Re: Straight Jackets and Video Cameras
* at 29/07 07:32 -0700 Ovid said: On the off chance that anyone here is interested, I thought it would be fun to produce a small parody of the I'm a PC/I'm a Mac ads. Basically, it would be a series of video shorts along the lines of I'm Java/I'm Perl, I'm Ruby/I'm Perl, etc. All in good fun, of course :) Isn't this just likely to turn out to be an exercise in poking a load of wasps nests? Struan
Re: Tricky localization/scope question
* at 27/07 17:01 -0700 Randy J. Ray said: So, let's assume there's a module called Test::Without[1] I'm not sure if you've seen it but there is a Test::Without::Module already on the CPAN that does the file part of what you want. Struan
Re: My New Job (Was: Social Thurs 8 Jan 2009)
* at 05/01 14:39 + Paul Makepeace said: If you're going multi-modal folding bikes are the only way to go, IMO. (I've heard awful things about Dahon though, btw.) FWIW: I had a terrible experience with Bikefix, to the point of having me give them another, rhyming name... The advice I had from my brother who works in a bike shop was to buy a Brompton. He'd seen too many of the other makes they stocked come back broken. s
Re: Stupid fucking antivirus software
* at 31/08 15:27 +0100 Peter Sergeant said: On Sun, Aug 31, 2003 at 01:54:56PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: What you are saying is equivalent to if there's money to be made from spamming, there's nothing wrong with doing it.. No, what I'm saying is that expecting businesses to act like charities is more than a little silly. Bouncing messages was added because at the time it was deemed useful by both the anti-virus company and clients, and because clients would pay money for this extra feature. If there is little client demand to improve this feature, then, bizarrely enough, the vendors aren't going to do it. Having said that, I believe more than a few of the vendors do have products that discriminate - it's hardly their fault if sysadmins don't upgrade their software. Ah, but it seems to me that while it's not reasonable to ask a business to act as a charity it is reasonable to ask them to act in such a way as to not inconvience you. I think the issue here is that people always say 'it's easy to delete email' or that the bounces don't cause any real harm. The problem is that it's not true. It's not hard to find people out there (quite a few of whom are on this list) who have had 10s of thousands of innapropriate bounces. When a problem reached that sort of scale I think it's entirely reasonable to expect the companies responsible to alter their products. And while they can't force their users to upgrade, much as I'm sure they'd love to, they can make sure they make attempts to inform their users of the issues. Isn't idealism nice? Struan
Re: insidious biometrics, identity crises
* at 28/08 18:26 +0200 Robin Berjon said: Nicholas Clark wrote: On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 05:39:49PM +0200, Robin Berjon wrote: I don't think that's what Elaine was pointing at. You're hit by a bus and die. How do they contact your friends and family if you can't be identified? Not sure. We seem to manage without. I didn't say you didn't manage, just that I thought that that was what Elaine was saying, and that it certainly helps. It also helps pull up your medical history from file if you're not dead but uncounscious or otherwise unable to communicate the fact that you may need special treatment for some reason. It's not actually relevant as people's medical records aren't held in a centralised way (as far as i know) so even if they do know who you are they then need to find out who your registered doctor is in order to get your medical records. I believe they've tried to computerise it but it all went terribly wrong so they gave up. s
Re: insidious biometrics, identity crises
* at 28/08 19:40 +0200 Ronan Oger (roasp) said: But how much are we *already* measured, controlled, and modelled, with and without our consent? Databas NAtion by Garfinkel (spl?) has a lot to say about this. with consent: air miles card purchases track spending habits in order to sell the individual behaviour to all-too-willing purchasers. But an air miles card is something I _choose_ to have. without: POS transactions (EC card in Europe, Interac in Canada) are tracked and cross-referenced to each other to generate spending-profile patterms. POS-transaction houses (my wife once worked for one) make the bulk of their money cross-referencing card-based spending patterns with air miles cards and CC cards, generating comprehensive behaviour models for individuals. We didn't really pay attention, but we gave consent to have this happen when we signed up to POS. There are limits in the EU about this, but you have to *know* it is happening in order to complain... While this is true I don't have to use POS. We still have the option of paying with real money so if you're bothered you can avoid the tracking. Plus, just because private companies are trying to track our every move doesn't provide justification for the government to attempt to do so, especially as the government has access to so much more information about us in the first place. ID cards are a _very_ seperate issue from the data mining of the private sector. Struan
Re: interactive tests
* at 30/07 15:32 +0100 Adrian Howard said: On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 05:50 am, Struan Donald wrote: snip / [snip] And, yes, I'm aware I should probably try and avoid interactive tests altogether but in this case there's no other way to get the information I need. [snip] Are you *really* sure about that? I've found that mock objects and judicious use of standalone W3 and DB servers (e.g. SQLite) have removed all need for interactive tests - unless there really is no alternative (e.g. the user has to press a button to test the button pressing). I'm pretty sure about it. It's a module that logs in to yahoo and in order to do that I need a yahoo login. I could provide one but that looks like being on the edge of the Yahoo Ts Cs[0] and as anyone that will be using the module will need to have a Yahoo login it's not much of an ask for them to provide one. I guess I could go and fake the whole yahoo login procedure locally but that seems error prone and, to be honest, a whole load more work than the actual module itself. In general though you're right. ta for the code btw, I think I'll pass as I don't really know enough about Term things and suspect using them might add more headaches than it solves. s [0] As to whether providing something to automate logging in to Yahoo is also a breach of the Ts Cs is another matter...
Re: interactive tests
* at 30/07 12:40 + Dominic Mitchell said: On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 12:49:10 +0200, Jos I. Boumans [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you want to change things in Makefile.PL, look at @ARGV or %ENV. as suggested below as well -- if possible every question in Makefile.PL should be overridable by a commandline switch. all questions met == no interactivity. That's fine and reasonable. I just take issue with the default of being interactive. It's a complete arse, even if you're not doing clever packaging stuff. Take the simple example of installing a module with lots of dependencies. You set off the build to run over lunch, go away and come back to find that the 3rd module it depended on is asking for your database connection details. It's exceedingly annoying. That's the case I was thinking of. CPAN is also another good reason for choosing environment variables; passing command line options for an individual module is really difficult. So, you look for environment variables in the Makefile.PL but at some point someone has to set those. I don't know about you but when installing stuff off CPAN I tend to fire up cpan/cpanplus and then type the relevant commands to do the intall. This might be considered niave of me (Memoize Makefile.PL and all) but I suspect I'm not alone in not reading the install instructions. Thsi is especially the case with things that seem like trivial modules. Still, I might go with this anyway, only defaulting to non interactive and spitting out a warning or something in the tests. cheers s
interactive tests
Hi, If you don't want to read about Perl look away now. In cases where you require some information to perform a test (say a database name, or login information) is there an accepted way of doing it? More specifically is there some way I can ask for the information and if I don't get a response in x seconds assume either defaults or SKIP the test? Also, where should I even ask the questions? Some use prompt in the (Makefile|Build).PL and others their own prompt style routine in the test itself. or should I go subscribe to perl-qa[0] and ask there? ;) And, yes, I'm aware I should probably try and avoid interactive tests altogether but in this case there's no other way to get the information I need. cheers s [0] the archive of which didn't have much to say about interactive tests.
