Re: Perl advocacy opportunity ...
Leon Brocard sent the following bits through the ether: Getting them to accept Perl may be tricky, but feel free to try ;-) Hmmm, I'm sure I wanted to enter this: This year Chris and I entered the Fifth ICFP Programming Contest: http://icfpcontest.cse.ogi.edu/ There's just one question, but it's a tricky one as you're competing against other programs. Lots of languages are allowed: http://icfpcontest.cse.ogi.edu/entries.html It's be good to get a large team together and ready for next year ;-) Leon -- Leon Brocard.http://www.astray.com/ scribot.http://www.scribot.com/ ... How do you pronounce my name? With reverence ;-)
Re: Perl advocacy opportunity ...
From: Jody Belka [EMAIL PROTECTED] robin szemeti said: as a first step, getting plenty of Perl people signed up and making Perl'y sort of noises on their 'internet specialist group' would probably be no bad thing ... http://www.isg.org.uk/member.htm I wonder what the chances of getting the whole of CPAN pre-installed on the machine would be :) Why? I expect the C Java libs will be standard, so why should Perl be any different. The NMS project has had to handle the fact they can only use standard installations of Perl, so I think it would make it more challenging to work from the same base of standard libs^H^H^H^Hpackages. The thing that bothers me, and perhaps Leon can clear this up, it does seem to be weighted on knowing the Windows platform. Are there other operating systems allowed? I sent my twopennarth to the email address on the website, so I'll be intrigue to see whether they will consider Perl for future competitions. Barbie. -- Birmingham.pm : http://birmingham.pm.org/ Home : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Perl advocacy opportunity ...
Barbie sent the following bits through the ether: The thing that bothers me, and perhaps Leon can clear this up, it does seem to be weighted on knowing the Windows platform. Are there other operating systems allowed? Nope, of course not. Leon -- Leon Brocard.http://www.astray.com/ scribot.http://www.scribot.com/ ... Clones are people two
Re: Perl advocacy opportunity ...
On Mon, 2002-12-02 at 15:33, Barbie wrote: The thing that bothers me, and perhaps Leon can clear this up, it does seem to be weighted on knowing the Windows platform. Are there other operating systems allowed? You mean like VMS or the IBM stuff? That is all rather old hat. Nobody much other than the US Gov. use that kind of thing now. AFAIK there is no other mainstream OS for the sort of hardware that they allow for this competition. Dirk (PS :-) -- Please Note: Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That When the Consumer Is Not Directly Observing This Product, It May Cease to Exist or Will Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State.
Re: Perl advocacy opportunity ...
From: Leon Brocard [EMAIL PROTECTED] Barbie sent the following bits through the ether: The thing that bothers me, and perhaps Leon can clear this up, it does seem to be weighted on knowing the Windows platform. Are there other operating systems allowed? Nope, of course not. Then my email to them objecting to the use sponsored languages and operating systems isn't so hollow then ;) Barbie. -- Birmingham.pm : http://birmingham.pm.org/ Home : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Perl advocacy opportunity ...
On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Barbie wrote: Why? I expect the C Java libs will be standard, so why should Perl be any different. The NMS project has had to handle the fact they can only use standard installations of Perl, so I think it would make it more challenging to work from the same base of standard libs^H^H^H^Hpackages. Well, borgification a go-go. I'm glad 5.8.0 sucked in half the known modules in the world then. ;-) I remember Hugo saying something when he gave his London.pm presentation about 5.10.0 having multiple distributions, one of which is designed for situations where it's bloody hard to get extra things installed (I think he mentioned it with regard to web hosting.) I think it'd be fair if we used that. Mark. -- Mark Fowler http://www.twoshortplanks.com/ The 2002 Perl Advent Calendar [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.perladvent.org/2002/ a different perl module featured every day
re: Perl advocacy opportunity ...
as a first step, getting plenty of Perl people signed up and making Perl'y sort of noises on their 'internet specialist group' would probably be no bad thing ... http://www.isg.org.uk/member.htm its free btw, -- Robin Szemeti
re: Perl advocacy opportunity ...
robin szemeti said: as a first step, getting plenty of Perl people signed up and making Perl'y sort of noises on their 'internet specialist group' would probably be no bad thing ... http://www.isg.org.uk/member.htm its free btw, -- Robin Szemeti From the rules: b. All problem solutions submitted for judging must be expressed in one of the designated programming languages of the competition, using the designated hardware with the designated operating system, compiler and other software. c. Competitors may consult any source materials intended for human use, including books, manuals, program listings and non-programmable calculators. However competitors must not load machine readable versions of software prior to the competition, nor may they bring their own computers (including programmable calculators and personal digital assistants), mobile phones or computer peripherals into the competition area. In addition, removable machine-readable media (e.g. floppy disks) must not be brought into or taken out of the competition. All source material must be declared and can only be used at the discretion of the Chief Judge. Infringement of this rule may lead to disqualification. I wonder what the chances of getting the whole of CPAN pre-installed on the machine would be :) Jody
Re: Perl advocacy opportunity ...
This is the contact email address for the compertition [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: advocacy
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 11:33:23AM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: The list has 286 regular and 32 digested members including (but not limited to) people from such diverse companies as the beeb, eidos, blackstar, thomson holidays, EMI music, Emap and motorola. For my own nefarious deeds I'm looking for examples of how Perl is used at these 'name' companies so if people could email me off list that would be really, really great. It's for a good and worthy but hush, hush cause although all should be revealed soon. And (hopefully not conflicting) remember that if you do a short piece for Betsy Waliszewski [EMAIL PROTECTED] she'll probably put it on www.perl.com, send you some O'Reilly books and maybe put it in the Perl Success Stories pamphlet with personal and corporate bios: a good deal for very little effort :-) -- Chris Benson
More advocacy
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 11:33:23AM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: The list has 286 regular and 32 digested members including (but not limited to) people from such diverse companies as the beeb, eidos, blackstar, thomson holidays, EMI music, Emap and motorola. For my own nefarious deeds I'm looking for examples of how Perl is used at these 'name' companies so if people could email me off list that would be really, really great. It's for a good and worthy but hush, hush cause although all should be revealed soon. Not directly related to Simon's request but I am putting together a list of companies who either support, or need support for Open Source software (which includes perl by my last reckoning...) The database is still in beta testing so you will see dummy records, http://www.owal.co.uk/oss_support/ Comments welcome including Why don't you do this Ideas on how to publicise and extend this database would be good. Alex McLintock Openweb Analysts Ltd, London: Software For Complex Websites http://www.OWAL.co.uk/ Free Consultancy for London Companies thinking of Open Source Software.
advocacy
The list has 286 regular and 32 digested members including (but not limited to) people from such diverse companies as the beeb, eidos, blackstar, thomson holidays, EMI music, Emap and motorola. For my own nefarious deeds I'm looking for examples of how Perl is used at these 'name' companies so if people could email me off list that would be really, really great. It's for a good and worthy but hush, hush cause although all should be revealed soon. Simon -- : as a language, it looks like rows of disciplined insects
Re: advocacy
On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Simon Wistow wrote: The list has 286 regular and 32 digested members including (but not limited to) people from such diverse companies as the beeb, eidos, blackstar, thomson holidays, EMI music, Emap and motorola. What about prestigious universities, and crucial science tools? L. I am not a moose.
