minus all the crap ones.
> >What?  Crap DW?? Never!
> 
> Timelash.

I submit.  :-)

-- 
David H. Adler - <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.panix.com/~dha/
Perl should only be studied as a second language.  A good first
language would be English. - Larry Wall

Re: Ob-buffy

[Dave Cross]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 04:47:34PM +0100, Steve Mynott ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> Dave Cross wrote:
> 
> >From: Jason Clifford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >Date: 9/3/03 2:51:26 PM
> >
> >[ BtVS ]
> >
> >>Still - it was the best TV ever made ;)
> >
> >You jest surely. Have you never seen "The Prisoner" or "Twin
> >Peaks"?
> 
> Have you seen the last episode of "The Prisoner" and if so would you 
> also consider that to be "the best TV ever made"?

I've seen it many times. I have the DVD. I confess that the last episode
isn't exactly my favourite but the series as a whole is brilliant.

> Or maybe some of the worse...

Maybe just the most confusing :)

Dave...

-- 
  Drugs are just bad m'kay

Re: Ob-buffy

[Nigel Rantor]

David H. Adler wrote:
On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 05:37:45PM +0100, Nigel Rantor wrote:
Buffy the TV series is a far too pale imitation of the movie to ever 
really make me watch it.
You realize, of course, that the movie was completely changed from its
original concept and that the tv series is much closer to what the
creator envisioned, right?
Well, to be honest, when all is said and done I can only comment on 
whether or not I liked the finished product. Which I did.

You may be right that the series is closer to the original author's 
vision but that really doesn't affect my opinion of the movie or tv show.

So, yes, maybe I like something that the author wasn't completely happy 
with. Well, so what? I liked it. I still do. Just because something does 
not turn out as the author intended does not make it better or worse. 
Entertainment is littered with 'happy accidents'.

Just checking.
Thats cool.

  N

Re: Ob-buffy

[Tony Bowden]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 05:16:58PM +0200, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote:
> It's clear, when watching interviews of the scenarists or other members
> of the team, that Whedon had control over every aspect of the show. I
> know no other example of this on TV, except McGoohan and the Prisoner.

David E. Kelly wrote almost every episode of all of his shows. I'm not
sure how much "control" he had beyond that, but as he often had 3 of
them running simultaneously, it's still quite an impressive feat...

Tony

Re: Ob-buffy

[Randal L. Schwartz]

> "Nigel" == Nigel Rantor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Nigel> Buffy the TV series is a far too pale imitation of the movie to ever
Nigel> really make me watch it. Basically it just pisses me off. The plots
Nigel> and characters are, quite frankly, a bag of shite. I figure that since
Nigel> any Buffy criticism is going to be met with a hail of bullets I may as
Nigel> well tell you guys what I tell my friends.

And SMG has never been naked ('cept for a couple of nipple slips in
one of the Scream/Summer movies, I forget which), but Kristy Swanson
recently appeared in Playboy.  Yum.  That makes KS superior, and therefore
the movie superior.

:-)

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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: Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Chris Devers]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, muppet wrote:

> stop the wrongful slander of goto!

Man, what a muppet this guy is...

Look, goto's are just bad, mmmkay?



-- 
Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]

channeling http://www.askoxford.com/pressroom/archive/odelaunch/>

Re: Ob-buffy

[Tony Bowden]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 06:10:19PM +0200, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote:
> Twin Peaks was pretty good, (and I enjoyed the companion movie as well), 

The movie makes a LOT more sense if you get a copy of the original
script.

A HUGE amount was cut, much of which seemed to actually be quite crucial
to the plot ...

Tony

Re: Ob-buffy

[David H. Adler]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 05:28:34PM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
> > 
> > > >  > Still - it was the best TV ever made ;)
> > > >You jest surely. Have you never seen "The Prisoner" or "Twin
> > > >Peaks"?
> > > 
> > > Ah, the ignorance of youth... ;-)
> > 
> > I am not that young and I watched both The Prisoner and Twin Peaks. 
> > Neither is as good in my opinion.

Frankly, I think comparing those shows to buffy is misguided.  It's sort
of like trying to compare 8 1/2 to the Philadelphia Story.  Ok, maybe
not quite *that* extreme.

> Twin Peaks winds me up. I remember being in school when it was on, and the 
> kind of people who were into it suffered from two other co-morbidities:
> 
> 1. They liked Marillion

Nope.

