Re: Should I work in the US or the UK? - which pays best?
ohai london.pm. Long time, no see. On 13 December 2011 13:01, Simon Wistow si...@thegestalt.org wrote: So, I'll bite. This is based on my last 4 years working in SF. YMMV, IANAL etc etc. For what it's worth. I still live out here, don't have any plans to come back to London any time soon, if ever. Make of that what you will. Mostly I have no quibbles with Simon's post, even though I've only been here a little over a year and can't imagine living here for more than the six years two H-1B visas give me (if that). So, some little additions. The Location SF seems more like a big city stuffed into a small city's footprint. It's much easier to get around (terrible public transport not withstanding). It's much easier to move between parts of the city and to randomly bump into people. Nearby we have world class mountain sports, wine country, surfing, diving, hiking, mountain biking, the desert. For me, as a culture vulture, SF doesn't cut it. SFMOMA is the size of, what, the Wallace Collection? As for a really world class museum, there isn't one, whereas London has the two Tates, the two National Galleries, the British Museum, the Exhibition Road cluster, the NMM/RGO, and that's just the big free ones that I can remember. As for the wilderness part, that's great if you have a car and can drive. I have not and cannot, and so I'm reliant on the kindness of strangers, which I don't like. Even the Golden Gate Bridge, part of the city, takes about an hour by bus from where I live. (There is a lovely urban forest about twenty minutes from my house, though.) On the other hand, if I'd managed to get to a different part of the US (NYC springs to mind) I'd have a much more London-like experience, grind and culture and all. Both have a reasonably good selection of job opportunities, too. Jobs Salaries seem higher too. Even with various different things taken into account I'd say I'm about 20-30% better off out here. Shame about the holiday (sorry, vacation) time. 15 days is just becoming common as a starting offer, although you could probably be unlucky and get just ten. When five or six of those days are eaten up every time you visit family and friends back home, that's kind of sucky, and more so when you're used to 25. You get roughly the same number of public holidays as the UK, but they're weirdly distributed (no Easter, but Thanksgiving; a holiday in February but nothing for May Day) which takes some getting used to. There are fewer than most EU countries, though, and some companies pick and choose. The UK's habit of Christmas shutdowns is less common here as well. (This reply was partly inspired by seeing the Economist's holiday time chart - http://theeconomist.tumblr.com/post/14173435104/ - which inexplicably lists the US legal minimum as 15 days then notes with the dagger that it's merely common practice. Note that's after ten years, too.) Visas The Politics These both suck. I can imagine bugging out of the country within months if Gingrich gets the White House, UK recession or not. Uncanny Valley To be honest - I miss the British personality as well. That's a longer story though. Also, pubs. Bars just aren't the same. Love your local pub, Londoners. Be cosy in it. Enjoy meat pies and warm beer. -- Paul Mison http://husk.org/
Re: Introduction to Perl for non-programming Mac folk
2008/12/23 Adeola Awoyemi ade...@creativeadea.com: On 23/12/08 10:41, Bower, Martin (LBB-LO) wrote: How can you turn a script into a clickable icon on the desktop ? Wrap it in an AppleScript that does a: do shell script /path/to/script.pl and save is as a clickable .app There are also apps that do this with various levels of panache, mainly in handling how arguments are passed to the script. http://www.bluem.net/downloads/pashua_en/ - Pashua ist a tool for creating native Aqua dialog windows for Perl, PHP, Tcl, Python, Ruby, Rexx and shell scripts as well as AppleScript. http://cocoadialog.sourceforge.net/ - CocoaDialog is an OS X application that allows the use of common GUI controls such as file selectors, text input, progress bars, yes/no confirmations and more with a command-line application. http://www.sveinbjorn.org/platypus - Platypus is a developer tool for the Mac OS X operating system. It can be used to create native, flawlessly integrated Mac OS X applications from interpreted scripts such as shell scripts or Perl and Python programs. All three are free (as in beer) and two are free as in speech also. -- Paul Mison http://husk.org/
Re: london.pm.org web site - facelifted
2008/12/11 Andy Wardley [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Andy Wardley wrote: I can help there. How about this? http://wardley.org/london.pm.org/ In the finest traditions of pointless bikeshedding, what's 122 Leadenhall Street (its stupid nickname is apparently the Cheesegrater doing in the header? Sure, they've cleared the tower so there's a hole in the ground for it to be built on, but I thought it had been put on hold until the economy recovers. Otherwise, the header is surprisingly geographically accurate, as stylised skylines go. Oh, and I quite like the rest of the page too. -- Paul Mison http://husk.org/
Re: Module dependencies
On 08/09/2003 at 13:15 +0100, Kate L Pugh wrote: I want to find a nice, visual, automatic way of looking at my modules' dependencies. [snip] I wonder how far a combination of Module::ScanDeps and Module::CoreList and a bit of wrapper code would get you? http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Module::ScanDeps.pm http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Module::CoreList -- :: paul :: historic light cone
Re: Dave and Religion
On 05/09/2003 at 12:54 +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote: snip well written and interesting email about religion When it comes to religion I think Hitler had some interesting ideas. Love it :-) What a nice generic way to end arguments before they've started :-) It would be if he understood what Godwin's Law actually said. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/legends/godwin/ One of the most famous pieces of Usenet trivia out there is if you mention Hitler or Nazis in a post, you've automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in. Known as Godwin's Law, this rule of Usenet has a long and sordid history on the network - and is absolutely wrong. I suppose you can make an argument that because noobdy understands the original sense of the law, that the new sense should take precendence. Of course if thats you're vue then u can allow alot of things to go horribly rong. I would of thort that was silly. :-) -- :: paul :: historic light cone
Re: Dave and Religion
On 05/09/2003 at 18:29 +0200, Robin Berjon wrote: Jason Clifford wrote: She's no more a God than Madonna is. Do those who adore Madonna generally do so as a god? Dunno. She sure looks good in some of those leather outfits. On the other hand, in the latest video she really manages to look her age. This wouldn't be so bad if she was wearing any clothes, but sadly she's prancing about in a negligee and a couple of really terrifying sundresses. Come to think of it, most of her recent videos have been utter rubbish. Ray of Light was a terrible bluescreen+timelapse horrorshow, and the one in front of the bluescreen prairie was equally bad. As for the Ali G half-animated one; please. Not in front of the children. Let's not even start on the sub-Tatu girls-kissing stunt at the VMA last week. Please, start acting your age. Not that Mick Jagger is any better. At least he doesn't pop up on the music TV channels so often, though. -- :: paul :: historic light cone
Re: Ob-buffy
On 03/09/2003 at 17:16 +0200, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: Indeed BtVS is, at a rarely-precedented level, the work of one man. It's clear, when watching interviews of the scenarists or other members of the team, that Whedon had control over every aspect of the show. I know no other example of this on TV, except McGoohan and the Prisoner. Babylon 5 is an obvious counter-example, given JMS wrote most of the three central seasons single-handed as well as the overarching five-year arc. (Buffy, in so far as it had arcs, were single-season only. Nowhere near as impressive. Whedon wrote far fewer episodes too.) I don't think either Whedon or Straczynski had particularly strong bargaining powers positions with the studios, either. -- :: paul :: historic light cone
Re: compression (was: gzipping your websites)
On 01/09/2003 at 12:35 -0400, Chris Devers wrote: Unfortunately WinZip does not unzip bzip2 [trolltech.com] bzip2 is much, much slower than gzip, but doesn't provide significantly smaller files, at least according to some benchmarks on Jeremy Zawodny's site: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000953.html So, apart from geeky dickwaving (I use bzip2 not gzip, because all my cool Linux pals told me it was better), why use it at all? Mind you, given PKZip and Winzip are currently touting incompatible versions of encryption with Zip archives, distinguished by the different extensions .zip and, er, .zip, maybe everyone should use .gz instead. Hmm, or maybe .sit files. Hem. -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: compression (was: gzipping your websites)
On 01/09/2003 at 20:26 +0100, Roger Burton West wrote: How often do you serve a MySQL file that's 2.5GB uncompressed? Is this typical of most web applications? If not, why bring in that particular benchmark in the first place? It was a page I'd seen recently and I thought that the information it included, despite being (admittedly) not tightly focussed on the exact area under discussion, was interesting, and because conversations on a number of IRC channels (including #london.pm, where someone else agreed that bzip2 was 'overrated', and #2lmc, who dissected it in typical abrasive style [0]). I lack the time or inclination to perform rigorous benchmarks on serving gzip against uncompressed files, let alone trying bzip2 or anything so rampantly unsupported. However, here's some rampantly unfair tests on a text file: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ time gzip File-Type.html real0m0.557s user0m0.010s sys 0m0.010s [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ time bzip2 File-Type.html real0m0.033s user0m0.010s sys 0m0.020s [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ ls -l File-Type.html* -rw-r--r--1 blech 3631 Sep 1 20:51 File-Type.html -rw-r--r--1 blech 1370 Sep 1 20:49 File-Type.html.gz -rw-r--r--1 blech 1449 Sep 1 20:49 File-Type.html.bz2 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. [0] http://2lmc.org/spool/id/3356 -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: OSX - 'the real question'
On 20/08/2003 at 23:34 -0400, Tara L Andrews wrote: On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 11:17:14AM +0100, Sam Vilain wrote: I think a better way to put this is that all changes to the OS owned directories should be made through the OS' native packaging system. 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. Personally this doesn't bother me, but then I don't futz with that nasty Unix stuff under the hood of Mac OS X very much either. On the other hand, apparently Panther has some sort of integrated ports/fink thing. This might help. On the gripping hand, new Perl installs are nicely versioned for Darwin, so installing Perls other than the system Perl will be easier. [0] other than, possibly, reading the receipt file (/Library/Receipts) [1] [0] + and doing an rm manually -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: Messing with spammers
On 05/08/2003 at 10:28 +0100, Earle Martin wrote: [Spam with embedded URLs] prompted me to take five minutes and write this. Filters That Fight Back: http://www.paulgraham.com/ffb.html via slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/10/1619206 Comments? -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: iCal meetings?
On 28/07/2003 at 10:06 +0100, Steve Purkis wrote: Anybody ever think of publishing the london.pm meets as an .ics file on the website? Unfortunately the maths for 'the thursday after the first wednesday' isn't supported by iCal ATM ;) Yes. It's not official, and since I really don't like iCal much, and I don't promise it's at all up to date. But: http://husk.org/misc/irc/london.pm.ics Now, if only there were nice DateTime modules to play with the ics format. (The people I'm prodding with this know who I am.) -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: fork()ing in perl
On 18/07/2003 at 14:28 +0100, Chisel Wright wrote: I've got a colleague here in the orifice, and between us we know how to use fork() but don't understand it as well as we'd like. The [EMAIL PROTECTED] list just had a fairly long thread about threading, (lazy) forking and Perl. You may find it useful, or not. http://groups.google.com/groups?th=f76f7cd2c0767055 -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: Expletives (was Eurocracy sucks)
On 15/07/2003 at 01:03 +0100, Ivor Williams wrote: Interestingly enough, this message, and at least four of the replies to it have tripped the corporate dodgy word detector on-site where I am working (lurking). Whilst I fully concur with Earle's sentiments about the attitude of the French authorities towards his wife, I am wondering whether to unsubscribe from this list at work. Perhaps that's a good idea. Either that, or collect it via a method other than your employee's servers. Personally I gave up on work subscriptions to lists after a rather unpleasant morning moving all my mailing lists when a company went bust, and all lists go to my personal addresses (and are collected at work over SSL-enabled POP, although I've also used SSH tunnels). I thought that this list was more or less work-safe and clean, now I am not so sure. Really? (Swearwords starred to protect the mail-filtered, hopefully. Obviously they weren't starred in the grep query. That would be silly.) [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ grep 'f*ck' london.pm.mbox | wc -l 216 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ grep 'c*nt' london.pm.mbox | wc -l 12 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ grep 'sh*t' london.pm.mbox | wc -l 293 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ grep 'cr*p' london.pm.mbox | wc -l 466 That's over the entire two-year history in the current pipermail archival mbox. So it's not too bad (that's, what, two severe swear-words a week, and of course I didn't do anything to remove quoted words), but it's not exactly angelic either. One of the list admins certainly has no problem swearing (quite possibly Not Safe For Work): http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20020218/010195.html -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: State of Onion 2003 MP3?