Re: advocacy
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 02:01:48PM +0100, Lucy McWilliam said: What about prestigious universities, and crucial science tools? Definitely. I'm looking for examples that would make a journalist prick up their ears and that can reverse the opinion that Perl is for kooks, beer swilling, rule breaking, havoc raising loons, CGI on hobby sites and is generally not an enterprise class language. I know this has been tried before but this is for a cunning plan. -- : as a language, it looks like rows of disciplined insects
Re: advocacy
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 02:44:50PM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: I know this has been tried before but this is for a cunning plan. A plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel? A
Re: advocacy
From: Lucy McWilliam [EMAIL PROTECTED] The list has 286 regular and 32 digested members including (but not limited to) people from such diverse companies as the beeb, eidos, blackstar, thomson holidays, EMI music, Emap and motorola. What about prestigious universities, and crucial science tools? Lucy, do you know anyone that's involved with a prestigious university? ;-) Andrew.
Re: advocacy
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 02:47:36PM +0100, Andy Wardley wrote: On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 02:44:50PM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: I know this has been tried before but this is for a cunning plan. A plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel? I would like to object at this juncture... Or rather raise a query... What about a fox with a tail stuck on it ? I'm sure that would be far more cunning! L(eo)
RE: Re: advocacy
Wouldn't a fox with a tail stuck on it just be a fox with a long strippy red and white tail, twice as long as never mind, I'll get back to me lurkin. D -Original Message- From: leo Sent: 24 June 2002 15:01 To: london.pm Cc: leo Subject: Re: advocacy On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 02:47:36PM +0100, Andy Wardley wrote: On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 02:44:50PM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: I know this has been tried before but this is for a cunning plan. A plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel? I would like to object at this juncture... Or rather raise a query... What about a fox with a tail stuck on it ? I'm sure that would be far more cunning! L(eo) Visit our website at http://www.ubswarburg.com This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. If verification is required please request a hard-copy version. This message is provided for informational purposes and should not be construed as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any securities or related financial instruments.
Re: advocacy
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 03:09:19PM +0100, Lucy McWilliam said: This very morning I was reading about an otter disguising itself as a fox. Unfortunately not pop science, but kiddie fantasy by Brian Jacques. It keeps me occupied till JK finishes the next HP book. Would that be Mossflower then? I loved Mossflower and Redwall and all that jazz. Much better than the Duncton Found series which all my mates back then (when I was but a young un) were into. -- : as a language, it looks like rows of disciplined insects
Re: advocacy
On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Andrew Bowman wrote: What about prestigious universities, and crucial science tools? Lucy, do you know anyone that's involved with a prestigious university? ;-) FSVO prestigious. This is my third, anyway. L. The internet is powered by banana milkshake.
Re: advocacy
On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Simon Wistow wrote: This very morning I was reading about an otter disguising itself as a fox. Unfortunately not pop science, but kiddie fantasy by Brian Jacques. It keeps me occupied till JK finishes the next HP book. Would that be Mossflower then? I loved Mossflower and Redwall and all that jazz. Much better than the Duncton Found series which all my mates back then (when I was but a young un) were into. It would. My colleague's daughter was in the lab over half term looking at the website and reminded me I have the boxset at home. Brian Jacques came to visit our school many years ago. I still remember him talking about stickatitability, which is a fantastic word. Duncton was more adult, and I still haven't read the final volume. To veer this towards on-topic, anyone ever read Skallagrigg by William Horwood? L. I sink therefore I swim.
Re: advocacy
was more adult, and I still haven't read the final volume. To veer this towards on-topic, anyone ever read Skallagrigg by William Horwood? I surrender. And the topic is actually 'advocacy', just to add insult to injury. :-0 Anyone been to the 'new' part of the Anchor, BTW?? JP -- Jonathan Peterson Technical Manager, Unified Ltd, +44 (0)20 7383 6092 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Anchor, was Re: advocacy
On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
Anyone been to the 'new' part of the Anchor, BTW??
Yes, we had a Perl Mongers meeting there. Do try and keep up dear boy.
Conclusion: New bit upstairs okay (but they try to throw you out of it
*way* to early,) new bit outside great - you can see the river and
everything. New bit downstairs is a great big pile of poo.
Later.
Mark.
--
s'' Mark Fowler London.pm Bath.pm
http://www.twoshortplanks.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
';use Term'Cap;$t=Tgetent Term'Cap{};print$t-Tputs(cl);for$w(split/ +/
){for(0..30){$|=print$t-Tgoto(cm,$_,$y). $w;select$k,$k,$k,.03}$y+=2}
Re: advocacy
On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Jonathan Peterson wrote: was more adult, and I still haven't read the final volume. To veer this towards on-topic, anyone ever read Skallagrigg by William Horwood? I surrender. And the topic is actually 'advocacy', just to add insult to injury. :-0 Sorry? L.
Re: advocacy
was more adult, and I still haven't read the final volume. To veer this towards on-topic, anyone ever read Skallagrigg by William Horwood? I surrender. And the topic is actually 'advocacy', just to add insult to injury. :-0 Sorry? I started from the (possibly erroneous) assumption that this was in some way a perl list. I assumed rashly that the topic 'advocacy' was not dedicated to the discussion of advocacy per se as a field of human endeavour. Rather, I assumed we would be talking about advocating some particular thing in the world. This thing, in my sadly deluded mind, I took to be 'perl'. So it was, I expected a perl advocacy thread. Imagine my delight and surprise at finding that instead we were discussing how to disguise a fox as an otter, and the relevance of this to children's literature. My poor brain cannot see how Skallagrigg by William Horwood is more (or, to be fair, less) relevant to perl advocacy than Duncton Whatever and its fox-like proto-otters. Thus, I surrendered in despair. Doubtless I'll be told that we were actually discussing advocacy of anthropomorphic children's books, but there you go. Such is the mystery of london.pm.org. Hey ho! -- Jonathan Peterson Technical Manager, Unified Ltd, +44 (0)20 7383 6092 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: advocacy
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 05:32:32PM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote: Thus, I surrendered in despair. Life is a journey, not a destination. London.pm doubly so. A ObPerlAdvocacy: http://www.mag-sol.com/talks/advocacy.html
Re: advocacy
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 06:41:02PM +0100, Andy Wardley wrote: Life is a journey, not a destination. London.pm doubly so. So London.pm is a return journey? Tom
Re: nms advocacy opportunity for me ;)
Newton, Philip wrote: I took the opportunity and suggested the look into replacing their formmail script not with Matt's 1.92 but with the nms offering. Let's see whether anything will happen Update: I got this short reply from the Form Mail Abuse Team: Thank you for the information. We are checking out the possibility of using NMS. So we'll see what happens. Cheers, Philip -- Philip Newton [EMAIL PROTECTED] All opinions are my own, not my employer's. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
nms advocacy opportunity for me ;)
My web hoster recently sent me email saying that they were upgrading their formmail script on 13 May and urged all customers who had installed their own copy to do the same. I took the opportunity and suggested the look into replacing their formmail script not with Matt's 1.92 but with the nms offering. Let's see whether anything will happen Cheers, -- Philip Newton [EMAIL PROTECTED] datenrevision GmbH Co. OHG http://www.datenrevision.de a gedas company TEL +49-40-797 007-37 Cuxhavener Str. 36, D-21149 Hamburg FAX +49-40-797 007-10
Re: nms advocacy opportunity for me ;)
On Fri, May 03, 2002 at 12:41:09PM +0200, Newton, Philip ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: My web hoster recently sent me email saying that they were upgrading their formmail script on 13 May and urged all customers who had installed their own copy to do the same. I took the opportunity and suggested the look into replacing their formmail script not with Matt's 1.92 but with the nms offering. Let's see whether anything will happen That's excellent news. If you need any backup from the proejct tema then please let me know. Dave... -- Drugs are just bad m'kay