Re: HTML to text
* at 30/06 10:32 +0200 Mark Overmeer said:
* Ian Malpass ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [030629 20:59]:
I'm trying to write something that converts HTML into nicely formatted
text.
$fh-open(lynx -dump -stdin temp.txt |)
HTML::FormatText produces a nice result.
Although in order to get it to produce lynx like output some
subclassing is needed to handle links:
package HTML::MyFormatText;
use strict;
use URI::WithBase;
use base qw(HTML::FormatText);
sub configure {
my $self = shift;
my $hash = shift;
# a base uri so we can resolve relative uris
$self-{base} = $hash-{base};
delete $hash-{base};
$self-{base} =~ s#(.*?)/[^/]*$#$1/#;
$self-SUPER::configure($hash);
}
sub a_start {
my $self = shift;
my $node = shift;
# local urls are no use so we have to make them absolute
my $href = $node-attr('href') || '';
if ($href =~ m#^http:|^mailto:#) {
push @{$self-{_links}}, $href;
} else {
my $u = URI::WithBase-new($href, $self-{base});
push @{$self-{_links}}, $u-abs();
}
$self-out( '[' . $#{$self-{_links}} .'] ' );
$self-SUPER::a_start();
}
sub html_end {
my $self = shift;
if ( $self-{_links} ) {
$self-nl; $self-nl; # be tidy
$self-goto_lm;
for (0 .. $#{$self-{_links}}) {
$self-goto_lm;
$self-out([$_] . $self-{_links}-[$_]);
$self-nl;
}
}
$self-SUPER::end();
}
1;
__END__
HTH
Struan
use warnings and 5.005
Harking back to Simon's[0] complaint of modules being non 5.005
compatible simply due to turning on the warnings pragma is there a way
to turn it on for 5.6+?
Some poking turns up this mail on p5p from Nick Clark:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?H28912404
which asks if
if ($] = 5.006) {
eval use warnings; 1 or die $@;
}
is the best way to do it. Sadly it doesn't seem to work as the use is
scoped to the eval. In fact, any way I can think of fails as the
warnings pragma is lexical so gets scoped inside the conditional block
I wrap it in.
So, is just missing out the line the way forward or is there an
approved idiom that escapes my google foo?
TIA
s
[0]
http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20030310/017669.html
Re: c email libraries
* at 18/03 18:44 + Marty Pauley said: On Tue Mar 18 17:48:12 2003, Simon Wistow wrote: and another one that implements jwz's threading algorith, Dunno about that. I thought he provided the C code himself. If you look at his page[0] on the algorithm he states: Sadly, my C implementation of this algorithm is not available, because it was purged during the 4.0 rewrite, and Netscape refused to allow me to free the 3.0 source code so I guess not. Bad netscape/aol/time warner. s [0] http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html
Re: sshd on port 443
* at 12/02 17:25 - Jody Belka said: Newton, Philip said: Jody Belka wrote: have you tried turning keep-alives on? How do I do that? i think you said you're using putty, yes? if so, it has an option to send null packets to keep the session active. that's what i was thinking of. This may not always work. I know the adsl router I have here doesn't honour ssh's ProtocolKeepAlives option, although it has worked in the past with other routers. s
Re: [OT] Playstation2 as DVD Player
* at 07/01 20:48 + Dave Cross said: So it seems that the problem is not with the DVDs I buy, but with my PS2's ability to play slightly sub-standard discs. Has anyone heard this about PS2s? Is it a known fault? Is there a way to fix it? $flatmates PS2 and the one that Sony replaced it with after he complained both did this as well as the sound/picture going out of sync so I think you could class it as a known fault. Or at least not a one off. s
Re: [JOB]
* at 26/11 06:32 + Piers Cawley said: Dave Hodgkinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Mon, 2002-11-25 at 18:53, Fiona Conner wrote: Hello I am looking for a full-time perl programmer to work on a major blue-chip client's e commerce site. Blue chip. Nottingham. This would be, hmmm, Boots? Raleigh cycles? AIUI they've pretty much shut up shop and out sourced everything to the far east so I doubt it. s
Re: Reuse; was: applying patterns
* at 10/10 10:08 +0100 Lusercop said: WRT to CPAN, as a system administrator, you do basically want to maintain the smallest number of independent bits of software on the machines you run, but when a CPAN module depends on several others, each of which depends on several others etc, you can have a potential nightmare on your hands.[1] [1] In this case, I'm counting stuff in the core as part of the core, and not as an independent software package. I'm curious to know what people's solutions are to this problem, as it seems to go against code-reuse. I can only imagine that the right answer is some sort of compromise. I think it's a trade off. Yes there might well be a lot of CPAN modules but surely this is better than having 6 bits of code that all do what $module does that you have to audit individually rather than going, oh yes, that uses $module to do that, that's fine. You then only (!) have to audit the application specific code. Assuming you've audited all the CPAN modules on your system already that is. s
Re: ADSL Help
* at 06/10 10:27 +0100 Robert Shiels said: I've just about decided to go for ADSL, and Nildram have been recommended here, so I go to this page: https://www.getadsl.co.uk/services_home.htm and now I'm not really sure what I want. I think the cheapest option will probably be fine, but maybe I want a static IP address, I'm not sure. I don't need web space. Maybe I should be looking at their secure service instead! I WILL be running this on a Windows PC [1], I will be playing Unreal Tournament and downloading MP3 files mostly, and I'd quite like to be able to access my home PC remotely to retrieve files when I'm at work. And of course fast surfing. I have 3 or 4 other PCs in my house with wireless cards in them from which I'd like to be able to access the internet through the ADSL connection too. Well, this is what I'm using due to non geek flatmates who require something that is easy to understand. Initially i did the using windows machine as router and it sucks. It's a pain to set up, does things you don't tell it and you need to leave the machine on all the time. After a while i bought one of those routery things and it's all much nicer. It has a firewall (for certain values of firewall) and will do all my dhcp and so on, and it all more or less worked out the box. It's a dratek (i think, i'm not at home so can't check) one and seems pretty good. And yeah, a static IP is always good as if nothing else it means you can tell any sysadmin whose box you might want access to that you'll be coming from that IP and suddenly they get much happier about making holes in firewalls... s
Re: mysql autoincs
* at 16/07 18:47 +0100 Jonathan Stowe said: On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Roger Burton West wrote: FreeTDS? It's getting there - it will work against SQL Server 2000 which suprised me greatly. Just make sure you make sure it's speaking the right version of TDS for your database otherwise Bad Bad things happen. Or at least they do with Sybase. s
Re: mysql autoincs
* at 16/07 15:51 +0100 Dave Cross said: On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 03:56:23PM +0100, Alex McLintock ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: For the record I hit this sort of problem doing some perl web stuff with Oracle. It seemed that because Oracle was multiprocessor each oracle process would grab for itself the next 20 ids. if you stopped and started the server there would be a gap of 19 between consecutive requests Sybase has a similar feature - except each process grabs about a million ids. This leads to some very confusing numbers. I've been told that the number they grab is editable but the DBA who told me did imply that it was a bad thing to at any time other than creating the database. Or so I recall as the next thing he said was here, use this stored procedure and table thing instead. s
Re: [ANNOUNCE] ANNOUNCE: Technical meeting, Thurs 18 July
* at 15/07 17:17 +0100 Dominic Mitchell said: Chris Benson wrote: Next time I'm in London this's what I'll be using: http://www.bromptonbicycle.co.uk/ They're very good and I wouldn't part with mine, but go easy with them. I'd been riding mine for less than a year before my first spoke popped out of the back wheel. That turned into an annoying habit, culminating in the need for a new wheel. I always thought these: http://www.strida.com/ looked kinda nice. certainly a nice elegant design. s
Re: Anyone up for a TPC6 skate jam?