On 09/07/2003 at 12:52 +0100, Steve Mynott wrote: Subject says it all. Does this exist? http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=70412pid=6398001 says tomorrow, which might well be our today. -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: archives (was Re: YAPC hotels)
On 09/07/2003 at 11:31 +0100, Richard Clamp wrote: On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 11:19:35AM +0100, R.Dobson wrote: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20030707/020112.html *slight mumblings about pipermail* You can't mumble slightly about archiving software without expecting me to mumble slightly about the mariachi archive I occasionally poke back to currentness: http://london.pm.org/~blech/arch/london.pm/ http://london.pm.org/~blech/arch/london.pm/2003/07/07/74eac159.html http://london.pm.org/~blech/arch/london.pm/2003/07/07/2f2f91bd.html However, while it's all very pretty, it takes a while even to do incremental updates: about half an hour total. That's with all the bells and whistles, and with a slightly old copy of the code. (Sadly penderel doesn't have svn, so I can't keep it up to date as easily as I'd like.) This means that the mariachi archive won't be kept up to date with cron for the moment. -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: UK money, again (again)
On 02/07/2003 at 14:48 +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 02:52:53PM +0100, Paul Mison wrote: Of course, the US has to give their coins cutesy names, just to LOL. You'll have to try harder than that. Shilling, bob, pony, monkey, quid, godiva, ton, large one, .. The US has nothing on the UK here. None of which would be found on the Royal Mint page, whereas dimes, nickels and quarters are official names (they're on the Treasury page I linked to in the previous email). As I said, we used to have nearly-official names (thrupenny bit) but we don't any more; a twenty pence piece is only known as, well, a twenty pence piece. Sure, there's lots of slang, but that's different. -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
UK money, again (again)
On 26/06/2003 at 10:19 -0300, Luis Campos de Carvalho wrote: This is the first time I meet a monetary system that is not based on the relation 100 - 50 - 20 - 10 - 5 - 1 - 0.50 - 0.25 - 0.10 - 0.01 As other people have mentioned, although not explicitly, the British pound (and the Euro) have different sub-unit currency subdivisions, ie: 100 50 20 10 5 2 1 http://www.royalmint.com/talk/specifications.asp http://www.eurocoins.co.uk/ireland.html as opposed to the US model: 100 50 25 10 5 1 http://www.usmint.gov/faqs/circulating_coins/index.cfm?action=faq_circulating_coin Of course, the US has to give their coins cutesy names, just to confuse people; a habit that's thankfully died out here (cf previous discussion of florins). I vaguely recall seeing a survey that recommended an 18/100 unit coin as the optimum for currencies, but the mental arithmetic would be horrific. I don't know if they pronounced on whether 20 is better than 25 or not, but it's interesting that the US doesn't issue 25 dollar bills. -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: UK money, again
On 26/06/2003 at 15:47 +0100, Iain Tatch wrote: On Thursday, June 26, 2003, 3:27:21 PM, Nicholas Clark wrote: Has the inscription Standing on the shoulders of giants around the edge. I think this one's broke. It's got Deoxyribonucleic Acid written round the edge. And a rather cool double helix printed on the tails side. Hmm I quite like that. I'll try to remember to put it to one side. It's a special commemorative edition. They come out periodically for high value coins (these days, that's 2 pound and 50 pence) to mark some anniversary. This one is for the 50th anniversary of the decoding of the structure of, um, well, DNA. http://www.royalmint.com/news/pnewsitem.asp?news_id=19 Pound coins have their own rotating series of national designs, the newest set of which (using bridges, just like Euro notes) have been previewed: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-718623,00.html http://2lmc.org/spool/id/2806 has more coin geeking and a slight jab at the lack of interesting bridges in Northern Ireland. -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: MS Office, Klingon Edition
On 08/06/2003 at 11:22 +0100, Ben wrote: On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 10:43:59PM -0400, R. Geoffrey Avery wrote: But if you are a Klingon with mental health problems, induced by Microsoft or otherwise, you should go to Oregon where they will have an interpreter at (the) hospital for you. This hasn't made it on to snopes yet, I think, but there's an excellent debunking of this latest urban myth on David Farbers IP (www.interesting-people.org) list. http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/klingon.asp However, when the story was originally being rampantly linked to from weblogs, Kuroshin hosted a very good account of how the original story in an Oregon paper was corrupted by CNN then took on a life of its own. http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/West/05/10/offbeat.klingon.interpreter/index.html http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/track.asp?id=5497222 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/5/11/7032/18347 -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: international beer summit
On 05/06/2003 at 10:22 +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 11:43:43PM -0400, Perrin Harkins said: Great! I'll be there from the 22nd through the 28th and have no plans yet. I'm going to rent an apartment with some friends in Clerkenwell. Nearest underground is Farringdon and Chancery Lane. I smell a trip to the Jerusalem Tavern. Well, yes, it's close to where Perrin is staying, and it's a nice pub. However, for a meeting involving more than about four people, it's too small, unless you're able to nab the large table at the back. (Even then, there's a lot of shuffling about as people go to the bar, and so on). The Yorkshire Grey isn't that far up the road, and is much larger, if you're going to force me to pick a pub around there. I'm sure other people could suggest something better, though. -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
April social: photos
I've trimmed and thumbnailed a few of the photos I took on Thursday. http://husk.org/pics/x/people/london.pm_2003-04-03 -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: [PUB] Green Man, Marylebone, big function room
On 04/04/2003 at 09:05 +0100, Jason Clifford wrote: On Thu, 3 Apr 2003, Kate L Pugh wrote: On the way home I remembered the Green Man, which is near Great Portland Street and Regent's Park tubes, and has a huge function room We use the Green Man for beer after GLLUG meetings and it is very good. I'd recommend giving it a try. UKBloggers met there in February, so evidently it's doing something right for the 'large groups of people thing'. (Not that I was there, but I didn't see any complaints about it in the subsequent days.) On the other hand, maybe Messrs Wistow and Batistoni will regard it as tainted. -- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
Re: RegEx for UK Postal Codes
On 01/04/2003 at 11:47 +0100, Jon Reades wrote:
So far my regex looks like this (using the {} notation for consistency
and readability):
m/[A-Z]{1,2}\d{1,2}[A-Z]{0,1}\W\d{1,1}[A-Z]{2,2}/
there's the interesting additional fact that C I K M O V cannot be
used in the incode (the letters that come after the digit on the
right-hand side).
Of course, it doesn't tell me if this is a rule, or just a general
statement of fact, but that could presumably help in validating
addresses using a regex.
I'd assume that it's an enforced rule, for two reasons. Firstly, the
letters are probably chosen such that it's hard for the Post Office's
OCR machines to get confused with bad handwriting, and secondly, the
Post Office are the only organisation that can assign postcodes.
However, I'm not sure if it's really worth
the additional effort and complexity in the regex to include this.
It's not that much more complex, especially if you use the
whitespace-aware /x flag (like Peter did in the other branch of this
thread):
Also, is 0 allowed as the first digit? I've never seen a postcode
like N0; even special postcodes like the Houses of Parliament tend to
either have 1 or 99. If that's a rule (and I'm not sure), then
Peter's version becomes:
m/
[A-Z]{1,2}
[1-9][0-9]?
[A-Z]?
\W
\d
[ABD-HJLNP-UW-Z]{2}
/x
If you preferred not to have the dashes, you could spell that out in full:
[ABDEFGHJLNPQRSTUWXYZ]{2}
There might be a nicer way of saying A-Z but not CIKMOV. But I don't know it.
If any of my ex-co-workers at UMS are reading, I'm sure they know
more about the subject than is healthy.
--
:: paul
:: complies with canandian cs1471 protocol
Re: RegEx for UK Postal Codes
On 01/04/2003 at 15:43 +0100, Jon Reades wrote:
2. Outcodes of the form [A-Z]{1,2}\d[A-Z] may in fact only apply to
London-area addresses for the time being.
I think this is right, but can't confirm it.
In fact, in a list of postcodes that I found there appeared to be only
three addresses in this format:
- Tower of London,Greater London,EC3R
- Westminster Abbey,Greater London,SW1A
- Marylebone,Greater London,W1M
I know this is wrong, because I work in EC2A (around Old Street), and
used to work in WC1A (around Holborn). However, I can't give you a
full list of such codes.
--
:: paul
:: complies with canandian cs1471 protocol
Re: CPAN site
On 31/03/2003 at 22:39 +0100, Leon Brocard wrote: This is terrible, terrible: http://www.cpan.org/ Out of interest, what do people get from www.cpan.org? I only ever use search.cpan.org myself. What am I missing? (Please no Matt's Scripts jokes, ta. April Fools has been tedious enough already.) -- :: paul :: complies with canandian cs1471 protocol
Re: [OT] Wierd HTML/Table/Image problem with IE6
On 20/03/2003 at 09:15 +, Andy Williams \(IMAP HILLWAY\) wrote: I've done (well a designer did anyway) some html that does some VERY weird things. When it initially loads some of the images apear to be missing. I hit refresh and some of them appear I hit refresh again and some more appear... on the fourth refresh the screen looks how it was designed... hit it again and we go back to the start! This doesn't happen in Netscape. Were the images created in Photoshop 7? It embeds XML colour profile information that IE6 (most usually on Win XP) chokes on. http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003j8d -- :: paul :: complies with canandian cs1471 protocol
Re: dim sum
On 20/03/2003 at 14:39 +, Greg McCarroll wrote: * S Watkins ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Sounds intersting, and I'm bored. Which website? hmm, i can't find it on grubstreet or london.pm , anyway its on gerrard place in china town, you can't miss it It's not listed on http://london.pm.org/meetings/, but it is on http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/ (a bare directory index? Whoopsie [0]). http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/new-world.html From that, http://grault.net/grubstreet/?Category_Chinese_Food, although http://grault.net/cgi-bin/grubstreet.pl?Category_Chinese_Food seems to work better. [0] Perhaps someone wants to work out how to dynamically generate nice, grouped indexes based on that semantically rich XML we use? [1] [1] (NARRATOR wanders off mutteringly darkly about insanity, XML, TT, grand plans that never come to fruition, and how the NARRATOR doesn't damned well care enough any more.) -- :: paul :: complies with canandian cs1471 protocol
Re: [OT] PDA recommendation.
