The java applet seems to use the IP it detects from the Brown Orifice site. It tries to estabilish the service on that port. With IP Masquerading in front of this winders box, the java thingie gets confused. I guess we'll have to work on that...
Star Craft is a wonderful strategy game. If you were bored within minutes of playing, you probably don't enjoy resource management as recreation.
Loving Scar Craft doesn't rule out classic games. I have the Atari 2600 emulator, xstella, installed on my Red Hat box and that too provides Good Times (tm). At work, we have a tertis like co-op called Klax (1989). Lot's of fun there!
The graphics are great in Star Craft, but the game design was well thought out. Good job Blizzard!
Unfortunately, I agree that many new games have CRAPPY design. I don't care for the Doom-esque games particularly since they don't seem to have much point other than: 1) blow up stuff real good 2) have me motion sickness
Still, I play Space Invaders or Galga whenever I can.:-)
The message that both this Suck article and Tim O'Reilly (at the Open Source conference) have is clear: WAKE UP, MOZILLA! On OSS web browser is not an option if OSS operating systems are to be taken seriously. Netscape is a bloated cow on Linux, with more memory leaks than me. I have NS open all day long since I use it for mail too.
If a slim standards compliant browser appeared from Mozilla even without "cool shit", I'd happily use it. Browser tech on Linux is stuck in 1995. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft does a stable port of IE to Linux and then it's over for Mozilla.
I've seen the screenshots of Aqua and I read a lot of articles about the BSD kernel with a pretty face. How exactly will Apple sell Unix boxen to Apple users who, for the most part, seemed to be afraid of typing? Is Steve Jobs trying to get the Unix hacks to buy Apple computers for the server market? Isn't MacOS X going to the standard Apple OS for consumer machines as well? If one makes a Unix box easy enough to use for Grandma, does one sacrifice the inherent flexibility of the system?
And insisting in doing SETI is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* planet are starving; yet all these self-described geeks would rather find out if there's life in another planet than see if there's still life in Somalia.
What a wonderfully articulated Luddite view. Let's see where this takes us.
But Columbus *is* a hopeless adventure
Your Highnesses, your proposed funding for that Genoan Columbus' foolish search for *another* passage to India is ill advised.
I mean, the odds are just insurmountable, and how would it help us if we discovered that there's another sea route for the vital Indian spice trade that's too far for us to go, or for them to come?
And insisting in funding Columbus is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* country are starving; yet all these self-described explorers would rather find out if there's an alternate sea route than see if there's still life in Seville.
It shows that they don't have any *real* concern for life, in this country or other-- just playing with their nautical toys.
Just because Linux is retro doesn't mean it's bad. In fact, Linux is quite useful. It may not be innovative in the way the original MacOS design was, but that wasn't a design goal.
It's very hard to find truly innovated OSs. BeOS was thought differently.
The day major hardware/software makers DON'T support a major release for Linux and that story makes it to/., you know Tux has become a 500 pound gorilla.:-)
I think you may be right about the MHz speed being an albatross. MHz is a weird rating. I think non-techies might believe that clock speed is roughly the same has a combustion engine's horsepower rating.
AMD was certainly bitten by this same confusion in the consumer's mind.
Anyway, I currently run redhat 6.2 on my IMB thinkpad 390x. Installation was a dream. It found the sound card, the Xircom card (which is not official supported) and X worked at 16-bit, 1024x768.
Well, I'm glad the interview was thought provoking, even if people don't agree with Larry. He seems like a smart cookie with Perl's best interests at heart.
Hey, they have standards committees for a reason, I guess.
I have to think P5P will not like this thread of conversation.:-)
MS Office isn't truly to blame. The OS is responsible for file ACLs. Office would be fine (for some values of 'fine') on Linux. Have a scripting languaging to bind separate applications together is a good thing. That's the area python, perl and tcl fill in UNIXland now.
While I can't imagine a self-respecting X user with Mr. Clipit, I can see Mr. Hanky answering you MS Office help questions.
I run a Linux desktop at work. While I can use Star Office or AbiWord to open many MS Office files, I find now that I need to make a little UI with Access which uses ODBC to connect to MySQL. Now, I need a PeeCee. It would be nice to develop this app on Linux, then ship the file to my windows users. Oh well.
