Re: Main general Perl mailing list
Is there a main general Perl mailing list? What's the actual question? -- Chris Devers
Re: Main general Perl mailing list
On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 10:52 AM, gvim gvi...@gmail.com wrote: On 12/02/2014 15:38, Chris Devers wrote: Is there a main general Perl mailing list? What's the actual question? What is the main general Perl mailing list, ie. most active for general Perl questions? lists.perl.org has over 200 entries. That's it? This is purely a surveying activity? Or did you want to ask this hypothetical general list a question, too? -- Chris Devers
Re: You! Yes, you! Are you ready for exciting world of global networking?
On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 5:12 PM, Simon Wistow si...@thegestalt.org wrote: On Mon, Aug 05, 2013 at 10:11:25PM +0100, me said: Hello people who know me from London.pm of yore! Crap, that was supposed to go to jobs@ Apologies for the noise. So by “you, yes you”, you meant “well… not actually YOU…” ? -- Chris Devers
Re: How to retrieve a row, biased by populatity?
On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 4:22 PM, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote:
Possibly a perl question. SQL would do...
Given a set of data, say bands, with each having a ranking, either a
review metric or a sales ranking, how would you retrieve a random
row, but biased towards the higher ranking?
If you have access to a copy of _Mastering Algorithms with Perl_, it had
some examples like this in chapter 14.
The sample code can be downloaded from O’Reilly:
http://examples.oreilly.com/9781565923980/
The one you’re interested seems to be the rand-dist-weighted example,
pasted below:
$ cat rand-dist-weighted
#!/usr/bin/perl
# $selection = rand_dist_weighted( \%dist, \@key_order, $total_weight )
# Select an element from %dist. The total of the weights, and the
# keys sorted by their weights can be provided, or else they are
# computed.
sub rand_dist_weighted {
my( $dist, $key_order, $total_weight ) = @_;
my $running_weight;
$key_order = [ sort { $dist-{$a} = $dist-{$b} } keys %$dist ]
unless $key_order;
unless ( $total_weight ) {
foreach (@$key_order) { $total_weight += $dist-{$_} }
}
# Get a random value.
my $rand = rand( $total_weight );
# Use it to determine a key.
foreach my $key (@$key_order) {
return $key if ($running_weight += $dist-{$key}) = $rand;
}
}
%smartie_weights = ( orange = 3, green = 10, pink = 8, brown = 10,
tan = 0, red = 6, blue = 11, yellow = 7,
purple = 5);
print rand_dist_weighted( \%smartie_weights ), \n;
$smartie_weight = 0;
@smartie_order = sort { $smartie_weights{$a} = $smartie_weights{$b} }
keys %smartie_weights;
for (@smartie_order) { $smartie_weight += $smartie_weights{$_} }
for ( 0..50 ) {
print rand_dist_weighted( \%smartie_weights, \@smartie_order,
$smartie_weight ), \n;
}
--
Chris Devers
Re: search.cpan.org MIA?
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Dirk Koopman d...@tobit.co.uk wrote: Er... search.cpan.org seems not to be responding? Just you. http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/search.cpan.org -- Chris Devers
Re: Mac OS X bootpd configuration
Right, if you try to update a plist for a running program, that program will get a chance to clobber the on-disk version of the file with its in-memory version when it quits. The workaround is to halt the program or daemon first (maybe from a GUI, maybe via launchctl) before making your changes. And `defaults write /etc/bootp parameter value` is definitely the way to go if you're updating simple key/value settings. For more complex nested data structures, look into /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy, which is way more flexible. -- Chris Devers
Re: Should I get my mum a Kindle?
Man, if only there were a way to get radio programmes, like, directly from the radio. Right? I mean, those are cheap, and don't require wifi or 3G or any such technological tomfoolery. Oh well, sounds like a lost cause. -- Chris Devers
Re: mutt
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Michael Stevens mstev...@etla.org wrote: On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 06:30:34PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 10:55:18AM +0100, Peter Corlett wrote: It's arguably better than Outlook, which seems to be the standard MUA these days. About the only thing which isn't better than Outlook is Outlook Express. Don't forget Lotus Notes. So where's the knob to get the mail agent to change the subject line, the relevant mail headers, and redirect the whole thing to h...@hates-software.com? Just curious. I can't seem to find that option anywhere. -- Chris Devers
Re: Speed v Version
On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote: Also note on my perfectly 64 bit macbook pro: $ uname -p i386 On Mac OS X 10.6, the system boots to the 32-bit kernel by default. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4287 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3773 You may get a performance boost by rebooting into the 64-bit kernel. On the other hand, you may see all kinds of subtle not-so-subtle things explode in imaginative, hilarious fashion. Presumably, 10.7 will boot to the 64-bit kernel and drop support for 32-bit mode. This wasn't a feasible default for 10.6, as it still supports the original Intel Core Solo/Duo Macs, which had 32-bit CPUs. Everything after the Core 2 Duo was 64-bit, and that seems to be the baseline spec for 10.7, so an updated kernel seems like a safe guess. -- Chris Devers
Re: GoDaddy CEO in elephant killing embarrassment
The weird thing about this video is that you can tell he thinks he's doing a good thing, as removing the elephant both (supposedly) saves their crops as well as provides enough meat for everyone in the village. But surely there are better ways to accomplish both of those goals than killing one of the world's last elephants. Right? I dunno. I'm just glad I've never done business with his company. -- Chris Devers
Re: Perl on a smartphone?
On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 6:15 AM, James Laver london...@jameslaver.comwrote: If only there were android smartphones with keyboards... Clearly I phrased that wrong. Given that we're talking about device roughly the size of a pack of cards, they're all going to either have a tiny keyboard, or no keyboard. I know many millions of Blackberry users would disagree with me, but I've yet to use a phone or PDA keyboard, in either hardware or software, that didn't drive me crazy for typing anything longer than a couple of sentences. On a proper computer, I'm generally happier typing to the thing to tell it what I want to do. But on something that small, whether with a touchscreen or a hardware keyboard, I'd find typing to get around to be an exercise in frustration, and so am just as happy to tap on icons on a touchscreen instead. YMMV :-) -- Chris Devers
Re: Perl on a smartphone?
On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 7:56 PM, gvim gvi...@gmail.com wrote: Anyone running Perl on a smartphone? Android must be close by now but I haven't ventured into this market yet. Would like bash 4 too. Make that Perl + bash + vim and I'm happy to pay. I like the idea in principle, but wouldn't those be frustrating with a touchscreen? They're all heavily text-oriented, which for me mandates touch-typing on a physical keyboard. Every now and then I try using VNC on my phone to drive a remote computer, and anything beyond basic tap-and-click type stuff starts getting unpleasant very quickly. YMMV, of course :-) -- Chris Devers
Re: Shell-fu
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 12:17 PM, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: $ svn add lib/Hlagh/Blagh.pm ... $ svn commit ... $ vi !($^*%*$ What line-noise should I type to get the last argument to the command two steps back in my history? Obviously I only care about bash. Is it too hard to just do upup^a^d^d^dvienter ? There's probably a Cleverer™ way to do this, but this approach works for me. -- Chris Devers
Re: London.pm leader election
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 01:29:42PM +0100, Jacqui Caren-home wrote: Denny wrote: On Fri, 2010-09-24 at 21:17 +1000, Kieren Diment wrote: Can we vote for the stuffed Camel? You have to nominate it first. I second. Thirded - a stuffed toy as chaircamel makes weird sense. However, it can't organise pubs or techmeets, which makes it of limited utility. You seriously think a human would do any better? I nominate Dipsy. -- Chris Devers
Re: Stand up comedy
On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: During the beer track at the German Perl Workshop, I was asked what's a good place to go to in London for an evening of stand up comedy? and I had no clue. Parliament? -- Chris Devers
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl Mongers Technical Meeting 12th April 2010
On Mar 27, 2010, at 3:59 PM, Denny 2...@denny.me wrote: On Sat, 2010-03-27 at 19:30 +, Christopher Jones wrote: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem?wasRedirected=true Co-incidentally, I may have said much the same thing. What are the chances? -- Chris Devers
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl Mongers Technical Meeting 12th April 2010
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 9:28 AM, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 08:51:51AM +, Edmund von der Burg wrote: Perhaps if we used some DRM. I believe that there is a technology called 'VHS' that offers reasonable quality but severely limits distribution. Only those with a penchant for old hardware and hoarding would be able to view it - which for london.pm should not be a problem :) Nah, I fear that it would still be too widespread.* Surely Betamax - better quality, and better lockdown. What, you guys didn't get Laserdisc over there? Possibly even more obscure (?), no ability to make copies (well, aside from the whole analog hole thing), and better quality as well. Plus, more shiny. -- Chris Devers
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl Mongers Technical Meeting 12th April 2010
On Mar 26, 2010, at 8:36 PM, Piers Cawley pdcawley-london.0dd...@bofh.org.uk wrote: On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 8:03 PM, Jesse Vincent je...@fsck.com wrote: On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 06:41:01AM +1100, Damian Conway wrote: [Various all-too-easily-copied archival format suggestions discarded] Look, if we *really* want to preserve and protect this extremely valuable intellectual property, I propose that we don't film it at all. Instead, let us commission Piers to record and commemorate the great event in the form of an epic ballad of several hundred stanzas in iambic pentameter that can be passed down for all eternity as part of the rich and confusing tapestry that is the oral history of London.pm, to be sung only on occasions of particular solemnity and alcoholism. ...wow. I'd donate several hundred dollars to $PERL_CHARITY to see that happen. Not that I expect to get taken up on this offer. Hmm... the tricky bit is finding a tune where 'Damian Conway' will scan... How about the bass line from the Doctor Who theme? Da-da-da-dahh-dah, Da-da-da-dahh-dah... Seems close, no? -- Chris Devers
