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Being too poor to afford computers capable of running X effectively, I've gotten very used to using Lynx to browse. In fact, I use Lynx everyday, and the only time I need to use a GUI I'm at work anyway, where the worst "ads" are the ones that show up from time to time on Perl Sites.


I advocate that we all go back to our console-based roots and dump these fancy-schmancy pop-up windows and all that advertising B.S. that seems to attract every get-rick-quick marketing ho there is.


Thank you.

BTW, WTF is Invalid form key: ndEmB3GXk5 ! ?? Jeez. We need a new Banjo.

Viruses.

It asks a very valid question about how much you can disclose before malicious virii can be possible.

There's no such word as "virii",
"Virii",
"Virii",
There's no such word as "virii",
The plural is "viruses".

There's no such word as "virii",
"Virii",
"Virii",
There's no such word as "virii",
The plural is "viruses".

Wow. I leave a thread for a day and look what happens. Everybody starts calling everybody else names.

There was a good link posted in another part of this thread... this one. I read it, I learned, I found out I didn't know what I thought I knew, and no one had to call me an imbecile or a moron or a stupid fuck to do it. You should all take a lesson from phase3000.

BTW, he was right... I've never had a formal lesson in Latin in my life. Everything I learned I learned from Slashdot.

There's an excellent page on why the plural really isn't virii which should explain it for you..

http://language.perl.com/misc/virus.html

please read and stop this nonsense: plural of virus

There isn't a Latin plural form of "virus", so "viruses" it is!

Its not "virii". If you wanted to use the Latin plural as an excuse, you'd say "viri" not "virii". See this rant on the subject for a better explanation than I could hope to give.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.

It's Heidi! Where's Shoeboy?

Sponsored By: NuSphere MySQL
NuSphere MySQL Advantage gives MySQL the power to handle transaction-intensive enterprise applications. With a pre-configured Perl DBI for MySQL, NuSphere MySQL Advantage gives you the power to build cost-effective solutions.

Not sure whether this is good, bad, or indifferent.

I think as long as it's use is based on it's usefullness (which has been the case with most scripting languages), it's only a matter of time.

Ruby has been as much of a pleasent surprise to me as Perl was back when I first learned it. No, it's not "Perl with Objects"; Perl itself does that quite well. It's more like Smalltalk, only readable, pragmatic rather than idealistic, and as expressive and concise as Perl when you want it to be. Personally, i think Ruby is a much greater threat to Perl than Python is, in the long run. Rather than forcing you to do it Guido's Way, you can do it the Perl Way, or the Smalltalk Way, or the Functional Way... or any combination of the above. No wonder the Pragmatic Programmers wrote a book on it. It does TMTOWTDI better than Perl does TMTOWTDI; while remaining relatively simple and clean.

So just give it time. I think it's well on it's way to world domination.

Oh, and as for a CPAN-like code archive for Ruby, there's a somewhat embrionic one here. There is discussion currently going on at the RubyWiki on how to implement a CPAN-like system for Ruby only avoiding the problems that CPAN has.

--

you'll see that Inline::CPR lets you do this.

#!/usr/bin/cpr
int main(void) {
printf("Hello, world\n");
}

tada! interpreted C.

Paul

It's called Perl. It works, it's mature, and it runs on nearly any platform.

The problem with the NC model is that it relies on a stable, secure, high-bandwidth connection that has 99.9999% uptime. Can anyone tell me of a network that meets these requirements?

The counter argument is that no computer has a 99.9999% uptime either and that any system can fail locally as well. The response to this argument lies in the idea of local control. If my hard drive fails and I have a report due tomorrow, I can choose to put in a new hard drive and could have myself up and running again relatively quickly. The NC model places those decisions and priorities in the locus of control of someone else. Who is to say that they have my best interests in mind? If you want an example, look at the DNS problems Microsoft had a while back. As a network consultant and support technician, I unfortunately have to spend hours digging through the sludge of Microsoft's technical papers and knowledgebase hoping to find answers to this new problem or that. For three days, during the DNS debacle (can anyone figure out why they didn't have an off-site DNS?!?!... The Road Ahead for sure!), people were out of luck when it came to getting access to those resources. Let me tell you, if the phone system of the US was down for three days, there would be congressional hearings and someone would probably be facing jail time. Now, I'm not saying that a company should be held responsible for its website being down for three days, but if that company was also providing "essential services" (as the .NET strategy is hoping companies will), then I believe that the level of accountability should rise in proportion to the critical nature of the services that are provided.