Many publishers would like to get into online publishing but the problem is how does defend against piracy? It is *really* difficult to defend yourself against. After all, HTML or plain text files are trivial to reproduce. *Any* file that can be downloaded from your site may be hijack for another.
The flexibility and ubiquity of the web allow you to be published world wide instantly. It provides no mechanisms to protect your Intellectual Property. If this concerns you, you should stick to paper.
Of course, I'd encourage you to publish your book for free. The exposure that a successful e-book will give should make your negotiations easier when dealing with publishers. This assumes you are confident in your abilities to produce more successful content.:-)
Re:Powerpuff Girls...fighting crime before bedtime
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 1
I too have become addicted to PPG. And Dexter's Lab. But most of all Space Ghost, Coast to Coast. Without a doubt, the best gonzo TV show on the air.
I know none of these are anime, but being old, I call them all cartoons. And you know what?
Let's face it, Perl is not a very readable language. TMTOWTDI basically guarantees that I am going to do something differently than my buddy in the next cubicle, and if you have ever tried to extend stuff from CPAN it becomes apparent there are a LOT more than one ways to do it.
For the love of Sweet Christ I'm going to smack the next person who calls Perl unreadable and unmaintainable. You know what? All langauges can be obfuscated. Even Python. That Python doesn't require statement terminators, uses white space to implicitly denote blocks and lacks variable prefixes do NOT aid its readability. If a langauge with syntax subtlety bothers you, try Pascal. If you want readable code, you must Do It Yourself.
There is NO silver bullet for creating code that documents itself. At least Perl's endearingly eccentric prefixes inform the reader of a variable's data type. You can look at Perl code and easily separate the pluralities from the singularities. That in itself is a tremenous help. But let's look at some basic operations in both languages.
Here's Perl.
my $a = 'hello'; my $b = $a;
print $b, "\n";
my @c = ("I'd", "buy", "that", "for", "a", "dollar");
my @d = @c; $d[4] = "ten"; print join, " ", @c; # list c is unchanged
@e = (@c, @d); # makes one list with 12 elements
Here's roughly similiar Python.
import string a = 'hello' b = a
print b # oh, I get a newline for free
c = [ "I'd", "buy", "that", "for", "a", "dollar" ]; d = c d[4] = "ten"
print string.join(c, " ") # what the? c got changed?
e = [ c, d ]; # one list with 2 elements (each a list)
Let's look at the Python code. Since all thingies in Python are objects and only references get copied, it won't surprise experienced hackers to find that collection types copy only references during assignment. However, the novice Pythoner will wonder why an assignment to an element in d now magically changes an element in c. After all, changing the singularity b doesn't change the contains of a. So Python copies *some* objects shallowly. That's a design feature and a good one, except for the newbie who is supposed to be aided by Python's clean syntax.
What happens when two lists are added together into a third? In perl, you get one long flat list that has no continuing relationship to its contributing parents. In Python, you get a list of references. Suddenly, you've got a multidimensional array. For the pro, this is a great labor saving feature. For the newbie, this might be a little weird, since they have to wrangle with "those durn references ag'in". Worse, the elements of the new list references (not surprisingly) the members of the lists that created it. How will the newbie make a deep copy of these lists so that the original lists remain unchanged?
Digging deeper into the mysteries of Pythonian indexing, one can take the slice of a singularity. This is sort of neat coming from Perl. Yet if one can index into a singularity, won't this look like an array to the newbie? After all, we can do the same operation to lists. And yet lists are different (assignments), but they look the same as singularities. Things That Are Different Should Look Different. Oh wait, that's Perl.
Python appends newlines to print statements without explicit instructions to do so. Certainly, this will surprise the experienced hacker more than then novice.
As for Python being a better Perl, I have yet to see this. There is nothing that Python does that Perl can't. There are things that Perl does that Python will *never* do (like soft references). But, as the python zealots tout, those are bad Perl features that are confusing.
Python is a great language with a bright future. Its syntax is clean, if punctuation bothers you, but it is not consistent. Word on the street is that Guido is fixing this. That Python helps create truly cross platform GUIs is great. I hope the world gets more scripting languages with garbage collection and dynamic scoping.