Advocacy
Simon, Just thinking about Perl advocacy, and having what blech refers to as a brainfart. I think that Perl has a major hurdle, yet to be overcome, regarding commercial takeup. I am thinking about software houses, and in particular, their techies and their managers. The open source cause is actually doing some harm here. Software houses are in the business of making MONEY out of writing code. Why should they use something that could expose them to a legal minefield regarding copyright? Also, why should programmers invest time in software that is perceived to be unglamorous, and unrewarding on the CV? Why take the risk? As fellow mongers will know, this is a matter of overcoming the initial reluctance; once bitten, one falls in love with the language. Perl programming is nice, and it's fun, and it gets the job done in 50% of the time. To explain this to a Java or C++ programmer is difficult. They will not understand the concepts, let alone appreciate the elegance. But, once they do, they often become the strongest advocates. While Dave is happy to concentrate on the likes of CGI101 and the Skriptkidz on the block, working with those who have had no exposure to programming before whatsoever, let alone computer science (this is still very valuable IMO), there is a very important place in getting Perl used and accepted in workplaces. (Wow, doing Perl at work and getting paid for it, yayhay!) I've been doing Perl now for 4 years; it does appear prominently on my CV, but never (for me nor any of my IT friends outside london.pm) has it figured as a requirement at interview. The fact that it is free has however enabled me to introduce it into a couple of companies where I have been working with no questions asked, whereas something not free would have required business cases, budgets, etc. Myths and misconceptions about Perl - Perl is a web script development tool, and can only be used for CGI and SSI - Perl is for sysadmins, as a shell with a bit more programming oomph - Perl is slow and clunky because it is interpreted - Perl is a Unix programming language - Perl is insecure, and installing it opens your system to loopholes and hackers - Perl is expensive on machine resources - Any Perl code you write will be unmaintainable when you leave - Learning the language is difficult - We don't want our developers wasting time learning Perl, when they should be doing productive work I actually encountered first hand, and countered all of these arguments. To summarise: we need to rectify the Cinderella image that Perl has inside the corporate IT environment. (after all, it's got some ugly sisters :-) Ivor. Perl is my bitch, cron is my batch. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Simon Wilcox Sent: 22 March 2002 09:43 To: London PM Subject: Tech talk For those who are interested, the slides from my talk at the tech meeting last night are online at: http://www.simonw.demon.co.uk/talks/lpm020321/ Thanks to State 51 for hosting the event and to Jon for the loan of his dinky projector. Simon. -- Ooh, the hair thieves... they come in the night steal your hair they do!
RE: Advocacy
Philip Newton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: Was this meant to go to the london.pm mailing list, or did you simply fall into the Reply-To trap? I initially addressed it to Simon, as his talk was about advocacy. In case you weren't there, he did ask for any war stories. Composing the message, I realised there was no harm, and quite a lot of good, if it went to a larger audience. I could have sent it to Simon, cc: london.pm, but sending it to the list achieved the same results - apart from the likes of your good self thinking I had posted it to the list in error. Ivor.
Re: Advocacy
On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 03:11:40PM +, the hatter wrote: and a business about internet services will have its needs also held closely to web-based presentation. Really? We're primarily (nay, exclusively) about internet services, and almost all of what we do can be considered to be sysadmin-related. Little that we do is directly affected by the fact that we mostly host web stuff. -- Grand Inquisitor Reverend David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ``I know, I'll use regular expressions.'' Now they have two problems.-- jwz
Re: Advocacy
On Fri, 22 Mar 2002, the hatter wrote: On Fri, 22 Mar 2002, iwilliams wrote: I think that Perl has a major hurdle, yet to be overcome, regarding commercial takeup. I am thinking about software houses, and in particular, their techies and their managers. The open source cause is actually doing some harm here. Software houses are in the business of making MONEY out of writing code. Why should they use something that could expose them to a legal minefield regarding copyright? Also, why should programmers invest time in software that is perceived to be unglamorous, and unrewarding on the CV? [ warning: snippage detected ] I've been doing Perl now for 4 years; it does appear prominently on my CV, but never (for me nor any of my IT friends outside london.pm) has it figured as a requirement at interview. I suspect you're looking in the wrong places then. Well for one thing I'm not always going to ask explicitly about someones l33t skillz with Perl on a job spec - I am more interested in their skillz as a programmer, if they are sufficiently thinged up with sundry languages and show an aptitude to learning new ones which have a similar curve then thats fine with me - but there again I have taken to asking whether interviewees prefer vi or emacs so I might not be the best witness here. /J\
Re: Advocacy
On Fri, 22 Mar 2002, the hatter wrote: a business about internet services will have its needs also held closely to web-based presentation. Er, bollocks. If this was the case I wouldn't have the job that I do. To summarize I do systems that support the business, the 'web' is crap for most of that piece on the whole ... I don't believe that p5ee is going to deliver any more than thousands of crack hrads before it have. I believe that interoperability is the key - this is why we like intelligent people and not raving language advocates /J\
Re: Advocacy
On Fri, 22 Mar 2002, Jonathan Stowe wrote: On Fri, 22 Mar 2002, the hatter wrote: a business about internet services will have its needs also held closely to web-based presentation. Er, bollocks. If this was the case I wouldn't have the job that I do. To summarize I do systems that support the business, I don't think that, post summary, I have any idea what your job is in the slightest. the 'web' is crap for most of that piece on the whole ... Am I to guess that (a) your work is mainly about getting lots of disparate bits of technology to talk and (b) is done in perl, in preference to any other language ? From the other things you say, that seems like at least a possibility, in which case that just reinforces my point, perl is a good place to start for lots of sysadminish tasks, and once you've started using it, it makes sense to carry on using it. I don't believe that p5ee is going to deliver any more than thousands of crack hrads before it have. With you on that one, no single language is ever going to be able to offer an end-to-end solution, it's just going to shift the point at which problems occur I believe that interoperability is the key - this is why we like intelligent people and not raving language advocates Which again, is something perl is good at, whether it's calling java or C methods, or being called from them, or grabbing stuff from another programs XML/HTML/text-screen-grabbed output. I never did get why marketting people made such a big deal of the middleware concept though, people have wanted programs not designed to cooperate, to cooperate, most likely since the second program was written. Or is that a bit to ranty and advocatish ? In my defence, I was socialising with sysadmins last night, rather than perlmongers, so I had no idea that the post I replied to had anything to do with anything. the hatter
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Sat, 26 Jan 2002, Nicholas Clark wrote: But I don't want to say Powered by nms Perl scripts because I don't have any perl scripts on my site. I'd like to say use nms Perl scripts or something like that, something with text that matches typical search terms. [no, not a href=http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net;img src=nms.gif alt=sex porn warez //a] I was tempted at playing around in $graphics_thingy and doing one of them. In the meantime, use yer initiative ;-) L.
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 02:24:15AM +, robin szemeti wrote: you can have much more fun mailing the producers and directors personally than using those 'wastebasket' emails they read out at the end. Score: 110/100 on the cynicism meter. :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: Advocacy link fest
And on PageRank specifically, _The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web_. http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/page98pagerank.html I don't think it's publicly known _exactly_ what combination of factors Google uses in its ranking algorithm, but if your page has good textual relevance (including relevance of the linked text in links to the page) and a high PageRank then it's obviously going to be near the top of the list. .robin.
