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Perl Creative Daemon Contest
eisen writes "We are pleased to announce the Perl Creative Daemon
Content sponsored by Mother of Perl, O'Reilly,
Stonehenge Consulting, and Whirlwind Interactive.
The First, Second, and Third place entries will win
a copy of the book "Mastering Algorithms with Perl".
In addition the First place entry will win $300.
The Second place entry will win $200. The deadline
for submitting entries is April 15th. Randal Schwartz
has graciously volunteered to judge the entries.
More information including contest rules are available
at the contest homepage."
Let's take a trip back in time to the Bad Old Perl Four days... perl has no modules, it does have includes, and there is a modest set of useful things allready written up for you to include. Python has modules, and pre-parsed token files, and thousands (well, 100s) of pre-written modules for useful things, most of which Perl doesn't.
(I had to learn a lot of Python to work on a Civ I clone written in Python and CLIPS, I'm pretty sure Python was chose rather then Perl because Python had usable X and Xt and Xaw modules. Perl had a little-known X lib, but it was little more then the X wire protocall, lower level then C's Xlib!)
I'm guessing not. After all Python was once ahead of Perl, and lost the lead. But who knows. After all Python is a pretty nice language.
I also don't have an "anti-Intel" agenda. See another post I made to this thread to see how Intel is still a client of mine! If some of my supporters have an "anti-Intel" agenda, it's not from my encouragement.
So you'd have no problem hiring a sicko like Patrick Naughton or a racist criminal like Al Sharpton or the KKK member recently released after vandalizing a synagogue?
Once they've done their time, including probation, the government has no business messing with them anymore. However, if you as a person have no problem associating with the likes of them, I think you'll find that a lot of people would have problems associating with you and your questionable ethics.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
He's a murderer who hasn't even claimed not to have been involved in his crime. Lucky for him, he has an army of clueless, white, suburban liberal kiddies (who of course feel guilty for having been born into the oh-so-oppressive white race) fighting his battles for him. I can't wait 'til they pull the switch on that street thug.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Just go to http://corvin.spb.ru/ and you can download the entire Perl CD Bookshelf (as well as the Web Developer Library and Java Reference Library) from O'Reilly for free. Of course, O'Reilly charges around $60 for each of these, but hey, the guys running the site are Open Source, Linux, and Slashdot groupies, and we all know how altruistic and giving such types are, so I'm sure they're just doing it for the good of the community. Information wants to be free, right?Judging by the large number of similar sites out there, I guess it really does.
Then again, maybe things like this are why O'Reilly's is putting up only 300 bucks for the winner. :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Give up on this replying-to-yourself thing. It just makes you look bad.
Ok, for starters, clearly you didn't read comp.lang.perl in the old days (when there was such a group). The JAPHs were Randal's way of demonstrating whatever feature he was explainging in the message. They were wonderful ways to see concrete examples of how Perl features worked. For those of us who learned perl at version 3, Randal and his JAPHs were a huge help.
Second, chat2.pl may seem like a mess, now, but I dare you to write something as efficient that does the same thing IN PERL VERSION 4! You couldn't just write C library, you didn't have references or anonymous anything, no objects, no lexical scope. Perl was primitive back then and chat2 was about as clean as a complex module like that could get. Once Perl version 5 came along chat2.pl was obsoleted by cleaner interfaces, not because there were better programmers, but because there were better LANGUAGE FEATURES.
As for his CPAN credits, Randal doesn't generally write modules. He's a trainer. I've participated in numerous conversations with him where he has fixed someone else code, or shown them how to do it themselves, and I can attest that he's not just good. He's worthy of being one of the Perl trinity.
You note that Larry Wall wrote Programming Perl. Go look at the 2nd edition. It's co-authored by Randal, Tom and Larry.
Now, Randal's technical credits asside, this thread was about how we should all boycott this contest purely because the person judging it has a conviction is his past. If you feel that strongly about people who have served their time, then perhaps you should stop ranting on Slashdot and go run for office. Your platform can be: "Never forgive the guilty: Life for 'em all!" I suspect there will even be a few takers. Not me, but then everyone's allowed an opinion. Just stop following up to your own Slashdot posts.
Anonymous Coward said, "I'll probably never be able to get another corporate job again." First sign that this guy is a little unstable (if replying to his own posts wasn't enough). The old, they're-out-to-get-me.
Then, "I was carrying a gun after being surrounded by a group of them brandishing baseball bats"
Wow. That's good, I like that part. What has this to do with Randal?
"don't you fucking tell me about duty and what anyone owes their employers."