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl Mongers Technical Meeting 12th April 2010
On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 2:02 PM, James Laver london...@jameslaver.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 04:13:03PM +, L?on Brocard wrote: and the speaker is Damian Conway, Damnit, why do you have to hold the really cool stuff while I'm out of the country? I would be very much obliged if someone could please film Damian's speech and upload it. Pretty please. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't approve. I taped one of his talks in Boston a few years ago, and he wanted to be assured that I wasn't going to upload it anywhere -- and I haven't. Jaunting around the globe giving talks teaching courses is how he makes his living, and he can't do that if any old shmoe can just look up SelfGOL (etc) on YouTube. -- Chris Devers
Re: Monads are like burritos
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 10:59 AM, James Laver james.la...@gmail.com wrote: I'm curious about vegetarian dim sum now... Don't be -- I've yet to find any vegetarian dim sum I cared for, and usually just end up ordering some entree from the menu instead. I suppose there must be veggie dim sum places out there that don't put mystery meat in everything, but I haven't found one that I found memorable. -- Chris Devers
Re: New www.perl.org site
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 5:29 AM, Simon Wilcox es...@ourshack.com wrote: For those who've not seen it elsewhere, congratulations to our very own Leo Lapworth and the guys at Foxtons for the shiny redesign of www.perl.org. Nice work Leo. Thank you ! Not to be contrarian, but is there any particular reason why random bits of text in the main banner need to be Flash assets rather than an open format like PNG or -- gosh -- text+CSS? Here's how the page looks with ClickToFlash installed on a Mac: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdevers/4100134153/ The page goes back to normal after clicking through the CTF filter: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdevers/4100890522/ As far as I can tell, it's just normal text in the Flash objects -- no animations or interactive bits or anything like that (thankfully). But if it isn't doing any such thing, then why does it need to be Flash in the first place? -- Chris Devers
Re: New www.perl.org site
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 4:18 PM, Mark Fowler m...@twoshortplanks.com wrote: On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Leo Lapworth l...@cuckoo.org wrote: 2009/11/13 Chris Devers cdev...@pobox.com Not to be contrarian, but is there any particular reason why random bits of text in the main banner need to be Flash assets rather than an open format like PNG or -- gosh -- text+CSS? We wanted to 1) be able to easily change the message on the home page (it rotates between two at the moment, but we can add more later and use for other sites, e.g. dbi.perl.org) 2) use a non-web font You mean you kept you eye on the prize of a nice looking and functional website that gave the best experience to the majority of users rather than instead of priotising some side issue to do with the correctness of using flash that threatened to undermine the very improvements to the design that you were attempting? Goodness me, whatever next? I should keep quiet about this if I was you, because if people hear that you can actually get things done rather than getting entrenched in the prevailing mindset that's holding back improvements, a whole bunch of work will be coming your way. Ha. Ha. I asked what the reason was. Now I know. I wasn't aware of iSFR. Now I am. -- Chris Devers
Re: Does Perl has a code hider
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 6:45 AM, Bob Walker b...@randomness.org.uk wrote: On Fri, 18 Sep 2009, Nicholas Clark wrote: If people would really like an automatic thrice-weekly FAQ fettling list, then people are welcome to set one up and advertise its existence to this list. not web2.0 enough. faqfettlr.com dont forget the pastel rounded corners. Only slightly less kiddingly, I note that http://twitter.com/perlfaq doesn't exist. Yet. Seems like making a Twitter account for this would push many of the right buttons: * Completely opt-in * Doesn't pollute a mostly unrelated mailing list * Rides on Twitter's inexplicably popular coattails * The Web 2.0, pastels, rounded corners are thrown in for free Any takers? -- Chris Devers
Re: Effort-free, box-it-up paperwork management
On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 12:27 PM, James Laverjames.la...@gmail.com wrote: Does anyone else have experience of doing something like this, have suggestions on a better way of doing it, etc.? Not sure how much this helps, if at all, but this sounded interesting to me, and seems to address at least part of the problem you describe: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/a-better-way-to-manage-receipts-for-business-travel/ -- Chris Devers
Re: http://www.xkcd.com/519/
On Mar 9, 2009, at 7:27 PM, Simon Wistow si...@thegestalt.org wrote: Sorry mate, it's just the way you tell them So then he clears his throat and tries another: ..Pi? Long pause. Then. Raucous laughter! We've never heard that one before! -- Chris Devers Who has assigned Part One of this joke the number 7, and the Sequel 8.
Re: Introduction to Perl for non-programming Mac folk
On Dec 22, 2008, at 8:32 AM, Andy Wardley a...@wardley.org wrote: Before I go and write this myself, does anyone know of any online or dead-tree resources that give a gentle introduction to using Perl on Mac OSX? I'm working with a couple of web designers who want to learn a bit of Perl, but need a bit of hand-holding when it comes to using the command line and other techy things. O'Reilly had a decent line of Unix for Mac Geeks books a while back. The last edition was for Tiger, and it may be out of print now (???), but the basic material still applies now on Leopard, and it covered the kind of turf you're talking about. -- Chris Devers
Re: Is Perl alive ?
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 1:59 PM, Nigel Rantor wig...@wiggly.org wrote: I really think that they should both say the same thing. Then *everyone* would be happy. Maybe? -- Chris Devers
Re: Is Perl alive ?
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 2:14 PM, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker ilm...@ilmari.org wrote: Needs RSS feeds! If you aren't seeing them, doesn't that ipso facto imply that it's dead? -- Chris Devers
Re: change which program user is looking at
On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, Hermann Ingjaldsson wrote: In Perl. How do i change (in code) which program the user is looking at? Depends. (That joke never gets old. The older it gets, the more it Depends.) -- Chris Devers
Re: Apple service providers
On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Martin A. Brooks wrote: Dave Hodgkinson wrote: Isn't a dead disk user-maintainable? Of course not. Assuming you can even get the case open without damaging it (also voiding your warranty), you'd be putting in a disk that hadn't been blessed by Apple's marketing department, also voiding your warranty. Oh don't be silly. Yes, replacing a Macbook hard drive is easy. If you can replace the RAM, it's the same level of complexity -- take out the battery, take out a trap door, and there it is. If you're under warranty, you can get it replaced with an identical one for free, but they will want to keep the dead drive. If you're out of warranty, want to upgrade the drive, or need to keep the old one, then you can replace it yourself easily. If you're under warranty, and put your own replacement drive in, this will generally not void the warranty on anything else as long as you don't break anything. If you're worried about this angle, keep the old drive in a drawer somewhere, and if you ever have to get it repaired for some other issue, drop the old drive back in first. They'll fix the other issue and replace the original drive while they're at it, which you can then pull back out replace with your bigger drive later. -- Chris Devers
Re: Mobiles and macs
On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, David Cantrell wrote: On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 11:53:03AM +0100, Nigel Metheringham wrote: On 11 Sep 2008, at 11:45, David Cantrell wrote: Completely unnecessary for PalmOS, which comes with a Mac desktop thingy. Well it would be unnecessary if the PalmOS offering worked right. When I was using a Treo I ended up forking out for the MarkSpace sync tools which, once set up, didn't randomly duplicate, delete and change entries quite so frequently. I wonder what you were doing wrong. It can be a royal pain in the butt to set up right if you've never done it before, or can't ferret out the procedure on Apple's support site. And even if you do get it working, it's surprisingly brittle. (I've had to help a lot of people get it working, or get it working again after it blew up for who knows what reason.) It's a pain that you need pay for a copy of Markspace's Missing Sync when in principle you can get it to work for free, but in practice, if you time has value to you, it can be worth it. That is, of course, if you're stuck in 2003 and still prefer a Palm. If you join the iPhone horde, things tend to Just Work. (Aside from the small mountain of infuriating bugs unimplemented capabilities, but nevermind that, drink your kool-aid, there you go.) For Blackberry phones, PocketMac is dead simple to set up, and free. It wasn't written by RIM, but apparently works better than anything they were able to come up with on their own, because they allow you to download it from their web site. For a huge number of other phones with Bluetooth support, iSync can often Just Work, no problem. My mom had a bottom-end freebie Nokia phone that took all of 45 seconds to get syncing with iSync, and most of the other ones are about that easy. Apple has a list of supported phones on their site, but for a lot of others it's a matter of tweaking a .plist file to get it to work as well as the officially supported ones. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/isync/ -- Chris Devers DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Re: Dave Cross and Bill Joy - separated at birth?