On 17/03/2003 at 11:45 +, Andy Williams \(IMAP HILLWAY\) wrote: Hi, I've decided to enter the 21st century and buy a PDA. Does anyone have any recommendations? As a minimum I'll need the follwoing: 1) Get at my email using my mobile phone as the modem. I guess Bluetooth is the best way of doing this. 2) Read Word and Excel docs that people keep sending me g!! 3) Read PDF docs 4) Usual calendar type stuff. 5) Games for those boring train journeys :) Palm Tungsten Ts look nice (ie I don't have one), and do the Bluetooth thing. Down to £ 300, and come with a bundle of Documents to Go, I believe. So do some of the Sony handhelds, but they don't come with Bluetooth until they get very expensive indeed. If you're happy using black and white and infrared, you can do all this with pretty much any low end Palm OS machine, but make sure Documents to Go gets bundled. iPaqs and their Pocket PC brethren might be worth a look if you need bigger devices, and are a Windows user. (afaik syncing to non-Windows platforms is a pain.) -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: Amazon.co.uk
On 13/03/2003 at 18:38 +, Alex McLintock wrote: It seems like you can now access Amazon.co.uk with a webservices interface similar to amazon.com It's exactly the same interface. If you have code that accesses amazon.com, all you need to do to access amazon.co.uk instead is pass in locale=uk as an appended parameter. (Actually, Andy McFarland, who looked at this on Wednesday when I heard about this change, reports that at the moment it appears to be merely looking to see if locale is set. This makes sense, as uk is the only supported one, but I expect this will change if and when other non-US sites get web services support.) I hope Andy can be persuaded to put a snippet of sample code here. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: iCal Re: website update needed
On 07/03/2003 at 15:13 +, Mark Fowler wrote: There's an utterly unofficial .ics that I intermittently hit with iCal at http://husk.org/misc/irc/london.pm.ics [updated this morning, if you want to refresh it] So how do I parse these files from Perl then? It'd be nice if I could just upload iCal stuff to a website and then as if by magic have it rendered into something nice for people who can't use an ics feed. The best open source [0] iCal to web site parser is in PHP; PHP iCalendar is fairly mature and works reasonably well, from what I hear. http://phpicalendar.sourceforge.net/nuke/ There are resources to play with ics/ical (note the lack of cap) files in Perl, but they're rather experimental still, and I don't know what they are off the top of my head (although they're related to Reefknot, I believe). I think Alex Mclean has been playing with them, amongst other people, to drop him in it. [0] Apple's .mac site uses WebObjects, unsurprisingly enough. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: website update needed
On 06/03/2003 at 09:04 -0800, Paul Sharpe wrote: Alex McLintock wrote: Suggestion: There is a link to the 2002 calendar of events, but nothing for 2003. Even if no one can create a 2003 calendar perhaps the old link should be removed. I believe Mark is planning some overarching XML based fix for the site. I decided not to go through that pain and slung up the 2002 calendar. However, you're probably right; the old one should go. If someone can maintain the calendar I can put it on http://calendar.russellsharpe.com/ All you need to do is keep it up-to-date in evolution. There's an utterly unofficial .ics that I intermittently hit with iCal at http://husk.org/misc/irc/london.pm.ics However, it doesn't have meeting locations, merely dates. It's not likely to have, either, but feel free to use it as the base for one that does. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: [buffy] is leaving?
On 13/02/2003 at 14:14 +, Andrew Wilson wrote: Let's face it, season six was complete shite. This season (seven) is vastly improved and they've only broadcast four episodes so far. Season six was great. Already the BBC viewers have seen the beginning of one of the great dysfunctional relationships in TV history (Buffy and Spike) and there's better to come. (Spoilers are still in effect, remember, kids. Otherwise I'd go into more detail.) Mind you, I'm a black-clad grumpy old bugger, so evidently I'm going to like it. The two and a half out of the first four of season seven that I've seen so far are distinctly lacklustre in comparison. While we're on the subject of Buffy, although you'll need to be a little careful, boils and burning torment is a great site. Here's their review of the infamous 'Willow gets hooked on magic' episode (on BBC2 a fortnight or so ago): http://www.boilsandblindingtorment.com/Wrecked.htm Also, because it's now out of spoiler territory, here's london.pm's archived discussion of it from when it was on Sky. http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20020304/010464.html http://dir.salon.com/sex/feature/2001/11/28/buffy/index.html # mentioned -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: Helpful subject lines
On 12/02/2003 at 14:51 +, Mark Fowler wrote: Whee, I'm having fun doing the summary this week. Everything's going all over the place. It'd just make doing the summaries (and finding posts in the archives) easier. Finding posts in the archives would be much easier if there was an X-Suggested-Archive-URL header (or similar), and if archiving software honoured it. Mind you, I said this a year and a half ago and nothing happened about it then either. I just thought I'd chuck the concept about again and see if it stuck any harder this time. On 12/02/2003 at 15:25 +, 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. It does if threads break. Which brings us to... In fact, I daresay clever modern software does message threading based on something smarter than pattern matching the subject line (oh, tell me that's true), so we could (steady now) change the subject every time we replied, subtly changing it to reflect (radical I know) the contents of the message: Most modern software supplies either References: or In-reply-to: headers. However, the most popular modern software (guess whose) doesn't supply these. Then there's webmail, which tends to be spectacularly crappy too. Some people still even read mail in non-threaded apps. The classic mail threading algorithm would still appear to be jwz's one outlined at http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html - although it could now be surpassed by something less famous. If you want to see how often threading fails, just visit the web archives: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20030210/thread.html -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: Threading
On 12/02/2003 at 20:49 +, Nicholas Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 07:18:49PM +0100, Newton, Philip wrote: That would depend on the nature of the mailing list, presumably (how quick a typical conversation turnaround is). On the order of weeks should work, though, otherwise you get interesting quirks of the type seen on groups.google.com, where you occasionally get threads starting in 1996, lasting for sixteen messages, then picking up again in 2001 (or whatever) -- thread by subject by-products. But only if there are no references headers? I sometimes reply to things after 6 months, and try to have the right in reply to. Although I'm just awkward, and I don't think the online list archives usually pick up on what I'm up to. :-( Pipermail (at least) doesn't provide back links across its refresh boundaries. On penderel, for london.pm, that's set to weekly (as that's pretty much enough for one page; last week, for example, is a 23KB page, which I'd say is fairly sane, compared to monthly, which would be nearer 100, and verging on too big), so any threads over a weekend will have a common root in the new week. This also has the side-effect that 'Previous Mail' links don't go to the start of the thread (as it's in the previous week archive). I can't comment on other lists and whether their 'previous in thread' links span index page divisions. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard... -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: source (was: Re: CPANSTATS)
On 06/02/2003 at 14:48 +, Mark Fowler wrote: On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Leon Brocard wrote: P.S. *cough* scribot *cough* source *cough* Parts of the source to scribot is public, although somewhat hapharzadly. Mind you, that word describes some of the code too. http://thegestalt.org/simon/perl/scribot2.html - irc side, somewhat out of date http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/scribot/web/ - spot the Mac user who didn't bother with .cvsignore Maybe you can persuade Leon to make it presentable as a tarball. Oh, plus there's the problem of running the month archiver on the web front end a little more often. There are probably URI::Find fixes lurking somewhere too. I can see why things never get released, you know. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: yapi / photo organisers
On 03/02/2003 at 23:26 +, robin szemeti wrote: On Monday 03 February 2003 18:41, Chris Heathcote wrote: Hello Can anyone suggest an online web photo organiser, like yapi(2), but that doesn't require Template Toolkit and other shenanigans? I'm trying to install on my webspace at he.net, so no root stuff. For the uninformed, yapi is at http://husk.org/misc/yapi/ while the newer, complete rewrite yapi2 is at http://jerakeen.org/cms/yapi2. There is newer code than that linked to on my page, but it's not available at the moment, and no doubt Tom would suggest using yapi2 anyway. I'll update it if people show any interest. In any case, obviously I like the way it works because I was one of the people involved in getting it going (although my code contributions are more tacking things on the side than the core design). Bear that in mind as I cast damnation upon everything else in the world ever. try cthumbs, run it locally, upload the resulting pages and images to your web space, its nice and plain, but effective. http://cthumb.sourceforge.net/ Nice? It manages to do very little and look overcomplicated in doing it. Um, no thanks. Anyway, who designed those fugly themes anyway? or spidereyeballs I've heard good things about and seems to do nice job on Mr Clamps archive .. but no idea what is involved in . Spidereyeballs involves even more cruft than yapi does. In particular, because yapi doesn't do thumbnails itself (there's standalone thumbnailing code, though), it doesn't need the grim behemoth that is Image::Magick. SEB does. http://www.spidereyeballs.com/ http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=6141group_id=33673 on a side note, I've been playing with Apache::Album (which requires mod_perl and all that) and have subclassed it as Apache::Album::Pretty, which if the maintainer of Apache::Album will accept my patches, will be a sub class of Apache::Album, and if not I'll release it as a standalone module in its own right ... I can see why it would need prettifying. It looks even more minimally ugly than cthumbs. (http://buglet.rcbowen.com/photos/2002/yapc/2wednesday/) Coming back to the point about installing Perl modules locally, a quick search for 'install perl modules without root' on Google turned up a few hits, but they weren't able to convince me that they knew what they were talking about (in particular, the one who suggested installing lib/ under cgi-bin/). Annoyingly it doesn't find a link to http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6/pod/perlmodinstall.html, which contains the handy advice: Also note that these instructions are tailored for installing the module into your system's repository of Perl modules. But you can install modules into any directory you wish. For instance, where I say perl Makefile.PL, you can substitute perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/my/perl_directory to install the modules into /my/perl_directory. Then you can use the modules from your Perl programs with use lib /my/perl_directory/lib/site_perl or sometimes just use /my/perl_directory. Phew. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: Mysql on soliaris
On 30/01/2003 at 16:25 +, Tony Kennick wrote: I'm getting this (below) from mysql on solaris and something disturbingly similar from php, which means I have done something stupid or the time libraries are wrong. The time libraries are right, but not what you expect. In 1970, Britain observed GMT during the entire year, not just end March - end October. I assume Solaris knows about this historical quirk, even if Linux doesn't. http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/british-time/ ...'the experiment with British Standard Time from 1968 to 1972, by which the time was advanced by one hour from GMT throughout the year. ' This could probably do with more Googling, to be honest. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: mysql on solaris
(Sorry, correcting/elaborating on my earlier post. And I've corrected the subject. Sorry if your mail client is crap enough to break the thread on that.) On 30/01/2003 at 17:17 +, Paul Mison wrote: On 30/01/2003 at 16:25 +, Tony Kennick wrote: I'm getting this (below) from mysql on solaris and something disturbingly similar from php, which means I have done something stupid or the time libraries are wrong. The time libraries are right, but not what you expect. In 1970, Britain observed GMT during the entire year, not just end March - end October. I assume Solaris knows about this historical quirk, even if Linux doesn't. Bah, I meant GMT+1. Or maybe BST (see below.) Also, it turns out Linux does know about the timezone oddness too. http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/british-time/ ...'the experiment with British Standard Time from 1968 to 1972, by which the time was advanced by one hour from GMT throughout the year. ' This could probably do with more Googling, to be honest. I did manage to find a bunch more references by Googling for British Standard Time which was the name used during the experiment. It seems to have been stopped after the Scots complained about the darkness in the mornings. Ho hum. (This is probably holy war territory for some people.) Something that came up at work this week was that whilst in the US time zones have either S or D in the middle (eg EST and EDT- Eastern Standard/Daylight Time), and Europe has CET which is the current timezone regardless of DST status (so at the moment it's GMT+1 but in May it's GMT+2), Britain has no name for its time zone; we're either on GMT or BST (which is GMT+1). Unless someone out there knows of one, of course. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: [PUB] Rising Sun, Ebury Bridge Road, Victoria
On 24/01/2003 at 11:25 +, Simon Wistow wrote: This is the pub we went to last night after the tech meet. A Young's pub which *is* currently selling Winter Warmer and Double Chocolate stout. About 2.40 UKP for a pint of excellent Winter Warmer. Traditionally the pubs london.pm visits for socials have been much more central, and invariably within the Circle line. This isn't. Does it have any great advantages over other candidates, given its downsides? -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: pub, tonight
On 16/01/2003 at 10:43 +, Joel Bernstein wrote: Does anybody fancy a pint or two after work tonight? As I've mentioned on IRC, yesteray was merely bad, today is shaping up to be horrific. Go on, you know you want to. What, with Buffy on BBC 2 *and* new series seven on Sky One? Are you some sort of heathen or madman? -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: copyright and NFS
On 13/01/2003 at 11:05 +, Andy Wardley wrote: In short, the Disney corporation is making sure that no-one ever does to them what Walt Disney did to others. The term of copyright law has been extended 11 times in the last 40 years, coincidentally around the time that the copyright on the first Disney movies was about to expire. I believe it was Aaron Schwartz who put it more forcefully on his blog: Copyright term has been extended for 40 years in the last 40 years. If this goes on, nothing that is not already in the public domain will emerge again. Now, if you're a book author whose works are likely to make money forever, and who wants their grandchildren to have a licence to print money, that's maybe fair enough. But I doubt Dave Cross is the only person on his list who doubts whether his book is going to be out of date in 10 years, let alone 100. In fact, even amongst authors, I expect he's in the vast majority. Ho hum. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: copyright and NFS
On 13/01/2003 at 12:01 -0600, Nigel Hamilton wrote: [...] the power is in the author's hands to licence it whatever way they want! What if your rights as an author are drowned out by your employer's contract over you? Who was the person at Disney who drew Ariel, the Little Mermaid, for the first time? Is that image their propery? No. Disney own it. And Disney, being a corporation, will try to retain copyright on that depiction as long as it exists. Meanwhile, the real author will never be known. In case you think that doesn't apply to you, there have been arguments about this before on list. You may be happy to have to put your employers name on every piece of code you write (even if it's not during work hours), but plenty of people aren't and have found renegotiating such contract provisions to be necessary. Of course. The point I believe Andy is making is that copyright law no longer servers readers or authors, but publishers. Raging against the machine is exactly the point; the machine is what's getting the power, not the people. I totally disagree ... copyright protects the author ... and it's the underlying legal machinery that *makes* the GPL (and others) work! Do you percieve that my argument is not about stopping the existence of copyright, but stopping its undue extension both in time and scope to things it was never intended to cover, and by entites who were never meant to hold sway over it? The preceeding paragraph makes it clear you do not. *Please* read the Lessig article that's already been linked to twice. In case you've lost it, it's here: http://www.google.com/search?q=lessig+osconie=UTF-8oe=UTF-8 # top hits -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: [fuzzpop@ukonline.co.uk: [cowabunga] Anyone in London, UKthis coming Saturday....]