If Python helps *YOU* write and use more Open Source Software, then we all win. If Python is just cutting your vegetables up for you because you can swallow some mild complexity, then it is no better than VB. I know Python was designed to be a superb teaching language, but I would hope the curious mind would soon thirst for more meat.
I will reiterate my call for better cooperation between the Python and Perl communities. There is more in common between us than other languages. Perl and Python are, I hope, the future of programming. Neither is perfect, but both are better choices for getting your job done faster to drink more beer. And that's a Good Thing (tm).
It's the OS that's the problem. That a user can take down their system with a double click is foolish. NT and perhaps W2K have put some security around the all important registry. It still stuns me that even after repeat attacks, IS managers still vomit the party line. "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
Well, maybe that will change after another dozen ILOVEYOU attachments make their rounds. It has been brought up again and again - homogenous environments are extremely fragil. This is true for biological systems as well as operating systems. This is the underlying design flaw to corporate IS.
To have interoperability, we need open standards not the same program. It's all about the API.
I happily await the DoJ hammer that will smash the bloated, gaudy porcelain pig that is Microsoft into many little porcine pieces. Maybe then, following open standards will be attractive to some of the "mini-bills".
This book not only does a wonderful job exploring OO perl, but does an equally bang up job with exploring other Perl arcana like references to typeglobs. I found this book more practical than the Advanced Perl book.
I too learned from perltoot. That is an excellent beginning.
OO is not needed for every task. But when it is, you'll be glad you have Conway's book.
-Let registered users remove comments. -AC's get removed by Admin's will.
Registered users should get more privilages than ACs because there is some accountability. Since some *accounts* were abused, the account holders should be allow to correct the situation or duke it out with M$. AC's have no rights.
Frankly, this doesn't seem like a slashdot issue. It has to do with irresponsible users. You may not like copyrights, but they are currently protected under the law. If you feel the need to protest, do so. It is your right. Slashdot doesn't not have to provide you with the means of protest.
Remember what the submit form sayth:
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
Strawmen are easy to knock over
on
Why Not MySQL?
·
· Score: 2
Although Ben Adida is correct in every fact about MySQL (lack of subqueries, poor ACID support, no foreign keys), his conclusion is a bit overstated.
The full RDBMS model is not needed by everyone. This is clearly the case for Slashdot and many other sites and companies that I know use MySQL. If you need transaction support, please don't be bitter than MySQL doesn't support it. It doesn't claim to.
Yes the speed of MySQL is nice, but the SQL interface is the selling point for me. I can model and access data more consistently from project to project because I don't have to worry about how low level issues (directory structures, multiple users, etc).
problem: M$ published the specs, but the user needs to agree to a license to see the specs
solution: The samba team uses the specs, implements them. End users of samba then get the same M$ package with the same agreement, whether they want to see the code or not. The whole world thus agrees to keep M$'s stoopid propriatary horse-poop a secret.
You know, for a company in fast decline, I don't know why they aren't scrambling to win back developers. I suppose it is too late to save poor old Microshaft. They are now irrelevant. I suppose we should send a win2K box to that Obsolete Computer Museum.:-)
Please find another way to express your frustration. Headlines should express the flavor of a news item succinctly. Complainly childishly that others are complaining childishly to you doesn't help your case.
Maybe you, CmdrTaco, can write an OpEd piece instead explaining your editorial decisions. Lord knows I did for my site. That would be more effective, more fitting and better received than being cranking. Remember, you've got *a lot* of eyeballs looking at the front page. You can use this medium much more effectively.
I know that I would love to see more about how a site like slashdot works. What sort of tools did you use to create slashdot? Would you use them again? How are you going to handle scaling? What features would you like to add?
If I relied on my formal education for all my learning, I wouldn't be in computers today. There are many fine books which explain regular expressions (like Jeff Friedl's _Mastering Regular Expressions_).
If you're not a programmer, are you certain Perl has lax syntax? Are you certain what that means and why it's bad?
Perhaps you are just trolling and you've simply caught this fish.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Running old slackware. Works fine. Connected to DSL.
Check out this site of the guy who wrote the book
_Linux Firewalls_.
http://www.linux-firewall-tools.com/linux/
The java applet seems to use the IP it detects from the Brown Orifice site. It tries to estabilish the service on that port. With IP Masquerading in front of this winders box, the java thingie gets confused. I guess we'll have to work on that...