> 2. They tried to understand R.E.M. lyrics

Only if really bored.

Twin Peaks was unique.  It's a kind of television that pretty much
doesn't exist otherwise.  I find it hard to do any kind of comparisons
to it.

That said, I don't think it's something everyone will appreciate.

> Anyway if we are ruling out comedies, then Northern Exposure was the best 
> TV series ever made. Or Dr Who minus all the crap ones.

What?  Crap DW?? Never!

Well, ok, Revenge of the Cybermen.  And The War Games is way too long.
And those dinosaurs...

Um.  Forget I said anything.  :-)

> Otherwise it's obviously The Simpsons :-)

Ok, that's up there.

dha

-- 
David H. Adler - <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.panix.com/~dha/
We honestly don't want to see another technicolored cow.
- the #macintosh faq

Re: Ob-buffy

[David H. Adler]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 05:37:45PM +0100, Nigel Rantor wrote:
> 
> Buffy the TV series is a far too pale imitation of the movie to ever 
> really make me watch it.

You realize, of course, that the movie was completely changed from its
original concept and that the tv series is much closer to what the
creator envisioned, right?

Just checking.

dha
-- 
David H. Adler - <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.panix.com/~dha/
Perhaps it IS a good day to Die!  I say we ship it!
- a selection from "If Klingons developed software"

Re: Ob-buffy

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Jonathan Peterson wrote:

> >
> > > >  > Still - it was the best TV ever made ;)
> > > >You jest surely. Have you never seen "The Prisoner" or "Twin
> > > >Peaks"?
> > >
> > > Ah, the ignorance of youth... ;-)
> >
> > I am not that young and I watched both The Prisoner and Twin Peaks.
> > Neither is as good in my opinion.
>
> Twin Peaks winds me up. I remember being in school when it was on, and the
> kind of people who were into it suffered from two other co-morbidities:
>
> 1. They liked Marillion
> 2. They tried to understand R.E.M. lyrics
>

I can categorically state I suffer from neither disorder but I did like
Twin Peaks.  But then again I was in my late twenties at the time.

/J\

Re: Ob-buffy

[Roger Burton West]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 12:55:14PM -0400, David H. Adler wrote:
>On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 05:28:34PM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
>> Anyway if we are ruling out comedies, then Northern Exposure was the best 
>> TV series ever made. Or Dr Who minus all the crap ones.
>What?  Crap DW?? Never!

Timelash.

R

Re: Ob-buffy

[Nigel Rantor]

Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote:
Dave Cross wrote:

You jest surely. Have you never seen "The Prisoner" or "Twin
Peaks"?


While Twin Peaks was pretty good, (and I enjoyed the companion movie as
well), I don't think it has the same level of achievement and
homogeneity than Buffy and the Prisoner. It's more like a testbed for
Lynch's next movies. Hopefully Lynch hasn't completely given away the
idea of coming back to TV...
And Wild Palms was forgettable. Well, I saw it and now it is forgotten. 
QED. It was a shame really, I liked TP, the movie was okay. Although I 
can't say I ever got as wildly excited as some of my friends.

The Prisoner was great, dated far too easily, and it's a shame that 
no-one rated it when it came out so it died a very quick death in terms 
of production.

B5 is awesome. I didn't get into it when it first came out and now need 
to see it all the way through.

You may all get your rocks ready for this one, I expect a stoning from 
the zealots. (and Lusercop because he can't resist a good stoning)

Buffy the TV series is a far too pale imitation of the movie to ever 
really make me watch it. Basically it just pisses me off. The plots and 
characters are, quite frankly, a bag of shite. I figure that since any 
Buffy criticism is going to be met with a hail of bullets I may as well 
tell you guys what I tell my friends.

The worst thing they did was make it into a TV series. (Along with lots 
of other great movies like Highlander, American Grafitti etc etc).

  N

Re: Ob-buffy

[Jonathan Peterson]

> 
> > >  > Still - it was the best TV ever made ;)
> > >You jest surely. Have you never seen "The Prisoner" or "Twin
> > >Peaks"?
> > 
> > Ah, the ignorance of youth... ;-)
> 
> I am not that young and I watched both The Prisoner and Twin Peaks. 
> Neither is as good in my opinion.