On 10/01/2003 at 13:13 -0500, David H. Adler wrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 05:43:42PM +, David Cantrell wrote: I'm intrigued. What is surf music? FAQ for the instrumental surf mailing list: http://www.poprecords.com/cowabunga/ Fifty Foot Combo page: http://www.fiftyfootcombo.com/ Hopefully that should help... dha, always flounders when asked to describe these weird music genres Always fall back to the music :) If you're awake at 9am tomorrow (ha!) listen to the theme music for John Peel's Home Truths on Radio 4. That's surf music. Or Misirilou, from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Anything by Dick Dale, in fact. At least, I think of it as surf music. Maybe I've been wrong all these years. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: Collapsing paths
On 12/12/2002 at 20:39 +, Alex Hudson wrote: PS, What evil magic on this list makes Evolution1.2 think that List-Post is [EMAIL PROTECTED]?! Or is it just me? :) One of the headers Mailman uses, I suspect. It's in an RFC (forgive my lack of pedantry in not knowing the number, although Michael Stevens will know, since Mail::ListDetector uses it if available for sorting [0]) as the identifier of a list: List-Id: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers london.pm.london.pm.org Now, Evolution makes the assumption the local part doesn't have a dot in it. Often this is fine; in fact, with Majordomo, I believe the list name used to have an underscore not a dot. However, in this case, it's going 'aha, there's no dot in the local part, so the first dot must be the seperator, and the rest is the domain! That makes it london@...'. The problem is that there's no way to sensibly guess other than that, although you might like to suggest (or if you have the requisite C-fu, patch it) so Evolution instead uses this header, which is a bit more of a giveaway: List-Post: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [0] I was attacked by a burst of energy; it's RFC 2369. http://search.cpan.org/author/MSTEVENS/Mail-ListDetector-0.22/ -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: nms problem on (old) macs
On 13/12/2002 at 08:30 +, Simon Wistow wrote: On Fri, Dec 13, 2002 at 07:06:30AM +, Dave Cross said: I assume that by alias he means some kind of symbolic link. I've downloaded the packages (from http://nms.sf.net/scripts.shtml) and they both look fine to me in my limited Linuxy view of the world. I got a bit more information from him later: Shirely http://nms-cgi.sf.net/scripts.shtml :) Yes, that got me just now, because I'm only 25% into my bottle of Irn Bru. I've just downloaded them both on my Mac (9.1) and Formail is present in both of them. Yes, Stuffit Expander 5.5 worked on both, and they both have FormMail.pl extracted fine, plus the other four files. As many Unix switchers to HFS+ will attest, HFS+ is case-preserving but not case-sensitive, so if there's both a FormMail.pm and a formmail.pl you'll have trouble. But that's not the case, so hurrah. (Just thought I'd mention it.) There's no resource fork (oh ex-gruppenfuhrer - am I using the right words) which is fine because nothing apart from macs can read them anyway (resource forks manifest themselves when Macs play with other OSs and leave .apple_double files around [or at least with netatalk they do]) Actually, there's a difference between the type/creator information and the resource fork. You can have one without the other. As it is my file translation setup is such that files that have the extension .pl get the type/creator TEXT/R*ch which just happens to open them in BBEdit. FormMail.pl still has no resource fork, though. As to the files inside the .AppleDouble folder, yes, they do get left around. OS X also leaves .DS_Store droppings all over the place. But then, that's why they invented .cvs_ignore and rsync --exclude-from, isn't it? :) The file was 42Kb, so I assume it was the full script, it just unzipped as an alias on my system (MacOS 9.2.1 on a G4/400) and I couldn't change it in ResEdit or anything else 'cos it kept looking for the 'original file'! That's very odd. I wonder what version of Expander they were using? FWIW the file came out as 44K (44,712 bytes) for me. I get an eror that says The document Formail.pl could not be opened, because the application that created it could not be found. Which is to be expected. Well, if you're too slack to set up File Exchange prefs it is :) You can always drop the file onto either MacPerl or BBEdit (or whatever else, I suppose). I'm not sure how to solves this or what the difference between nms and matt's are. Maybe one of the Macnoscenti can work it out. There's nothing to be solved about this, as far as I can tell. However, attempting to run the script gives: # Too late for -T option. If I get another burst of energy I'll try setting up a Mac webserver (probably Quid Pro Quo, as I have a copy lying around) and see if I can get it to work. If I do, I'll write it up. I'm sure you'll all be nicely horrified at the hoopage. Referring back to Dave's question, I can't see any difference in the files either. Perhaps suggest downloading the files and explicitly opening them with Stuffit Expander? -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: nms problem on (old) macs
On 13/12/2002 at 11:32 +, Glyn Hughes wrote: If there's anyone out there who's still using MacOS 9 I'd appreciate a little help on an nms problem. I got and email the other day from a Mac user who said: The formmail.pl in your zipped archive is an alias on my Mac system, and is missing altogether in the tar.gz version! I couldn't unzip the tar.gz with Stuffit (Mac OS utility included as standard) at all even though I had both tar and gzip decompression enabled on my G4/400. There's probably something at versiontracker.com that'll do it. If I find something I'll let you know Which version of Stuffit? You may need DropStuff with Expander Enhancer [0] for old versions. Stuffit Expander 7 should do it too, and it's free. If you want to go the hardcore way, suntar and MacGzip will do the expansion, albeit in two steps. http://www.stuffit.com/expander/macindex.html http://www.pianodisc.com/index001/suntar-222.hqx [1] http://persephone.cps.unizar.es/~spd/gzip/ [0] Snappy names, these Mac apps. [1] I believe there may be a version 2.3 but I couldn't find a page for it. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: aliases (was Re: nms problem on (old) macs)
On 13/12/2002 at 08:29 +, Jon Reades wrote: On 13/12/2002 at 07:06 +, Dave Cross wrote: I assume that by alias he means some kind of symbolic link. I've Yes, an alias is *effectively* a symbolic link (I believe that there are some differences under the hood, but that's probably because of the HFS/HFS+ file system). An alias doesn't really map neatly to either a symbolic nor a hard link in Unix terms, although it has elements of both. Tedious detail follows. [This is your hint to skip this.] An alias contains a whole heap of information about where to find a file, including what volume it was on, its creation date, and its location (both as the equivalent of an inode and the full path). (The curious can find quite a lot about the Alias Manager at developer.apple.com simply by searching for 'alias'.) It's not necessary for an alias to be created on an HFS or HFS+ file system. Next time I've booted OS X I might try creating a UFS disk image to test this. You can certainly leave aliases on remotely mounted file systems. Like a hard link, aliases continue to be resolved even if the file is moved around (although only if it's moved around the volume it was created on, usually). Unlike a hard link, and like a soft/symbolic link [0], the alias is definitely not the same file; deleting the alias and deleting the file it references do very different things (one leaves a dangling alias that can be retargeted, the other leaves the file untouched and simply removes the alias). Annoyingly, the Mac OS X Finder can resolve symbolic links, but cannot create them, whereas the CLI utilities can neither create nor resolve aliases This is shame, since to my eyes this is another example of where the Unix model is exhibiting 'worse is better' behaviour. Returning to the original question, a file being unpacked as an alias, especially from a 'foreign' platform, is fairly unlikely. However, and I'm not able to test this situation (today), it's possible that: * Mac OS 9.2 has been updated to understand symlinks * The latest versions of Stuffit (or whatever tool was used) understands that a symlink in a tarball should be expanded as a symlink * A tarball has been created which used a symlink rather than resolving it to the target file In that case, the Finder may present what looks like an alias but is in fact a symlink from a foreign system which, unsurprisingly, fails to resolve. Get Info (command+I) on the alias may show whether this is the case. [0] I wonder if the Unix people will drop on me like a ton of bricks for using these two terms synonymously? -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: Perl and Time zones.