* at 02/07 12:51 +0100 Paul Makepeace said: On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 12:13:25PM +0100, Harper, Gareth wrote: Other than that London skaters should know about the Wednesday and Friday Night Skates, WNS: http://www.londonskate.com/ FNS: http://www.citiskate.com/fnsfaq.htm Both depart from different parts of Hyde Park, typically 19:00/19:30. The FNS meets up with the Crit Mass folk on the last Friday, weather permitting. WNS is a bit friendlier, p'haps. AIUI the FNS doesn't meet up with Critical Mass anymore. Skater friends of mine who do the FNS thing say it's great fun, if a little tiring if you're out of practice... s
Re: Book reviews
* at 30/05 04:36 -0700 Paul Makepeace said: The point at which you start saying oh well, it's OK to this or that even though it is basically spamming is the thin end of the wedge. Imagine if this what you think is acceptable was done by every commercial company who had a product you could conceivably be interested in. This strikes me as the slippery slope argument which is always a dodgy one. I think Manning sending mail to perl monger group leaders about perl books to review is a lot different to Dell[1] sending them mail about computer offers. One is very specifically related to that group of people whereas the other is a much more tenuous link, and clearly a very different situation. There is a line that can be drawn. Of course it's still unsolicited which is inherently bad but that's by the by as regards to that argument. s [1] as a random example of a company that sells things they could conceivably be interested in
Re: Signs and Ports (as in many bottles of different)
* at 28/05 14:03 +0100 Greg McCarroll said: [1] Is it just me or have their been a number of indicators we are nearly due for our biannual (or if you prefer semiannual) introspective mailing list thread where we debate in our usual manner mailing list pedentry, fascism, etc. ? Maybe we need a new mailing list for just such things. Then the fun can never stop! london-pm-meta anyone? s [1] I'm unsure if it was an attempt to leach the wound before it gets too bad or a goading. I'm assuming the former.
Re: Counting words in any document
* at 27/05 13:30 +0100 Pierre Denis said: I'd like to count the number of words in any type of documents. I have a processor that transform the initial document into plain text and then counting the words is a piece of cake. No problems so far to do it for plain text and html documents. The problem is for MS Word documents and pdf. Is there a perl module I've missed that could do it? Maybe something that can transform MS word and pdf docs into rtf? It would be nice also to be able to extract the text from Excel spreadsheets. Spreadsheet::ParseExcel will do the excel bit (as long as they're not password protetected) and seemed ok for the quick hack i used it for. I'm sure there's a stack of PDF modules. a quick search of cpan shows several. Word might be a bit trickier. there are a few libraries out there that do the word - text dance (the one antiword uses seems to be pretty good) but none of them (as far as I've ever found) has a perl interface so you'd either have to write one or so something ugly like shell out to the relevant program. I do seem to recall a talk at yapc::europe 2000 about doing some sort of word - text conversion but I seem to recall they used some sort of windows machine with some sort of server that then use the perl OLE stuff to take a word file and save it as text. This is obviously non optimal :) s
Re: mod_rewrite, individuality and purty urls
* at 03/05 11:48 +0100 Simon Wistow said: My first thought would be to do something like ... 1. Lower case the title 2. Strip out common words like and, a, but, and, like, or etc etc. 3. Convert spaces to underscores. 4. Check to see if that's unique, if it's not then add a number on the end (my least favourite bit about it) or ask the editor for an alternative. Or I could just ask the editor everytime. Ideas? Stuff the date in there if it's not unique? So you have http://example.com/drink_like_a_monger.html and then a later article is http://example.com/drink_like_a_monger_may_3.html The date is at least a bit more contextual than a number. Asking the editor every time might result in a lot of one word names that might not be very helpful, people being lazy and all that. s
Re: OT: Mailing list software
* at 24/04 11:49 +0100 Roger Burton West said: My feeling as a listmaster (since 1994 or so, list sizes up to about 200) is that anyone who has trouble following the instructions send mail to address X with subject line Y is unlikely to have much to contribute to a mailing list. This has been entirely borne out by experience. Depends on your audience though. I've got a few small mailing lists on mailman with non techies on them and the web interface is a boon as some of them really get confused by the whole mail this address and follow the instructions thing and I end up hand holding them through it. The web form bit is so much less complex to explain. Plus the web admin means I can delegate while I'm on holiday. Not that I've used MajorDomo so no comparison. s
Re: ADSL
* at 12/03 23:44 + Steve Keay said: On Tue, Mar 12, 2002 at 03:15:10PM +, Leon Brocard wrote: fact, I want cheap ADSL with none of that silly USB business, so I was h, I'm doing a long post. Vehemence? Now, I still have a USB modem (the Alcatel speedtouch thing that looks like a sea creature), but since November I have been using the Benoit drivers. There are no kernel-space parts, no patches for anything, and it's been rock-solid. In my set-up (always-on i386-based Linux server, several mixed downstream clients on my Ethernet LAN) I think that the USB thing is fine, and I see no reason to change to an Ethernet ADSL router. Indeed, if I moved to a hardware router I fear that I would lose some flexibility in having Linux manage my WAN interface. If you had a 56K modem-dialup would you prefer a hardware-ethernet modem to one that attatched via a serial port? FWIW I bought one of the router/switch things that you can plug your USB modem into[1] and it's been great. As much as I'd like to do the linux router thing the issue is $flatmates who won't have two computers in the living room and must have a windows box for the kaaza goodness and so on and windows is hopelessly unstable for the routing thing. Anyway, it's been great. It did exactly what i wanted it to do with no fuss. It does firewalling[2], port forwarding, NAT and so forth and it just works. Don't think it does QOS type things though. one caveat is you need a windows machine to install the drivers for the usb modem from. and ok, it's £200 so i imagine i'd go for wires only and ethernet now but as they also do ethernet versions of the product i'd say they's be worth a look. s [1] http://www.seg.co.uk/draytek/products/vigor2200usb.html [2] nice touch here being the two default fireall rules are block all outgoing and incoming netbios traffic which shows forethought.
Re: ADSL
* at 09/03 22:24 + David Cantrell said: On Sat, Mar 09, 2002 at 08:52:48PM -, Robert Shiels wrote: I have to admit that I'm not really sure what I want from the service, apart from 24/7 connectivity (I'd like to be able to pull files off my home PC from work too), a static IP address, and fast downloads. Do you get the static IP from the consumer version? Not that it matters if you can live with using that dynamic DNS malarkey. I think a few people, certainly nildram, do static ip with the consumer version. Ususally it's a bit more that the dynamic service though. oh, and http://www.adsguide.org.uk/ is pretty handy for adsl related info if you haven't seen it already. s
Re: Tea (was Re: Bolloxia)
* at 26/02 10:58 + Peter Haworth said: On the other hand, surely the AI has a reasonable chance if you take regular backups? :-) but if the OS crashes and then you restore the AI isn't that a little ethically unsound? in that the AI has died and the you've restored it ,presumably from a not fully up to date backup either, no doubt leading to some degree of confusion etc for the AI. s reminded of the ethics of star trek style transporters debates he's heard.