On Sun, 21 Sep 2003, Simon Wistow wrote: Joy http://prometheus.frii.com/~gnat/tpc5-photos/Smaller_Dave_Cross.JPG Cross http://www.andfinally.com/images/headshot.gif Striking that Joy's photo has Dave's name, eh? :) On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Dominic Mitchell wrote: Joy is quite scary, but definitely not related: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/ceo/pics/img-joy.jpg http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/ceo/pics/img-joy.gif Interesting how different those pictures are... Has anyone seen Bill Joy Dan Sugalski in the same room? http://www.juliancash.com/view/jc_os/set/medium_os6_d3_3663.html And Larry Wall is, of course, Weird Al Yankovich. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] np: 'Yea Yea' by The Ramones from 'All the Stuff and More'
Re: web testing
On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Michael Stevens wrote: On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 11:57:42AM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: The proxy neatly (IMO) got around the problem of rewriting URLs, cookies, and JavaScript. I thought quite hard about this and couldn't see a non-proxy way of doing it. (Bueller?) Is that the sort of thing you're talking about? Are you looking for an online service or tarball? I'm heading toward implementing the former route. Yeah, that's the sort of thing. Prefer a a piece of software I can install. I've used expensive commercial windows stuff which will do this by automating IE, which I'd rather avoid. I was doing something similar to this for Zope testing a few months ago. It was the same basic idea: run a little proxy daemon, then point your browser[s] at it. For each request, it would generate a .in a .out file with the contents of the HTTP request response. Then there was another tool that could play back those input output files looking for relevant patterns in the data stream. One insight that the programmer I was working with had was to use XPath to aid in parsing the responses. It was more robust than regex matching, but slightly less complex than parsing out everything by hand; basically, it allowed us to say there's going to be a string wrapped in a foo tag, and the foo tag will be nested under bar, baz, and blimey. If that last one is nested in anything else, we don't care. In most cases, this was good enough to zoom on exactly on what was needed. The system was written in a mix of Bourne shell Python code, but most of the elements were pretty self contained and I see no reason why it wouldn't have cooperated with anything written in Perl or most other languages. I don't *think* I have a copy anymore, but it may be possible to find it somewhere on zope.org -- look for 'ftrunner' / 'utrunner'. Around the time I was working on this, there was a talk at Boston.pm about WWW::Mechanize, which seemed very complimentary to these tools. That might be something worth looking into. I think the proxy is the important bit though: if you can get that to work, and it can record all the data in a useful format, then you can use whatever tools you like to analyze the results. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ np: 'Ma Muse M´amuse' by Rabih Abou-Khalil from 'The Cactus Of Knowledge'
Re: [ot] doubtless silly perl question
On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Shevek wrote: On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Joel Bernstein wrote: I have a problem with some code which I'm trying to debug. I'm not certain, but I think perhaps I'm doing something wrong in the following line - perhaps inadvertently creating an array slice? what do you understand by the line: my $foo=( split ',' = $line )[7]; ? I understand that you should have used two lines. Why not do so? my @tmp = split /,/, $line; my $foo = $tmp[7]; Fair enough, but what's a good, non-obfuscated-Perl one liner for this? Would this work? my ( ,,$foo ) = ... No, that's ugly brittle at best, and hopeless at worst. Nevermind. I am curious about good idioms for doing an array slice like this though. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ np: 'Mast Aankon Ki Kasam' by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan from 'The Supreme Collection, Vol 1 (Disc 1)'
Re: Spam tarpits...
On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Joel Bernstein wrote: On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 06:08:11PM +0100, Earle Martin wrote: I suck even more! On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 05:40:06PM +0100, Earle Martin wrote: http://downlode.org/perl/spamtrap.pl No, that should have been http://downlode.org/perl/spamtrap.cgi Dammit! I think I should go home now. Well, don't worry... At least the .txt URL worked ;) *pat* Have you considered the possibilities of Apache redirects? Now might be a good time to give some a try... :) -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] SPEARS: Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens. http://edition.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/03/cnna.spears/
Re: Pub feedback please
On Sat, 6 Sep 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: imagine a world where budwieser is your only choice. I've heard that this world is called St. Louis. Fortunately, it's a small place, easy to escape from, and more importantly it also gave us Miles Davis. You lose some, you win some. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ np: 'Diminuendo In Blue Blow By Blow' by Duke Ellington from 'Cote d'Azur Concerts (Disc 1)'
Re: Bad C Source (Re: gzipping your websites WINRAR 40 days trial)
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: DOS/WIN archivers of the mid 1990s
On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Philip Newton wrote: No idea what ARJ is doing these days. They still seem to be around as a company (and have a better format called JAR, apparently) [...] JAR? No relation to the Java archive format, is there? I thought that Java's JAR files were just Java-tARballs. Now you have me wondering if that's actually true. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ ALU, n. [Arithritic Logic Unit or (rare) Arithmetic Logic Unit.] A random-number generator supplied as standard on all computer systems. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Fave calendering software?
On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Steve Keay wrote: Hmm, I just tried this and I decided to download the UK Holidays from the same page. Can anyone tell my why it has New Year's Day on the 1st of December? I also find it a little worrying that Christmas, etc are not re-occurring events. I like to speed forward to 2020 in the calendar and see that Christmas is still there. Didn't you get that memo? No Christmas for you after this year! Cthulu Matata! -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ ALU, n. [Arithritic Logic Unit or (rare) Arithmetic Logic Unit.] A random-number generator supplied as standard on all computer systems. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: compression (was: gzipping your websites)
On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Paul Mison wrote: On 01/09/2003 at 14:42 -0400, Chris Devers wrote: But at my last job, when compressing daily server logs, bzip was able to produce compressed files half to quarter the size of what gzip could do with the same log files. Consistently, over the course of months. How often do you *serve* log files? Wasn't the discussion up until now about gzip for web server downloads? No, it wasn't. At least, this sub-thread wasn't. Evildave was asking about Windows support for bzip compressed files that he would like to distribute on his site. On the fly decompression of the files was not part of the equation, as a later post by him clarified. read first, troll later? :) The point wasn't to compress as fast as possible, but to keep the size of the archive directory as small as possible. For downloads, yes, smaller files come down well, but if they take much longer to compress, your combined download+unzip time will be greater than the (admittedly slower) download+unzip time for bzip2. Horses for courses. For archived logs, they may never end up getting decompressed again, but there is a need to have the data available in case a need emerges. In this context, bzip is a better solution. For a situation where the file is decompressed often, the decompression time required by bzip becomes an issue, but that wasn't the scenario that I was describing. You asked why anyone would ever use bzip. I was giving a perfectly valid example. You're now asking about other situations. I think you're deftly evading the point :) End of discussion. Oh, is it? Okay then, can we at least have end of trolling? Pretty please? *sigh* indeed -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: compression (was: gzipping your websites)
On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Paul Mison wrote: I maintain that David is being pointlessly discriminatory in his approach, and that bzip2 has a bogus level of popularity that its merits don't justify. And I maintain that you're ignoring the possibility that in certain contexts, bzip can be the appropriate tool to use. As you're clearly aware, gzip has a speed advantage over bzip. You then take this to mean that gzip is the only option consider. I find that questionable. Given a selection of tools and a set of requirements, shouldn't it always be the case that you choose which tool to use based on which one offers the best tradeoffs between features that you need and drawbacks that you can put up with? This is not a case where one tool is unambiguously better, so asserting that one should never be used seems very odd to me. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] source code, n. The version of a program to which the compiler OBJECTs. See also DECOMPILING, JAMES JOYCE'S LAW OF. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: require
On Sun, 31 Aug 2003, duncan wrote: Are you declaring you array with 'my' int he require()d script? It's a bit late, but at a guess I'd say this probably limits the scope of the array to the require()d file, preventing the other file from ever seeing it. yes, this was exactly the problem. id cut and pasted it out of the code and left the my in there - DOH! problem solved and everything working fine now though. thanks for the examples anyway. Well hang on, this is an interesting question. What is the right way to do something like this, if you want your code to work under 'use strict'? Would it be enough to simply delete 'my' from the require'd file, or will that blow up? Is this the context under which 'our @foo' makes sense? I've never grokked why 'our $foo' was added as a complement to 'my $foo'... ...or of course I could just go look in the camel book... -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ app, n. [Diminutive of application] The irrelevant 10 percent of your code lurking beneath, and well-nigh inaccessible from, the glamorous, marketable GUI layer. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
pine editor derby, was Re: London.pm identity cards
On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Michel Rodriguez wrote: On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Sam Vilain wrote: On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 09:26, Michel Rodriguez wrote; MR (where is the pound sign when you need it?). Try AltGr+Shift+3 (or AltGr+#) with a standard XFree86 keymap... No AltGr on my keyboard, but Alt+# works in vi, but not in pico apparently, too bad I like using the native editor in pine. In your ~/.pinerc, make sure that enable-alternate-editor-cmd is one of the options selected under 'feature-list', and also set editor=/path/to/vim (or if you're the regressive type, editor=/path/to/vi) in the same file. That or search for the equivalent editor directives under the config options, by typing 'mscweditorenter' -- but the other way is faster :) Once the editor to use is enabled set, you can drop into it with ^_ (I think under older versions of Pine it was ^^ or something, but ^_ seems to be the keystroke on versions from the past year or two). If you want to use vi instead of pico always, select the option labeled enable-alternate-editor-implicitly -- this kind of screws up the display of message header info though, so personally I didn't care for this setting. Pico will do for most email for me anyway, but having the option to reach vim for more subtle formatting etc is nice to have. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/resume/ integral, adj. (Of a solution) accurate to the nearest whole number, as: The PENTIUM has an integral FPU. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: pine editor derby, was Re: London.pm identity cards
On Sat, 30 Aug 2003, Peter Sergeant wrote: If you want to use vi instead of pico always, select the option labeled enable-alternate-editor-implicitly -- this kind of screws up the display of message header info though, so personally I didn't care for this setting. How so? Dropping into it from mutt, the headers are nicely highlighted (where appropriate), and I've added a bit of magic to put me directly into input mode a line down from the headers... Does pine treat this so differently? I like Pine a lot, but this is an area where I'll concede that Mutt does a better job -- but that's mainly because Pine Pico are pretty tightly integrated. long-winded explanation, because I'm having a hard time succinctly describing in plain text how this plain text application works... :-( In Pine, my default message composition interface -- at least for the first screenful of information, is something like this: From: Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] To : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Attchmnt: Subject : Re: pine editor derby, was Re: London.pm identity cards - Message Text - On Sat, 30 Aug 2003, Peter Sergeant wrote: If you want to use vi instead of pico always, select the option [ a screenful of editable fields ... ] ^G Get Help ^X Send^R Read File ^Y Prev Pg ^K Cut Text ^O Postpone ^C Cancel ^J Justify ^_ Alt Edit ^V Next Pg ^U UnJustify ^T To Spell The lines up to /^- Message Text -$/ line are configurable, but they are distinct from the editable area itself. Also, the command help lines at the bottom display one set of commands when the cursor is in the header lines, and another set when in the message composition section. The example above is from message composition mode. If the message is long enough, you scroll away from the headers and then Pico gets the whole display area (minus the bottom command rows), but there's always a strong division between headers, message, and footers. The best description I can think of is to imagine these applications as if Pine Mutt were GUI applications or web pages. In Pine, the header rows are treated like labeled text fields, message body composition is a separate multi-row text area, and the footer command row is like a set of labeled buttons. This means that it is not possible, for example, to move the cursor onto any area other than the labeled areas in the header or the message composition section. From what I've used of Mutt, on the other hand, it seems like the whole screen is editable, so if it were a GUI then the whole area would be a text field, and you can (I think?) move the cursor anywhere within that region that you choose. In the background, Magic[tm] happens to make sure that special parts of that editable area are handled in special ways. (If I misunderstand that, feel free to correct me -- I'm not a Mutt user :) This is why handling of external editors works so non-smoothly in Pine. When you invoke an external editor, you go into a different full screen mode. Functionally, after you fill in the header lines and hit down or enter to leave the header lines, the screen is redrawn with Vim or Emacs or what have you, and the entire screen real estate is given to that editor to work on your message body. To get back to your header lines, you have to quit out of the editor, at which point you're dropped back to a screen like what you see above. The transition is hardly seamless. In GUI/browser terms, it's like filling in the header fields, then opening up a fully external application to edit the message body and only the message body. After you save your changes in that external application and quit out of it, you're dropped back into the original. Mutt, by contrast, seems to allow the external editor to control everything, so there isn't that sense of going through a tunnel to get to the editor -- Mutt itself is almost more like a proxy between $EDITOR and the mail system. I suspect that if the transition were to get any better in Pine, a way would have to be found to embed $EDITOR into the display area such that it can share that portion of the screen below the header lines (maybe) above the command lines -- like an applet $EDITOR, or something. Does this make sense? It's pretty straightforward, but I'm not sure if I'm describing it clearly, hence the rambling... :-/ -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/ throwaway, adj. (Of a program) sold below cost for public debugging. See also PROTOTYPING. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Fave calendering software?