On 09/12/2002 at 21:43 +, Tamsin wrote: Beware. I believe one US state (Montana IIRC) also stands out by only partially adopting daylight saving time. ie half of Montana does, half does not. Or maybe this is what you meant by the above comment. Montana seems to be mostly MST, except for one bit in the corner that is PST ... Maybe MST does daylight saving and PST doesn't? MST is Mountain Standard, PST is Pacific Standard. PDT is PST+1, or MST. I expect. You'd be best checking. As to the divided state, it's Indiana. The US doesn't say everyone has to do DST, but it does say that if you do, you have to swap at the same dates. About six or seven counties (ie smaller than states) in Indiana choose not to use DST at all. Ah, badly designed web page with facts: http://www.mccsc.edu/time.html I believe the EU not only mandates a date but also the fact that countries must observe the change, but I'd have to check. Ever got the feeling you've opened a can of worms... Oooh, yes. My favourite (because it's in dipsy's time feed) is the fact that Adelaide and Brisbane have, for no particularly obvious reason, a half-hour offset from each other. I read Time Lord: Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time on the way back from YAPC::NA. It's an interesting book, although I think it may still be lacking a UK publisher. It's an interesting book, although it doesn't tackle DST, which is a later innovation. http://www.spikemagazine.com/0601timelord.htm -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: buffy
On 05/12/2002 at 12:40 -0500, David H. Adler wrote: On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 03:02:53PM +, Lusercop wrote: Hey, it's buffy-related, it must be on-topic, right? I was under the impression that the only thing that ran the risk of being off-topic was perl... Oh, shush. We've got a lot better recently, although whether that's because Perl's better or Buffy's worse I'm not sure. Anyway, *we* don't have huge threads about rubbish movies that you wouldn't want to sit through. (Admittedly, that thread's been much more entertaining than I expect I'd find many of the movies...) (You do have archives so the rest of the list can figure out what I'm on about, don't you?) :-) I'll see that and raise it a couple of :) -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
[ANNOUNCE] Leadership election: result
The election for the leader of London.pm has now closed. After the first preference votes were counted, the standings were as follows: David Cantrell : ** 14 ( 25%) Richard Clamp : *** 7 ( 13%) Mark Fowler: ** 34 ( 60%) R.O.N. : * 1 ( 2%) Total : 56 (100%) Mark Fowler, having secured over 50% of the vote, is hereby announced leader of the London Perl Mongers, effective immediately. I'll start passing over the controls of the levers of power (ie the announce list password :) as soon as it makes sense to do so. This probably works out to when my hangover wears off :) Thanks very much to all who nominated, stood, debated and voted. It's nice to see a leader with some democratic legitimacy finally emerge. I don't expect I'll post very much to announce in the future, so it's goodbye (for now) from me. Thanks very much to everyone who's helped with organising things over the last year, and to all of you who've posted to the list or attended meetings. Cheers, -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
[ANNOUNCE] Social meeting, Thursday. Voting closes, Wednesday.
On Thursday, 5th December, there will be our monthly social meeting, once more at the Calthorpe Arms, Gray's Inn Road. Please note that if the proposed firefighter's strike commences as planned, the nearest Tube station (Russell Square) will be closed as it is lift-only. There will be, as usual, a reminder on the main list on Thursday. Full location details are on the web site: http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/calthorpe.html At the social meeting the results of the leadership elections will be announced. This is the FINAL REMINDER that voting closes at 21:00 GMT on Wednesday, 4th December. For further details of candidates, and the voting form, please refer to the archives: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20021118/015034.html Cheers, -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: Film: LotR:TTT
On 02/12/2002 at 17:07 +, David Cantrell wrote: On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 03:03:28PM +, S. Joel Bernstein wrote: At 30/11/2002 17:56 [], David Cantrell wrote: The Two Towers opens on the 18th. I suggest that I book tickets for the 19th, which is a Thursday. Alternatiely, we could go on Mon 23rd, but that's probably a wee bit too close to christmas for people. Anyway, the film is three hours long, plus trailers and crap, so we'll need to go to a showing at or before 6pm so that we can fit food in afterwards. Do enough L.PMers live in North London to make it possible to choose a venue in, say, Camden or Chalk Farm or somewhere like that? I'm sure that the northerners could do that. I, however, will be orgynising one in Streatham, cos it's close to where I live. Speaking for my arse, I'm not sure it can take another three hours of swoopy fantasy bollocks, whether it's fifteen minutes walk from my house or the other side of the city (and, more importantly, sf o' the river). Of course, that's only my arse talking. Other, more hardy (Scandinavian, even) arses might be up for the troll-slashing bloodbath the trailer seems to promise, and even prepared to herd some rabid hobbits into a cinema. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: 5.8.0
On 27/11/2002 at 14:29 +, Leon Brocard wrote: The latest, most-tested-ever, stable version of Perl, version 5.8.0 was released on 18th July 2002, which is a while ago. We use it at work for development and on the new production servers. I don't use it on my personal colo box (it has so much stuff running it'd be a pain to update). Despite the fact theproject (the colo box I share with a few other london.pm/ #london.pm types) uses a fair bit of perl, we did actually (mainly) migrate to 5.8.0 last week. Apart from the fact that DB_File didn't want to build (because I couldn't figure out where the hell to point it towards the DB library), and the fact we hadn't got all our perl modules installed yet. However, we're leaving 5.6.1 installed as well, and there are a couple of things that are specifically using that so they don't have the DB_File problems noted above. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Voting -- a reminder
A quick reminder that voting for the London.pm leader closes at 21:00 GMT on Wednesday, December 4th; that is, in just over a week. Fuller details and links to manifestos are archived: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2002-November/31.html Mark your choices with 1 (first choice), and optionally 2 and 3 on the following form and send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Form Starts David Cantrell[ ] Richard Clamp [ ] Mark Fowler [ ] Re-Open Nominations [ ] Form Ends -- Thanks. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: Candidates' attitudes [or why are you all op'd]
On 26/11/2002 at 00:44 +, Dirk Koopman wrote: As a matter of interest, having just become a #london.pm virgin this evening, why is [nearly] everybody op'd? So we can set the topic, mainly. And as mutually asssured destruction if anyone goes nuts. Is the fact that a newbie isn't an op part of the problem? What is going on here? We need to find out who you are. If you'd said 'Hello, I'm Dirk, I've been active on list' you're more likely to be opped than if you appear and start asking about k-lines. (People online on the morning of Tuesday 4th June, when someone connected to rhizomatic and unleashed a flood of clonebots, may remember what's wrong with that one.) [0] Once the channel is convinced you are who you say you are, and that you're not going to go mad, you'll get ops on a per-session basis or, once you're fully trusted, via the opbot(s). This should probably be worked into http://london.pm.org/about/irc.html along with a warning that we're a bit... less tolerant, perhaps, as a rule, on the IRC channel. [0] As a side note, assuming we'll read your real name out of /whois probably isn't enough. You may as well do the introduction too. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: re IRC
On 24/11/2002 at 14:30 -0500, Chris Devers wrote: On Sun, 24 Nov 2002, Lusercop wrote: A: No Q: Do I like top-posted messages? Q: Is netiquette important? A: Yes. Q: Did anyone ask you to be the grand enforcer of list etiquette? A: I'm quite sure no one did. The cure is far worse than the ailment. In future, I suggest people who have a problem with top quoting send a polite pointer, preferably offlist, to the mailing list page information at the site (http://london.pm.org/about/list.html) which says: Avoid jeopardy (or 'top') quoting, with the reply above the original content. Although this suggestion is more controversial (and hence less binding) than some of the others, this still annoys many people, so please think hard before doing so. I hope this will close the thread, since we did the last argument over it all of three months ago, and it's not stopped being boring since. Thanks. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Technical meeting reminder
Just a quick reminder that there's a technical meeting tonight at Profero. Profero is at 134 Liverpool Road, Islington, behind Upper Street and between Angel and Highbury Islington tube stations. http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?G2M?X=531427Y=183957A=YZ=1 The entrance to the office is set back off the east side Liverpool road, and to get to it you need to go down a passageway between a corner shop and a laundrette, roughly opposite the bar Stone, which can be easily spotted due to the large lizard climbing up the corner of the building. The office will be available from 6.30 pm, but I believe there was some talk of meeting up beforehand. Please refer to any previous threads for details. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
[ANNOUNCE] Voting open; tech meet reminder
Firstly, a reminder that there is a technical meeting this Thursday, 21st November, at Profero, Liverpool Road, Islington. The meeting starts at 7pm with the venue open from 6.30pm. Mark Fowler posted fuller details a week or so ago: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2002-November/26.html Now we have all four manifestos from candidates, voting is open for the London.pm leadership election. Voting closes at 21:00 GMT on Wednesday, December 4th. Voters are reminded that votes cast before now are NOT valid. Please resubmit your vote in order for it to count! Full rules are here: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2002-November/27.html Manifestos are here: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2002-November/28.html http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-2002/015011.html http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2002-November/29.html http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2002-November/30.html To vote, please mark your choices with '1', '2' and '3' in the following form, and send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Form Starts David Cantrell[ ] Richard Clamp [ ] Mark Fowler [ ] Re-Open Nominations [ ] Form Ends -- -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
[ANNOUNCE] Leadership election rules
The nominations for leader of London.pm closed on Sunday at noon, GMT. In total, there were six valid nominations and five invalid nominations, as well as two that missed the deadline. However, none of the seven nominations that I did not count would have affected the outcome of the nomination round. The following candidates have accepted their nominations, and are invited to post a brief manifesto to [EMAIL PROTECTED] preferably before voting opens: David Cantrell Richard Clamp Mark Fowler Here are the instructions for voting in the Leadership election. Please read them carefully as invalid votes will just be ignored. Voting will open on Monday, 18th November at 12:00 GMT and end on Wednesday, 4th December at 21:00 GMT. The result will be announced on the social meeting on Thursday, 5th December at the Calthorpe Arms. When you vote, you can vote for up to three candidates in order, with 1 being the first preference, 2 the second preference and 3 the third preference. In the event that a candidate fails to win 50% of the first preference votes, the candidate with least first preference votes will be eliminated and the second choices of the voters who chose them will be redistributed. This will continue until a candidate has over 50% of the votes. Voters who dislike PR are reminded they can merely use their first choice. You are also reminded that you do not have to vote for a candidate if you nominated them, although you may. In addition to the candidates, you can vote for Re-Open Nominations (RON) with any of your votes. You can vote as many times as you like, but the last vote that is recieved before the closing time will be taken as your actual vote. As with nominations, voting is open to members of the group. Membership of the group will be taken as being on the london.pm mailing list, as of 10pm on 29th October. Duplicate addresses will be weeded out at my discretion. Votes should come from a subscribed address with your usual posting name. To vote, please mark your choices with '1', '2' and '3' in the following form, and send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Form Starts David Cantrell[ ] Richard Clamp [ ] Mark Fowler [ ] Re-Open Nominations [ ] Form Ends -- May the best man win. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
REMINDER: social meeting tonight
It's the beginning of the month, so it's time for a reminder that there's a social meeting on Thursday 7th November (that's tonight, in case you were wondering) at the Calthorpe Arms, Grays Inn Road, from 6pm. http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/calthorpe.html -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
[ANNOUNCE] Social, emergency and tech meets this month
It's the beginning of the month, so it's time for a reminder that there's a social meeting on Thursday 7th November at the Calthorpe Arms, Grays Inn Road, from 6pm. http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/calthorpe.html As always, there'll be a reminder on the main list on Thursday morning. In addition, this month there will be an emergency social meeting on Tuesday 12th November at the Lamb, Holborn, as detailed in this post by Kake, because Perl author Randy J. Ray is in London. Oh, plus we seem to like booze anyway. http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20021028/014601.html Mark Fowler is organising the next London.pm technical meeting, with a selection of short talks aimed at getting people who haven't spoken before (or attented tech meets before) to come along. The date is set already; the meeting will be on Thursday, 21st November. I believe he's still looking for a venue, so if you can offer something to him please get in touch. http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20021007/014226.html As you'd expect, there will be a further post to announce once the venue is confirmed. In other news, members of the ordinary list are reminded that nominations are being taken for my replacement as London.pm leader as set out in The Rules: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20021028/014645.html Thanks. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
LEADERSHIP: Election rules
I guess it's time we actually did something about finding a new leader. Here's what we're going to do. The new leader will be decided by an open and democratic election. I will oversee this process. Any (human) member of the group can be nominated for the position. Any member can submit a nomination. A nomination must include the name (and email address) of the proposed leader. You don't need to tell the person that you are proposing them, but once the nomination process is complete candidates will be asked whether they wish to stand and have the chance to refuse. Membership of the group will be taken as being on the london.pm mailing list, as of 10pm on 29th October. Duplicate addresses will be weeded out at my discretion. Votes should come from a subscribed address with your usual posting name. The three nominees who gain most proposals, and accept the nomination, will go through to the next round. In the case that there is a tie in the number of nominations, there may be four or more nominees standing. You are allowed to nominate yourself. Nominations will open at noon (GMT) on Thursday 31st October and close at noon (GMT) on Sunday 10th November. Nominations should be sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Thursday 14th November I will announce the candidates. Between Friday 15th November and Sunday 17th November, all candidates will be invited to make a short statement to the group on why they are would make a good leader. Voting will be open from noon on Monday 18th November to noon on Sunday 1st December. I'll take votes by email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Only one vote will count from each person, but you can change your vote by voting for someone else from the same address. Voting will close at 21:00 (GMT) on Wednesday 5th December. I'll announce the result at the social meeting after that, on Thursday 6th December. I won't announce who voted for which candidates, although in the case of any disputes Dave Cross will have access to the votes as an independent arbitrator. From now until the end of the election, I'll answer questions on the procedure, but won't make any further comments on the candiates. Let the games begin and may the best person win! -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: better way to split text into a hash ?