We have a scary future ahead of us my friends. But you guys already know that, don't you?

The Perl strict pragma will not be mandatory in Perl 6, but it will probably be the default. Happy? :-)

Personally, I wouldn't recommend going with a closed source IDE or language, as you really won't get a language that is as fast or secure or constantly changing like an Open Source language is. On the plus side, however, Python comes with a rather nice IDE.

Almost every rule in English has several exceptions, and many things in English cannot be deduced from rules, they must simply each be learned, and there are hundreds of these. Pronunciation is ridiculous, which you've mentioned, but apart from pronunciation is grammar, spelling, plural forms, tenses and possessive forms, all of these have strange nuances in English.

Sounds suspiciously like perl. How many times have I explained about scalar and list context.

Arrrgggg... it's "viruses", not "virii". You can't just change any -us to a -ii to make a plural (there's no latin plural for virus; it would be like saying "furnitures" in english). I'm so tired of correcting people on this, but some force compells me to. I guess I'll just keep it brief, and refer you to this page, with much more information than I'll ever care to reproduce (and an interesting read).

When i first went to this page I saw a shitload of RFC's. all numbers to low to be Real RFC's.

so whats up? Does this guy actually has to audacity to call something an RFC and actually just mean request for comment?

-Jon

pricewatch.com

www.pricewatch.com

gotta love those sites that do that...

pricewatch.com

www.pricewatch.com

gotta love those sites that do that...

Anyone who doesn't think code can be art should look at the JAPH archive on CPAN Beautiful stuff there. Functional, meaningful(as long as you have the requisite knowledge to understand it) and beautiful.

Steven

What about those of us who use Perl?

Seems like a fairly simple sceme to me -

Again, I liked the post, but your use of "u-kernel" made it seem less knowledgeable, sort of like when you read an otherwise informative post about computer security and then the person uses "virii"[?] three times in a row.

--

PHP (perl for people to stupid to perl)

While I tend to find some things about PHP annoying in comparison to perl -- PHP is, in most things, just a little less convenient, and I'm used to perl -- I think that comment is just way off. Much better, I think, is Mark Jason-Dominus' view.

"In my world, PHP can be a good solution, and Perl can be a good solution, because maybe a problem can have more than one good solution. In my world you use what works, and using PHP can't possibly reflect badly on Perl."

as Objective C does to C++

Now I know you're smoking crack. For years, a small group of people called NeXT programmers wrote serious software with ease and speed the rest of the world -- especially the C++ world -- only dreamed of. Yes, back when (and perhaps before) perl was still in version 4.

And the functional and logical paradigms are VERY useful in the right problem domains (and/or with the right mindset). Which can be said of just about every language. Yes, perl is cool, and multiparadigmatic, and it is the swiss army chainsaw it's touted as, but that doesn't mean that other languages are all useless. There's more than one way to do it.

--

Jon Orwant Search on Slashdot...

Jon Orwant -- 2 O'Reilly Network Articles

Jon Orwant and The Real Perl Keyboard -- Fuzzy picture of Jon against a fuzzy background. Mildly humorous.

Good Picture of Jon Orwant

Mastering Algorithms with Perl -- "Topics covered: Perl data types, Big-O notation, data structures, queues, deques, linked lists, binary trees, sorting and searching algorithms, game and dynamic programming, sets and multisets, matrices and graphs, string matching and parsing, 2-D geometry, number systems, cryptography (including DES and RSA), probability, statistics, and numerical analysis." (Comments: Written by Jon Orwant. The link points to the evil Amazon.com)

Magnetic Perl kits -- "I just recieved this note from Jon Orwant (editor of The Perl Journal).You can order magnetic perl poetry kits from the Journal now." (Comments: This is a somewhat interesting 1998 posting to MacPerl.)