On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Paul Makepeace wrote: Basic hour-by-hour, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly views. Something that produces HTML output for inclusion or direct embeddable on the web would be my personal ideal, to be shared with various types of people. E.g., a client could see in detail what I'm doing on their project and the rest is simply blocked off as available/not available. Prospects could get an overview of availability say during a month. I found CyberCalendar via the mod_perl examples page a couple of months ago, and ...sort of like it. http://www.cyberweavers.com/download/cybercalendar.html CC is a web-based, browser-accessed application, and of the calendar applications I looked into at the time, I liked the feature set of CC best. In particular, of the calendar programs I looked at, it was the only one that advertised the ability to offer vCal files (which would be great for transferring entries from the server application to, say, Palm Desktop or Mozilla). Plus, you can setup different calendar categories, each of which may optionally allow public submission of events, and these public events can either be queued for review or posted directly to the site. On the downside, it's not very flexible. Most of the HTML is directly embedded in the Perl code, and it is very bad, old school FONT based HTML at that. They do silly things by letting you set a stylesheet where you fill out a not-very-clear form, and the fonts colors you select are dynamically plugged into page elements at serve time, rather than e.g. having the generated code use 'foo class=bar and having a real (if dynamically made) CSS sheet specify what to do with bar. I spent some time trying to clean this mess up, but it wasn't very fun and eventually I gave up on the idea. It also seemed to be flaky about letting you re-edit committed events. If something was supposed to happen next Tuesday, but now it's going to be next Thursday instead, there was no clean way to change this. Annoying. CC could be the prototype for a decent calendar program, but I assume that a rewrite rethinking of some basic assumptions could only help. *** Farther into the web-cal idea, Yahoo's calendar service doesn't seem to be that bad (some kind of Palm support, etc). The main thing that has kept me from signing up is just a general discomfort at the idea that I'd be recording my comings goings on some company's public servers. *** Back towards the desktop, Mozilla calendar is nice, but Palm Desktop isn't bad either, and you can download Win32 MacOS/OSX versions for free from Palm's site. If you don't have a PDA, you can just ignore that aspect of the application, but the functionality it provides is pretty good. Apparently, Palm Desktop is basically a rebranded version of Claris Organizer, which seems to have had a strong reputation even before the Newton came out, nevermind the Palm Pilot. And now it's free, and just as useful without the PDA as, I assume, Claris Organizer was. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ binary, adj. 1 Offering little choice; maximizing the chance of error. 2 Relating to the 20th century's boring challenge to the Babylonians. 3 Relating to a numbering system introduced to protect children from parental help during math homework assignments. 4 Reflecting the quintessential dichotomy of the universe. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: No multipart or HTML
On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Michael Stevens wrote: On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 12:22:25PM +0100, Roger Burton West wrote: On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 12:17:28PM +0100, Michael Stevens wrote: I'm fully in favour of banning text/html only messages, but I'm quite happy with multipart/alternative, as they usually render perfectly well in decent console MUAs. Spammers have noticed that people are banning text/html only; quite a bit of the spam I've seen recently has been of the form: multipart/alternative text/plain (blank) text/html (body of spam) Okay, possibly a more intelligent filter that can spot this case as well? Harder to implement as a system filter in exim, though, I'd guess. But then to get around that you've got multipart/alternative text/plain (body of gibberish) text/html (body of spam) At which point it seems attractive to at least take a stab at making sure that the /plain and /html branches resemble each other. But how? It doesn't seem feasible to embed an HTML parser in a high volume mail scanner (meet the new SpamAssassin 3.0 -- now with Gecko!). Checksums seem unlikely to help. You could guess with metrics such as the average html branch will be N times the plain branch, give or take X standard deviations but ...yuck. A less painful approach might just be to queue multipart messages for moderator review. As has been noted, there have only been a handful of these in the past six months, not all of which were meant to go to the list anyway. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] ISO, n. [Origin: possibly Greek iso equal but now presumed acronym for International Standards Organization.] A meta-standards organization set up in 1947 in order to establish standards for the setting up of standard organizations. See also ANSI; ASCII; STANDARD. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: No multipart or HTML
On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Jonathan Stowe wrote: On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Chris Devers wrote: A less painful approach might just be to queue multipart messages for moderator review. As has been noted, there have only been a handful of these in the past six months, not all of which were meant to go to the list anyway. Not less painful for the moderators though. Hmm, I thought that's what I meant, but maybe it isn't what I said. I suggest: * trash all text/html * trash all multipart/alternative where the text/plain branch is empty * queue all multipart/alternative where text/plain is nonzero The way I read the rest of the thread, it seemed like this would cut down the moderator load significantly while still having a safety net for people forced to use permanently misconfigured mail clients. Of course, if all spam starts having a text/plain branch, then my suggestion ends up not helping very much... -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/resume/ locale, n. An ANSI-approved ethnic stereotype. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: insidious biometrics, identity crises
On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Andy Wardley wrote: I've got a new credit card waiting to be signed. This escapade here: http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/ is making me wonder what I should sign it with. This one, [also?] from this month's Cryptogram, is also pretty good: http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2003/07/17manssignatureof.html Charles Weinstein's signature is more legible than many - it is just that it appears to be upside down. And this is a problem for the Delaware Division of Motor Vehicles, which informed Weinstein on Monday that his signature was unacceptable. Weinstein said a clerk told him he would not get a new driver's license until he agreed to sign it right. Weinstein, 45, of Glasgow, has refused, saying it should be up to him, not the DMV, to decide how he writes his name. He said he trained himself to write his name in this unusual way, working right-side up, as a way to make his mark unique. He said he has been signing his name this way for more than eight years on all official papers, checks, credit cards - even his old driver's license. It was never a major problem until this week, he said, when he went to the DMV office on Airport Road to change his address. [] The funny thing is, looking at the sample image [1], there doesn't seem to be a need for him to have trained himself to write it upside down -- he could have just spun the receipt around and signed it normally. Maybe he's just able to do it faster this way, or draw less attention, or just thought it was funnier. Which is as good of a reason as any other. In any case, he apparently was able to have this kind of fun for eight years before some bureaucrat decided to give him a hard time about it -- and it appears that legally the bureaucrat has no legal basis for making a complaint: However, Williams said, no one could find any statute that defined an acceptable signature, which is why the matter was sent to the attorney general. We want to get this resolved, he said. Your English mileage may not be 5280 feet like ours is :) And I suppose there's nothing to stop me from having a second credit card that I sign Cherie Blair Blows Goats or even I stole this card too. That would be quite amusing for those times when a shop assistant asks me for another card to verify my signature. You could sign it with no hands. Or feet. Like the way you type. That might not go unnoticed, however. Ho ho ho. Indeed :) -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/ aibophobia, n. The fear of palindromes. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: insidious biometrics, identity crises
On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Chris Devers wrote: http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2003/07/17manssignatureof.html [] He said he trained himself to write his name in this unusual way, working right-side up, as a way to make his mark unique. He said he has been signing his name this way for more than eight years on all official papers, checks, credit cards - even his old driver's license. It was never a major problem until this week, he said, when he went to the DMV office on Airport Road to change his address. [] The funny thing is, looking at the sample image [1], there doesn't seem to be a need for him to have trained himself to write it upside down Damned dangling footnotes... [1] http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2003/07/images/165042.jpg -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/ terminology, n. Both the nomenclatura and its catastrophic side-effects. See also ONOMANCY; WINDOWS. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: golf and reversed emails
On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Mark wrote: tac heresySometimes perl ain't the best way to do it./heresy Mark. As this thread shows: the original question was how to tersely reverse the input file in a Perl oneliner. Calling out to a program that does this for you rather than doing it in pure Perl seems like a wonderful solution. New heretical Perl golf meme: 1. Accept challenge to do program in one line 2. Write in a separate Python script. Take as many lines as you need. 3. ??? 5. Profitably demonstrate your Perl one liner that calls it !?!?! har har har -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/ RAM 1 Major Hindu deity. 2 Revised Ancient Model (as in Martin Bernal's Black Athena.) 3 Random Access Memory. Overload caution: Often beyond contextual disambiguation. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: golf and reversed emails
On Sun, 24 Aug 2003, Simon Wistow wrote: I was mucking round with some stuff this morning and, as a slight side diversion, wrote something that took this message of MBM's http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20030811/020742.html and 'fixed' it. It's mildly golfish so I thought I'd post it and see if people would come up with something better (ignoring the easy wins like shorter variable names). Does this count? % echo hello there | \ perl -e 'print `rev`' ereht olleh Can anyone beat 11 characters? :) -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/ dragging, n. The canonical GUI method of moving a WIDGET to a point on the screen determined by the unencumbered areas of your MOUSE PAD. See also CLICK; MOUSE; DRAG'N'DROP. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: OSX - 'the real question'
On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Paul Mison wrote: On 20/08/2003 at 23:34 -0400, Tara L Andrews wrote: Even then, at least in the case of OS X, one can be bitten. I found an Installer package for perl 5.8 somewhere on the Net; it messed up my system perl pretty badly. Well, that's partly because Mac OS X doesn't really have a native packaging system. Sure, there're downloadable .pkg installers, but since there's no way of telling which package put a file somewhere, or which version of the package did so, or what the version of the file is, or to see a list of the packages [0] nor to remove a package [1], I'm standing by the 'not really' part of that statement. Really? % lsbom /Library/Receipts/Safari.pkg/Contents/Archive.bom | head . 41775 0/80 ./Applications 40775 0/80 ./Applications/Safari.app 40775 0/80 ./Applications/Safari.app/Contents 40775 0/80 ./Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info.plist 100664 0/8094863265824559 ./Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS40775 0/80 ./Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari 100775 0/80761132 3156916282 ./Applications/Safari.app/Contents/PkgInfo 100664 0/808 2190113219 ./Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources40775 0/80 ./Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/Activity_Stop.tif 100664 0/80 374 1307578447 I know of know pointy-clicky wrappers around the `lsbom` command -- or more accurately, at the .bom databases inside the .pkg packages -- but it seems like there is enough information available to, say, write a tool that could make necessary repairs if files went missing, had their ownership or permissions changed around, or if symlink targets moved. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/resume/ hype, n. Any document headed For immediate release. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: OSX - 'the real question'
On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, David Wright wrote:
Alternatively (3), if you're happy replacing rather than supplementing
the existing perl, there are some foolproof installers here:
http://serverlogistics.com/downloads-jag.php. (not just perl.)