Star Craft is a wonderful strategy game. If you were bored within minutes of playing, you probably don't enjoy resource management as recreation.
:-)
Loving Scar Craft doesn't rule out classic games.
I have the Atari 2600 emulator, xstella, installed on my Red Hat box and that too provides Good Times (tm). At work, we have a tertis like co-op called Klax (1989). Lot's of fun there!
The graphics are great in Star Craft, but the game design was well thought out. Good job Blizzard!
Unfortunately, I agree that many new games have
CRAPPY design. I don't care for the Doom-esque games particularly since they don't seem to have much point other than:
1) blow up stuff real good
2) have me motion sickness
Still, I play Space Invaders or Galga whenever I can.
The message that both this Suck article and Tim O'Reilly (at the Open Source conference) have is clear: WAKE UP, MOZILLA! On OSS web browser is not an option if OSS operating systems are to be taken seriously. Netscape is a bloated cow on Linux, with more memory leaks than me. I have NS open all day long since I use it for mail too.
If a slim standards compliant browser appeared from Mozilla even without "cool shit", I'd happily use it. Browser tech on Linux is stuck in 1995. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft does a stable port of IE to Linux and then it's over for Mozilla.
Yuck.
I've seen the screenshots of Aqua and I read a lot of articles about the BSD kernel with a pretty face. How exactly will Apple sell Unix boxen to Apple users who, for the most part, seemed to be afraid of typing? Is Steve Jobs trying to get the Unix hacks to buy Apple computers for the server market? Isn't MacOS X going to the standard Apple OS for consumer machines as well? If one makes a Unix box easy enough to use for Grandma, does one sacrifice the inherent flexibility of the system?
And insisting in doing SETI is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* planet are starving; yet all these self-described geeks would rather find out if there's life in another planet than see if there's still life in Somalia.
What a wonderfully articulated Luddite view. Let's see where this takes us.
But Columbus *is* a hopeless adventure
Your Highnesses, your proposed funding for that Genoan Columbus' foolish search for *another* passage to India is ill advised.
I mean, the odds are just insurmountable, and how would it help us if we discovered that there's another sea route for the vital Indian spice trade that's too far for us to go, or for them to come?
And insisting in funding Columbus is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* country are starving; yet all these self-described explorers would rather find out if there's an alternate sea route than see if there's still life in Seville.
It shows that they don't have any *real* concern for life, in this country or other-- just playing with their nautical toys.
Just because Linux is retro doesn't mean it's bad.
In fact, Linux is quite useful. It may not be
innovative in the way the original MacOS design
was, but that wasn't a design goal.
It's very hard to find truly innovated OSs. BeOS was thought differently.
Here! Here!
Wait, is that bad?
:-)
for interesting mid-coitus arguments about BSD and Linux
mmm. Wouldn't the argument start before sex? Wouldn't that precipitate the make sex later?
"Can't you understand?! CVSup is the one true package management system!"
"Bah! RPMs all the way!"
"You're just like your mother."
"Sys V is nothing to be ashamed of."
The day major hardware/software makers DON'T support a major release for Linux and that story makes it to /., you know Tux has become a 500 pound gorilla. :-)
I think you may be right about the MHz speed being an albatross. MHz is a weird rating. I think non-techies might believe that clock speed is roughly the same has a combustion engine's horsepower rating.
AMD was certainly bitten by this same confusion in the consumer's mind.
Anyway, I currently run redhat 6.2 on my IMB thinkpad 390x. Installation was a dream. It found the sound card, the Xircom card (which is not official supported) and X worked at 16-bit, 1024x768.
Well, I'm glad the interview was thought provoking, even if people don't agree with Larry.
He seems like a smart cookie with Perl's best interests at heart.
Hey, they have standards committees for a reason, I guess.
I have to think P5P will not like this thread of conversation. :-)
MS Office isn't truly to blame. The OS is responsible for file ACLs. Office would be fine (for some values of 'fine') on Linux. Have a scripting languaging to bind separate applications together is a good thing. That's the area python, perl and tcl fill in UNIXland now.
While I can't imagine a self-respecting X user with Mr. Clipit, I can see Mr. Hanky answering you MS Office help questions.