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 02:53:59AM +, Lucy McWilliam wrote: On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Nicholas Clark wrote: Do we have a nice bit of official standards compliant HTML for a link for cargo cult web page writing? :-) [Better still, do we have one to put on the NMS page to encourage people to link to it] Try reading the nms page ;-) But I'm offline. [I have a cunning plan to solve this. It involves finding a job that could be construed to involve testing USB ADSL. Maybe I should restrict myself to the simpler find a job] looks But I don't want to say Powered by nms Perl scripts because I don't have any perl scripts on my site. I'd like to say use nms Perl scripts or something like that, something with text that matches typical search terms. [no, not a href=http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net;img src=nms.gif alt=sex porn warez //a] Nicholas Clark -- ENOCHOCOLATE http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/CV.html
Re: Advocacy link fest
Paul Makepeace wrote: There's another issue where hyphenated URLs broken across a newline contain dashes -- is that dash part of the URL or not? (assuming it's not correctly marked up with an a) The German computer magazine c't, IIRC, uses the convention of breaking a word in two without adding a hyphen if a URL is too long to fit on (the rest of) the line. Generally picking a 'logical' place, as in yadda yadda yadda yadda http://www.engineering theimpossible.co.uk/ and leaving it up to the people to know that URLs aren't supposed to have spaces. So if you see something like yadda yadda yadda yadda http://www.criminally- insane.org/ then you know that the registered domain is 'criminally-insane.org' with the hyphen. Other pet peeve: journalists (or editors) who don't know the conventions of the typesetting software they are using and end up (a) using smart quotes when illustrating strings in program code (especially dumb in German text where they ,,look like this``; that is, the first pair isn't at the top of the line but rather at the bottom) or (b) using en dashes rather than double hyphens in program options. There is a difference between `foobar --help` and `foobar endashhelp`, and I don't care whether the typesetting program they use makes this hard to type or whatever; the output should be correct. Similarly, the C compiler won't like 66 99 printf( Hello, world!\n ); ; it want's good old ASCII double quotes. (In a similar vein, I also dislike the practice of `quoting like this', as does http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html .) Cheers, Philip -- Philip Newton [EMAIL PROTECTED] All opinions are my own, not my employer's. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 12:23:10PM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 02:28:01PM +, Chris Carline wrote: The structure of the HTML page is also extremely important in how searched-for words are weighted in the engine - namely, if search terms appear in titles and headers, or in bold, or in a big font, near the top of a page, then google is significantly more likely to favour Can you provide some info to back up these claims about the operation of Google? http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html provides a lot of info about how the original Google scored things. Info about things like font-size, capitalisation, position in document etc live down at 4.2.5.. I have no idea how much of this is still in use... Tony -- -- Tony Bowden | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.tmtm.com/ all history is too small for even me; for me and you,exceedingly too small --
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 02:44:06AM +, Lucy McWilliam wrote: On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 02:28:01PM +, Chris Carline wrote: The structure of the HTML page is also extremely important in how searched-for words are weighted in the engine - namely, if search terms appear in titles and headers, or in bold, or in a big font, near the top of a page, then google is significantly more likely to favour your page to a.n. other's - page rank has less of an effect because your actual subject-match weighting is better. Can you provide some info to back up these claims about the operation of Google? I think he read the interview with one of the Google blokes in last Thursday's Guardian Online for which I now can't find the link. Hmm, Chris Devers has already supplied the background material on how the google search engine works, it's been available for years (and I've been banging on about it for almost as long, as anyone who knows me will atest!). To be honest, it surprises me that so few people seem to know about it - after all, the information isn't *that* hard to find. But the thing most people seem to remember about how Google works is the PageRank stuff, and tend to forget that there's a lot more to it than just that. I'd recommend the Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine[1] paper to anyone with even the slightest interest in how Google works, even if (I'm sure) there's even more cleverness now that we don't know about. It really is very, very cool. 8) And structuring your pages to suit google really does improve your page ranking - I've done it myself. Sorry for not providing appropriate references the first time around; I was going to follow up when I got home (and had access to my bookmarks file), but it'd already been done for me. I'm as dubious of grand claims as the next person, but I realise in retrospect that I should at least have mentioned that. Anyway. Digressionary excuses aside, I've not actually seen the interview to which you refer, but I searched for it and found this one: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4336874,00.html Time to go back to lurking now, I think! Chris [1] http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm[2] [2] This is the same paper but at a different URL linked to by Chris -- Chris Carline [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://chris.carline.org/ GnuPG: 1024D/57B5CB20 | 5E85 207A 89D8 E097 0C0F FD4C 871A CE15 57B5 CB20
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Chris Devers wrote: On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Chris Benson wrote: And the URL again, is accent role=bbc-announcerh-t-t-p-colon-forwardslash- forwardslash-nms-cgi-dot-sourceforge-dot-net/accent So would the BBC not pronounce the dash in 'nms-cgi', or would they pronounce *all* of the dashes you just typed there? Either way, I'm getting a parse error here... and its definitely DOT not dot :) /J\
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Sat, 26 Jan 2002, Newton, Philip wrote: (a) using smart quotes when illustrating strings in program code [snip] or (b) using en dashes rather than double hyphens in program options. The overzealous helpfulness of Word in this area is infuriating, and it's what made me basically stop using it with Word 97. You have to go though way too many different dialogs to get it to disable all the that was what you typed but this is what we think you meant options. Being helpful, even aggressively so, isn't a bad thing, particularly for beginners. But getting in the way is just, well, getting in the way. But then, as I learned in retrospect, you really shouldn't be doing text processing in a word processor, as the typesetting features that all word processors embed can only be a problem. Content first, format later. Following that rule tends to make a lot of things a lot easier... -- Chris Devers People with machines that think, will in times of crisis, make up stuff and attribute it to me - Nikla-nostra-debo
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 01:50:26PM +, Dave Thorn wrote: From this it follows that everyone who runs a website should link to nms from their homepage, or as close to it as possible, to get it shoved up the list a bit. I've linked to it from http://www.fuckedgoths.com/, which seems to have quite good google karma :) But that's because every goth under the sun has a link to fuckedgoths on their homepage or LiveJournal :) Alex -- KCBpd lWmulvo ECS+ m5 CPEIV B13 Ou Lmb Sc+isIC+ T++ A6LAT H6oe b5 D+ - See http://bob.bob.bofh.org/~giolla/bobcode.html for decoding Website: http://www.cpio.org/~grimoire Writing: http://www.livejournal.com/~diffrentcolours
Advocacy link fest
Reading Dave's perl.com article and the threads about advocacy, I had a thought. Google promotes sites based on being linked to. From this it follows that everyone who runs a website should link to nms from their homepage, or as close to it as possible, to get it shoved up the list a bit. Oh, and can we get it linked from perl.com, or supported in some way as official or endorsed ? Simon. -- We've added years to life not life to years.
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 01:26:14PM +, Simon Wilcox wrote: From this it follows that everyone who runs a website should link to nms from their homepage, or as close to it as possible, to get it shoved up the list a bit. I've linked to it from http://www.fuckedgoths.com/, which seems to have quite good google karma :) -- dave thorn | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 01:26:14PM +, Simon Wilcox wrote: Google promotes sites based on being linked to. From this it follows that everyone who runs a website should link to nms from their homepage, or as close to it as possible, to get it shoved up the list a bit. It's also worth knowing that the fewer links there are on a page, the more seriously Google takes each one. Ideally we need to find a page which has a massive PageRank and take out all the links apart from one to NMS... .robin.