This option seems to be unpopular among a lot of people, on grounds that a
lot of system software (installers etc) depend on having a particular copy
of Perl at /usr/bin/perl, and can't be guaranteed to work if you replace
that with a better version. This isn't just an OSX idea: the same people
also seem to prefer to leave the stock Perl alone on Debian, FreeBSD,
Solaris, etc.
The consensus seems to be to *always* leave the system software (Perl et
al) alone, and put your stuff in a custom directory such as /usr/local,
/opt, or /sw. Tinkering with the contents of /{usr,}/{bin,sbin} is
generally seen as something that shouldn't be done in most cases.
Ach. I paid for the last one and felt burnt. Next time I'll get it
somewhere ... cheaper. That should make up for the ludicrous price I
paid for their RAM.
Ouch, you bought ram from the vendor? Bummer... :)
--
Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://devers.homeip.net:8080/resume/
algorism, n.
A pre-LISP ALGORITHM devised by abu-Ja'far Mohammed ibn-Musa
al-Khuwarizmi (Persian mathematician fl. ce 825) who wrote the first
BASIC substring modifier in a vain attempt to shorten his name.
-- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: OSX - 'the real question'
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Alex Brewer wrote: The real question was why the STDOUT doesn't appear in the terminal window, so the famous 'hello world' script runs OK but puts the output somewhere else. I can pipe it to a second script to put the output in a file but that's no use if I want to build an interactive script. This is just not correct. I haven't seen or read anything to suggest that STDOUT, STDIN, and STDERR behave any differently on an OSX console than they do on Linux, BSD, Solaris, or Irix. (I haven't tried any other Unix variants, but that's enough to satisfy my curiosity :). What results are you seeing that suggest OSX Perl behave at all strange as far as the standard file streams? Can you provide sample code? A related question. I have chmod 755'ed the file (called foo.command) so that it is executable, but when I type the command name in the terminal (have checked the path), the response is 'Command not found', so I have to type 'perl foo.command' then the script runs. I have the '#!/usr/bin/perl -w' as line one. Are you using the default shell, tcsh? What do you get from echo $PATH ? Chances are, the current working directory ( . ) isn't on the list. You can change this by editing your dotfiles (~/.tcshrc or ~/.bashrc, depending on your poison of choice), but a lot of people will argue that having CWD in your path is questionable from a security point of view. One way around this, regardless of your $PATH settings, is to explicitly add the current directory to the command you're invoking with './', as ./foo.command This will work no matter what $PATH is, because your shell will expand that dot into the full path, as if you had typed (say) /Users/abrewer/bin/foo.command or whatever. This isn't an OSX issue; it comes up on pretty much all POSIX shells. The other stuff was how I get hold of perl 5.8 (do I need compilers?), and thanks for the cpan url. If you have specific functionality you need from 5.8, then yes it can be built installed, and yes doing so generally means getting a compiler. For the latter, Apple provides a full suite of development tools that generally gets updated a couple of times per year. The development tools are a free (and huge) download after you sign up for a free developer's account at http://connect.apple.com/. Those will provide you with the standard GNU command line tools (gcc, make, etc) as well as graphical applications for building OSX gui software. Once you've got the developer's tools installed, you have everything you need to upgrade Perl. However, you may want to try the Fink package manager, which is based on Debian's dpkg/apt-get/dselect toolkit. If you install Fink, then installing Perl 5.8.0 is just a matter of running sudo fink install perl580 and waiting half an hour or so for it to compile. Alternatively, you may prefer to just follow David Wheeler's instructions for this kind of thing at http://david.wheeler.net/osx.html. Alternatively, if you don't *need* 5.8.x just yet, and you can make do with 5.6.0 for now, then the next version of OSX is planned to come with a copy of Perl 5.8.1; it should be out by the end of the year. More questions? Send 'em here, or feel free to sign up for the OSX Perl list at http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=macosx. HTH :) -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/ version, latest, n. That VERSION which most exceeds the DEADLINE for completion. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: [OT] SQL woes
On Sun, 17 Aug 2003, Peter Sergeant wrote: is it not simply: ? Apparently not. mysql UPDATE user SET user.user_realname = users_names.name WHERE user.user_id = users_names.user_id; ERROR 1109: Unknown table 'users_names' in where clause However, users_names definitely does exist. I'd speculate here, and, if I'm wrong I'd appreciate being corrected, that it assumes 'users_names' is an alias to a table, but that what it's an alias to hasn't been defined in the query... At a guess, maybe it would be illuminating to send the output from: mysql describe user; mysql describe users_names; That might clarify what's what. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/ network, n. v. trans. [from net reduced slightly from gross+work] 1 n. The antisynergetic interconnection of noncompatible nodal systems divided by a common protocol. 2 v. trans. To reduce [net] the work rate (of a computing resource) by adding it to a network. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Exporting from .mdb Access files
On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Paul Makepeace wrote: Are there any free tools for extracting tables etc from MS Access databases? I'm not looking for ODBC connections to Access installations, rather actual parsing+dumping tools so I can re-import into say Pg. Closest I've found is http://www.csrobins.com/mdb2txt.htm which unfortunately is a closed Windows program. It doesn't quite seem to work with Wine, popping up a usage dialog each time it's run (mailed the author). Why is ODBC not an option? I thought that was the preferred protocol for exchanging data among Access, Excel, SQL Server (et al?). It seems like if you can get an instance of Access running with the file, you should be able to use ODBC to extract the data. For that matter, if you can run Access then I'm pretty sure you can avoid ODBC by saving the tables into Excel format (I'm pretty sure there's an option for this; at least, there used to be an option...) and then using Spreadsheet::ParseExcel to extract the data fro the resulting .xls file. Of course, running Access itself might be a pain under Wine... :-/ -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/resume/ LP, n. [Gramophonic abbrev: Long Playing -- sometimes confused, understandably, with the abbreviation for LINEAR PROGRAMMING.] The recording of Paul Erdos's recitation of e to 80,000 places, available in Hungarian, German, Russian, Hebrew, and English. The rare, collectible 1972 edition has a small error in the 34,034th digit. See also DIGITAL RECORDING; OVERLOADING. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Siesta party
On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Dave Cross wrote: From: Nigel Rantor [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 8/14/03 10:39:33 AM please realise that top posting is The One True Way(tm) for short posts You'll find that a controversial opinion round these parts. I'm sure it was a typo for The One Truly Awful Way. Right, Nigel? :) -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] terminology, n. Both the nomenclatura and its catastrophic side-effects. See also ONOMANCY; WINDOWS. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Reordering Arrays.
On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Mark Fowler wrote: On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Nicholas Clark wrote: I'm not convinced that it's a great idea to sit it in a top level namespace. Is it about cartography? Or data manipulation? List::Maptastic? The function in question does matrix rotation -- that's math/data manipulation. Unless the other functionality is specifically about cartography, a more usage-neutral namespace might be better. IMO. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Messing with spammers
On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Nicholas Clark wrote: IIRC there's at least one domain where warez and porn were A records for 127.0.0.1, but I forget which (or it has dropped those records) % nslookup warez.sevenroot.org Server: boston1-qwest.bellatlantic.net Address: 151.203.0.84 Non-authoritative answer: Name:warez.sevenroot.org Address: 127.0.0.1 I blame Darren. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [ANNOUNCE] YAPC::Europe Auction
On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Mark Fowler wrote: On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Mark Fowler wrote: Well, we can have a shot at this this year at the auction...the only condition is that London.pm have to risk the same arrangement. [So if we win, Paris.pm have to change their page to English for a whole month. If Paris.pm win, we have to change their page to French for a whole month.] [re-inserted -- c.d.] Maybe I didn't stress this bit enough. If we don't raise enough cash to beat the french, our web page will be written in french for a month (well, the front page.) Ahh... here I was thinking it was a heads I win, tails you lose deal :) -- Chris Devers
Re: State of the Onion
On Mon, 14 Jul 2003, Alex Hudson wrote: I did see somewhere that the SotO speech was going to get posted online in mp3/ogg or something, but haven't seen it go up anywhere yet. Does anyone know for definite if and when it will be posted? ...? So is this a not available yet, please be patient then? From the looks of -- http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=70412cid=6398447 -- Chromatic seems to not have had the time to do it yet. Hrm... -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] best-last search, n. Known in Ireland as the Polish search; and in Poland as the Irish search. See also ETHNOLOGY -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Hundredweight was Re: UK Money, again
On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, Tom Hukins wrote:
I wonder what the value should be for a trilobyte.