I run a Linux desktop at work. While I can use Star Office or AbiWord to open many MS Office files, I find now that I need to make a little UI with Access which uses ODBC to connect to MySQL. Now, I need a PeeCee. It would be nice to develop this app on Linux, then ship the file to my windows users. Oh well.
Many publishers would like to get into online publishing but the problem is how does defend against piracy? It is *really* difficult to defend yourself against. After all, HTML or plain text files are trivial to reproduce. *Any* file that can be downloaded from your site may be hijack for another.
The flexibility and ubiquity of the web allow you to be published world wide instantly. It provides no mechanisms to protect your Intellectual Property. If this concerns you, you should stick to paper.
Of course, I'd encourage you to publish your book for free. The exposure that a successful e-book will give should make your negotiations easier when dealing with publishers. This assumes you are confident in your abilities to produce more successful content. :-)
I too have become addicted to PPG. And Dexter's Lab. But most of all Space Ghost, Coast to Coast. Without a doubt, the best gonzo TV show on the air.
I know none of these are anime, but being old, I call them all cartoons. And you know what?
PAPA LIKES!
Let's face it, Perl is not a very readable language. TMTOWTDI basically guarantees that I am going to do something differently than my buddy in the next cubicle, and if you have ever tried to extend stuff from CPAN it becomes apparent there are a LOT more than one ways to do it.
For the love of Sweet Christ I'm going to smack the next person who calls Perl unreadable and unmaintainable. You know what? All langauges can be obfuscated. Even Python. That Python doesn't require statement terminators, uses white space to implicitly denote blocks and lacks variable prefixes do NOT aid its readability. If a langauge with syntax subtlety bothers you, try Pascal. If you want readable code, you must Do It Yourself.
There is NO silver bullet for creating code that documents itself. At least Perl's endearingly eccentric prefixes inform the reader of a variable's data type. You can look at Perl code and easily separate the pluralities from the singularities. That in itself is a tremenous help. But let's look at some basic operations in both languages.
Here's Perl.
my $a = 'hello';
my $b = $a;
print $b, "\n";
my @c = ("I'd", "buy", "that", "for", "a", "dollar");
my @d = @c;
$d[4] = "ten";
print join, " ", @c; # list c is unchanged
@e = (@c, @d); # makes one list with 12 elements
Here's roughly similiar Python.
import string
a = 'hello'
b = a
print b # oh, I get a newline for free
c = [ "I'd", "buy", "that", "for", "a", "dollar" ];
d = c
d[4] = "ten"
print string.join(c, " ") # what the? c got changed?
e = [ c, d ]; # one list with 2 elements (each a list)
Let's look at the Python code. Since all thingies in Python are objects and only references get copied, it won't surprise experienced hackers to find that collection types copy only references during assignment. However, the novice Pythoner will wonder why an assignment to an element in d now magically changes an element in c. After all, changing the singularity b doesn't change the contains of a. So Python copies *some* objects shallowly. That's a design feature and a good one, except for the newbie who is supposed to be aided by Python's clean syntax.
What happens when two lists are added together into a third? In perl, you get one long flat list that has no continuing relationship to its contributing parents. In Python, you get a list of references. Suddenly, you've got a multidimensional array. For the pro, this is a great labor saving feature. For the newbie, this might be a little weird, since they have to wrangle with "those durn references ag'in". Worse, the elements of the new list references (not surprisingly) the members of the lists that created it. How will the newbie make a deep copy of these lists so that the original lists remain unchanged?
Digging deeper into the mysteries of Pythonian indexing, one can take the slice of a singularity. This is sort of neat coming from Perl. Yet if one can index into a singularity, won't this look like an array to the newbie? After all, we can do the same operation to lists. And yet lists are different (assignments), but they look the same as singularities. Things That Are Different Should Look Different. Oh wait, that's Perl.
Python appends newlines to print statements without explicit instructions to do so. Certainly, this will surprise the experienced hacker more than then novice.
As for Python being a better Perl, I have yet to see this. There is nothing that Python does that Perl can't. There are things that Perl does that Python will *never* do (like soft references). But, as the python zealots tout, those are bad Perl features that are confusing.