Twin Peaks winds me up. I remember being in school when it was on, and the 
kind of people who were into it suffered from two other co-morbidities:

1. They liked Marillion
2. They tried to understand R.E.M. lyrics

Neither is the sign of a well ordered mind. But yeah, the walking 
backwards bit was good.

Anyway if we are ruling out comedies, then Northern Exposure was the best 
TV series ever made. Or Dr Who minus all the crap ones.

Otherwise it's obviously The Simpsons :-)

Re: Ob-buffy

[Michel Rodriguez]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote:

> Paul Mison wrote:
> > Babylon 5 is an obvious counter-example,
>
> First time I encounter this title. I think it was never
> broadcast in France, at least not on a public channel. Or is
> it ancient ?

It was on Canal + a few years ago. I don't think it ever made it to
regular channels.

Michel Rodriguez
Perl & XML
http://www.xmltwig.com

Re: Ob-buffy

[Elizabeth Mattijsen]

At 16:47 +0100 9/3/03, Steve Mynott wrote:
Dave Cross wrote:
Have you seen the last episode of "The Prisoner" and if so would you 
also consider that to be "the best TV ever made"?
Or maybe some of the worse...
A think a lot has been said and written about the last episode of 
"The Prisoner".  I'm pretty sure that that episode wasn't anywhere 
near what Patrick McGoohan intended:

"There are many theories, some quite fanciful, as to why The Prisoner 
was made up of seventeen episodes - an extremely unlikely number in 
anyone's book. The simple truth is that, despite it's cult status 
today, the series bombed on it's first showing and the production, 
over budget and out of time, was cancelled. The cast and crew, with 
sixteen episodes filmed (but not necessarily completed), were told 
that they could make only one more episode to wrap up the loose ends 
- an episode unwritten and unscripted, yet due to go into production 
the following week! "

From:

  http://www.the-prisoner-6.freeserve.co.uk/episode_aftermath.htm



Liz

Re: Ob-buffy

[Rafael Garcia-Suarez]

Dave Cross wrote:
> You jest surely. Have you never seen "The Prisoner" or "Twin
> Peaks"?

While Twin Peaks was pretty good, (and I enjoyed the companion movie as
well), I don't think it has the same level of achievement and
homogeneity than Buffy and the Prisoner. It's more like a testbed for
Lynch's next movies. Hopefully Lynch hasn't completely given away the
idea of coming back to TV...

Re: Ob-buffy

[Rafael Garcia-Suarez]

Paul Mison wrote:
> Babylon 5 is an obvious counter-example,

First time I encounter this title. I think it was never
broadcast in France, at least not on a public channel. Or is
it ancient ?

Re: Ob-buffy

[Randal L. Schwartz]

> "Rafael" == Rafael Garcia-Suarez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Rafael> Indeed BtVS is, at a rarely-precedented level, the "work of one man".
Rafael> It's clear, when watching interviews of the scenarists or other members
Rafael> of the team, that Whedon had control over every aspect of the show. I
Rafael> know no other example of this on TV, except McGoohan and the Prisoner.

B5?

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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: Ob-buffy

[Paul Mison]

On 03/09/2003 at 17:16 +0200, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote:

Indeed BtVS is, at a rarely-precedented level, the "work of one man".
It's clear, when watching interviews of the scenarists or other members
of the team, that Whedon had control over every aspect of the show. I
know no other example of this on TV, except McGoohan and the Prisoner.
Babylon 5 is an obvious counter-example, given JMS wrote most of the 
three central seasons single-handed as well as the overarching 
five-year arc. (Buffy, in so far as it had arcs, were single-season 
only. Nowhere near as impressive. Whedon wrote far fewer episodes 
too.)

I don't think either Whedon or Straczynski had particularly strong 
bargaining powers positions with the studios, either.

--
:: paul
:: historic light cone

Re: Ob-buffy

[Jason Clifford]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Elizabeth Mattijsen wrote:

> >  > Still - it was the best TV ever made ;)
> >You jest surely. Have you never seen "The Prisoner" or "Twin
> >Peaks"?
> 
> Ah, the ignorance of youth... ;-)

I am not that young and I watched both The Prisoner and Twin Peaks. 
Neither is as good in my opinion.