Why not? I have strong feelings on the matter, and clearly so do you. I respect your right to say what you like on the topic, but please consider not ordering others around. It doesn't work very well as a debate tactic.
Randal felt he had a duty, and he executed that duty in a way that was questionable. That does not change the fact that he is qualified to judge the contest in question.
- Stay with the context, son. We're talking about a SunOS system circa mid 90's.
/etc/shadow was OPTIONAL. /etc/passwd would have likely contained the passwords (DES hashed, of course). - What do you mean the poster did not know what grep does. He used the phrase "grepped the password file". Being an author of several versions of grep (including the only one that I'm aware of in Perl), I would use the same phrase (password, if I was being generic and passwd if I was refering to
/etc/passwd). - Randal did what many of us did. He logged into a machine in a department that he used to work with in order to verify that his security recommendations were being followed. I've done it. He did it. He got "caught" by people without a clue. In the end, had he not been stopped, he would have alerted them to potentially serious security problems (which he had advised them about previously when he had been in that department).
Give it a rest, Randal is one of the most upstanding folks on the Net. He just fell afoul of some bad assumptions WRT corporate culture meets UNIX culture, and paid the price for it.The thing that I took away from the Randal incident was that you can't trust your employer to trust you. You have to be every bit as paranoid about them as they *could* be of you and that has, of course, hurt my job performance since. Sigh.
Randal is well known as one of the most selfless members of the Perl community. He spent years helping others on USENET for NO PAY. He's the author of one of the most respected introductory language texts in existance. I say this, not to appologize for his actions, but to demonstrate the truth of his central claim in the case: he did what he did because it was in his basic nature to try to help others, and it never occured to him that that help would be mis-interpreted. And what's more, his actions in the case in question were exactly how a lot of us were dealing with security probelms at work at the time.
I know that I did exactly what Randal did. He was "found out" before he could report his findings. I managed to get info to the admins in that department before that happened. Neither of us thought twice about it. We were just doing the right thing for the people who depended on technology that they didn't understand. I would have been stunned if anyone had been upset by what I did. When I heard about Randal, I almost threw up. It was just stupid, and it scared me. Today, I'm much less productive, because I don't take chances. Of course, I really don't have this problem NOW, because all of the company's production hardware is my domain. I don't have to answer to anyone about logging into/examining security on any of the systems.
You're supposed to submit your entry as "a MIME attachment". So, it counts if I submit a 1280x1024 scanned JPEG of the source, right? ;-)
Actually, I am going to enter. I have a plan that will either get a quick chuckle or win the prize... we'll see.
I note that you responded to none of the points that I made. Far from being objective....
Please troll someone else's reputation. Randal has too much history of being honorable and helpful to be harmed by your rants.
Replying to your own post.... getting desperate are we?
You're preaching the sins of wearing blue to the police, in this case. We've all done what Randal did in the line of what we were told was our duty. Intel flipped when they realized that a) he could circumvent security and b) he did so in order to fix it. In the end, if you haven't had to break into a box to fix something at work, I assume you're not much of a sysadmin.
How can you feel "dirty" for having learned Perl from someone who risks jail time over helping his employer?
I'm not perl guru, but I'd say the loosers like me would get a lot more out of a good perl book than the winners. :) Lets start a free books for the loosers movement. Sheldon
they could have been a bit more generous. :-) Second, think of how much your market value will rise if your new boss sees this on your resume. (Untill he found out that you did this during worktime and that is the reason you're looking for a new job :-)
First you should be in it for the honour
Use Adsense for Charity
I disagree. What Randall did was as qrong as you can get. As for the reference to 1/2 the open source liminaries, I also disagree. Randall did a lot more than most, frankly I feel he got off ver easy. Theft is theft, plain and simple, in my view I place in the same punk kid catagory as Mitnick. I think the guys is a disgrace and the assumption that "Everyone does it, he just got caught" is incorrect, everyone does not hijack passwords, break into corporate systems or steal.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
An educational language should come with source - otherwise, I really don't see its usefulness as an education tool. Part of a language is its implementation - students need to be able to poke under the hood.
As it stands, the current pro-Java movement in education has been undertaken by profs who have fallen victim to Java hype. They have turned their classrooms into Sun training centers, and in turn are cheating their students out of a full programming education, which must include detailed research of the tools they are using.
Your assertion is incorrect. Encapsulation is about providing an interface that you can enforce. C++, Python and Java do enforce encapsulation - C and Perl do not. Even Perl's OO allows you to look at any variable in any package you wish to - there is no concept of hidden variables (although I don't know if the our keyword in 5.6 addresses this).