Yeah that's a troll :-)

I never heard of an applet written in Perl.

Which just means that you're not looking. In fact, there is currently a reference to an article on writing Gnome panel applets in the Perl slashbox here on slashdot. Your lack of knowledge does not mean that it isn't being done.

# copy stdin to stdout, except for lines starting with #
while left_angle_right_angle:
if dollar_underscore[0] =eq= "#":
continue_next;
}
print dollar_underscore;
}

taken from the interview at http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm

What do you say to the speculation that this move was influenced by your new employers, the ActiveState corporation?

LW: (laughs) That's pure nonsense. Nonsense, nonsense.

GvR: I can't imagine what you're talking about. (Fnord.)

perl -le 'use Inline C=>q{SV*JAxH(char*x){return newSVpvf("Just Another %s Hacker",x);}};print JAxH("Perl")'

Inline currently supports C, C++, Python, Java, and even a handful of Assembly languages. The list will grow, because Inline has been setup as a framework to allow anyone to bind their favorite language to Perl. In fact, all of the languages besides Inline::C were written by other programmers.

Neil Watkiss, the author of Inline::Python, is planning on writing Inline functionality *for* Python. If done right, this might allow Python to make use of many of the CPAN modules. Stay tuned.

For more information you can read a recent article at http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/02/inline.html

To get involved join the inline@perl.org mailing list. See http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=inline for details.

Cheers, Brian

But, FYI, Perl has a coupla thousand killer apps, most of which are available on CPAN.

Industry Standards include:

• CGI
• LWP
• DBI
• AxKit
• mod_perl
• and, of course, slash

The Beatles never flamed the Stones. The Stones never dissed the Beatles. And at no time did either party rip on Bob Dylan or badmouth Marvin Gaye. Language designers should celebrate their brethren. Particularly when the similarities so overwhelmingly outnumber the differences.

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse. Larry Wall, 14 Oct 1998

Frankly, I'd rather not try to compete with Perl in the areas where Perl is best -- it's a battle that's impossible to win, and I don't think it is a good idea to strive for the number of obscure options and shortcuts that Perl has acquired through the years. Guido van Rossum, 7 Jul 1992

When I originally designed Perl 5's OO, I thought about a lot of this stuff, and chose the explicit object model of Python as being the least confusing. So far I haven't seen a good reason to change my mind on that. Larry Wall, 27 Feb 1997 on perl5-porters

If Perl weren't around, I'd probably be using Python right now. Tom Christiansen in comp.lang.perl, 2 Jun 1995

Python is an excellent language for learning object orientation. (It also happens to be my favorite OO scripting language.) Sriram Srinivasan, Advanced Perl Programming

"perl"

If you ever feel like hanging up your trolling underpants and doing something productive, check out www.perl.com for more info.

hah it's like that old SNL sketch where the actor goes on about how he takes his roles very seriously and does a lot of research, then when they show a clip of him in action as a doctor he badly mispronounces all the medical terms.

Since when did Blizzard own all rights to the word "diablo"?

Perl has been ported to the Psion 5/5mx series platform for some time.

Because Perl rules. It is too powerful to learn anything else.

Dave

See http://language.perl.com/misc/virus.html.

Check out "Perl Power Tools: The Unix Reconstruction Project," where many of the Unix utilities have been written in Perl. In addition to being kinda neat, they make for good mini tutorials for Perl. So far there are implementations for:

addbib apply asa ar arch awk basename bc cal cat chmod chgrp chown clear cmp colrm comm cp cut dc deroff diff dirname dos2unix du echo ed egrep env expand expr false fgrep file find fold from grep glob head id join kill ln look ls mail make makewhatis man mimedecode mkdir mkfifo mv od par paste patch ping pr printenv printf pwd rev rm rmdir shar sleep sort spell split strings sum tac tail tar tee test time touch tr true tsort tty uname unexpand uniq units unix2dos unpar unshar uuencode uudecode wc what which whois xargs yes

Cheers,

The kornshell.com page has the code for a script that can be included in a CGI script in which all the arguments are mapped into shell variables.