Jason Clifford
-- 
UKFSN.ORG   Finance Free Software while you surf the 'net
http://www.ukfsn.org/   ADSL Broadband available now

Re: Ob-buffy

[Steve Mynott]

Dave Cross wrote:

From: Jason Clifford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 9/3/03 2:51:26 PM
[ BtVS ]


Still - it was the best TV ever made ;)


You jest surely. Have you never seen "The Prisoner" or "Twin
Peaks"?
Have you seen the last episode of "The Prisoner" and if so would you 
also consider that to be "the best TV ever made"?

Or maybe some of the worse...

--
1024/D9C69DF9 Steve Mynott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Re: Ob-buffy

[Elizabeth Mattijsen]

At 08:38 -0700 9/3/03, Dave Cross wrote:
 > Still - it was the best TV ever made ;)
You jest surely. Have you never seen "The Prisoner" or "Twin
Peaks"?
Ah, the ignorance of youth... ;-)



Liz

Re: Ob-buffy

[Dave Cross]

From: Jason Clifford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 9/3/03 2:51:26 PM

[ BtVS ]

> Still - it was the best TV ever made ;)

You jest surely. Have you never seen "The Prisoner" or "Twin
Peaks"?

Dave...

-- 


"Let me see you make decisions, without your television"
   - Depeche Mode (Stripped)

Re: Ob-buffy

[Rafael Garcia-Suarez]

Jason Clifford wrote:
> 
> Hollywood commercialism had it's chance with Buffy and produced the movie 
> - truly awful rubbish that nearly frightened any TV network from buying 
> the show when Joss finally got complete control to make it himself.

Indeed BtVS is, at a rarely-precedented level, the "work of one man".
It's clear, when watching interviews of the scenarists or other members
of the team, that Whedon had control over every aspect of the show. I
know no other example of this on TV, except McGoohan and the Prisoner.

Re: Ob-buffy

[muppet]

Jason Clifford said:
> the movie - truly awful rubbish

how can you say that about a film that contains paul rubens' absolutely
stellar and breathtaking death scene performance!?  thespians the world over
could take a lesson from that one.

/me ducks

-- 
muppet 

Re: Ob-buffy

[Jason Clifford]

On 3 Sep 2003, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

> 

Sorry for me this "The mere existence of Buffy proves the declinists wrong 
about one thing: Hollywood commercialism can produce great art. Complex 
and evolving characters" turns the whole article into shite.

Hollywood commercialism had it's chance with Buffy and produced the movie 
- truly awful rubbish that nearly frightened any TV network from buying 
the show when Joss finally got complete control to make it himself.

Still - it was the best TV ever made ;)

Jason Clifford
-- 
UKFSN.ORG   Finance Free Software while you surf the 'net
http://www.ukfsn.org/   ADSL Broadband available now

Re: Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[muppet]

Nicholas Clark said:
> Parrot has much cleaner source than Perl 5. However, to maintain the
> balance of good and evil^Wgoto, Perl 6 will compile down to parrot
> bytecode, which quite definitely does have gotos. So even the nicest,
> most clean award winning code from the purest best intentioned authors
> will be automatically corrupted by the Perl 6 compiler. (Eventually.)

but even beautifully goto-less C++ code gets compiled into assembler which
contains nothing *but* gotos and if then gotos, because that's all the machine
understands.

goto is not inherently evil, it has earned the evil reputation because people
use it for evil.

don't bash perl for its use of goto, if anything chastise it for its use of
longjmp(), which causes nightmarish maintainability problems in C programs in
general.  but then, without longjmp(), we wouldn't have a working eval and
die, so we can hardly say "don't use longjmp"...  in fact, C++'s
try/throw/catch is just a grown-up version of setjmp()/longjmp(), which itself
is goto on steroids.  in 95% of cases a jump of any kind is the wrong thing to
do, but in that other 5% of cases, not jumping is the worst thing you could
do.  you even said yourself that you added two gotos to perl5 because the
alternative was a twisty and nasty ratsnest of if() trees.

stop the wrongful slander of goto!


:-)

-- 
muppet 

TCP/IP Illistrated vol 2 (was Re: Bad C Source)

[Mark Fowler]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Dominic Mitchell wrote:

> Which reminds me, I must purchase a copy TCP/IP Illustrated vol 2.

It's not as informative as the first one.  The first one was a world of
wonder and amazement at how networking works, explaining everything
clearly and nicely. The second one is a bunch of BSD code that shows how
it works in the real world (with lots of pain it would seem.)