On 09/10/2002 at 15:13 +0100, Dave Thorn wrote: On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 03:08:37PM +0100, S. Joel Bernstein wrote: At 09/10/2002 13:11 [], Jasper McCrea wrote: ps I was semi-seriously thinking of getting some 'use strict; is gay' t-shirts printed. Anyone interested? No, why would we be? 'Gay' isn't pejorative, and I doubt you're saying that 'use strict;' is homosexual. Grow up? http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-authors/id/R/RC/RCLAMP/Acme-USIG-1.01.tar.gz Also http://search.cpan.org/author/RCLAMP/Acme-USIG-1.01/lib/Acme/USIG.pm Short history. Dave Cross spends time on CGI bulletin boards full of amateurs. Suggests that all scripts should 'use strict;'. Someone responds 'use strict is gay!'. London.pm laugh at the poster. Richard Clamp writes Acme::USIG, probably conceived under the influence of booze. Phrase falls into general usage, not meant perojatively. If someone wants to flesh this out and send it back to me so if can go on the FAQ page, please do. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Musings on the future
It was at about this time last year that Dave Cross announced he was looking to step down from the leadership, and seeing that when I was elected I said I'd serve no more than a year (and that I've been talking about things way too much at meetings and on IRC) it's probably time I warned you all that I'd be stepping down soon, too. Although it's somewhat tempting to either appoint a new leader or just stand down and see who emerges victorious from the morass, elections seem a much fairer way of deciding how who the next leader should be. Dave's rules from last year are pretty good, but there are a few complaints that people have made which I'll be considering. The rough timetable, though, is probably: Nominations open: Thursday 31st October Nominations close: Sunday 10th November Voting starts:Thursday 14th November Voting ends: Sunday 1st December The observant amongst you will note that the nominations procedure spans a social meeting and the voting spans a technical meeting. This means that if people want to discuss this in smoke-filmed rooms, rather than bot-filled IRC channels, there's a chance to do so. Admittedly it is a little drawn out, but then I don't want a feeling of rushedness. Thanks. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: better way to split text into a hash ?
On 09/10/2002 at 09:31 -0700, Randal L. Schwartz wrote: I have the same reaction when a disclaimer exceeds the length of the message content. We had a saying on another mailing list that to participate on a list, you can't have boilerplate disclaimers, and that if you wanted to participate but couldn't turn it off, you moved to a free email address and joined from there. Maybe that should be the policy here too. A saying, or a policy? In any case, I'm inclined not to go that far. Next thing someone will get annoyed enough at supercite to want to ban that, and where would we be :) For the record, there is a mention of long disclaimers in the mailing list FAQ (http://london.pm.org/about/list.html): Do not use overlong signatures. Keep them to within four lines, use the standard -- \n seperator to mark the start of the sig, or both. (Some people have Evil Corporate Disclaimers they can't remove. These people are, however, still able to use the standard sig seperator; please do so.) Martin didn't use -- \n, but he has said he'll try and post from Hotmail in future. As far as I'm concerned either of those approaches is fine. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Social tonight, 6pm, Calthorpe Arms
As the subject says, there's a London.pm social meeting tonight from 6pm at the Calthorpe Arms, Gray's Inn Road, London. There are full details of how to get there on the website: http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/calthorpe.html -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
[ANNOUNCE] Social meeting, Thursday: reminder
As usual for the day after the first Wednesday of the month, there'll be a London.pm social meeting on Thursday, 3rd October. Once again we'll be meeting at the Calthorpe Arms, Gray's Inn Road. http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/calthorpe.html There'll be another reminder on the main list on Thursday. Hope to see you there. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Dim sum, Thursday
Is anyone else likely to turn up if I suggest going to dim sum at the New World on Thursday 26th at 1pm? http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/new-world.html -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: BodyWorlds
On 24/09/2002 at 19:26 +0100, Lucy McWilliam wrote: On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Earle Martin wrote: Mmm, curry. I'm guessing it'll be busy. Is 11am too early for a Saturday? In case of emergency phone 07939 476024. Count me in. Meet at Shoreditch station perhaps? looks at map Sounds sensible. Except of course for the facts that: a) getting to the East London Line is usually Hard b) it doesn't run at all on Saturdays Although if you meant 'we should meet at it having walked there from Liverpool Street, a station that is usually open, even if it is a glorified Sock Shop emporium' that would be fine. Oh, other handy hint: there are no trains on the Circle, HC or Metropolitan Lines through King's Cross most weekends at the moment because of engineering works (to make it shiny and new for the Channel Tunnel rail link). People coming to London from, say, Cambridge might want to see if they can get to Liverpool Street rather than the usual express to King's Cross. This has been a public transport geeking moment. Thank you for your patience. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Re: Orange website...
On 24/09/2002 at 17:57 +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 05:22:35PM +0100, Leo Lapworth said: I'm sorry (or happy) to announce the London.pm website (http://london.pm.org/) has now changed colour. OH GOD! MY EYES! IT BUURNS! http://london.pm.org/about/faq.html - bottom question. I think I might get into trouble about that one... I've taken the opportunity to change the style sheet, too, which should fix a couple of things people have (rightly) complained about accessibility-wise. Blame Simon. He told me to. -- :: paul :: we're like crystal
Tech meet, still on, still tonight
Despite the privations of the tube strike, the technical meeting at the Angel pub, City Road, just south of Old Street roundabout, is still on (all the speakers, and Jon Mckoewn, the Man with the Projector, are all able to attend), with us gathering at 6.30 for a 7pm start (although of course we'll do the most interesting talks last, and we'll be expecting that people may be a bit late). Just as a note I'd forgotten to mention before, the meeting is upstairs. Full directions to the meeting, and a map, are at http://london.pm.org/meetings/ -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
[ANNOUNCE] ANNOUNCE: Technical meeting, Thurs 18 July
There will be a technical meeting this Thursday (the 18th) at the Angel, a pub near Old Street (note that this is a change from the previous venue). We'll meet at 6.30 for a 7pm start. Talks planned are: Leon Brocard: CPAN Modules I Hate and CPAN Modules I Like Chris Ball: Magicpoint: A meta-presentation Dave Cross: Idiomatic Perl (another extract) Jo Walsh: Why bots and the semantic web will change the world. Paul Mison: The One Where I Bore You To Death About Scribot Pierre Denis: A Talk About Vx The Angel is on the corner of City Road and Leonard Street: http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?G2M?X=532783Y=182390A=YZ=1 The nearest tube station is Old Street, on the City branch of the Northern line. (At the time of writing, a tube strike is planned for 8pm Wednesday to 8pm Thursday: http://thetube.com/content/pressreleases/0207/10.asp) Nearest buses are the number 55 and 243 from the West End, 76 from Waterloo and 43 from London Bridge/Islington. Hope to see you there. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: [PUB] Report on the Calthorpe Arms
On 15/07/2002 at 12:32 +0100, Kate L Pugh wrote: Some of us went to the Calthorpe Arms last Thursday, to see if it would be suitable for a future social meet. Wasn't it Wednesday? Not that it's important, though. - Function room is big enough; it's certainly at least the size of the area we generally squeeze ourselves into at the CoY, though it doesn't have the advantage of quieter sections to retreat to. It's also not underground. And we can have it for free. I thought it smelt a bit funny, but it's probably just pubbish. - The food's not great. The omnivore food seemed to be all deep-fried, including Leon's steak. The veggie option (stuffed roast marrow) wasn't bad, though. I quite liked my food, but I'm not particularly worried about food quality. Comments? Thanks for writing this up. I'm minded to go here for the next social, on the 8th of August, despite the beer festival going on, because I think more people will go to a pub social than to a pay-to-get-in event. Speak now, or hold your peace. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: Charlbury beer festival tomorrow
On 12/07/2002 at 15:36 +0100, Kate L Pugh wrote: I'm going to the Charlbury beer festival tomorrow, partly to meet up with Oxford types, and partly because beer is nice. Ah, that reminds me. At the emergency social (and I hope Kate will get round to posting a report soon) I picked up a leaflet for the Great British Beer Festival [0], which happens to run from the 6th to the 10th of August, coinciding with the next social meeting (on Thursday 8th August, in case you hadn't kept track). There have previously been meetings at the beer festival (both in 1999 [1] and 2001 [2]), so would people like to do this again? The main catch I can see is the ticket price (6 UKP), but the people at the pub on Wednesday reckoned you'd make that back in the worth of the beer you were drinking. So, do people think this is a good idea, or would you rather have an ordinary pub meet? [0] http://www.gbbf.org/ [1] http://london.pm.org/nx_meetings/1999_aug.shtml yes, there are some rendering issues on some browsers [2] As the alternative meeting for people not at YAPC::EU -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: Dim sum on Thursday
On 10/07/2002 at 09:51 +0100, Leon Brocard wrote: S. Joel Bernstein sent the following bits through the ether: Where is the New World? The New World, 1 Gerrard Place London, W1 (Chinatown) Weren't you going to mark that up as XML so Leo could put it on the website? You already know the nearest Tubes, and I'll even work out the buses if you ask me nicely. See me yield the Stick of Leadership. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
[ANNOUNCE] First of the month meeting reminders
It's the first of the month, and also the Monday before the day after the first Wednesday of the month, so there's a social meeting soon. In fact, it's on Thursday, the fourth of July, from 6pm, back at the Cittie of Yorke. In my absence Chris Ball organised a technical meeting, which will be graciously hosted by Fotango on Thursday 18th July. Thanks to Leo there are details of this on the meetings page of the website. http://london.pm.org/meetings/ Hope to see you there. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: Perl/CGI/Web Calendar Thing
