Slashdot Mirror

Andy Lester writes "CPAN is a treasure trove of submitted code from across the Perl community, and is one of the reasons for Perl's great popularity. There are hundreds of active contributors, and over 2500 modules in the module list. With so many modules, it can be daunting for a Perl beginner to know what's worth noting. Plus, since so many modules are built on other modules, it's important for module authors to know which modules are best-of-breed. One source for direction is Mark Fowler's Perl Advent Calendar. Each day in the month of December, Mark reveals a new module in his calendar, including an overview and mini-tutorial in its use."

andy@petdance.com asks: "Any programmer who's used an online programming resource or community has had the frustration of answering programming questions for non-programmers. This is especially true with web-centric technologies like Perl and PHP. I've always wondered where to point these newest of the new, and O'Reilly's latest Ask Tim article addresses this. Unfortunately, Tim suggests picking up an ORA book on ActionScript, which seems a bit too specific. Are there any good introductions to the concepts of programming? And is any such book necessarily tied to a language?"

Lets start this off with some homework: we were nominated for a 2000 Webby in Community. Please go vote for us (requires annoying login, but please do it anyway! I want a crappy little trophy!) Now with the 'biz outta the way, brainsik pointed us to the Brainshaker: a headmounted subwoofer that looks like it would make Quake a bit to real. Plastik noted a web filter guaranteed to offend the conservative and humorless. But it makes reading Slashdot damn entertaining. And if you're interesting in violating most religions, vkulkarn found an "Escort" who apparently reads Slashdot (will she go out with CowboyNeal?) Speaking of religion, Zippy noted that I am apparently a prophet in the Church of The Enlightenment , along with Jay Stile of Stileproject . Illiad, from Userfriendly.org is a bard. webword sent us CalculusGirls.com which combines 2 of the many things I don't understand. Andy Lester noted that Brunching Shuttlecocks has a book on "Fuzzy Logic Functions", in the style of O'Reilly. yek401 noted that his english professor builds barbie doll cyborgs: god bless tenure ;) Trenchcoat Steve warned us about Moon Land Registry which claims to be selling land on the moon for $10/acre: you even get a deed and mineral rights... and it might be legal! Gravey noted that their are two new Reboot movies going into production. For you conspiracy theorists, backtick noted that everyone's favorite software monopoly might be getting into the furniture biz along with Lazyboy. SgtPepper pointed us to RFC 2795 which "describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters" ucsimon noted that LegoLand in California just gota liquor license. Mind you after a few shots of vodka, finding a 2x2 blue block takes a lot longer. Let's wrap up with jyuter's note that Comedy Central has vid clips of the south park kids doing Python's parrot sketch in Quicktime or Real.

andy@petdance.com writes, "In a recent Ask Tim article on the O'Reilly Web site, Tim O'Reilly takes Jeff Bezos to task for his attempts at patenting 1-click and the associates program. An Open Letter to Amazon is provided for adding your voice to Jeff & co." O'Reilly has a very thoughtful letter about how Amazon's attitude would have killed the Web in its infancy. He also submitted a letter to the IP mailing list which explains his thoughts a bit more. See also NoWebPatents.Org which is running their own anti-Amazon boycott, and our previous story about RMS's call for a boycott.