Actually this might be a good thing.  But it's not much fun to read.
Unless you're really into that kind of thing.

I guess what I'm saying is that just because you loved volume one you
won't necessarily love volume two.

Mark.

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -T
use strict;
use warnings;
print q{Mark Fowler, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://twoshortplanks.com/};

Ob-buffy

[Randal L. Schwartz]

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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: Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Andy Wardley]

Paul Johnson wrote:
> I think I wrote my first ever goto code in C yesterday.  

Way back when I was a teen-geek, I played around writing a few games,
mostly in C, with the odd bit of assembler thrown in for bad taste.
One of these was a rip-off of the classic Tron light-cycle game.

I got myself in an almighty mess trying to write a structured control
loop that would handle 2 player input or 1 player and computer.  I had 
to read keyboard scan codes to detect multiple keys being pressed 
simultaneously.  This made it particularly gnarly, although I forget
the precise details.  Whichever way I carved it up it got ugly.  The
code resisted all attempts at being structured.

After hacking on this same chunk of code for days and getting no 
further, I suddenly realised that a simple goto made the problem 
collapse into thin air.

I was enlightened.  The use of goto is not always considered harmful.

A

Re: DOS/WIN archivers of the mid 1990s

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 01:08:54PM +0100, Earle Martin wrote:

> [list of compression schemes]

To that, add:

?Q?
?Z?
Crunch
Compress (not the same as Unix compress)
RLE

-- 
Lord Protector David Cantrell  |  http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  " Norton Wipe Info uses hexadecimal values to wipe files.  This
provides more security than wiping with decimal values. "
-- from the manual of Norton Systemworks 2002, pg 160

Re: DOS/WIN archivers of the mid 1990s

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 01:08:54PM +0100, Earle Martin wrote:

> There do seem to be a lot of compression formats. A quick Google suggests:
> 
> ... BatComp (4DOS) ...

Batcomp isn't a general-purpose compression tool.  Its purpose is to
transmogrify a batch file (which with 4DOS can be quite sophisticated,
almost up to the standards of a Unixy shell script) into a form which
is not human-readable but is still executable.  IIRC, it tokenises
keywords but does nothing else.  The resulting file is smaller, true,
but it can only compress batch files.

This attempt to hide a script's source is about as useful as a chocolate
crash-helmet, given that you can download 4decomp from any Simtel
mirror.

-- 
David Cantrell |  Degenerate  | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

   23.5 degrees of axial tilt is the reason for the season

Re: DOS/WIN archivers of the mid 1990s

[Earle Martin]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 10:09:16AM +0100, Roger Burton West wrote:
> JAR was available in 1996 or so, I think. I still have copies of most of
> the archivers and compressors I was playing with in those days... anyone
> remember UC2? HA? SAR? ACB?

There do seem to be a lot of compression formats. A quick Google suggests:

ARC, ARC+, PAK, ZIP, LZH, ARJ, UC2, ZOO, DWC, PUT, HYP, LBR, HA, HAP, HPK,
SQZ, SQWEZ, LIM, RAR, MD, BSN, BS2, AIN, SAR, ACB, MAR, CPZ, JRC, JAR, ARX,
Quantum, ReSOF, QuArk, YAC, ChArc, Codec, NuLIB, PAKLeo, AMGC, X1, PSA, ZAR,
LHARK, CPAC, Freeze, KBoom, Crush, NSQ, DPA, TTComp, WWPack-Data, RKV, JAR,
ESP, ZPack, Sky, ARI, UFA, FOXSQZ, AR7, TSComp, PPMZ, MP3, ZET, ARQ, ACE,
Terse, Squash, Stuffit, UHarc, ABComp, CMP, CARComp, LZOP, szip, Splint,
TAR, BA, InstallShield Z and CAB, BOA, ARG, BZ, Gather, QFC, PRO-PACK,
MSXiE, RAX, 777, LZS221, HPA, Arhangel, NRV, oPAQue, BZ2, Squish, MS CAB,
HIT, IMP, NSK, DST, ASD, BTS, TOP4, BatComp (4DOS), BIX, LZA, BLI, CAR,
SARJ, Compack Sfx, LGC, Akt, Akt32, ARS-Sfx, Flash, PC/3270, NPack, PFT,
XTreme, SemOne, InstallIt, PPMD, RK, RPM, XPA32, XPack Data/DImg/SData.