Re: Tea (was Re: Bolloxia)
* at 26/02 11:47 + the hatter said: On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Struan Donald wrote: but if the OS crashes and then you restore the AI isn't that a little ethically unsound? in that the AI has died and the you've restored it ,presumably from a not fully up to date backup either, no doubt leading to some degree of confusion etc for the AI. Erm, if you restore an AI to the state it was in some time ago, why would it be any more confused than when it was first in that state ? Unless you're implying that some part of the AI's 'spirit' isn't included in the backups, but I can't see an easy way to justify that, given that its entire construct exists in electronic memory. well, as i see it the AI will have access to all the information that any process runnind under the OS will, including the date and time. the backup will have knowledge of the date and time it was last aware of hence it will suddenly have 'lost' $period_of_time which may well be a fairly traumatic event for the AI. the principle here is that what you are doing is taking a copy of the AI, killing, allbeit inadvertantly, the original and then replacing the original with the copy. i.e. you are killing the original. it's not really got a lot to do with spirit or any such thing. Of course this is assuming a fairly large level of sentience in the system as well as positing that it will feel emotion or at least the moral equivalent thereof. of course we soon get into skynet/kevin warwick territory here :) s
Next social and tube strikes
It's been noticed that the next social (on the 7th of March) and the first of the two proposed tube strikes overlap (in that it finishes at noon on the 7th). Do we think this is liable to be a problem? ISTR that last time this happened the social meeting was moved to the following Thursday. Is this a good idea or should we just leave be and hope that as per the last time everyone kisses and makes up and there is no strike? Responses to the list, please. ta s
Re: Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]
* at 20/02 10:13 + Paul Mison said: I know a fixed start time is a possible solution, but it doesn't sound like a good one to me. As to an introductory speech, I doubt I'd be able to talk in front of you lot without a little booze inside me... which would also guarantee not going overboard on them, I think. isn't the tradition more on the wait till it looks like most people have turned up and then do any talking things required lines? s
Re: Bolloxia
* at 18/02 17:57 -0600 Chris Devers said: But what then? The more I study this, the more all the sides just sound hopelessly naive wrongheaded, but I can't offer any better suggestions. we should all just rememember to be nice to each other and get along :) s
Re: Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]
* at 20/02 00:02 + David Cantrell said: On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Kate L Pugh wrote: * How about offering a free pint to first-time attendees at the social? That was originally my silly suggestion, but I'll stand by it. I'll buy a $drink_of_choice for a few new faces. is a good idea too as it's a bit weird to walk up to a bunch of strangers and offer to buy them $alchohol but buying your own drink and then sitting nursing it in the corner isn't all that social. on the other hand if you get bought a drink it tends to draw you in. now we just need the i am not a new member tattoos to prevent abuse ;) s
Re: Social meet kick up the arse [Was: Return to the Yorke]
* at 19/02 22:16 + Kate L Pugh said: * Social meets aren't the best way to recruit newbies. Pah, that's where you got me from, and aren't you glad you did. i think the key difference is that people who come to social meets are more likely to participate actively rather than just lurking which is why social's are good. * Circulating was difficult at the Cittie of Yorke last month. I agree, and this is another reason why I'd like to try to fill the whole bar; we'll get a lower density overall. We maybe also need to have oldbies who are focussing on making sure nobody gets left out. circulating in almost any pub becomes difficult with more than 10 people so i don't think you can level that at the CoY exclusively. I don't see having our own bit of the pub as a neccessary thing _provided_ that the bit that isn't ours doesn't result in conversation being difficult. i.e. it is a quiet pub. one thing about the have a big meeting and get all the lurkers in is that some people find large groups of strangers a bit intimidating so it might put some people off. s
Re: Bolloxia
* at 18/02 12:59 + Rob Partington said: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Simon Wistow [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: By globalised I meant when a brand has been changed to fit in with a more homegenised global ideal. But it's being changed to fit in with a more homogenised global ideal. They're being changed because it's a whole lot easier dealing with one brand name. I read a rationale somewhere about the SuperMop (I think) that pointed out that having one brand over all of Europe meant they could launch the product 6-9 months earlier and at about 50% of the cost. but the point is that this attitude leads to the homigenisation of everything as it's easier. Now in some cases this is fine (netowrk protocols as an example) but largely it's not. the ability to find irish/english theme pubs in most major european cities is enormously depressing, never mind mcdonalds et al. and ok, this might be simon's reducing ab absurdium but when you get kids the worl over wanting a mcdonalds over the local cuisine and nike's and so on it begin's to get less funny. for me anyway. and then there's the labour market evilness that comes with all of this. insert type=std anti capitalsim/globalisation rant / s -- an empowered and informed member of society ;)
Re: Bolloxia
* at 18/02 14:00 - Robert Shiels said: From: Simon Wistow [EMAIL PROTECTED] Branded clothing is in no way guaranteed to be better than quality. My Vans fall apart very quickly and my Levis split at the crotch. well take them back then, and have them replaced for free. That's why we buy brands, because we have a comeback if they're crap. Get a non-branded pair of jeans/trainers at a market and try taking them back and see how far you get. I suspect that in a lot of cases you'd be told it was wear and tear and not get them replaced. you only get them replaced if there is a provable fault rather than just built in shoddiness. and the point about the non branded is kind of a straw man. just 'cause levi's are a bit better than the bloke down the market stall doesn't make it right. the point is that levi's et al are not really good products for the money, and they don't care and won't care untill it starts to impact their profits or, heaven forfend, their brand image. Untill people actually stop buying stuff they'll just carry on relying on huge marketing budgets over quality and more and more people will follow suit (c.f vans who used to have hand made in america because it's the best way on all their shoes and then shipped most of their manufacturing to the far east and upped the marketing spend. apparently this was a better way) s
Re: Bolloxia
* at 18/02 14:59 + Jonathan Peterson said: Hey, I like Levi's! just an example :) There's a difference between the brandname thing and the globalisation thing. Brands have been qith us for a while, and people have been buying brands for the sake of the brand for hundreds of years. true. it's not really the brands but the brand as a lifestyle choice and the whole art of branding such that the _brand_ is the important thing rather than the actual products. hundreds of years ago the concept of branding wasn't really the same. you had products that were made by a company and that companies logo on the $container was as much branding as you got. and yes, i imagine people did buy certain brands in preference to others and certain brands were perceived as better but if you look at the advertising it was all based on actual qualities of the goods (guiness is good for you and all that). now it's largely not based on the qualities of the goods. it's all about the lifestyle that is portrayed to come with the goods. and not even that, the products are secondary to the brand. nike advert often don't mention any specific product. you can happily watch a nike advert and not come away any the wiser about why you should buy nike shoes other than they have cool adverts. and that's the difference. things are sold on how cool they are rather than how good they are. call me practical but this sort of thing gives people all the excuse they need to make lower quality goods and charge more money for them as people will buy them _because_ they are cool and to hell with how good they actually are. and the globalisation thing comes in as you are then selling the same lifestyle to everyone regardless of their own local culture so everyone aspires to the same lifestyle. this seems kinda like a bad thing to me. and yes, globalising your product line is cheaper but it leads to worse products as they then have to be all things to all people hence compromising on features in order to make them more global. however you look at it globalisation is only good for the large companies and not for anyone else. s