Now that just strikes me as a terrible idea. Bad things happening to shell variables is exactly why you should not write CGI's using a shell.

Really. If you don't yet believe the awesome power of unchecked variables, then read Perl's security docs and learn about Taint mode. Check the FAQ's to see a small example of how often poorly checked input in CGI leads to a compromise. Taint mode specifically is what makes Perl my prefered language for CGI (among my primary languages: C, Perl, Python)

Csh Programming Considered Harmful (sorry, it's technical, not humerous)

ActivePerl has all the problems you'd expect from a Microsoft-oriented product, requring forced upgrades of Microsoft software. (Requires NT Service Pack 5, Internet Exploder 5, Microsoft Installer 1.1, etc.) The pure Perl release for Win32 seems to have been killed off, unless you build it from the sources. No current pure Perl binary distribution for Windows is available from the main Perl site or from CPAN.

Now the "ActivePerl" books will start to appear, seducing programmers into using the Windows-only features. It's Microsoft's "engulf and devour" as usual.

To reduce bloat, the Linux distros should look at another Open Source success: Perl and the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). With the CPAN module (or ActiveState's PPM - Perl Package Manager), installing a Perl module is a piece of cake. With http://search.cpan.org, finding a module from among the gajillions of Perl modules available is a piece of cake. All the distros would need to do is include sufficient documentation that the average unsophisticated Linux user knows what's out there and how to install the free software that's available.

First off, I agree that too many people in Utah just vote Republican, or just vote for Hatch because they *like* the idea of a Washington Insider as a champion for them. There might be some legitimate reasons to vote for Hatch, but these ain't it. I voted for Howell, and Orton, and was happy to see the sensible Matheson beat Derek Smith, who tried to run on "I'm a Republican, vote for me."

But I'm a little bit worried about this point:

mormon church carries enough influence to affect any election they want to

That's pretty much true. But the implication that they use this influence to get behind parties or candidates -- such as Hatch -- doesn't seem quite right to me. The official line of the church is that no party or candidate is endorsed by the church. Occasionally the church becomes involved in an issue/initiative (MX missile, Gambling, Religious Freedom Act, Gay Marriage -- generally moral issues), but I've never heard the church endorse any person or party specifically. I've heard them repeatedly emphasize that they don't do that and don't want anyone to pretend they have been endorsed by the church. The "Republicans are Righteous" view is an unfortunate cultural side effect, not religious dogma.

"heriditary republicans" that will vote republican on election day no matter what, without giving it a second thought

I think it's the "second thought" that people have problems with, rather than the church. They want things to be simple. So there's two politcal parties: God-fearing armed free market capitalists, and pinko gay-loving baby killing communists. Black and white. Vote Republican. :|

A "reactionary left" or "group of angry liberals" can only exacerbate the problem in Utah, I think. Trying to blame the problem on the Mormon Church won't help a bit. The only solution I can think of is to somehow raise the level of dialogue. People in Utah really need to learn how to investigate policy and issues and discuss them w/o the usual polemics (really, that probably goes for people everywhere, but I live here, so that's where I see it).

Given that you're posting around here, I'm guessing you have a Linux box handy. Here are some of my favorite sysadmin tools:

• dig - This is a more advanced tool for seeing what's going on with DNS.
• nmap - A great tool for probing your server to make sure you haven't left anything open.
• Apache Bench (ab) - This simple but effective benchmarking tool comes with the Apache server. It's great to see how your site will perform under load.
• wget - a tool for remotely getting web pages; it's very versatile -- you can even use to save a copy of your whole site, just in case.
• Ethereal - Having trouble figuring out what's going on between the browser and your server? This will capture all the packets and decode them into a nice conversation for you.
• vmstat - want to know why your server is slow? Get used to watching the vmstat numbers while it's fast, so you can see what's different when it's slow. It's raw numbers that are hard to interpret, but it's worth getting to know. Maybe this should be another Ask Slashdot question?
• Netsaint - this is my favorite automatic monitoring package. Once your site is in production, you can set this up to patrol things and make sure everything is working. That lets you get on with other stuff, knowing you'll hear about trouble pronto.
• MRTG - A tool that makes excellent long-term graphs of bandwidth use.
• IPtraf - Where MRTG gives you the broad overview, this gives you the second-by-second nitty gritty.
• perl - Last but most is Perl, a Swiss Army chainsaw of languages. If you'll be doing any web stuff, pick up a copy of Learning Perl and spend a little time with it. Once you learn the magic of regular expressions, you will never again say "that's impossible!" to a problem.

As far as non-sysadmin stuff goes, here are some of my other favorites:

• Bugzilla - this is a free and flexible bug tracking system. Highly recommended, especially for those people who don't think they need a bug tracking system. Our designers thought it was silly to start, but even they use it all the time now.
• CVS - Like bug tracking, most web sites don't think they need version control. Most web sites are wrong! CVSweb is also recommended.
• HTML Tidy - bad HTML in, good HTML out.
• WebTV Simulator - Sure, you and I don't use WebTVs, but a lot of people do. Browse your site with this to see how the other half surfs.
• VMWare - Along similar lines, VMWare is a Windows box emulator. I use it to keep a bunch of synthetic windows machines with a variety of OS versions and browser versions. It makes QA much easier.

And if there are particular tasks that have you stumped, come back and ask again. 'Round these parts, we have big toolboxes.

And have you considered that because Be is a company that when the RIAA decides to go with a *secure* digital music format, they can then implement it without the whole open-source problems that Linux entails?

Don't get me wrong, I like Linux, but from a commercial standpoint, Be makes more sense. If I can hire a company to customize the way things look and work underneath without worrying about code and save money developing it, I would. Instead of hiring someone to hack this and that into a bunch of Linux source to get something that will probably not quite what i expected. And there is more accountability with one company working on it. They get blamed for screw ups, who do I blame when the code is open source? And they can keep their trade secrets to themselves if they want.

Is it just me or does anything that's not Linux-based here, get gunned down for any real reason?

Read the article here and realize that each os has it's role. I personally am getting sick of Linux is for everything because it's open source. It isn't. BeOS isn't suited for everything. NT/9x/Me/CE aren't either. QNX is cool, but also not suited for everything. Open/Free/NetBSD have their places as well.

Use the right tool for the job. Isn't open source about choice anymore? I recall people complaining about gimp being ported to win32. If I can't run the software on the os of my choice, what good is it? This is what the source is for, to use, abuse, and port.

Now time for the mods to mark me as flamebait. :)

________________________________

NOMEN

Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl in Latin

DESCRIPTIO

The Lingua::Romana::Perligata module makes it makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. (If you have to ask "Why?", then the answer probably won't make any sense to you either.)

The linguistic principles behind Perligata are described in: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ Perligata.html

The module is used at the start of the program, and installs a filter which allows the rest of the program to be written in (modified) Latin, as described in the accompanying documentation.

EXEMPLUM

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;

adnota Illud Cribrum Eratothenis

maximum tum val inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso scribe.
vestibulo perlegementum da meo maximo.
maximum tum novumversum egresso scribe.
da II tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
dum damentum nexto listis decapitamentum fac sic
lista sic hoc tum nextum recidementum cis vannementa da listis.
next tum biguttam tum stadium tum nextum tum novumversum
scribe egresso.

SCRIPTOR

Damian Conway (damian@conway.org)

IUS TRANSCRIBENDI

Copyright (c) 2000, Damian Conway. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software. It may be used, redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the Perl Artistic License (see http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html)

MUTATIONES IN EDITIO 0.01

Initial release.

ADITUS

Lingua::Romana::Perligata has been uploaded to the CPAN and is also available from:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/CPAN/Lingua- Romana-Perligata.tar.gz _____________________

There you go. Isn't that a much saner, much more legible language? :-)