-- 
# Earle Martin http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EarleMartin
$a="f695a9a2176a7dd1618af6649896ee10f05ea986de18af6277e9a1d8ef4696644569a1d".
"8ef46961ae1e64277e9896eea7d92ea8003e9a1d8ef4696f6950";$b="8ALB6AIA4.BA2";$c=
join"",unpack"C*",$b;$c=~s/7/2/g;@b=split"",$c;foreach$d(@b){$e=hex(substr($a
,$f,$d));while(length($e)<8){substr($e,0,0)=0;}print pack"b8",$e;$f+=$d;}

Re: Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Dominic Mitchell]

Rafael Garcia-Suarez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In bleadperl :
> $ perl -lne 'print if /\bgoto\b/' *.[ch] | wc -l
> 605
> 
> This is a rough metric, there are probably less actual gotos than this
> (because of comments and because "goto" is a perl keyword -- not
> forgetting the yacc-generated code, that contains gotos as well).
> 
> However most of gotos appear to be in the tokenizer and in the regular
> expression engine. Thoee are based on state machines, and IMHO gotos are
> legitimate in state machines.

This is correct.  Outlawing goto's entirely is a bad idea, but they are
only needed in very specific circumstances.  I seem to recall that the
TCP/IP source in BSD is another case...  Ah yes, the bottom question of:

http://www.kohala.com/start/rstevensfaq.html

Which reminds me, I must purchase a copy TCP/IP Illustrated vol 2.

-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: Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Sam Vilain]

On Wed, 03 Sep 2003 11:17, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote;

  > However most of gotos appear to be in the tokenizer and in the
  > regular expression engine. Thoee are based on state machines, and
  > IMHO gotos are legitimate in state machines.

Right, and we all know that every program can be considered a state
machine, as it has a set of states and means of transitioning between
those states.

So, therefore goto is valid everywhere!  :-)
-- 
Sam Vilain, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

  The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we
  are permitted to remain children all our lives.
ALBERT EINSTEIN

Re: [OT] Web Hosting on Linux with ssh access

[Sam Vilain]

On Wed, 03 Sep 2003 09:49, Andy Williams wrote;

  > I'm looking for a hosting company for a website I want to set-up.
  > It'll need the following:
  > - ssh access
  > - a database of some sort (mySQL, postgresql)
  > - perl with a good selection of cpan installed
  > - be reasonbably cheap.
  > - can be on a shared machine but own box would be great.

Check out

http://www.webhosting.uk.com/hostingpackages.html

A flatmate recently put his music on their servers (see ffield.net).
Extremely cheap for an account with shell access and 5GB/month.

I don't think that their servers are actually based in the UK though.
-- 
Sam Vilain, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Real computer scientists don't write the user interfaces, they merely
argue over what they should look like.

Re: Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Simon Wistow]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 11:13:35AM +0100, Nicholas Clark said:
> At the risk of going off topic, the Perl 5 source isn't exactly pleasant.
> And contains gotos. IIRC I added 2 between 5.6.0 and 5.8.0, but the
> alternative was a big mess of if()s and braces. C doesn't have all the
> nice loop labelling features of a certain other language.

I have to admit, I like gotos in C. This is not a winning testimonial 
though. I've been told that my C is like Object Orientated assembler 
which is fair enough because I learnt C after I'd learnt 68k.

My code typically looks something like ...

quirka_t *
foo (foo_context * context, int * error)
{
/* malloc bar and if that fails set error and goto FAIL */
/* malloc quirka and if that fails set error and goto FAIL1 */
/* do something with quirka and if that fails, set error, goto FAIL2 */

SUCESS:
return quirka;

FAIL2: 
/* free quirka */
FAIL1:
/* free bar */
FAIL0:
return NULL;
}



apparently people ahve been known to be sick.


-- 
the illusion of knowledge without any of the difficult bits  

Re: Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Paul Johnson]

Nicholas Clark said:

> At the risk of going off topic, the Perl 5 source isn't exactly pleasant.
> And contains gotos. IIRC I added 2 between 5.6.0 and 5.8.0, but the
> alternative was a big mess of if()s and braces. C doesn't have all the
> nice loop labelling features of a certain other language.