Re: Bolloxia
* at 18/02 16:00 - Robert Shiels said: From: Struan Donald [EMAIL PROTECTED] however you look at it globalisation is only good for the large companies and not for anyone else. sorry for snipping everything, but I have no idea how you can come to that conclusion. I'm not for it, but I can see many benefits: snip Anyway, there are advantages for the consumer; there are disadvantages too, but it's not as black and white as you're painting it. well yes. fair point. on the whole though i think globalisation does not favour the consumer as it's all about increasing profit and decreasing overhead and generally i'd say that's not something that dovetails all that well with the needs of either the consumer or, for that matter, the employee. s -- who could argue all year about this but knows everyone else can't :)
Re: Bolloxia
* at 18/02 13:51 -0800 Paul Makepeace said: On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 04:37:42PM -0500, Mike Jarvis wrote: Theoretically decreasing overhead means decreased prices for consumers, but we all know that never happens in the real world. I'm pretty sure I'm paying less for an 80GB of harddrive storage now than I would've paid two years ago. And so on. well, the globalisation thing seems to work better for commodity goods[1] like that, esp as the manufacturing process is pretty automated so staff costs are much less of an issue. also marketing spend is a lower percentage of costs for most of these companies. on the other hand the move out to the far east and the drop in labour costs seems to have little effect on the prices of the various companies that have done it. s [1] largely 'cause a lot of the market is selling to other companies who don't have a lot of truck with what their choice of hardrive says about how cool they are. (unless they were a dot com ;)
Re: The Hotel Fiasco
* at 14/02 10:41 + Greg McCarroll said: The following prices assume staying for the 17,18,19,20,21. Please double check the prices, I worked them out quickly. They looked about right. out of interest how many people (like me) are leaving on the 21st? we go for the MMA and those who need to economise should go for a double room sounds like a plan to me. i'm certainly ameanable to it as long as i can find a sharee (bearing in mind 4 night contraint...) as the difference is only 20ish quid between that and the single room. s
Re: IMPORTANT!!!! Forwarded : YAPC 2002 - hotel bookings
* at 12/02 11:21 + Greg McCarroll said: I need feedback on this ASAP seems a bit steeper, pricewise, than i was anticipating in that it's heading on for twice what i was anticipating... s
Re: [plug] grubstreet
* at 07/02 12:35 + Leon Brocard said: Earle Martin sent the following bits through the ether: If this interests you, you can find it at http://grault.net/grubstreet/ . Dipsy knows more than grubstreet. Why the wiki? not everyone groks irc might be one reason. plus dipsy does have a very #london.pm slant on things. not that this wiki won't have the same issues. and the fact that dipsy tends to have short, sometimes bordering on obtuse, answers whereas a wiki can be more discursive. of course these are just guesses. s
Re: OSX
* at 01/02 11:23 - Robert Shiels said: From: Simon Wistow [EMAIL PROTECTED] summaryit'll all be micorpayments i tell you/summary I'm not convinced by the micro-payments model. I like to know exactly what something is costing me, otherwise how can I budget. I suppose if there was This is what I see as the fatal flaw in the micropayment model. If I'm a manager with a budget I don't want to have to say well in April the marketing department have a lot of copy to write so will be using the spell checker more than normal so I need to have $extra in the budget for that. And it's not like you can say the software budget's a bit tight so you can't use the spellchecker this week. Also it would seem like an administrative nightmare as if you assume power features will cost more to use then you have to have a system to restrict who can use them to control costs. And then you would want to make sure that people aren't making excessive use of some of the other features (can't use spell checking on internal email for example). It all seems to add a chunk of complexity into the system for no added benefit to the user, not to mention extra cost. The other thing is it goes against how people percieve software purchasing. At the moment you buy it and it's yours to use as much as you like. Overcoming that will a very hard sell I think. s
Re: Email from a cultural icon
* at 28/01 00:33 + Andrew Wilson said: On Sun, Jan 27, 2002 at 07:09:21PM -0500, David H. Adler wrote: On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 02:16:02PM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote: Notoriety in English has a negative connotation. It does? Are you sure you're not thinking of notorious[ness]? Probably the same root, but, IMO somewhat different in meaning. The oxford english says Notoriety: the state or character of being notorious Notoriousness: the fact of being notorious; notoriety. you gotta love those circular definitions :) s
Re: [OT] 3 light bulbs problem
* at 28/01 14:52 - Ivor Williams said: Time for one of those lateral thinking problems. Imagine you have a cellar in which there are 3 light bulbs on different circuits. The light switches are all at ground level, at the top of the staircase, and it is not possible to see from here, which light(s) are on. Using just one journey downstairs, determine which switch controls which bulb. You do not need any equipment other than your hands and eyes to solve this. so is it the case that it's obvious when a switch is on or off? i'd assume so as otherwise the problem becomes impossible but the question doesn't state this explicitly s
Re: Idiotic Perl
* at 25/01 12:08 + Dave Cross said: My slides from last night are now online at http://www.mag-sol.com/talks/idiotic/ I forgot to mention that last night was a practice run for the German Perl Workshop (and, hopefully, a couple of other conferences this year, so if you have nay comments on the content I'd be very happy to hear them. And in a huge piece of serendipidy, my CGI scripts article has just appeared on perl.com. It's at http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/01/23/cgi.html. and in not so happy serendipity i opened up pc plus today to see an article on settign up a message board pointing to a script at: www.cgi-factory.com which (woo hoo!) has no use strict, -w, CGI.pm and so on. sigh. frighteningly they charge for some of their scripts which is the free message board is anything to go by is cheeky at best. they do have a rate this script feature though :) i think writing to all the pc magazines saying if you're going to run these articles then you might want to consider using nms scripts might be a good idea then at least we limit future damage. s
Re: bad nasty evil thread