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 01:26:14PM +, Simon Wilcox wrote: Reading Dave's perl.com article and the threads about advocacy, I had a thought. Google promotes sites based on being linked to. That's just one aspect of how google ranks sites, but its effect is less than you might think. The structure of the HTML page is also extremely important in how searched-for words are weighted in the engine - namely, if search terms appear in titles and headers, or in bold, or in a big font, near the top of a page, then google is significantly more likely to favour your page to a.n. other's - page rank has less of an effect because your actual subject-match weighting is better. I'm not sure this will massively help in increasing the page ranking of the nms scripts page for cgi scripts per se, but it's useful knowledge for less generic searches. Basically, a single link from perl.com might not help`as much as you might hope. But a coordinated link from several well-structured and relevant (to google) resources might[1]. The only other thing to note is that smaller, less visited sites tend to get updated in the index far less often and thus have a long lead time (in the order of 2-3 months) before making it in in the first place. So even if everyone did this tomorrow, we probably wouldn't see any difference till April/May, if at all. Chris [1] e.g. nms-scripts might improve in cgi scripts searches by as many as 30 places - up from #78,953 to #78,923 for instance. -- Chris Carline [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://chris.carline.org/ GnuPG: 1024D/57B5CB20 | 5E85 207A 89D8 E097 0C0F FD4C 871A CE15 57B5 CB20 msg04803/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Advocacy link fest
- Original Message - From: Simon Wilcox [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reading Dave's perl.com article and the threads about advocacy, I had a thought. Google promotes sites based on being linked to. From this it follows that everyone who runs a website should link to nms from their homepage, or as close to it as possible, to get it shoved up the list a bit. Oh, and can we get it linked from perl.com, or supported in some way as official or endorsed ? I've started helping out on a Perl/CGI forum, and so far every time I've spotted a response to the wrong site, I've had a rant and pointed the appropriate thread at NMS ;) So hopefully the word will spread Barbie.
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 02:28:01PM +, Chris Carline wrote: The structure of the HTML page is also extremely important in how searched-for words are weighted in the engine - namely, if search terms appear in titles and headers, or in bold, or in a big font, near the top of a page, then google is significantly more likely to favour your page to a.n. other's - page rank has less of an effect because your actual subject-match weighting is better. Chris, Robin -- Can you provide some info to back up these claims about the operation of Google? There is a tremendous amount of folklore associated with search engines and having hard, firm (oo-er) evidence of behaviour is very useful. Other search engines may use these techniques (which sound crude and so 1997) but does Google? The only page I'm aware of that definitively talks about Google's technology (PageRank) is, http://www.google.com/technology/index.html Paul -- Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/ What is the difference between a bat? You must embrace the chaos. -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Paul Makepeace wrote:
The only page I'm aware of that definitively talks about Google's
technology (PageRank) is,
http://www.google.com/technology/index.html
Google grew out of academic research at Stanford, and there was a series
of papers that came out of that work before it went commercial. It was
easier to find these when it was just google.stanford.edu, and presumably
the design has evolved over the past couple of years anyway, but you can
still find some of that material.
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
{sergey, page}@cs.stanford.edu
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Efficient Crawling Through URL Ordering
Junghoo Cho, Hector Garcia-Molina, Lawrence Page
{cho,hector,page}@cs.stanford.edu
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~cho/crawler-paper/
WSQ: Web-Supported (Database) Queries
Roy Goldman, Jennifer Widom
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:K59eKNoud1AC:www-db.stanford.edu/wsq/++site:www-db.stanford.edu+google+stanford+paper
Finding near-replicas of documents on the web
Narayanan Shivakumar, Hector Garcia-Molina
(fshiva, hectorg}@cs.stanford.edu
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~shiva/Pubs/web.ps
Et cetera:
http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www-db.stanford.edu+google+stanford+paper
Some of the stuff they did is pretty brilliant...
--
Chris Devers
People with machines that think, will in times of crisis,
make up stuff and attribute it to me - Nikla-nostra-debo
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 01:26:14PM +, Simon Wilcox wrote: Reading Dave's perl.com article and the threads about advocacy, I had a thought. Google promotes sites based on being linked to. From this it follows that everyone who runs a website should link to nms from their homepage, or as close to it as possible, to get it shoved up the list a bit. Done. And the URL again, is accent role=bbc-announcerh-t-t-p-colon-forwardslash- forwardslash-nms-cgi-dot-sourceforge-dot-net/accent or: http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net -- Chris Benson
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Chris Benson wrote: And the URL again, is accent role=bbc-announcerh-t-t-p-colon-forwardslash- forwardslash-nms-cgi-dot-sourceforge-dot-net/accent So would the BBC not pronounce the dash in 'nms-cgi', or would they pronounce *all* of the dashes you just typed there? Either way, I'm getting a parse error here... :) -- Chris Devers People with machines that think, will in times of crisis, make up stuff and attribute it to me - Nikla-nostra-debo
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 03:27:12PM -0600, Chris Devers wrote: On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Chris Benson wrote: And the URL again, is accent role=bbc-announcerh-t-t-p-colon-forwardslash- forwardslash-nms-cgi-dot-sourceforge-dot-net/accent So would the BBC not pronounce the dash in 'nms-cgi', or would they pronounce *all* of the dashes you just typed there? Either way, I'm getting a parse error here... :) Yeah, me too! :-) I notice that most of the BBC addresses are punctuation-less. I assume because of the aggravation it causes: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? - the correct one, grrrh In the past I have favoured '-' to separate words. I think I've convinced myself leaving them out is simpler: saying www.engineeringtheimpossible all one word .co.uk is easier than distinguishing between - and _ and telling party on other end of phone where the character is on their keyboard! -- Chris Benson
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 10:03:16PM +, Chris Benson wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? [EMAIL PROTECTED]?? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? - the correct one, grrrh You can hack your mail server to allow for this... *evil grin* In the past I have favoured '-' to separate words. I think I've convinced myself leaving them out is simpler: sayingwww.engineeringtheimpossible all one word .co.uk is easier than distinguishing between - and _ and telling party on other end of phone where the character is on their keyboard! There's another issue where hyphenated URLs broken across a newline contain dashes -- is that dash part of the URL or not? (assuming it's not correctly marked up with an a) Paul
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 01:26:14PM +, Simon Wilcox wrote: Reading Dave's perl.com article and the threads about advocacy, I had a thought. Google promotes sites based on being linked to. From this it follows that everyone who runs a website should link to nms from their homepage, or as close to it as possible, to get it shoved up the list a bit. Do we have a nice bit of official standards compliant HTML for a link for cargo cult web page writing? :-) [Better still, do we have one to put on the NMS page to encourage people to link to it] Nicholas Clark -- ETAXMANUNHAPPY http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/CV.html
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 02:28:01PM +, Chris Carline wrote: The structure of the HTML page is also extremely important in how searched-for words are weighted in the engine - namely, if search terms appear in titles and headers, or in bold, or in a big font, near the top of a page, then google is significantly more likely to favour your page to a.n. other's - page rank has less of an effect because your actual subject-match weighting is better. Can you provide some info to back up these claims about the operation of Google? I think he read the interview with one of the Google blokes in last Thursday's Guardian Online for which I now can't find the link. L. We're off to see the elves.
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Chris Benson wrote: On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 01:26:14PM +, Simon Wilcox wrote: Google promotes sites based on being linked to. From this it follows that everyone who runs a website should link to nms from their homepage, or as close to it as possible, to get it shoved up the list a bit. Done. Ditto (in the useful section). And the URL again, is accent role=bbc-announcerh-t-t-p-colon-forwardslash- forwardslash-nms-cgi-dot-sourceforge-dot-net/accent lol. Actually, I think some of them have improved and now just say 'slash' and don't leave such a bewilderingly long pause after the 'dot's. L. Omome - the collection of 'omes.
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Nicholas Clark wrote: Do we have a nice bit of official standards compliant HTML for a link for cargo cult web page writing? :-) [Better still, do we have one to put on the NMS page to encourage people to link to it] Try reading the nms page ;-) L. Asase - an enzyme which breaks down enzymes.