I think I wrote my first ever goto code in C yesterday.  It was a part of
a rewrite of the runops function in Devel::Cover, so I justified it on
performance grounds and it felt quite invigorating.

I wonder whether I could find a way to justify some self modifying code?

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

Re: Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Rafael Garcia-Suarez]

Nicholas Clark wrote:
> 
> At the risk of going off topic, the Perl 5 source isn't exactly pleasant.
> And contains gotos. IIRC I added 2 between 5.6.0 and 5.8.0, but the
> alternative was a big mess of if()s and braces. C doesn't have all the
> nice loop labelling features of a certain other language.

In bleadperl :
$ perl -lne 'print if /\bgoto\b/' *.[ch] | wc -l
605

This is a rough metric, there are probably less actual gotos than this
(because of comments and because "goto" is a perl keyword -- not
forgetting the yacc-generated code, that contains gotos as well).

However most of gotos appear to be in the tokenizer and in the regular
expression engine. Thoee are based on state machines, and IMHO gotos are
legitimate in state machines.

Re: Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Nicholas Clark]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 09:53:21AM +, Dominic Mitchell wrote:

> Yuck.  I didn't actually look at it, just let the ports compile it for
> me.

I didn't inspect it too far, but it seems that the current source
is safe to look at. I seems to have benefited from a complete re-write

> When it comes to bad C source code though, I don't think I've been more
> offended by anything other than procmail.  It was (last I looked) a
> rats nest of gotos and other horrors.  Hmmm, I've just had a look and
> it's still remarkably unpleasant to wade through.

At the risk of going off topic, the Perl 5 source isn't exactly pleasant.
And contains gotos. IIRC I added 2 between 5.6.0 and 5.8.0, but the
alternative was a big mess of if()s and braces. C doesn't have all the
nice loop labelling features of a certain other language.

Parrot has much cleaner source than Perl 5. However, to maintain the
balance of good and evil^Wgoto, Perl 6 will compile down to parrot
bytecode, which quite definitely does have gotos. So even the nicest,
most clean award winning code from the purest best intentioned authors
will be automatically corrupted by the Perl 6 compiler. (Eventually.)

Nicholas Clark

Re: DOS/WIN archivers of the mid 1990s (was Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Roger Burton West]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 09:49:28AM +, Dominic Mitchell wrote:

>You can get unrar as source code.  I posted the link yesterday.

Yes, but not the compressor. Ditto for ACE and ARJ. So there's no way to
originate a RAR file under Linux without using binary-only software, and
any other Unix will have to use Linux or Windows emulation to run even
that. That makes quite a lot of people look for something else.

Roger

Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Dominic Mitchell]

Nicholas Clark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 07:16:40AM +, Dominic Mitchell wrote:
>> For the benefit of people likely to come up against Yet Another
>> Compression Format, though:
>> 
>> http://files10.rarlab.com/rar/unrarsrc-3.2.3.tar.gz
> 
> The code in there is a lot cleaner than the last time I looked at
> it. (I presume I was looking at the same official unrar source; previous
> was in C, not C++).
> 
> The old version was a liturgy of bad style tips. For example, using
> #include to pull in lots of other .c files, and IIRC
> #define BEL 007
> printf ("... %c ...", BEL)
> 
> when the escape "\a" has been in C for a couple of decades now

Yuck.  I didn't actually look at it, just let the ports compile it for
me.

When it comes to bad C source code though, I don't think I've been more
offended by anything other than procmail.  It was (last I looked) a
rats nest of gotos and other horrors.  Hmmm, I've just had a look and
it's still remarkably unpleasant to wade through.

Good C source can be a pleasure to read, though.  It's one of the
reasons I always keep a BSD source tree handy.  It's usually very easy
to work out what's going on.

-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: DOS/WIN archivers of the mid 1990s (was Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Dominic Mitchell]

Roger Burton West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Unix, RAR and ACE are only available as binaries, which puts off a
> lot of people; and neither those nor ZIP preserves file ownership or
> permission information. So while I'm able to extract most files under
> Unix, I wouldn't choose those formats for something that I'm originating
> and plan to share primarily with other Unix users.

You can get unrar as source code.  I posted the link yesterday.

http://files10.rarlab.com/rar/unrarsrc-3.2.3.tar.gz

-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: [OT] Web Hosting on Linux with ssh access

[Dave Cross]

From: duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 9/3/03 9:16:01 AM

> www.oneandone.co.uk are good.
>
> Not too sure about how much CPAN they have installed but 
> their tech support has always been good at responding to 
> questions when I've needed to use them

I have root access to my own server at oneandone so it has whatever
bits of CPAN I want on it. It costs £30/month.