/me, impressed by this riff, tries to pick up from there...
$ grep 'byte$' /usr/share/dict/words
presbyte
$ dict presbyte
1 definition found
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Presbyte \Presbyte\, n. [Gr. ? an old man.]
Same as {Presbyope}.
$ dict presbyope
2 definitions found
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Presbyope \Presby*ope\, n. (Med.)
One who has presbyopia; a farsighted person.
From WordNet (r) 1.7 [wn]:
presbyope
n : a person with presbyopia; someone who is farsighted
resulting from the progressive loss with aging of the
elasticity of the crystalline lens
$
/me gives up
So, how 'bout them milli-Helens?
--
Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://devers.homeip.net:8080/resume/
Turing machine, n. [After Alan M. Turing (1912-1954), British
mathematician and computer pioneer.]
The earliest but still the fastest and most reliable computing system
ever conceived. Dis maschine vill run und run (K. Godel).
-- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Andrew Beattie wrote: Microsoft consider telnet to be part of sfu, so when your 90 days are up you loose [the rather sucky] MS telnet. If it matters to you to have telnet logins to a Windows box, you can also get it via IIS. I don't rememeber the details of how it's set up, but I have played around with it and it worked tolerably well. Granted, the fact that IIS supports Telnet may be misconstrued as a bug, not a feature... -- Chris Devers
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Andrew Beattie wrote: Microsoft consider telnet to be part of sfu, so when your 90 days are up you loose [the rather sucky] MS telnet. If it matters to you to have telnet logins to a Windows box, you can also get it via IIS. I don't rememeber the details of how it's set up, but I have played around with it and it worked tolerably well. Granted, the fact that IIS supports Telnet may be misconstrued as a bug, not a feature... -- Chris Devers
Re: UK money, again (again)
On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Iain Tatch wrote: Pick up a handful of Merkin change and you get things that say Nickel, Dime, Quarter with no other clue as to their monetary value. You don't have any US change handy, do you? :) penny ($0.01): says ONE CENT nickel ($0.05): says FIVE CENTS dime($0.10): says ONE DIME (okay, you got this one) quarter ($0.25): says QUARTER DOLLAR (close, but more descriptive) For those of us not brought up in the USA, even if you're aware that one's 5c and the other 10c, there's no obvious way to get from the names nickel and dime to their monetary values. But nickel is a nickname, just like quid or bob, and dime, while apparently official, does seem to imply 1/10 of a dollar -- if you're going to be that analytical about it, deducing the value of that coin based on the name isn't impossible. Interestingly, the values are all noted on what I assumed was the back of each coin, but I seem to recall a rule that the side with a value written *is* the side with value, i.e. if you could somehow slice the coin in half, the side without dime written on it (or whatever) would be without value as currency. This is vaguely relevant as the quarter has been having it's first redesign in 25 years or so, with the eagle back (which, like the others, has the value and so is probably actually the front) being replaced by a logo for each of the 50 states, with 5 states a year being put into circulation for the next decade or so. Part of the redesign meant putting the words quarter dollar on the front, by Washington's head, instead of the other side where it had been for decades. Apparently this was a big deal to the treasury numismaniacs... -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/ nanotechnology, n. A quark with an outboard motor. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: UK Moneyngton, again
On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Ian Malpass wrote: On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, muppet wrote: Ian Malpass said: On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Nicholas Clark wrote: Meanwhile, which is heavier, an ounce of feathers or an ounce of gold? In air, an ounce of gold. In a vacuum, they weigh the same. bzzt! they always weigh the same, because the same mass experiences the same amount of gravitational attraction. air vs vacuum makes a difference for falling speed, which for some reason is of incredible interest to physicists. Bzzt! You're forgetting the effect of uplift in a fluid. Now, of course, we're assuming the feathers are in an uncompressed state But you're forgetting the Manchurian Gambit of 1978, in which it was clearly demonstrated that this very gravitational maneuveur could be used to traverse the vacuum and end up at King's Cross station. Tut tut. -- Chris Devers
Re: UK Money, again
On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, David Cantrell wrote: On Thursday, June 26, 2003 15:19 +0100 Nicholas Clark [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alternatively a chain is 100 links, which sounds almost metric. (Quick, wash your mouth out)(or bah, that sounds too sane to be Imperial) But we're saved by the hundredweight not being a hundred anything. Surely 100 hundreths of a hundredweight should be about right, no? -- Chris Devers
Re: UK Money, again
On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Shevek wrote: A jiffy is 1/HZ of a second, where HZ depends on your architecture. On most x86s, it's 1/100. Unless you're using a Pentium, in which case it's 1/101... -- Chris Devers
Re: UK Moneyngton, again
On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, David Cantrell wrote: On Thursday, June 26, 2003 19:37 +0100 Ian Malpass [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For shame, Mr. Devers! Oh, for shame! The Manchurian Gambit of 1978 has been considered obsolete since 1981, after Lt. Col. Charles Monkfish (rtd.) demonstrated that no feathers could exist at King's Cross station without being attached to a pigeon. In the words of Monkfish himself: Like, duh! This subthread has reminded me - is platform 9.75 permitted under the current rules? My gaming group couldn't decide, so we treat it like a clone of platform 9, but this seems inelegant. My understanding is that it is permitted only if reached by flying car, and seeing as *those* are in such short supply... If anyone asks how you got there, LIE. -- Chris Devers
Re: [OT] Places to go, people to see...
On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Dave Cross wrote: I've been there. It's deeply unpleasant. You can search for hours in vain for a Starbucks [...] Surely that's a feature, not a bug? I dream of a place that remains uncorrupted by Seattle's twin beasts -- Starbucks, and Mudhoney. But no, it's all expensive scalded coffee cheap snotty rock roll... -- Chris Devers
Re: SQL standards
On Sat, 21 Jun 2003, Ben wrote: The standards, especially SQL 99 are just horrible. Because of the mutually entirely different standpoints taken by the major vendors, the standardising body just seemed to opt for a standard which represents the union of all major implementations. Of course, to then be able to allow any vendor to claim 'compliance' with the standard you then have to redefine compliance to mean implements one of a number of different possible semantics for quite core elements. So these are the same people that drafted USB 2.0 then? -- Chris Devers
Re: Number Indicating Participation in London.pm (NIPL) (was:assimilating CPAN)
On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, David H. Adler wrote: On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 03:59:30PM +0100, Dominic Mitchell wrote: Luis Campos de Carvalho wrote: /me hopes native english speakers don't mind about correcting my english errors. Don't worry about it; most english people can't spel anyway. :-) For once, I'm glad I'm an American... :-) In this day age? Viva la France! -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] LINO [Acronym for Last In Never Out.] A stack uncertain whether Pascal or C argument conventions prevail. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: MiddleEarth hacking
On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Lucy McWilliam wrote: www.theonering.net are looking for a voluntary perl hacker. Amusing comments on a postcard. http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/8/1055722384 Except, they're in Kenosha, Wisconsin: http://www.theonering.net/theonering/contact.html OOO weee ooh I hack Perl like Buddy Hobbit... Oh oh and you're Galadriel I don't care what they say about this stupid ring I don't care 'bout that *ahem* -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] NAN [Not A Number] A set of bits known as a number to Rene Magritte but rejected by the IEEE FLOATING-POINT Polizei. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Number Indicating Participation in London.pm (NIPL) (was:assimilating CPAN)
On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, David H. Adler wrote: On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 05:48:16PM -0400, Chris Devers wrote: In this day age? I see everyone missed the For once part... Viva la France! That's Vive. HTH, HAND. :-) I see you missed that creative spelling was the order of the day :) -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] Ibid Ben Passim (?35-?100 B.C.E.) The oft-quoted Eastern scholar. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: The Perl Color?
On Fri, 6 Jun 2003, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: Dominic Mitchell wrote: Lusercop wrote: What's this M-x rubbish? Just take this red pill, labelled emacs.rpm. You'll soon find out how deep the elisp hole really goes. What's that .rpm rubbish ? Just take this red Hat, labelled rpm.rpm. You'll soon find out how deep the python hole really goes. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]grasping but amused drag queen, n. A move in GUI chess. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: The answer to the map and disc problem
On Wed, 28 May 2003, Jasper McCrea wrote: Jasper McCrea wrote: What are the various shakespeare - strange genre adaptations? I can only think of Forbidden Planet offhand. http://uk.imdb.com/Name?Shakespeare,+William to answer my own question. Just to add a couple that I don't see on that list, both The Lion King and Strange Brew are basically just the Hamlet story, redone as Disney cartoon and Wayne's World / Bill Ted style buddy comedy, respectively. Heh -- citing Shakespeare as a source is one thing, but -- 115. Wars of the Roses, The (1989) TV Series (writer) -- goes a bit far, I think :) If there was no copyright expiration date his descendants would be pretty wealthy. Well, yes. But then, he would have made quite a few of his predecessors and their ancestors wealthy as well. Really it's just hypothetical passing of money from one generation to the next. Or something like that. :) -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] Q: What is the difference between a duck? A: One leg is both the same.