Re: Advocacy thoughts - was Re: bad nasty evil thread
On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 04:00:41PM +, Jonathan Peterson wrote: Neither of you can predict the future. I don't know the specifics of this case, but Win2K (or even NT3SP3) is hardly an unreliable file serving platform*. In my experience they both are (assuming you meant NT4SP3). And Penderel is hardly a testament to the reliability of Linux machines. I don't know who set up Penderel. I do know that no Linux machine I've set up has had downtime from anything other than hardware failure. It's my job to get these things right, and I do. I can't go into much more detail of this particular case, for obvious reasons; suffice it to say that technical issues were not a factor. Roger -- He's a suicidal guerilla barbarian whom everyone believes is mad. She's a virginal hypochondriac mercenary with an MBA from Harvard. They fight crime!
Re: Advocacy thoughts - was Re: bad nasty evil thread
On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 04:00:41PM +, Jonathan Peterson wrote: Anyone who chooses a fileserver which won't work reliably over one that will - Neither of you can predict the future. I don't know the specifics of this case, but Win2K (or even NT3SP3) is hardly an unreliable file serving platform*. And Penderel is hardly a testament to the reliability of Linux machines. Penderel is a testament to the unreliability of x86 machines. It is my experience, however, that on any particluar x86 box, Linux is more stable than Billware. With Linux you only have to worry about the shitty hardware. With Billware, you need to worry both about that and about the shitty OS. /handwave I doubt the pretty login screen counts for much, although possibly some. Seriously, what do you suppose this manager's reasons were for making his/her decision? Was it a simple case that he sees Microsoft as a predictable if unspectacular option versus Linux as a high risk option? If he sees it as a high-risk option, then he is at best ignorant. Does he just think you recommended Linux only because you can't be bothered to learn how to administer NT properly? If he thinks Roger is unprofessional then he should say so, and should fire him. That he didn't shows that he is an idiot if that is his reason for choosing NT. Does he have a friend who had real trouble setting Samba up for some reason and now he's wary of it? If he values the advice of a random friend over the advice of the person he pays good money to to know about these things, then he's an idiot. Was it that the decision over this file server was entirely trivial as far as he was concerned, and he just couldn't care less what gets used? If that is the case, then he's an idiot. Occasionally you do get incompetant people. But usually, people have good reasons for making decisions, even when they make the wrong decision. This seems to boil down to a pointy-hair not paying attention to the people who he pays to know about these things. Not paying attention to your hired experts whilst continuing to pay for the service of those hired experts is idiocy. Until you understand why people decide to choose technically inferior products, it's hard to make your technically superior product more popular with them. Agreed. But I see no non-technical reasons above which would justify choosing something which is technically inferior. I've met a lot of resistance to Perl based on 'bad past experiences'. We all know these were usually caused by bad programmers and stupid timescales. But your bad experience counts for a lot more than someone else's good experience, which is why the 'Perl success stories' are not alway so convincing. That's OK then. Soon *everyone* will have been burnt by Java and come flocking back :-) [stuff about negative campaigning being bad] all true. -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david One person can change the world, but most of the time they shouldn't -- Marge Simpson
Re: Advocacy thoughts - was Re: bad nasty evil thread
David Cantrell wrote: Does he have a friend who had real trouble setting Samba up for some reason and now he's wary of it? If he values the advice of a random friend over the advice of the person he pays good money to to know about these things, then he's an idiot. No, actually I disagree, and it's an important point. I didn't say it was a random friend. My friends are less random than my employees. I employ people based on the best of a bunch of C.V.s that I manage to get within a short time period, minus those ruled out by salary restrictions, minus those that don't want the position in the end, and filtered according to one or maybe two hour long interviews and if I'm lucky some examples of past work. My friends on the other hand may be people I've worked with closely for years, selected out of all the many people I've ever worked with. Or people whose opinions I've read on mailing lists for years. Like many of us I tend to change jobs every 1-2 years, so I'd never know my employees longer than that, while I've known some of my technically minded friends for 5 years or more. true I have two employees who work for me. They are both good(ish) Java programmers but have limited knowledge of other areas of computing. One of them tells me he wants to use some commercial bug tracking tool that he used in his last job. It's expensive and proprietary (PVCS tracker) but he really wants it. My friends tell me they've got by fine with cheap and chearful bits of web based freeware, or maybe bugzilla when things get hairy. I overule him and tell him we'll use some PHP based thing I installed in my lunch break (called Mantis, it's on sourceforge somewhere). Why should I do this? He's the developer who has to use it, right? I should just give him what he recommends, after all he says it's good and I've never even used it. Well, my job as manager is not to do whatever my programmers say. I have to think about budget, I have awareness of our future staffing requirements, which make the license fee look a lot worse down the line. In fact, I had a political aim too - I recognised this employee was rather over fond of commercial software, and I wanted to show him that sometimes free stuff can do the job - and it's much better to show than to tell. Plus, it wouldn't kill him to learn a bit of PHP, if nothing else so he can compare it to Java. Plus, if I'm wrong, it's not really a big deal to fix down the line, it's a good chance for me to try something out. In fact, I was also quite interested to see how he would react to being overuled by me. The point is, I did not evaluate this based purely on What is the best (value for money) bug tracker around. I had lots of other things on the agenda. And I had a lot of faith in friends who assured me that for my size projects you really don't need super duper feature rich wizzo bug tracking tools. /true Business people place a huge amount of store in the opinions of their friends and contacts. Unless they have a good relationship with their employees, they may place considerably less store in their opinions. If you want your boss to listen to you, be nice to him. Yes, that's politics, but it's a feature of human nature so we have to deal with it. I've met a lot of resistance to Perl based on 'bad past experiences'. We all know these were usually caused by bad programmers and stupid timescales. But your bad experience counts for a lot more than someone else's good experience, which is why the 'Perl success stories' are not alway so convincing. That's OK then. Soon *everyone* will have been burnt by Java and come flocking back :-) Actually I think that's true. Already Java is becoming the new VB. Want a job in computing? Can't do anything? Read a book on Java and tell them you are a programmer. As the quantity Matt Wright style Java and JSP increases (and I've seen plenty already) it will lose much of its appeal. I think Java will soon become what C is now. Neither good nor bad, still widely used, but somehow a bit old and tired, OK for some big old J2EE project left over from 2002 but not really the best thing to be doing a new project in. One person can change the world, but most of the time they shouldn't -- Marge Simpson Everyone has better sigs than me. -- Jonathan Peterson Technical Manager, Unified Ltd, +44 (0)20 7383 6092 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Advocacy thoughts - was Re: bad nasty evil thread
On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 04:00:41PM +, Jonathan Peterson wrote: serving platform*. And Penderel is hardly a testament to the reliability of Linux machines. I think Penderel is suffering from a bad case of old-shabby-hardwaritis. Paul
Re: Publicity Stunts/Advocacy Suggestions?
Patrick Carmichael [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Other than the inevitable cheesy picture of me wearing a Perl T-shirt and standing beside a camel, what possible advocacy activities a.k.a. shameless publicity stunts might be worth a try? That don't involve my getting arrested? Any suggestions? More cheesy ? Picture posing for Camel Toes: http://www.essentialclan.com/Cameltoe_files/frame.htm ObBuffy: http://www.cameltoe.org/celebrity.html ObNerdy: Bring a projector and beam code onto a landmark at night ? YY
Re: Publicity Stunts/Advocacy Suggestions?
Patrick Carmichael wrote: If you're alluding to Reading FC's descent towards the Unibond League, then that doesn't actually apply to me ... Wimbledon fan, man and boy ... so .. oh yeah .. right .. OK, point taken. No, actually I was referring to everyone's favourite cyborg, Kevin Warwick of Reading University (or is that the other way around?) Tony
The links are not work safe, Was: Re: Publicity Stunts/Advocacy Suggestions?