On 01/07/2002 at 17:06 +0100, Dave Cross wrote: You should almost certainly be looking at the Reefknot projects. They are building Perl-based shared calendar software based on iCal. http://reefknot.sourceforge.net/ At the various conferences last year there was a lot of talk, but very little software. Hopefully there will be more stuff written by now, There was a talk at YAPC::NA which I didn't attend, but I talked to a couple of the Boston-based folks working on it who said the gist was 'this is where we were, we haven't got much further, and these hard problems are why'. Shared calendaring is hard. Shared calendaring that needs to observe timezones is *very* hard. Calendaring that does repeating events is also hard. If you can avoid these requirements it might be easier. iCal compliance is definitely something you should be aiming at, though, even if it adds to the hardness. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: London.pm List Weekly Summary 2002-06-17
On 24/06/2002 at 19:15 -0500, Chris Ball wrote: o Paul Mison: (un-named)[1]. [1]: Paul didn't say what talk: there's a talk I could do, too The One Where I Bore You To Death About Scribot. Or something like that. Probably only 5-10 minutes worth there. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: REVIEW - Running Weblogs with Slash
On Sun, Jun 23, 2002 at 04:27:14PM -0400, Yeoh Yiu wrote: my mailer strips off attachments. is this review posted somewhere, or can you include it as text ? I imagine that it'll appear on the website (london.pm.org/reviews/) at some point int he near-ish future. -- :: paul :: everybody with a heart votes love
Re: Building Net::SSL on penderel
On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 03:46:31PM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote: I can't build Net::SSL on penderel :-(. Just wondered if this problem was unique to me or not. I get: So I'm (pessimistically) assuming something wants a particular version/brand/flavour/political attitude of library somewhere. Yes, almost certianly Debian has only bothered installing the binaries of various SSL stuff. Ask your friendly local sysadmin (damn, that includes me) to install the relevant development stuff. ... done. Or maybe the OpenSSL libs need a quick update? There haven't been any security updates, but it might be due a update soon. I doubt it, though. Or maybe someone would like to install Net::SSL in /usr/lib/perl? Installed to /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/i586-linux/Net/SSL.pm as that's where CPAN shell decided it should live. Paul Makepeace will probably point out requests like this are better directed at [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- :: paul :: the future has been and gone
Fwd: Mac OS X Tech Talk: Unix on the Desktop
Well, if I was in the country (and could wangle the time off) I'd be interested in this, so I thought I'd forward it to the list. You never know, if you're really lucky you'll be able to blag a Jaguar CD. ---begin forwarded text From: Josette Garcia [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Josette Garcia [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mac OS X Tech Talk: Unix on the Desktop Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2002 12:03:05 +0100 I have just been asked by Apple to let you know about these free half day seminars. MAC OS X TECH TALK: UNIX ON THE DESKTOP Monday 24 June: London, UK Wednesday 26 June: Paris, FRANCE Friday 28 June: Berlin, GERMANY http://techtalk.apple.com/ Dear Developer, You've read about Mac OS X's UNIX-based, open source core in technical publications all over the Web. Now here's your chance to evaluate Mac OS X as a development platform in one afternoon. You are cordially invited to attend one of three Mac OS X Tech Talks, brought to you by the Apple Developer Connection, in London, Paris, and Berlin this month. - WHAT YOU'LL LEARN - This free, half-day briefing provides an overview of the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X for developers and IT professionals. An array of topics will be covered, including: * Mac OS X System Architecture - Explore the structure of Mac OS X and the range of development and deployment options it offers. * Mac OS X Unix Essentials - Review all the familiar UNIX-based tools, libraries, and applications that ship with the operating system. * Porting UNIX-based Applications to Mac OS X - Learn how quickly you can port a UNIX-based application to Mac OS X. * Networking with Mac OS X - Discover how easy it is to integrate Mac OS X client and server products into heterogeneous networks. - DATES AND LOCATIONS - Monday 24 June 2002 Mac OS X Tech Talk - London, UK Time: 13:00 to 18:00 Location: Radisson/SAS Portman Wednesday 26 June 2002 Mac OS X Tech Talk - Paris, FRANCE Time: 13:00 to 18:00 Location: Cite Internationale Universitaire Friday 28 June 2002 Mac OS X Tech Talk - Berlin, GERMANY Time: 13:00 to 18:00 Location: Hotel Intercontinental - RESERVE YOUR SPOT TODAY - Mac OS X offers developers and IT professionals the best of both worlds. Don't miss this opportunity to discover for yourself how compelling the simplicity of Macintosh combined with the power of UNIX can be. Seating is limited so please reserve your place soon using the form located at http://techtalk.apple.com/. If you'd like to learn more about Mac OS X before attending a briefing, visit the following URLs: http://developer.apple.com/unix/ http://developer.apple.com/gettingstarted/ If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact us at mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]. We look forward to meeting you this June! ---end forwarded text -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Bounces
You may have experienced some bounces if you tried to post to list in the last hour or so, but hopefully a) that's over and b) things will be working without a sysadmin having to frob permissions every second now. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Meetings in July
Well, the last social [0] was a little quiet (for whatever reason; the lack of announce posts, move of pub and strange three-day week probably all contributed) but it's already time to think about the next one. After my slightly cavalier approach to deciding where we met in June, I'd like to make sure July is as close to a consensus as possible. If we're going to book, though, we should do so soon. Kate Pugh's been doing a good job of looking at new venues but sadly so far none of them are looking right for us. So, do we: * Try another pub on the South Bank, unbooked (perhaps the Founder's Arms)? * Go back to the Cittie of Yorke, where we're guaranteed room? * Hope that we find a venue after an emergency meeting this week? There's also due to be a technical meeting in July, too (on the 18th, according to http://london.pm.org/meetings/cal2002.html) but as I'm going to be busy at work and going to YAPC::NA, I'm not able to organise it. Hence, a volunteer to find a venue and some speakers (yes, that really is all there is to it) would be appreciated, or there might not be a meeting after all. Cheers. [0] As usual, documented on someone's use.perl journal: http://use.perl.org/~2shortplanks/journal/5487 -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: Meeting reminder, other adminsitrivia
On 04/06/2002 at 11:43 +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote: * Paul Mison ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: In all the Jubilee strangeness you might not realise that Thursday is the first Thursday of the month So what? ;-) Philip's right, it also happens to be the... oh, I can't be bothered :) Anyway, after an epic struggle (mainly with my own idiocy) penderel is back, running a sparkling copy of Debian 3.0 (yes, we're running testing; the previously compiled Apache needed the newer glibc stuff). Mailman and the web site are back and seem fine. Thanks to Jo and Alex (and possibly Richard, who seemed to be giving advice on IRC) for tidying up the lists after I went to bed. However, I did manage to make a couple of spectacularly bad mistakes, the biggest of which is that people's authentication details [0] and mail [1] (if it was on the spool) got deleted. The mail is sadly gone for good but if you get in touch with me (or Alex, if he doesn't mind- Alex?) we'll sort out something. In other news, if people want me to bring things to the meeting tomorrow (books to be doled out for review, tshirts you've paid for, ponies [2]) then let me know today, so I can pack them this evening. [0] And everything else in /etc, so reinstall any crontabs and suchlike [1] Guess what, and everything else in /var [2] I'll see what I can do -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Meeting reminder, other adminsitrivia
In all the Jubilee strangeness you might not realise that Thursday is the first Thursday of the month, and hence it's meeting time, at the Anchor, Bankside. As usual we'll meet from 6pm, and, if weather permits, I'd expect looking for us outside is a good idea. http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/theanchor.html In other news, there was a slightly annoying IRC script kiddie attack this morning, so #london.pm now has a channel key, which for the moment is 'coy' (as in Cittie of Yorke). Instead of /join #london.pm you'll need /join #london.pm coy Hopefully they'll get bored and we'll be able to remove this soon, but if not, any changes will be distributed here, unless someone has a better idea. Just a little reminder that I'll be reinstalling the london.pm box with Debian this afternoon, so the list (and website) may be down for a little while, but they should be up before tomorrow morning (let alone the day of the meet.) -- :: paul :: the future has been and gone
Fwd: [cam.pm] CPMBOPPC - Summary
MBM's commentary on his beer/perl challenge. There's also a summary on
the web at http://cam.pm.org/cpmboppc-summary.shtml if you like the
pretty colours.
---begin forwarded text
From: Matthew Byng-Maddick [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i
Organization: Colondot.net
Mail-Copies-To: never
Subject: [cam.pm] CPMBOPPC - Summary
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
List-Id: Cambridge(UK) PerlMongers cam.pm.cam.pm.org
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2002 01:54:41 +0100
This is similar to the one on the website, but is less unedited and has
more of my personal views of what I thought of the entries.
In the reformattings that I've posted below, I've kept variable and
function
names the same, but I've squashed the '.' and reformatted with spaces to
make subroutines more readable.
In the order in which I got them, I'll start off with an analysis of mine:
Requirements: ANSI terminal
--8--
/Cam.pm_-_Program_with_Beer/;sub
r{$d=~s/^(..)//;return(hex$1)};#
$e =
02 0A
1000
0209
020F
03 08
02 10
03 09
020F
040A
020E040B020D040C020C040D020B020E
020A020E0C00;$e=~s/\s+//g;1;sub
g{$l=shift;$d=$e;while(length(
$d)){($n,$s1,$h,$s2)=(r,r,r,r)
;for(1..$n){$s++;$a=(31-$l)$s
?chr(32):@;print(chr(32)x$s1
,#x$h,${a}x($s2*2),#x$h,
\n)}}}print\e[2J;for$t((
reverse(2..28))){$s=0;sleep(
1);print\e[0;0H;g($t);}$_=
Qevax*Orre,*Cebtenz*Crey
.,*Pnz.cz\n;s/\*/chr(32)
/eg;tr/a-zA-Z/n-za-mN-ZA-M
/;print;m{Cam.pm_for_info_
see_our_website_at:.
.http://www.cam.pm.org/.
Real_Perl_mongers_drink_
Real_Beer._Join_CAMRA!!}
--8--
For those that didn't try it, it prints the same pint glass, full, and
empties it at a rate of one line per second. At the end it prints
Drink Beer, Program Perl, Cam.pm. The way it works is pretty simple,
the shape of the glass is encoded in the scalar $e, in groups of 4
bytes. The first byte in each group is the number of lines, then the
number of spaces, then the number of hashes, and the number of spaces
to the midline of the glass. The function g() prints out the glass,
using this data, and also prints `@' in the bottom $l lines of the
glass. r() reads the top hex digit on the encoding, modifying it as
it goes. The end is just a simple rot13 and substitute. The comments
are, of course, just regexp matches in null context. This trick is
thanks to BooK in his Postscript and Perl TPJ entry.