Re: CPAN site
On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Nicholas Clark wrote: On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 10:39:57PM +0100, Leon Brocard wrote: This is terrible, terrible: http://www.cpan.org/ Indeed yes. All the NMS links point to CPAN :-( All in good fun -- On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 15:08:22 -0600 From: Elaine -HFB- Ashton [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: mongers of perl [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] what the??? [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoth: *hey, when i put in www.cpan.org right now, *I end up at Matt's Script Archive, Inc. *what the heck is that??? APRIL FOOLS...damn, you'd think people would a) try the links or b) check the calendar as 1 April comes only once a year. CHERISH THE HUMOUR! This year's hack is in honour of Dave Cross :) e. ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm :) -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] portable, adj. (Of a program) able to CRASH any OS on any PLATFORM. Compare MACHINE- INDEPENDENT; VENDOR-INDEPENDENT. See also C; UNIX. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: message board software
On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Toby|Wintrmute wrote: I need to setup a message board / forum thing, and I want something that runs on Perl/DBI(::Pg) or Perl/Pg .. (or just a simple dirs+textfiles backend) I haven't heard of it being applied this way, but Request Tracker would probably actually be pretty good at this. Playing into the web vs. nntp comments from later in the thread, one of the aspects of RT that I like the most is that people can interact with it via posts to the web interface, via email to the system, or through a CLI. You get to choose your poison. It uses PostgreSQL or MySQL as the standard data store, and needs about half of CPAN to bootstrap itself. Works nice once you get it up running though. http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/ That it's nice to see someone making a living by writing maintaining a solid open source project, as RT's author has managed to do. Not that that was one of your selection criteria or anything :) -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] verification, n. An optional method of compounding the errors of data entry: e.g., the situation where Jo(e) decides that the 8 that Fred(a) thought was a 3 is really a 5. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Guy Langley/GB/ABNAMRO/NL is out of the office.
On Fri, 28 Mar 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote (in his headers): X-MIMETrack: Serialize by Router on AAAMSR003/HUB/ABNAMRO/NL(Release 5.0.11 |July 24, 2002) at 03/28/2003 02:07:42 AM In other words don't blame this poor bastard -- he has to use Lotus Notes Some day a real rain will come, and liberators will wash this scourge from the earth. In the meantime, the rest of us have to put up with vacation messages. *sigh* -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] LINO [Acronym for Last In Never Out.] A stack uncertain whether Pascal or C argument conventions prevail. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: [OT] PDA recommendation.
On Mon, 24 Mar 2003, Robin Berjon wrote: Moran,B wrote: I've had my Zaurus SL-5500 for a couple of months. Mmmm. (...) My highlights: We have one at work to which we're porting our stuff, I must the commonly expressed highlight here is the very nice graphical port of Nethack. Endless hours of amusement! For PalmOS folks... http://sourceforge.net/projects/roguelike-palm/ There's actually some decent Free stuff form PalmOS on there, as well: http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=223 As a replacement for the built in calculator, I like EasyCalc: http://sourceforge.net/projects/easycalc/ Except that, hilariously, my version has somehow gotten stuck in Espanol, with no obvious way to change it back to English. Uhh... -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] payroll, n. [from pay emolument + roll to stagger, to perform a periodic revolution.] 1 A computer that allows you to see how much more your colleagues are making and, in extreme cases, offers remedial action via discreet program optimization. 2 The most vulnerable business application, and therefore the first to be computerized. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Starting Again
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Randal L. Schwartz wrote: Paul == Paul Makepeace [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Paul ... is where you keep warez, pr0n and rootkits. No, I use . for that. Or maybe .\n :) You keep rootkits, Randal? I thought you weren't supposed to be doing that :) -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Perl 6 Apocalypse 6
On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Paul Mison wrote:
On 11/03/2003 at 08:39 +, Andy Wardley wrote:
In case you haven't already seen it, Apocalypse 6 is out.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/03/07/apocalypse6.html
And Apocalypse 7, too.
It is? I see no mention of it on perl.com, {dev,use}.perl.org, etc.
Do you have a URL?
--
Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Infinity?
On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, darren chamberlain wrote:
* Neil Fryer [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2003-02-28 10:31]:
How do I specify an endless loop using Perl?
while (1) {
# your code here
}
And something much like this will work in most languages.
The catch though is that, depending on what you're running this on, this
can spiral out of control bring your computer to a quivering standstill.
Depending on what you're trying to do in this infinite loop, it may make
sense to put in pauses -- which do a *lot* to bring resource usage back
down here -- or provide a mechanism to exit (though if you eat up all your
memory crash, that will take care of itself).
Hence, something like:
while (1) {
# code here
sleep;
}
Or more idiomatic equivalent.
Unless you want it to run as fast as computationally possible, in which
case by all means skip the pause.
--
Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
target audience, n.
(COMPUTER BOOKS) all breathing primates with $34.95 spare change.
-- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Infinity?
On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, darren chamberlain wrote: Uh... $ perldoc -f sleep sleep EXPR sleep Causes the script to sleep for EXPR seconds, or forever if no EXPR. [...] Almost right. :) Brainfart. I was assuming it worked like the shell sleep command, which ISTR can work without arguments, at least on some platforms. Now that I try it though, it's not working that way on any of the platforms I can get to at the moment (OSX, Linux, Solaris, Irix), so I'm not sure what exactly gave me that impression in the first place. Hrm... But anyway, the bigger point for the less pedantic :) is to be careful that infinite loops like this aren't so tight fast that they end up consuming all your system resources, unless you're trying to smoketest your computer for some reason. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: London.pm Aptitude Test
On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Richard Clyne topquoted thus: -Original Message- From: CyberTiger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Do you like pie ? Do you like kittens ? Do you like Buffy ? Do you like beer ? What is perl ? Ducks!!! Do you like ducks? Funny, I don't remember that one ever coming up before... depends, usually, indifferent to tv shows, yes, 4/5's of a gem That I'm on a different continent, but nobody's perfect... -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] quack quack quack
Re: London.pm Aptitude Test
On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, David Cantrell wrote: On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 04:27:59PM +0100, Philip Newton wrote: On 27 Feb 2003 at 14:25, CyberTiger wrote: Do you like pie ? Do you like kittens ? Do you like Buffy ? Do you like beer ? I'm sure I missed a few things, feel free to add some more :) Do you like ponys? Do you prefer Willow? I suppose, but Howard the Duck was in hindsight more memorable... -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
buffy kaput?
Somehow this seems like the sort of thing London.pm would want to know: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/26/2220223 http://news.google.com/news?num=30hl=enie=UTF-8q=cluster:tv%2ezap2it%2ecom%2fnews%2ftvnewsdaily%2ehtml%3f30318 Consider these urls as potential spoilers, even the headlines themselves. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Helpful subject lines
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Jonathan Peterson wrote: I've always wondered about adding the was Re appendage. I mean, if you are following the old thread it should be obvious what's happening. If you haven't been following the old thread, then it doesn't help you to know that the new one grew out of the old one. *shrug* I liked it because, independent of your particular mail client's threading capabilities (or lack thereof), it allows you to put things in cognitive context. If I'm reading from message to message in Pine, seeing a new subject that quotes old material can be confusing, but having that 'was re:...' text in there puts it back in context without necessarily having to go back out to the message list to see how things were threaded. I suppose it can be redundant, but good redundancy can be good UI, no? -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] cursor address, n. Hello, cursor! -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: books 7015b70ef5c6b8d88f27ffd6d063425e
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, David Cantrell wrote: My apologies for lack of imagination. In future I shall take an md5 hash of the message body and append that to the subject. Like this. Hello spam filters. Keep trying: Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 17:04:29 + From: David Cantrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-4.1 required=5.0 tests=KNOWN_MAILING_LIST,QUOTED_EMAIL_TEXT, SIGNATURE_SHORT_SPARSE,SPAM_PHRASE_00_01,USER_AGENT, USER_AGENT_MUTT,X_AUTH_WARNING version=2.44 X-Spam-Level: Subject: books 7015b70ef5c6b8d88f27ffd6d063425e You don't heven have a positive value there :) -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: perl website on CD
yOn Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Paul Makepeace wrote: I personally know several Dvorak typists and they're all without fail blindingly fast typists (90wpm) and crucially their accuracy is good. Donald Norman's _Psychology of Everyday Things_ has a section on the whole tired qwerty / dvorak debate, basically saying that the supposed benefits of the Dvorak layout -- and the supposed weaknesses of qwerty -- are mostly speculative, and there really hasn't been much persuasive evidence one way or the other. In his tests, as I recall, seasoned qwerty users took a while to readjust to Dvorak, and after relearning how to type again their speed comfort weren't significantly better than they had been before -- to the point that any marginal gains they saw -- if any at all -- were pretty much offset by the chore of having to learn how to type all over again. There may be better research out there, but this is one of the more concrete examples I'm aware of. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] guru, n. [Origin: Hinduism, spiritual guide.] (UNIX) The local Shiva who, being one Vedic man page ahead of the site, can create and destroy as the whim dictates. See also METHODOLOGY; SYSADMIN. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Perversity
On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Paul Johnson wrote: Lusercop said: It also includes all sorts of things that are now deprecated. An (untested) decompiled version of it is: IIRC, Jeffrey shows how it was built up in Mastering Regular Expressions. Does the second edition have an more modern updated version that doesn't use deprecated constructs? How is the second edition, anyway? -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] LP, n. [Gramophonic abbrev: Long Playing -- sometimes confused, understandably, with the abbreviation for LINEAR PROGRAMMING.] The recording of Paul Erdos's recititation of e to 80,000 places, available in Hungarian, German, Russian, Hebrew, and English. The rare, collectible 1972 edition has a small error in the 34,034th digit. See also DIGITAL RECORDING; OVERLOADING. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: YAPC::Europe
On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Piers Cawley wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I won't be doing YAPC::Eu this year, I'm doing YAPC::NA - TPC via the Appalachians, DC, NW, Boston, Vermont, Michigan, Chicago, Minneapolis, North Dakota, the Rockies. Which section of the Apalachans? Going anywhere near NC? Um... most of them. Where's NC? Southern end of the chain, about halfway down the east coast, between Georgia, Virginia et al. The NC section of the Appalachains is really nice (but then, I grew up there, so I would say that :). -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] integral, adj. (Of a solution) accurate to the nearest whole number, as: The PENTIUM has an integral FPU. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Drink for Peace? [[was: [PUB] Spread Eagle, NW1]]
On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
I liked the earlier versions of AIX (among others) where the default
error for make was 'don't know how to make [foo]' thus:
$ make love
don't know how to make love
$
Which always seemed kind of sad to me.