For what its worth, these may be considered not work safe. * Yeoh Yiu ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: More cheesy ? Picture posing for Camel Toes: http://www.essentialclan.com/Cameltoe_files/frame.htm ObBuffy: http://www.cameltoe.org/celebrity.html ObNerdy: Bring a projector and beam code onto a landmark at night ? YY -- Greg McCarroll http://217.34.97.146/~gem/
Re: Publicity Stunts/Advocacy Suggestions?
If you're alluding to Reading FC's descent towards the Unibond League, then that doesn't actually apply to me ... Wimbledon fan, man and boy ... so .. oh yeah .. right .. OK, point taken. PC On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Anthony Fisher wrote: Arrange a football contest with teams of trained camels. Then give everyone else incorrect versions of the rules in advance but manage to have your own team come last anyway. I think this tactic is popular around your parts... :) Tony
Publicity Stunts/Advocacy Suggestions?
I'm off to set up a XML/Perl/Template Toolkit web-based knowledge management/portal thingy and train people how to use it in the Talaat Harb Training Centre in Cairo i.e. home of many camels. Other than the inevitable cheesy picture of me wearing a Perl T-shirt and standing beside a camel, what possible advocacy activities a.k.a. shameless publicity stunts might be worth a try? That don't involve my getting arrested? Any suggestions? Patrick Carmichael Lecturer in IT Education School of Education University of Reading Reading RG6 1HY http://www.reading.ac.uk/~ems97pc
Re: Publicity Stunts/Advocacy Suggestions?
Patrick Carmichael wrote: Other than the inevitable cheesy picture of me wearing a Perl T-shirt and standing beside a camel, what possible advocacy activities a.k.a. shameless publicity stunts might be worth a try? That don't involve my University of Reading Arrange a football contest with teams of trained camels. Then give everyone else incorrect versions of the rules in advance but manage to have your own team come last anyway. I think this tactic is popular around your parts... :) Tony
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
Marna Gilligan [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On 21 Nov 2001, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: Marna Gilligan [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: snip Indeed it does. I don't know if you've been round schools lately, but IME the machines are getting very integrated with each curriculum subject, they _are_ becoming tools. That's not been my experience, but the school I've had most dealings with is an inner-city school, with very high teacher and pupil turnover, and very poor results (and expectations). There you go :-) -- David Hodgkinson, Wizard for Hirehttp://www.davehodgkinson.com Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Deep Purple Family Tree news http://www.slashrock.com Interim Technical Director, Web Architecture Consultant for hire
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
robert shiels [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Geek parents like me are the exception though (insert gene-pool joke here!) My kids are at least linux-aware at least, and they've also used macs (where are all the mouse buttons!). -- David Hodgkinson, Wizard for Hirehttp://www.davehodgkinson.com Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Deep Purple Family Tree news http://www.slashrock.com Interim Technical Director, Web Architecture Consultant for hire
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
A more difficult one to counter may be that, this being a fee-paying school, the parents are going to be well-off and a high proportion of them are likely to have Windows machines at home and will wonder why their little darlings don't use the same at school. Thats a excellent point. actually this might be where we need to drive some of the criticism and education rather than expect some of the curriculum to carry the responsibility. So whats important to the parents ? Regards Nik Butler Director Wired4Life Limited [EMAIL PROTECTED] 07713 241 956 www.wired4life.org - Original Message - From: Roger Horne [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2001 12:37 PM Subject: Re: Your Advocacy ideas
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
From: Nik Butler [EMAIL PROTECTED] A more difficult one to counter may be that, this being a fee-paying school, the parents are going to be well-off and a high proportion of them are likely to have Windows machines at home and will wonder why their little darlings don't use the same at school. Thats a excellent point. actually this might be where we need to drive some of the criticism and education rather than expect some of the curriculum to carry the responsibility. So whats important to the parents ? Well, I don't really care what they teach them at school. My daughter (aged 9) has WindowsME on this PC, which I let her use for games and web browsing/email to her friends, and we have an iMac for other games for my 4 year old when I'm busy here. I upgraded the iMac to OSX this morning, so now my children will be casually switching between 3 operating systems, which is nice, and gives them a good introduction to computers in general. Geek parents like me are the exception though (insert gene-pool joke here!) /Robert
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
nik butler [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Ive been asked to provide a further reason and presentation to a local independent school. It would be quite a coo to get in the door here as I would really like to get this Educational establishment using some flavour of Linux. Im getting the usual anti open source arguments along the lines of 1. We will never get any support. 2. Students should use software which is commercially recognisable 3. Students should use tools which they will encounter in the real world. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he eats for a lifetime. -- David Hodgkinson, Wizard for Hirehttp://www.davehodgkinson.com Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Deep Purple Family Tree news http://www.slashrock.com Interim Technical Director, Web Architecture Consultant for hire
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
And, what is to stop the school buying some VMWare licenses and MS Office is they are really set on teaching the kids MSOffice - bear in mind that may actually be a syllabus consideration - it is prolly worth getting hold of any relevany syllabi... Having lectured at Crawley College I have seen a number of the syllabuses for the variety of certifications and qulifications. They can be unusually vague but in general they dont say , Students must show an ability to use the Insert Table menu of office 2k. In general the syllabuses will say that the student should show an aptitude to use wordprocessor functions. I will ask Joan to forward me the details though Regards Nik Butler Director Wired4Life Limited [EMAIL PROTECTED] 07713 241 956 www.wired4life.org
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
Natalie Ford [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 10:39:07PM +, the hatter wrote: As someone else said, should they ? It would be more sensible to teach them the right tool for the job. Sometimes that might be MS Office, sometimes it might be TeX, sometimes it might be turbo pascal, sometimes it might be fortran. 3. Students should use tools which they will encounter in the real world. And, what is to stop the school buying some VMWare licenses and MS Office is they are really set on teaching the kids MSOffice - bear in mind that may actually be a syllabus consideration - it is prolly worth getting hold of any relevany syllabi... Are they teaching them word processing in general or office specifically? It it's simple word munching, then Abiword will do fine. Likewise gnumeric for numbers. -- David Hodgkinson, Wizard for Hirehttp://www.davehodgkinson.com Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Deep Purple Family Tree news http://www.slashrock.com Interim Technical Director, Web Architecture Consultant for hire
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
On Tue 20 Nov, nik butler wrote: Ive been asked to provide a further reason and presentation to a local independent s chool. 3. Students should use tools which they will encounter in the real world. I have never understood this argument. It is used by people who do not understand the speed of software development. It is not many years ago that the argument was Schoolchildren must learn Word Perfect 4.2 so that they can use it when they leave school. A more difficult one to counter may be that, this being a fee-paying school, the parents are going to be well-off and a high proportion of them are likely to have Windows machines at home and will wonder why their little darlings don't use the same at school. Roger -- Roger Horne 11 New Square, Lincoln's Inn, London WC2A 3QB mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.hrothgar.co.uk/
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
On Wed, 21 Nov 2001, Roger Horne wrote: On Tue 20 Nov, nik butler wrote: 3. Students should use tools which they will encounter in the real world. I have never understood this argument. It is used by people who do not understand the speed of software development. It is not many years ago that the argument was Schoolchildren must learn Word Perfect 4.2 so that they can use it when they leave school. Indeed. We used Acorns at School which were probably perfect for teaching as they had a very simple interface, a good collection of simple packages which allowed you to gain the basic cut-and-paste, document organisation, simple spreadsheet and graphical skills. Having got these generically, it becomes a lot easier to use anything else and I don't know of anyone that had problem adapting. Also the Acorns had these manual things, so interested people could dig into the darker secrets of the machine's setup, something which I enjoyed doing. Using OS stuff can provide the same set of basically functional spreadsheet and word processing packages and a simple interface (for suitably configured WMs) while letting the curious find new and interesting ways to shoot themselves in the foot. Then again, remember that teachers are the poor fools that end up maintaining these systems in the face of mallicious 15 year olds and most just don't have the time to look after anything complicated or gain the skills needed to do so well. Perhaps schools need proper sysadmins... Alex Gough -- That one never has to vary G or introduce any fudge factors in order to fit emperical data illustrates the essential difference between the mere mathematical modelling of irregular phenonema and laws of nature: research fields that are totally disconnected from physics have no universal constants.