* at 23/01 19:25 + Mark Fowler said: On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Struan Donald wrote: * at 23/01 17:44 + Mark Fowler said: This name has to go. Perl 6 makes it sound like it's just another update to perl. It's not. It's a new beginning. won't that just confuse people? alternately it's the sort of thing people see through pretty easliy too. i I'm not suggesting that we hide the fact that it's Perl. More the fact that we brand it in such a way that it's clear it's not perl. You see the difference? I agree there is a branding issue here but i'm just not sure that changing the name is the way to go. it's more about changing the perception of perl than anything. now i have no idea how to go about doing that but i feel that a name change won't make that much difference in the long term unless we make people realise that it's not the same perl. The biggest opposition that perl 6 faces is for mind share. You're thinking with your programming hat on. This is the issue: maybe i am thinking with my programming hat on but in some ways i think this is where we have to start. if we want to persuade people outwith the perl community to think of perl in a different way we have to start to persuade the community to project perl in a different way. i think it's fair to say that the perl community is perl's biggest asset but in some ways it's also perl's biggest drawback as we're not very good at thinking outside the community. we all assume that perl's benefits are so obvious that once people look they will magically be converted and it's not true. (and i know i'm over generalising here but as a whole community it seems like a trueism) foo? what's that? oh, i see, it's just perl with a different name This does not differ from 'Perl 6. It's just Perl with another digit.' Some people will always think like that. But using a digit will not convince them otherwise fair point. you have to convince them that perl 6 is a good thing because it is a good thing rather than with a flashy name. Yes! But I don't see the point in not making a big deal out of how much it's changed. I think you're seriously ignoring the mind share issue. again, fair point. but why can't we make a big deal out of how much it's changed between perl 5 and perl 6? perl has mindshare. surely we should be trying to increase that and alter the perception of it rather that starting from scratch? plus i think there is possibly enough good feeling etc out there that it's worth hanging on to the name. This may be true. Maybe you want a sub-brand. Java has this with J2EE. Now I'm not saying that we reopen the whole P5EE debate again, but *never* underestimate the power of branding. shit no. take nike as the prime example of this. perl does need better branding. however that can start now. we all agree that perl 5 rocks and will be about for a while. if we start trying to make people realise that then when perl 6 arrives and rocks harder it'll be all the easier to persuade them to take it on. i guess that's my point. why wait for perl 6 to kickstart perl? if perl has an image problem then why not start trying to fix that now? the longer we wait the steeper the slope we have to climb is. s
Re: [OT] Exam Question
* at 21/01 11:00 - Ivor Williams said: Thought this might amuse the Perl mongers. :- I. Subject: EXAM QUESTION http://www.snopes2.com/college/exam/hell.htm would seem to throw doubt on the veracity of this tale s
Re: Scraper fix
* at 18/01 12:43 + Leon Brocard said: I think I like rt, and I've been using it to report all sorts of silly bugs. Of course, there's nothing to stop the author disappearing off the face of the earth and/or ignoring your bug reports, but it's a good start at least. Also good as it means we now have somewhere you can check for bugs in modules. Looking and discovering that someone else has reported the same bug you were about to is always a good thing, esp when you discover their patch is more elegant :) s
Re: Year 2K2 problem
* at 15/01 11:58 + robin szemeti said: A 7-Page Interpretive Report created for your unique type. Simple to take 93-question test online in the privacy of your home or office. Results typically within 48 hours. Report in Adobe .pdf format. 93 questions? they have enough trouble getting people to fill out the census even with the threat of a fine and that has nothing like 93 questions. who on earth is going to fill out a 93 question online form in the hope of getting back some useless and almost certainly fundamentally flawed[1] personality description? s [1] i seem to recall that most of these thing display a large degree of cultural bias.
Re: OT perl question
* at 15/01 15:21 + nemesis said: Anyone know of a way of telling whether a perl script was called as a CGI (via the apache webserver) or directly (as in as a cron script or command line)? will be a whole load of exciting CGI type things in %ENV if it's a cgi call so you could test for those. s
Re: high fidelity
* at 07/01 10:04 - Robert Shiels said: From: Barbie [home] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 3) The Kiss, The Cure An interesting choice - I was listening to this only last night actually on my headphones quite loud, and it is truely an outstanding track - I even contemplated getting an electric guitar just to see if I could get it to distort like on this song. I'm just completing my Cure MP3 collection now, and picking a favourite track is almost impossible, though it's probably Play For Today from Faith, still my favourite album. Why are The Cure overlooked as one of the top bands of the last 20 years... i think it comes down to the general perception of them as goths and hence not worth bothering about. and having had that label attached most people don't bother to look further. but then you could ask similar questions about teenage fanclub or the auteurs... s
Re: high fidelity
* at 07/01 11:10 - Barbie said: From: Struan Donald [EMAIL PROTECTED] i think it comes down to the general perception of them as goths and hence not worth bothering about. and having had that label attached most people don't bother to look further. snip I find it strange they keep getting the goth tag, as really they're just an indie pop band. They have some dark meaningful songs, but far too many happy pop songs to really fit with the dark and moody image of the majority of goth bands. yeah but there is the whole tendancy of goths to turn up at cure gigs and the way other goth bands have named them as an influence (although you could also say this of a chunk of the eraly 90's shoegazers who owe a big debt to disintegration). these things tend to confuse people. on the plus side the last singles album did kind of make people reasses them. s
Re: high fidelity
* at 07/01 12:12 + Greg McCarroll said: * Dave Thorn ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: You never can tell with bees. Bees? I'm confused now. stripey tights? s
Re: Damn Hackers
* at 07/01 14:18 + Robin said: Steve Mynott wrote: In short portscans are of very limited use to sysadmins. hmmm .. whilst comparing a port scan from a known baseline doesn;t tell you that badness hasn't happend .. if you find new ports open then thats an indication that something has changed, sure its not a substitue fro all the other things you do .. but it is still a useful check and if run remotely from a cron job its a no-brainer that might save you some grief .. certianly won;t do any harm. and i find them kinda useful to check that the firewall on the windows[1] adsl gateway at home is actually doing what i think it is. sometimes it even does. s [1] i have flatmates who would be confused and afraid of anything else otherwise i'd have saved myself the pain of too much time fighting contrary windows programs which think just not working is all the error/debug message you need.
Re: JOB: Mod_perl
* at 04/01 12:55 + Tony Bowden said: On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 05:00:35AM -0500, Andy Williams wrote: Role: SOFTWARE DEVELOPER / MOD_PERL / LINUX / MYSQL Skills required: ... 6+ years experience as a software developer in the internet industry. 6 or more years in the internet industry?? well amazon started hiring in '94 so it's certainly possible. improbable but not impossible :) s
Re: leon = famous?
* at 29/12 13:52 + [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: leon made kuro5hin: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/12/27/174625/76 heck, he also made ntk and two or three blogs that i've seen. it's not quite how i'd want to go about becoming famous though... s
Re: Dual boot
* at 20/12 11:49 + [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 11:37:14AM +, Lucy McWilliam wrote: How painful is it to make a machine Win/Linux dual boot (apart from finding another license)? It would make my research s much easier. Anyone got any convincing arguments for my superiors? mumble mumble mumble Last time I tried it the only hard part was tracking down the work copy of partition magic, but I think you only really need that if you're as lazy as I am. I imagine there's probably some cunning command line tool which is also suitable. word of warning though. if you're installing windows on a linux machine make sure you have alinux boot floppy you know works as windows tends to assume that it is the only OS on the machind and whack the MBR with it's own boot loader and leaves you with no way of getting into linux. ideally you want two hard disks[1] so as to minimise the chances of cross contamination :) s [1] i do know people who have just installed on two hard disks and then just swapped the boot device in the bios as they were too lazy to get round some lilo related error.