Googling for funny unix commands turns up many, many hits.
Excerpts from the first one:
% make fire
Make: Don't know how to make fire. Stop.
% why not?
No match.
% gotta light?
No match.
% !1984
1984: Event not found. # (on some systems)
% How's my lovemaking?
Unmatched '.
% How would you rate Bush's incompetence?
Unmatched .
% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].
% [Where is my brain?
Missing ].
% ^How did the sex change^ operation go?
Modifier failed.
% ^How did the sex change operation go?
Bad substitute.
% If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many ('s.
% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.
% scan for Arnold Schwarzenegger^J^D
Arnold Schwarzenegger: terminator not found
% cat 'the can of tuna'
cat: cannot open the can of tuna
% rm Quayle-brains
rm: Quayle-brains nonexistent
% cat door: paws too slippery
cat: cannot open door: paws too slippery
% look into my eyes
look: cannot open my eyes
% talk Gorvachev@Kremlin
talk: Kremlin: Can't figure out network address.
% talk Comrade Khruchev
[Your party is not logged on]
% echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln256%Pln256/snlbx]sb3135071790101768542287578439snlbxq'|dc
GET A LIFE!
% ping elvis.rice.edu | awk '{print substr($1,1,5), $2, $3}'
elvis is alive
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/perl/unix.html
There were many, many others on that page. More still on other pages.
It's a little like The Onion -- very funny at first, but repetitive and
slightly boring after a few minutes. As opposed to, say, The Big
Lebowski, which never gets old :)
--
Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
pun moratorium, n.
The doomed campaign to deoxymoronize computer humor.
In particular, the vain attempt to demonstrate that plays on words such
as RISC and UNIX are unfunny if the player is unaware of their
historically built-in playfulness. Other puns assinorum deserving a
well-earned retirement relate PARADIGM, Paradise, and ten sents in
boringly obvious ways: Paradigms Lost and Regained, Brother, can you
s'paradigm? and so on. Likewise, the cash/CACHE thing is surely
bankrupt: Cache-only memory, no checks. Be assured, too, that every
known C homophone has had its weary, C-sick day at the C-Users
Journal's annual C-pun contest: C-through UNIX, C'est C Bon, Holy C,
Proficient C, Vitamin C, O say can you C? e = mC^2, Variations in C,
C-C Rider, Rauchen C?, The Cruel C from Cmantec, Mer-C Beaucoup... ad
nau-C-am.
One of Western Democracy's major flaws is that we cannot, without
pettifogging legal interference, publically hang, draw, and quarter
C-punsters.
-- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: web app stylings
On Sat, 18 Jan 2003, Alex McLintock wrote: Are there any off the shelf MVC systems? I know of TemplateToolkit and other View systems, and DBI::Class and similar can be used for Model side of things, but the controller is always missing in perl. Zope? Yeah yeah, it's mostly Python, but it's pretty good and it seems to do each of these roles (unless I misunderstand the roles -- I haven't really delved into the patterns meme/cult...). Boston.pm was presented with a Zope demonstration six months or so ago, and the audience -- all skeptical Perl nerds, mind you -- were pretty universally impressed. Two of the most common questions after the demo were why doesn't Perl have something like this? and how come we have to rebuild everything from scratch on top of mod_perl? This may be the part where Darren Chamberlain speaks up, as he's part of the group that is implementing a Zope system at work. I'm just the ad monkey... -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] Internet, n. The anarchic mother of all networked networks, dedicated to the memory and upholding the aims of the Catalan and Basque insurgents in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Mother is to be taken here in the Black-American elliptical sense. Apart from a few O'Reilly Associates authors, nobody really understands or needs to know how Internet works (stretching the word works beyond its usual semantic web). Individual users are content to acquire access via a chain of generous nodal gateways, each of which may or may not form part of the user's Internet address. The Catch-22 is that inter-communication is rarely possible until either party has successfully reached the other. A typical Internet message, therefore, consists of a two-page header listing each store-and-forward gateway routing (with many disconcerting Apparently-to strings), followed by a paintive one-liner: Let me know if you don't receive this. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: What is london.pm?
On Thu, 2 Jan 2003, David H. Adler wrote: Try dha. :-) heh heh... Chris Devers turns up almost nothing, though the first one is good :) chris devers is sinner against the laws of usenix chris devers is in chris devers is probably on we Devers turns up more, but they seem to all be about Gail Devers, US track field athlete in the summer olympics a few years ago. Snipping a bit: devers is looking for her first gold medal in the 100 devers is in perpetual motion devers is approximately 318 devers is so darn hot right now devers is no exception devers is literacy devers is not responsible for the contents of any site but its own devers is at the junction of us highway 90 and state highway 61 devers is affected by hitting the barriers devers is president of the devers group devers is the 1993 and 1997 titlist devers is the two devers is a farmhouse of provence whose oldest buildings date back to the beginning of the last century devers is not available in canada Guessing which I think are the funniest is an exercise for the reader :) -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] email, e-mail n. \pronounced ee-mail\ Abbrev. electronic mail. A picaresque novella (also known as the header) listing the sequence of gateways, nodes, mailers, and protocols responsible for garbling the appended one line message. The OED has a semi-prophetic citation: emailed (1480) ...arranged in net or open work. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Re: Crazy maths proof
On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Mark Fowler wrote: I don't know, showing this to a load of Perl coders. Of course we're not going to try and work it out, we're going to try and hack the system. This is such an incitement for a script that sends all the numbers from one to hundred thousand to the list ;-) Surprisingly good word puzzle heard on pop radio this weekend: Consider the word wored 'chewed'. It has two personal pronouns in it -- 'he' and 'we'. Can you find a six letter word that has six pronouns it it? Given that there's only a handful of personal pronouns to begin with, it seems like this should be not-too-hard, but I haven't yet figured it out. Correct answers sent to 98.5 fm in Boston by Monday will possibly get you free movie tickets or Britney Spears tickets or some such nonsense, but I think the puzzle is more interesting than the prize, personally :) -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: books
On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, David Cantrell wrote: The following are avaialbe now or over the next month or so if anyone who's not on the naughty list fancies taking a stab at reviewing them. Aye, sir. Apache 3e http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/apache3/ Perl Graphics Programming http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlgp/ Programming Web Services with Perl http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pwebserperl/ Essential System Administration Pocket Reference http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esapr/ Running Linux 4e http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/runux4/ Objective-C Pocket Reference http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/objectcpr/ 802.11 Security http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/80211security/ Managing RAID on Linux http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mraidlinux/ Any of the above still available (sorted by preference)? -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: IRC
On Sun, 24 Nov 2002, Alex McLintock wrote: I was thinking of installing an IRC client on my Win NT4 box to chat to the Londonpm'ers ... but the one I chose at random crashes when trying to talk to the official server. You conspicuously don't mention which one you tried. I've always like mIRC, but opinions here are a dime a dozen... -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: re IRC
On Sun, 24 Nov 2002, Lusercop wrote: A: No Q: Do I like top-posted messages? Q: Is netiquette important? A: Yes. Q: Are messages like this a good example of proper netiquette? A: No. Q: Does anyone care what message posting style you prefer? A: Doubtful. Q: Did anyone ask you to be the grand enforcer of list etiquette? A: I'm quite sure no one did. Please keep this stuff offlist, LC. The cure is far worse than the ailment. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: MySQL - PostgreSQL migration
On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Walt Mankowski wrote: On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 11:39:45AM -, Mark Buckle wrote: Good, is there any real commercial benefit to an individual acquiring a good knowledge of PostgreSQL rather than Oracle SQLServer ? Be careful with your terminology. Oracle is Oracle; SQL Server is Microsoft's RDBMS. Having said that, the main commercial benefit is that there are a hell of a lot more Oracle shops in the world than PostgreSQL shops. But is it safe to say that in some ways -- and for most things that one would be likely to do while learning at home, perhaps *all* ways -- Oracle and PostgreSQL can be treated as if they are interchangeable? Put another way, Oracle skills may be more marketable, but paying for the right licenses hardware to learn Oracle may be unfeasible for most. If one practices with a toy PgSQL database installation, will that help much when trying to work with Oracle later? Granted, explaining this to the HR drones may be an effective filter against finding jobs, but it seems like something that techies would be more prone to appreciate. Put another way, a little bird tells me that a certain large [huge, no really] east coast (USA) newspaper uses Oracle for their web site's live ad delivery, but clones all the data in-house on near-identical PostgreSQL servers, and apparently it works quite well for them -- to the extent that in principle they should be able to run the same ad system all with PostgreSQL servers if they ever chose to do so. I've never read any PostgreSQL / SQL Server comparisons. Supposedly SQL Server is pretty nice software, but it would be interesting to see a comparison of it, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and maybe some of the others [DB2, Sybase, and so on]. In particular, and more off-topic for L.pm, it would be interesting to see how well these engines do when running Perl against them. But of course, because the big vendors seem to have terminal benchmark-a-phobia, this never seems to be available... -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