Rewritten, it looks something like:
--8--
sub r {
$d=~s/^(..)//;
return(hex$1)
}
$e=020A1000
0209020F
03080210
0309020F
040A020E
040B020D
040C020C
040D020B
020E020A
020E0C00;
$e=~s/\s+//g;
sub g {
$l=shift;
$d=$e;
while(length($d)) {
($n,$s1,$h,$s2)=(r,r,r,r);
for(1..$n) {
$s++;
$a=(31-$l)$s?chr(32):@;
print(chr(32)x$s1,#x$h,${a}x($s2*2),#x$h,\n)
}
}
}
print\e[2J;
for$t((reverse(2..28))) {
$s=0;
sleep(1);
print\e[0;0H;
g($t);
}
$_=Qevax*Orre,*Cebtenz*Crey,*Pnz.cz\n;
s/\*/chr(32)/eg;
tr/a-zA-Z/n-za-mN-ZA-M/;
print;
--8--
Andy Wardley posted his to london.pm, but I'll include it here for
completeness:
Requirements: run from a file
--8--
#!/usr/bin/perl
## ##
## ##
####
####
####
## ##
## ##
## ##
####
####
##
##
##
##
Re: Book reviews
On 30/05/2002 at 10:06 +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 09:05:39AM +0100, Alex McLintock wrote: PS There is a new Manning book graphics programming with perl http://news.diversebooks.com/article.pl?sid=02/05/30/0754246 Shall we ask for a review copy? No, instead Manning collectively should be lowered onto a rough-hewn wooden spike and sacrificially burnt to be set as an example to other would-be book publishing spammers who harvest addresses from www.pm.org. Are you sure that's where they got the addresses from? Do you also regard the O'Reilly newsletter that started this thread as spam? (I started getting them without explictly asking for it, after contacting Josette asking for the Jabber and Slash books. I could, I suspect, stop the emails coming, but that would probably stop the books coming, too.) Anyway, I'll be requesting a copy later, with the appropriate delegating actions attached, as I will if Manning ask for reviewers for the Simon Cozens book that Manning are reportedly publishing soon. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: [josette@oreilly.co.uk: Newsletter issue 02-9]
On 29/05/2002 at 14:44 +0100, Barbie wrote: From: Leon Brocard [EMAIL PROTECTED] Observe how Birmingham.pm have reviewed lots of books. Nice ;) London.pm have done lots of reviews too: http://london.pm.org/reviews/ Still, we have quite a lot of outstanding reviews, some of which are really quite old indeed: Web Caching - Andy Williams Learning Perl - Alex Page NFS/NIS - Sue Gray Linux Device Drivers - Simon Wistow Java Cookbook - Joe McFadden Web Design in a Nutshell - Earle Martin Perl for Web Site Management - AEF Programming Cold Fusion - Simon Wilcox Server Load Balancing - Sue Spence Running Weblogs With Slash - Dave Cross (?) Programming Jabber - Robert Shiels (?) (?) - I really should have kept notes when I handed those two out. Apologies again if I've managed to miss your already publised review. Books that are available for review (or should be soon) are Bioinformatics, the Flying Dutchman of london.pm book reviews, and Web Development with Apache and Perl, by Theo Petersen, which Manning are meant to be sending to me. After a little discussion on IRC Richard Clamp appears to be vaguely happy to chase you lot up every now and again about outstanding reviews, for which I'm very grateful. He might also be better and trying to get hold of books to review than I was, which wouldn't be that hard. -- :: paul :: the future has been and gone
(over)use of london.pm-announce?
I've become a little worried that I may be overusing london.pm-announce, or encouraging others to do so. There seem to be two views at the extremes: I forget meetings if I'm not reminded two weeks before, three days before and on the day of the meeting, and so might people who only get -announce, so all these things need to go there too. Announce should only be used for socials and technical meetings, and only once for each of these, when the venue is announced And there's a range in between. It's obviously difficult to discuss this on the announce list itself (as there's not meant to be much traffic there), but what are people's feelings here? For reference, the list archive for May (including a couple of embarrasing Mailman hiccups I caused) are here; there've been ten posts so far this month. http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2002-May/thread.html (I'm not going to say what I think until people voice an opinion, but if you lot don't, I'll do what I like anyway. Mwuhahaha. (Dave, can I borrow a cat to stroke for a second?)) -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: Fwd: [cam.pm] CPMBOPPC
On 27/05/2002 at 12:31 +0100, Mark Fowler wrote: On Sat, 25 May 2002, Paul Mison wrote: I thought the slavering hordes of london.pm might like to have a look at this, despite the fact claiming your prize may be slightly tricky. Not wanting to fail for silly reasons, what's the exact spacing on that? (did you forward it with or or what?) How about I just point you at the archives, so you can look at what cam.pm have said about it since? http://cam.pm.org/archive/2002-May/000761.html http://cam.pm.org/archive/2002-May/thread.html -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Fwd: [cam.pm] CPMBOPPC
I thought the slavering hordes of london.pm might like to have a look at this, despite the fact claiming your prize may be slightly tricky. ---begin forwarded text From: Matthew Byng-Maddick [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i Subject: [cam.pm] CPMBOPPC Precedence: bulk Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Id: Cambridge(UK) PerlMongers cam.pm.cam.pm.org Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 01:22:53 +0100 This is the Cam.Pm Beerfestival Obfuscated Perl Programming Contest. The prize is that I will buy all the drinks for whoever I think should win all night at the next meet that I make (which means that the winner should also try and make the relevant meet :-) The rules of the contest are fairly simple, below, I have drawn a beer glass in `#' signs. Any of the hash signs must be filled by a non-whitespace character, and no whitespace or null position must be filled by anything other than a whitespace. The shebang line is not included in this, and is not a necessary part of the submission. The contest is open from the moment that this message goes out until midnight BST on June 2nd (ie. June 1st 23:59:59 is OK), and the challenge is to produce the most interesting piece of code. It is open to everyone except Lucy and I, who will be judging it, and the winner will be announced at the appropriate meeting. Obviously, if you want to claim your prize, you will have to go to the meeting. :-) (no cash equivalents etc). The image may not be shifted to the left in any way, so if you want to rely on the spacing, it must be the spacing below. Submissions to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and they will be confidential until the winners are announced. --8-- ## ## ## ## #### #### #### ## ## ## ## ## ## #### #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## --8-- Despite the name, solutions do not have to be obfuscated, but the most interesting will win the prize. (and yes, I do intend to honour this.) MBM (not at all drunk, surprisingly, for such a stupid suggestion) -- Matthew Byng-Maddick [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://colondot.net/ ---end forwarded text -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
[ANNOUNCE] Reminder: tech meet, punting
A quick reminder that there's a technical meeting tomorrow (the 16th of May) at state51, at their offices just off Bethnal Green Road: http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/state51.html Leon Brocard, James Duncan and Dave Cross will be speaking, along with anyone else who brings along a lightning talk. As ever, we'll be meeting from 6.30pm for a 7pm start. Kate Pugh also asked me to drum up further recruits for the punting trip on Sunday. Check the archives for details: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2002-May/03.html -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
[ANNOUNCE] Technical meeting, state51, Thurs 16th May
There will be a technical meeting next Thursday, the 16th of May, graciously hosted (once again) by state51, at their offices on Bethnal Green Road: http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/state51.html Speakers so far confirmed are Leon Brocard, James Duncan and Dave Cross. I'm still open to other 20-minute or shorter talks (especially lightning talks). Otherwise I might have to talk, and you probably wouldn't want that. A projector is already in hand. Please can people who turn up early be prepared to move chairs and tables around a bit, and also some people to stay late and tidy are needed. Also, for those on -announce who missed it, the next social will be at the Anchor on Thursday 6th June. There'll the usual string of reminders with directions nearer the meeting. Thanks, and apologies again to -annouce users for some mail oddness towards the end of last week caused by your humble admin (me) being very stupid. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: Sharp Zaurus
On 10/05/2002 at 12:01 +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: (otWouldn't it be nice to not *almost always* have London.pm meetings on Thursdays?/ot) Nah. Despite the three (relatively) simple rules for meetings, there still seems to be some confusion about when meetings are. By keeping at least the day constant, it becomes a little more likely that there'll be people at the meetings. Of course if somebody wants to arrange emergency meetings that's fine by me. On the subject of palmtops, I was very smitten with this rather odd hand-held laptop-except-designed-to-be-handheld Vaio, as seen on slashdot: http://www.dynamism.com/u1/main.shtml http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/PCOM/Software_02q1/ThumbPhrase/index.ht ml (Latter is a Flash animation of the thumb controls) It has the same mini-VGA out as an iBook and iMac, built in ethernet, and a 1024x768 screen. Mmm. What with this and the new flap-top Clies, Sony are really going a long way to removing the gap between laptops and handhelds. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Emergency pub reconnaissance, Tuesday 21 May
On 04/05/2002 at 00:31 +0100, Richard Clamp wrote: Sorry, you don't count because you're not voting for the Anchor. Only the old bits or outside though. Yeah, the new bar looks like- urk- a Wetherspoons. Even so, however, there being no (significant) disagreement, and the people on IRC deciding it's not worth trying to book, I'm going to do the leader bit and declare that the next social meeting, on Thursday, 6th June, shall be at the Anchor, Bankside, but not in the new bits. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Emergency pub reconnaissance, Tuesday 21 May
On 03/05/2002 at 12:41 +0100, Kate L Pugh wrote: Glasshouse Stores ... I would think though that if we do like it, we might still want to put it on the back burner until after the summer; people have been saying that they'd rather be somewhere that sunlight was actually visible, in the summer months. (Opinions? Send 'em to the (non-announce) list.) The two places I remember being mooted were the Anchor and the Three Cups. A few people said yesterday that the Three Cups was probably too small, now, and as far as I know it's not finised refurbishing. The Anchor might well be busy, but I think the new meeting room might be available. I'm heading there tonight and will enquire, if I don't get too drunk too quickly. Otherwise, we could go back to the Doggett's for a meeting, or to the Founder's Arms, if people like the riverside atmosphere of the South Bank. Any other suggestions? Or should we simply go back to the Cittie of Yorke in June, and try and get a plan together for July? Quick apologies for the double post, an artefact of me grappling the announce list back to life in Mailman and messing things up in the process. -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Reminder: Social meeting tonight
On 02/05/2002 at 12:10 +0100, someone wrote off-list: On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 11:26:17AM +0100, Paul Mison wrote: Just in case you need one (and because Leon told me too), here's another quick reminder that there's a social meeting tonight, downstairs at the Cittie of Yorke, starting at 6pm. not to be a pain in the arse but where is the Cittie of Yorke ! http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/cittieofyorke.html has directions. It's on High Holborn, less than five minutes walk from Chancery Lane tube station. (Posted back to list in case anyone else wanted to know where the pub was.) -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
[OT] Exim logo petition
Dear Friends, I have just read and signed the online petition: Less Awful Logo for Exim hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com, the free online petition service, at: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/eximlogo/ I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider signing yourself. Best wishes, Paul Mison
[ANNOUNCE] Reminder: Meeting this week
Just a quick reminder that the next social meeting is this week, on Thursday, 2nd May, at our regular venue, the downstairs (cellar) bar of the Cittie of York, High Holborn (nearest tube: Chancery Lane): http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/cittieofyorke.html As usual, it's booked from 6pm; I'd suggest early arrivers drink at the public bar until then. May also sees a technical meeting (hopefully); please send me a note if you have a talk you'd like to give (perhaps you need to practice for a conference?), and the usual suspects can expect emails about hosting and projectors soon. Cheers, -- :: paul :: dave staugas loves bea hablig