Re: Dual boot
* at 20/12 12:01 + Rafiq Ismail (ADMIN) said: It's quite straightforward, however if you can wrangle it such that you get to use something like vmware you'll probably have sorted yourself out with a far more elegent solution to using both os's. vmware is nice only if you have shit loads of ram[1] though and a fast processor. plus you have cost of vmware + cost of windows license so more expensive. vmware also seems happiest if you give it it's own disk... (this is assuming you run vmware on linux and have windows as the guest os). oh, and win 9* don't seem to work as well under it either... all those things aside vmware is nice.o s On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Lucy McWilliam wrote: How painful is it to make a machine Win/Linux dual boot (apart from finding another license)? It would make my research s much easier. Anyone got any convincing arguments for my superiors? mumble mumble mumble L. [1] at least 384 i'd say but then as ram is still pretty cheap...
Re: Dual boot
* at 20/12 14:01 + Dominic Mitchell said: Lucy McWilliam [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: There already are three Win NT machines squashed into this office, but the techs and postdocs tend to hog them. Thanks to everyone for advice. I find that using vnc and moving the mouse around whilst other people are trying to use the computer normally confuses them enough that they tend to leave the weird machine alone... :-) you should try hitting extra keys as they type their password in... s
Re: T-shirt idea
* at 19/12 09:34 +0100 Newton, Philip said: Are you saying you type perl and hack into standard input, or create a little source file whenever you want to test the odd item of syntax or what-not? personally i think there's a lot to be said for using files for this sort of thing. the main thing is that if you keep the files in a known location and have a descriptive name then in 6 months when you can't quite remember how the thing you were looking at works you have a handy record saving you time. but then that might just be due to my poor memory :) s
a request
hi, being as it is the 19th and all i think now would be as good a time as any to request a moritorium on LOTR discussions for a while for those of us that will not be seeing it until sometime in the new year... either that or at least indicate that's what the dicussion is about. thanks s
Re: The Perl Foundation
* at 18/12 14:28 + Andy Wardley said: On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 08:48:08PM -0700, Nathan Torkington wrote: Please give. I have. I haven't (yet) but I made a silly donation-a-thon-a-mometer which you could use to chart the exciting progress of the fund. (I already mailed Kurt to tell him about it) http://www.andywardley.com/perl/thermo.html All hail Perl and GD! following on from a conversation at the end of the last social meet: http://www.kfs.org/~abw/misc/#links surely one of those should be changed :) s
Re: Belgos
* at 13/12 08:19 + Greg McCarroll said: You may also like to be careful, if you are a the top of the stairs in the pub tonight and Leon comes peddling madly towards you on a little red tricycle. what a truely disturbing image... although surely it'd be an orange tricycle anyway? s
Re: Cleaning up perl distributions?
* at 13/12 10:56 + Dominic Mitchell said: Paul Makepeace [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Is there a tool or at least an algorithm that could be turned into a tool to aid in ensuring there is only one version of each module in a perl distribution? E.g. `locate CGI.pm` reveals (aside from the Template Plugin) two versions of CGI.pm which are different. I think at various times I've had at least four at various revision levels. I suppose you would need to know the constituents of a module at each of its versions. Presumably this isn't recorded in a log anywhere? Is there any work going on in this general area? At worst, one could take perllocal.pod (of which there are no less than six on this system, sigh) and reinstall based on collected works? Can't you just walk the contents of @INC and look for the same file in each dir? Doesn't this assume that the files will always be in the same place (relative to the dirs in @INC at least) across distributions? Seems like it might be the sort of reasonable sounding assumption that turns out not to be true. s
Re: The Geek Syndrome
* at 07/12 13:56 + Leon Brocard said: There's an article in December's Wired magazine entitled The Geek Syndrome. Finally an interesting article in Wired, you say, well, here are a couple of choice quotes as I can't find it online: snip wired quotes Oh, go and buy the magazine, I'm not typing the rest in. Simon's talked about this in the past, but what do the rest of you think? Mmmm. I've got a few friends that are teachers and from what I can tell there is a general rise in the number of people with these sorts of problems. Or rather there is a rise in the number of kids diagnosed with these sorts of problems. As with a lot of these thigns I think we're going through a period where there is a lot of awareness about it and hence and increase in the quantity of diagnoses... Partly it's better understanding leading to a better ability to identify the conditions but partly it's just easy to label people with these things. Also this whole geek gene thing sounds like something people have made up as it's a nice easy explanation. AIUI some of these things can be explained away from a behavioural point of view as much as a neurochemical one so it may just be a result of common social surroundings. struan caveat I've not read the article, this is just general feelings about this sort of thing. /caveat
Re: Perl Advent Calendar
* at 04/12 14:40 +0100 Newton, Philip said: Mark Fowler wrote: I'm finalising the module list, so if there's any you particularly want to see go in mail me Date::MMDDYY! the advent covers the 1st of april? s
Re: An open letter to Miss Camel
* at 30/11 11:57 + [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: I think the idea here is that Leon isn't the (putative) leader. Amelia is. But she will delegate 'difficult decision making powers' to Leon. Well then why not have Leon stand as leader and do the delegation? Amerlia standing seems rather an artificial way of doing this. Plus for the humour impared finding out that the contact point for london.pm is a fluffy toy might mean they don't bother... s
surfraw and cpan
heh, No. 2 in an occaional series on making your access to CPAN goodness easier... Some of you I'm sure will be aware of surfraw[1] which allows you to do this sort of thing: $ google camel which then goes off and gives the result for a google search on camel in $browser_of_choice. It lets you do this for many different search engines and the like but not CPAN. Well, not until now. If you all go to: http://exo.org.uk/code/cpan.tar.gz and stick that in your path then: $ cpan template will then provide you with the many template modules that are available in CPAN. hurrah! I also sent it to the author so it might appear as standard in a future release... s [1] http://surfraw.sourceforge.net/ or apt-get install surfraw
Re: Another Good Meeting
* at 15/11 04:18 -0800 matt jones said: At 06:59 15/11/01 -0500, Alex Page wrote: I heartily agree. I've been wanting to attend tech meetings (as well as things like dorkbot etc) for several months now, but it's just such a pain to do these things midweek if you don't live in That London. I have to take the best part of two days off work which isn't something I can do all that regularly. The odd friday meeting would be rather convenient for me. But then again, they are *London* Perl Mongers meetings, aren't they, so there's absolutely no requirement to accomodate anyone who lives outside the M25 really, is there? Where is this outwith the M25 of which you speak? Seriously though, I think the odd friday meeting would be good if for no other reason than I'd not have to deal with working through the hangover. :) s
Re: Leadership
* at 14/11 13:42 + Matthew Byng-Maddick said: I think that counts as 5 nominations for David Cross. Dave, you are now in the leadership contest. :-) somehow i'm not sure this was quite what dave had in mind :) s
Re: contracts
* at 09/11 17:41 + robin szemeti said: On Friday 09 November 2001 15:01, Mark Fowler wrote: Our supply chains are, in the majority, run by cars and trucks and other road transport and without them the cities start to starve (both metaphorically and literally.) indeed. theres another thing that needs changing then. well i wasn't doing anything this saturday so i'll look into it :) s
Re: Re: TPJ