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 01:39:31PM +, Alex Gough wrote: Then again, remember that teachers are the poor fools that end up maintaining these systems in the face of mallicious 15 year olds and most just don't have the time to look after anything complicated or gain the skills needed to do so well. Perhaps schools need proper sysadmins... Actually, my dad's in that exact position and is far from a poor fool. Malicious is right though, from what I've heard.. Hard core test environment that's for sure. A good place to get linux into a school system is as a LAN server, not just the usual samba share but more interesting things like serving up PC drive images to provide default setups for the machines whose configs are nigh-on destroyed each time said teenager gets near it. Paul
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
[snip] It would be quite a coo to get in the door here as I would really like to get this Educational establishment using some flavour of Linux. [snip] There is growing interest in using Free/OS software in education on developing countries - I do research on using IT in sustainable development projects (there is a very non-technical article 'Open Source as Appropriate Technology' on my site at http://www.reading.ac.uk/~ems97pc/opensource.html). The strongest argument we have found is that good practice in education is 'open' - with teachers sharing problems, solutions and resources etc - and of course this applies to the Uk as well. Debian have an active education group and of course have ports of Linux for the Acorn RISC-PC which can give these machines a new lease of life now that Acorn have pulled out of the education market. Another person to check out is Phil Jones who runs the 'Linux for Schools Project' (http://www.lfsp.org) and has used Linux as the basis of a school network. Patrick Carmichael
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
On Wed 21 Nov, Patrick Carmichael wrote: Debian have an active education group and of course have ports of Linux for the Acorn RISC-PC which can give these machines a new lease of life now that Acorn have pulled out of the education market. Um, Acorns are still being made and sold to schools http://www.castle.org.uk and a new version of RiscOS is just being released http://www.riscos.co.uk/ Roger -- Roger Horne 11 New Square, Lincoln's Inn, London WC2A 3QB mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.hrothgar.co.uk/
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 05:26:00PM +, Roger Horne wrote: On Wed 21 Nov, Patrick Carmichael wrote: Debian have an active education group and of course have ports of Linux for the Acorn RISC-PC which can give these machines a new lease of life now that Acorn have pulled out of the education market. Um, Acorns are still being made and sold to schools http://www.castle.org.uk And as always, they are spectacularly over-priced. Which is a shame, cos I've always had a soft spot for them. Cut the prices in half and they might be worth buying. You know you're overpriced when Sun and Apple are cheaper and faster. -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david Considering the number of wheels Microsoft has found reason to invent, one never ceases to be baffled by the minuscule number whose shape even vaguely resembles a circle. -- anon, on Usenet
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
Marna Gilligan [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Using packages like this has the advantage of teaching computers as tools rather than as an entity unto themselves, which is what seems to happen at the moment. So rather than, or as well as, having a 'computer class', art classes and design classes, and tech drawing classes, and all sorts of other classes, could use computers as part of their course. And gain skills using the sort of software (if not the exact package) that the students may well have to learn when they go on to college. I studied art for a bit and whizzed ahead in the pooter classes because I had played with graphics and 3D stuff at home. Indeed it does. I don't know if you've been round schools lately, but IME the machines are getting very integrated with each curriculum subject, they _are_ becoming tools. Which is a nightmare for the poor network troll who has to wire up all the disparate buildings! Hmm..you could even continue the argument by saying that things like math and english should be integrated into the other subjects. Nah. -- David Hodgkinson, Wizard for Hirehttp://www.davehodgkinson.com Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Deep Purple Family Tree news http://www.slashrock.com Interim Technical Director, Web Architecture Consultant for hire
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
On 21 Nov 2001, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: Marna Gilligan [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: snip Indeed it does. I don't know if you've been round schools lately, but IME the machines are getting very integrated with each curriculum subject, they _are_ becoming tools. That's not been my experience, but the school I've had most dealings with is an inner-city school, with very high teacher and pupil turnover, and very poor results (and expectations). Until this year the centre where I teach/network admin provided space and pooters for this school, and the classes consisted of using MS Word or browsing the internet for fun. One (short-lived) enthusiastic design teacher used the time to try to get the kids doing something creative (but again using Word). Most teachers never took advantage of the facilities, despite us offering help and encouragement, although I suspect that this was due to the children becoming harder to manage once they were outside their classroom, and because the teachers themselves didn't have that much experience using computers. This is probably school-specific, and since it's the only school whose computer-based offerings I've had to deal with I'm prolly coming from a rather biased position. I'm glad that doesn't match up with what you've found. Which is a nightmare for the poor network troll who has to wire up all the disparate buildings! Not good. Hmm..you could even continue the argument by saying that things like math and english should be integrated into the other subjects. I don't think there *shouldn't* be dedicated pooter classes, but that they should involve learning how a computer works and how to make it do things. Not just how to use MS Office and find pictures of Brit'ny Spears. I'd like to see computers used the same way that being able to read and write is used in history classes, and being able to add is used in accounting classes. A tool, a skill you learn when you're little and then use for al sorts of things. I suspect that's not going to happen anytime soon, but I'd love to be wrong about that. Marna.
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 08:50:07PM +, nik butler wrote: So over to you chaps for your usual upbeat of the wall and balanced arguements for and against why the Schools should be using open source software. I guess the argument that schools should be about education and not about training people to become mindless corporate drones won't go down too well :-) -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david o/~ I want my SMTP o/~
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
I guess the argument that schools should be about education and not about training people to become mindless corporate drones won't go down too well :-) Ok point, yes im actually willing to explain this. From experience sometimes we just gotta say the obvious in a reasonable way. next !
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, nik butler wrote: 1. We will never get any support. Blatant tosh, obviously - if you want support, you have to pay for reliability, regardless of OS. Also, because of its lower barriers to entry, you'll find more people experimenting with linux sysadmin stuff rather than buying MCSEs, so hiring someone to handle day-to-day stuff is that much cheaper. 2. Students should use software which is commercially recognisable As someone else said, should they ? It would be more sensible to teach them the right tool for the job. Sometimes that might be MS Office, sometimes it might be TeX, sometimes it might be turbo pascal, sometimes it might be fortran. 3. Students should use tools which they will encounter in the real world. I hear that open source software is all the rage in companies both large and small these days. The kids can legally install and experiment all the like at home with open OSs, open applications, open tools, too. Knowing the basics of the commercial alternatives really doesn't take very long, learning the averagely complex features of most open apps will put you on the path to mastering the really tricky techniques. Learning how to use a wizard will teach you only that single job you're trying to do. Also, by the time they're ready for the job market, the features only found today in scalable open OSs will appear in theings like Windows, learning the unix way now will give them a grasp of the concept (Scheduler and Run As in win2k both spring to mind as things that have existed for ever in unix, but only recently appeared in winders) the hatter
Re: Your Advocacy ideas
Regarding the lack of effective user support for Open Source software, you might like to point out that effective user support for commercial software is a less-than-certain proposition too. My favourite example is the study reported at: http://www.bmug.org/news/articles/MSvsPF.html Damian