Yup. I was picking on Java. Python is almost nearly the perfect language, although Perl has an implicit advantage in having so many people and packages already developed.
A trip through CPAN will show you the real power of a language is in libraries and packages - once you can literally download packages to solve nearly any problem you will reasonably encounter, syntax issues aren't a huge deal.
Will python reach this level of adoption? Lets hope so.
XP is a group of practices, not a coding methodology per se. It really has nothing to do with any particular language, and if memory serves correct, Kent never endorses on language over another.
First of all, salutations for staying level-headed throughout this language debate. Its a rarity on /.
For straight-up simplicity I find that you can reach a zen-like state in Haskell, although you have to work hard, really hard to get there (I can't see I held that state for too long).
I really think functional programming would take off if we were all just more intelligent and maybe better educated.
Perl seems to just accept that we're all basically dumb, which is how I like it.
Yes, it looks good on paper. So does ML. That doens't mean it stands up very well to daily mangling, constant hacking, and continuous rework. Thats why perl and C are popular - they don't force a strict paradigm on you (all truly useful languages are multi-paradigm). Perl in particular maps very well to the psychology of human programmers - human think in terms of patterns, and perl is literally a pattern detection language.
Yet, people still continue to sniff the glue. Right now, out there, someone is using Rational Rose to construct a highly convoluted object hierarchy, mixing in as much Rumbaugh/Jacobson/Booch mumbo-jumbo as possible.
Then they'll implement and test. Chances are they'll find their model extremely brittle...the moment the first requirement change breaks their cute little hierarchy, they'll understand how they've been suckered.
There are no popular operating systems built with OO tools. Your conjecture is false.
As to how it all relates to Java, well... At the core of both languages is a strong object model
Java does not have a strong object model. It offers neither functions as first order types, parametric polymorphism, or even simple consistency. There is no ability to circumvent polymorphism and the overhead incurred - the virtual keyword is assumed. Java is OO for idiots.
The Borg in Python is in how it's modules interact with other software.
Pelr talks as many protocols as python and more. By the way, this has nothing to do with OO at all in any case.
This means that the programmer can access and use a very large base of existing code
CPAN has at least ten times as many packages for perl as any other competing service for any other language. Its not even close.
I wish I had made it further into my Perl evaluation, but it is too obtuse for me
Oh I am so sick of hearing this. Its not sanskrit for God's sake - just open Programming Perl and start reading. If a twelve year old can do it (and many have), you can too.
here's some info on the case.
# load required modules /: $!"; /dev/null: $!FIRST POST;; /dev/null: $!FISRT POST;; /dev/null: $!NOFIRSTPOST;;
use strict;
use POSIX qw(setsid);
use LWP::Simple;
# set costants
my $URL = 'http://www.slashdot.org/';
my $FILE = '/tmp/firstpostbaby.html';
# flush the buffer
$| = 1;
# daemonize the program
&daemonize;
# first post infinite loop
while(1) {
# mirror the file
mirror($URL,$FILE);
# wait for 20 seconds
sleep(20);
}
sub daemonize {
chdir '/' or die "Can't chdir to
open STDIN, '/dev/null' or die "Can't read
open STDOUT, '>>/dev/null' or die "Can't write to
open STDERR, '>>/dev/null' or die "Can't write to
defined(my $pid = fork) or die "Can't fork: $!";
exit if $pid;
setsid or die "Can't get a first post, start a new session: $!";
umask 0;
}
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Think about it. If the winner writes the most creative daemon on the planet, what does he/she need a book about mastering algorithms for?
;-)
At least money is involved, so the prize isn't _all_ useless...
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
This (bashing of Randal) is almost certainly a troll, but I'll reply for the benefit of those who don't already know. Randal was convicted of three felony counts for performing tasks that essentially fell within his professional scope as sysadmin. Read the whole story. It's worth learning about, because many people who work with computers are in danger of similar prosecution if they piss off the wrong person. So before you condemn Randal, answer this: have you ever accessed a corporate information resource without explicit authorization? If you say no, and you work in a large, heterogeneous corporate environment, I can rest assured that you don't get much accomplished. If you say yes, you are confessing to the crux of the charges against Randal. The real problem here is that the average person (judge, juror) has so little understanding of how computers work that many innocent actions can be portrayed as criminal. Ever grepped a password file? Now picture how that could sound in court. Anyway, if someone has a serious reason to disbelieve Randal's side of the story, please post it or a link to it. In the 4+ years since the conviction, I haven't seen any.