* at 31/10 06:19 -0800 matt jones said: Robin Houston wrote: The entire academic periodical industry is based on the idea that authors don't get paid, and it seems to work. I can't imagine Einstein not bothering to write up the theory of relativity because he wouldn't get paid for it. The entire academic periodical industry seems to be based on the idea of ripping off academia. I mean, these journal publishers get the academic community to write their content for free, and then charge them an arm and a leg to look at their own work! if you think that's bad i'm told that some journals _charge_ to have articles included. i really don't think academic journals are a good example of best practice... s
Re: CFT / dim sum / evening meet
* at 23/10 16:46 +0100 Geoff Wright said: Greg McCarroll ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) said : Re: CFT / dim sum / evening meet is on the south side of London Bridge (Err its near Cynthia's Cyber Oddly enough if you go further along the road from Cynthia's toward tower bridge you get to a bar called the Elusive Camel[1]. Strange but true. there was one of those round the corner from here[1] but the camel was apparently so elusive that is's shut. or at least it appears to have done so. s [1] where here eq just off baker st
Re: Late comment on the computer book thread
* at 21/10 13:05 -0400 David H. Adler said: Not that I've actually read *all* of them, but there are two books that have rather good reputations (and what I have read of them don't seem to undermine that) which didn't get mentioned. SICP (the wizard book) /me goes to amazon.co.uk, searches, finds, notes category, raises eyebrow. s
Re: Cocktails
* at 10/09 07:18 -0700 Randal L. Schwartz said: Simon == Simon Wistow [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Simon I went back home to Hastings and ordered a lager top and the Simon bar man looked at me and said 'you know we don't serve Simon cocktails in here Brian' Simon Sounds like these people ahve a sensible attitude to drinking. Can someone translate this to 'merkin for me? I don't get it. What's a lager top? it's an odd thing consisting of a pint[1] of lager that's topped up with lemonade. i guess it's kind of like half way between lager and shandy and as such the reasons for it's inventions are beyond me. s [1] or at least nearly a pint
Re: Divorcing data storage from business logic
* at 09/07 16:24 +0200 Philip Newton said: Lee Goddard wrote: Is there a free alternative to MySQL? Define 'free'. MySQL is GPL licensed and can be downloaded and used without charge. Is that not 'free' in your book? but if it's GPL'd doesn't that mean my computer'll be infected with viruses? struan
Re: In Defence of Mysql was Re: Divorcing data storage from business logic
* at 06/07 08:44 + Steve Mynott said: Jonathan Stowe [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Who said anything about free. MySQL is imply utter shite. On the downside the SQL was pretty non-standard and encouraged use of extensions which make it pretty much impossible to port it to any other system. the lack of subqueries is a real pain in the ass and the lack of foreign keys/referential integrity is also a pain. i think my big issue with it is how much work you have to do in code that the database should be doing. struan
Re: Big Projects / Variable Backends
* at 06/07 10:01 +0100 Piers Cawley said: Hmm... Everything I Know About Extreme Programming I Learned From Watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It's a book title. sounds like the book of the pub crawl[1] that is london.pm struan [1] a very leisurely pub crawl with long rests between pubs but a pub crawl none the less
Re: In Defence of Mysql was Re: Divorcing data storage from business logic
* at 06/07 10:32 +0100 Lee Goddard said: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Struan Donald Sent: 06 July 2001 09:58 * at 06/07 08:44 + Steve Mynott said: Jonathan Stowe [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Who said anything about free. MySQL is imply utter shite. On the downside the SQL was pretty non-standard and encouraged use of extensions which make it pretty much impossible to port it to any other system. the lack of subqueries is a real pain in the ass and the lack of foreign keys/referential integrity is also a pain. i think my big issue with it is how much work you have to do in code that the database should be doing. But I get the impression that the coders have an ethos along the Apache lines - an extensible, modular design whose central object, aside from speed and industrial power, is integration with extrnal modules. that's as maybe but the problem with that metaphor (as it were) is that apache does come with modules to do pretty much everything you'd want a webserver to do and whether you use them is up to you. in mysql a lot of the functionality that you might want from a database is simply missing. the other flaw is that apache has an api for adding modules into the core (or as near as) while in your example the extensions happen in your applications space an not in mysql's which inevitably results in it all running slower than if it was inside the database which can/could do all sorts of clever optimisation things. that said if you just want to use it for a simple website or something then it is the boy. struan
Re: In Defence of Mysql was Re: Divorcing data storage from business logic
* at 06/07 11:18 + Greg Cope said: Struan Donald wrote: not sure that mysql calls itself an RDBMS. From section 1.1 of a recent manual MySQL is a relational database management system. A relational database stores data in separate tables rather than putting all the data in one big storeroom. This adds speed and flexibility. The tables are linked by defined relations making it possible to combine data from several tables on request. The SQL part of MySQL stands for Structured Query Language - the most common standardized language used to access databases. well, if you're going to cheat and read the manual i resign :) struan
Re: Divorcing data storage from business logic
* at 19/06 22:01 +0100 Robin Szemeti said: right .. thats another mail on the long march to the top of the posting ladder ;) greg'll just 'break' his computer again :) struan
Re: Job
* at 03/07 21:01 +0100 Chris Benson said: 2. By Linux I assume you mean Linux/ix86 ... I've been trying to get an app running on Linux/PPC for a few weeks on-and-off: I'm definately a 2nd-class citizen. I wonder how the Linux/MIPS, Linux/ARM, Linux/390 people get on! heck, i have enough trouble getting it to run on Linux/ix86. but then as the only reason i have to use it for at the moment is the odd shitty java applet it never seems worth the trouble. struan
Re: LinuxExpo/Social
* at 04/07 13:02 +0100 Greg McCarroll said: * Lucy McWilliam ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: [1] The Tomorrow's World live event was rather shiny. Lots of toys, including Steve Bennett's 10 metre rocket. I wonder if we could persuade Steve Bennett to become an honourary member of London.pm - he is just the sort of loon that would fit in. and then we could add: 'the use of rockets in conjuction with the perl language is a trademark of the london perl mongers to the collection. struan
Re: Buffy (was: Re: TT new website)
* at 27/06 15:42 +0100 Lucy McWilliam said: On 27 Jun 2001, Piers Cawley wrote: Does anyone know when the next box set of Buffy is out? Series 5, second half? I'm waiting for the DVDs to get up to season 4. Had a moment of madness and bought the first three seasons on Video about a fortnight before season one came out on DVD. Oh, for a disposable income...*sigh* you only end up with insufficient room to store all the crap that you bought, plus the fact that you have so much more stuff to re-buy when the format becomes obselete, and then you can't off load any of the old stuff as it's obsolete. struan
Re: Next social meeting, 2001-07-05
* at 22/06 11:08 +0100 Cross David - dcross said: Dave... [wondering if there's a market for a book called Jean-Luc Picard's Management Tips] would it not just consist of: Wait for someone to suggest something that sounds like a good idea and then say 'Make it so' and as such be more of a poster campaign? struan
Re: HTML email
* at 20/06 14:30 +0100 Dominic Mitchell said: On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 02:25:13PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 07:00:11AM -0400, Alex Page wrote: CSS - Sanity for the InterWeb. CSS - insanity for anyone trying to get the fucking thing to work properly cross-browsers. Don't shoot the messenger... It's not our fault that no browser has implemented it properly yet. it's more the fact that they've all implemented it differently. i could cope with equally incomplete versions, or versions with the same idiosycracies but the browsers all have their own foibles. struan