Python is a great language with a bright future. Its syntax is clean, if punctuation bothers you, but it is not consistent. Word on the street is that Guido is fixing this. That Python helps create truly cross platform GUIs is great. I hope the world gets more scripting languages with garbage collection and dynamic scoping.
If Python helps *YOU* write and use more Open Source Software, then we all win. If Python is just cutting your vegetables up for you because you can swallow some mild complexity, then it is no better than VB. I know Python was designed to be a superb teaching language, but I would hope the curious mind would soon thirst for more meat.
I will reiterate my call for better cooperation between the Python and Perl communities. There is more in common between us than other languages. Perl and Python are, I hope, the future of programming. Neither is perfect, but both are better choices for getting your job done faster to drink more beer. And that's a Good Thing (tm).
It's the OS that's the problem. That a user can take down their system with a double click is foolish. NT and perhaps W2K have put some security around the all important registry. It still stuns me that even after repeat attacks, IS managers still vomit the party line. "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
Well, maybe that will change after another dozen ILOVEYOU attachments make their rounds. It has been brought up again and again - homogenous environments are extremely fragil. This is true for biological systems as well as operating systems. This is the underlying design flaw to corporate IS.
To have interoperability, we need open standards not the same program. It's all about the API.
I happily await the DoJ hammer that will smash the bloated, gaudy porcelain pig that is Microsoft into many little porcine pieces. Maybe then, following open standards will be attractive to some of the "mini-bills".
This book not only does a wonderful job exploring OO perl, but does an equally bang up job with exploring other Perl arcana like references to typeglobs. I found this book more practical than the Advanced Perl book.
I too learned from perltoot. That is an excellent beginning.
OO is not needed for every task. But when it is, you'll be glad you have Conway's book.
-Let registered users remove comments.
-AC's get removed by Admin's will.
Registered users should get more privilages than
ACs because there is some accountability. Since some *accounts* were abused, the account holders should be allow to correct the situation or duke it out with M$. AC's have no rights.
Frankly, this doesn't seem like a slashdot issue. It has to do with irresponsible users. You may not like copyrights, but they are currently protected under the law. If you feel the need to protest, do so. It is your right. Slashdot doesn't not have to provide you with the means of protest.
Remember what the submit form sayth:
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by
adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
Although Ben Adida is correct in every fact about MySQL (lack of subqueries, poor ACID support, no foreign keys), his conclusion is a bit overstated.
The full RDBMS model is not needed by everyone. This is clearly the case for Slashdot and many other sites and companies that I know use MySQL. If you need transaction support, please don't be bitter than MySQL doesn't support it. It doesn't claim to.
Yes the speed of MySQL is nice, but the SQL interface is the selling point for me. I can model and access data more consistently from project to project because I don't have to worry about how low level issues (directory structures, multiple users, etc).
problem: M$ published the specs, but the user needs to agree to a license to see the specs
:-)
solution: The samba team uses the specs, implements them. End users of samba then
get the same M$ package with the same agreement,
whether they want to see the code or not. The whole world thus agrees to keep M$'s stoopid propriatary horse-poop a secret.
You know, for a company in fast decline, I don't know why they aren't scrambling to win back developers. I suppose it is too late to save poor old Microshaft. They are now irrelevant. I suppose we should send a win2K box to that Obsolete Computer Museum.
You killed my elf!
:-D
ESR wrote Fetchmail.
Eric Allman wrote Sendmail.
Hope this helps.
Please find another way to express your frustration. Headlines should express the flavor of a news item succinctly. Complainly childishly that others are complaining childishly to you doesn't help your case.
Maybe you, CmdrTaco, can write an OpEd piece instead explaining your editorial decisions. Lord knows I did for my site. That would be more effective, more fitting and better received than being cranking. Remember, you've got *a lot* of eyeballs looking at the front page. You can use this medium much more effectively.
I know that I would love to see more about how a site like slashdot works. What sort of tools did you use to create slashdot? Would you use them again? How are you going to handle scaling? What features would you like to add?
For the love of God man, it's Perl.
:-)
If I relied on my formal education for all my learning, I wouldn't be in computers today. There are many fine books which explain regular expressions (like Jeff Friedl's _Mastering Regular Expressions_).
If you're not a programmer, are you certain Perl has lax syntax? Are you certain what that means and why it's bad?
Perhaps you are just trolling and you've simply caught this fish.