Their support people don't seem particularly clued up to me,
but I've never had a problem that I couldn't solve myself.

Dave...

-- 


"Let me see you make decisions, without your television"
   - Depeche Mode (Stripped)

Re: [OT] Web Hosting on Linux with ssh access

[duncan]

www.oneandone.co.uk are good.

Not too sure about how much CPAN they have installed but their tech 
support has always been good at responding to questions when I've needed 
to use them

Andy Williams wrote:

Hi,

I'm looking for a hosting company for a website I want to set-up.
It'll need the following:
- ssh access
- a database of some sort (mySQL, postgresql)
- perl with a good selection of cpan installed
- be reasonbably cheap.
- can be on a shared machine but own box would be great.
Any suggestions as I have only used US based ones in the past, but this
site needs to be hosted in the UK.
Oh and please not Amenworld. complete nightmare!
Thanks

Andy



 

Re: [OT] Web Hosting on Linux with ssh access

[Peter Sergeant]

> I'm looking for a hosting company for a website I want to set-up.
> It'll need the following:
> 

I've had absolutely nothing but pure joy from Bytemark:

http://www.bytemark-hosting.co.uk/index.html

£15 a month for a machine with 64MB memory, 3GB HDD and 7.5GB transfer
(with more transfer being charged at a very reasonable rate). They are
virtual machines, but, mine has never acted in such a way as that I
would notice...

+Pete

-- 
Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
 -- Samuel Johnson

[OT] Web Hosting on Linux with ssh access

[Andy Williams]

Hi,

I'm looking for a hosting company for a website I want to set-up.
It'll need the following:

- ssh access
- a database of some sort (mySQL, postgresql)
- perl with a good selection of cpan installed
- be reasonbably cheap.
- can be on a shared machine but own box would be great.

Any suggestions as I have only used US based ones in the past, but this
site needs to be hosted in the UK.
Oh and please not Amenworld. complete nightmare!

Thanks

Andy

Re: DOS/WIN archivers of the mid 1990s (was Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)

[Roger Burton West]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 10:05:02PM +0100, Barbie [home] wrote:
>On 02 September 2003 09:43 Roger Burton West wrote:
>> (All of this
>> only applies to the Windows world, obviously; I think the parallels in
>> Unix, or at least Linux, would be .tar.bz2, .tar.gz, and dodgy
>> commercial software with auto-extracting installers like the JRE.)
>Why obviously? RAR, ACE, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP formats are all available on both
>Windows and many Unix variants.

On Unix, RAR and ACE are only available as binaries, which puts off a
lot of people; and neither those nor ZIP preserves file ownership or
permission information. So while I'm able to extract most files under
Unix, I wouldn't choose those formats for something that I'm originating
and plan to share primarily with other Unix users.

Roger

Re: Mercury Amalgam

[Philip Hellyer]

Quoting Ben <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 03:48:06PM +0100, Philip Hellyer wrote:
> > My s.o. also took 10 grams of intravenous vitamin C during
> > the procedure.  
> 
> Isn't that above the level where vitamin C will crystalise out of urine
> and potentially cause damage to the urethra?
> 
> I mean, the RDA for vitamin C is only, what, 60 milligrams?
> 
> This seems awfully high to me.

It was administered by an MD rather than the dentist, and I asked that 
very question.  It is certainly higher than the maximum dose that can be 
taken orally, but is safe because it bypasses the stomach, et al.  

In cases of mercury poisoning, it is taken because vitamin C competes 
better than your red blood cells (IIRC) to bind with the free mercury.  So
instead of being transported to cell-storage it is neutralized and excreted.
As part of ongoing detox you must also be taking something to mobilize the
mercury out of the cells and organs where it has deposited.

The 10g takes a couple or three days to work its way out of your system.
After extraction, both of us were back to the doctor's for weekly drips
for a month or two.

Many of the recommended treatments for fibromyalgia (a.k.a. M.E., et al.)
involve megadoses of several vitamins.  Not that a megadose can be judged
solely by the RDAs, which I understand were set as genuine minima during
the war, for rationing purposes.
 
Philip

--