Posts

LWN interviews the incomparable Larry Wall. I try very hard to never miss a Larry Wall interview, although this one seemed a bit more by the numbers than most of them. Perhaps it’s Perl day here at rc3.org. I’m working on a Web application as a favor to someone, and I’m writing the whole thing in Perl, which is a nice change from the Java I’m writing at my day job. It’s nice to get myself back in a Perl frame of mind again. Unfortunately, I’m trying to apply some of the concepts I’ve learned programming Java back to my previously hackerish Perl programming style with limited success. I really just need to dig into the object-oriented Perl stuff, but I’ve been in a hurry to get code written and haven’t done so yet. Anyway, A Beginner’s Introduction to POE looks helpful. I won’t be using POE itself, but some of the design concepts might be useful. ...

Pilsbury’s lawyers have notified bunches of geeks that they’re no longer to use the term bake-off to refer to events where systems are compared or tested, due to trademark issues. Oh, please. The O’Reilly Network has published part 2 of their series on JSP taglibs. Wanna get righteously pissed off? Read Jon Gilmore’s rant against copy protection. It’s incredibly jarring to read about all the different ways that corporations are conspiring to make sure that we have to pay them over and over. The fact that computer equipment makers are willing participants disgusts me most. As consumers, we don’t have to allow ourselves to be exploited by entertainment companies, but it will take a concerted effort to prevent it. I wonder if we’re up to it? ...

Who let the DHTML out? Check out the International Herald-Tribune’s design for individual stories. You can alter the font size for the story and reflow it as one or multiple columns without reloading the page. You can also page through the story without an additional request. The pages also look decent enough in Netscape 4.x. Someone at the IHT just let their designers go wild there, and I think it worked out well. The stories even have very short URLs. Whoever designed their site really knows what they’re doing, it seems. ...

The interesting parts of now defunct online retailer garden.com have been acquired by walmart.com. garden.com was a site that I really admired, so it’s good to see their assets go to a good home. Interestingly, I was checking out the walmart.com site, and noticed that their pages use the extension .gsp, one that I’m not familiar with. I quickly discovered that GSP is, in fact, a system similar to JSP for building template-based Web sites. It looks like the system hasn’t been updated since 1999, so I wonder if walmart.com is revising the code internally. ...

Bill Coleman,the chairman of BEA Systems, is donating one Alex Rodriguez to the University of Colorado to support research on cognitive disabilities. It’s the largest donation ever to a public university, and over a third of Coleman’s net wealth. Radnet, the maker of WebShare, has gone out of business. I used WebShare for a lot of applications at an old job. I thought their tool really was bad, but it’s still a little sad to see them go. The tragedy is that even though their tool was a big mess, it wasn’t far from being pretty cool. They just made some design decisions that were killers. ...

What every Perl programmer needs to know about .NET by Nathan Torkington. Local news: Peace College beats Bennett College 97 - 3 in women’s basketball. That’s the ugliest it’s ever been in NCAA Division III women’s basketball. Salon has an intersting article on urban exploration. It’s worth reading just for the links to cool sites where people chronicle their adventures in off-limits urban spaces. Allaire and Macromedia are merging.

Sometimes the government is so ridiculous. One of the conditions of the FCC accepting the AOL/Time-Warner merger was open access to AOL’s instant messaging services – when AOL combines IM with broadband services. Ugh. What the hell does that mean? In the meantime, big corporate players like Yahoo and Microsoft have supposedly completed a unified IM standard. Why didn’t they use an existing standard? Perhaps their system will be unified but not open, which certainly won’t do anyone any good. ...

How do you know you’re a geek? Someone sends you a URL to a story in the National Enquirer. Instead of opening it, you look at the file extension, see that it’s .cfm, think, “That’s interesting, they use Cold Fusion,” and move on without ever seeing what’s on the page. Robert Wright’s followup on his article about Donald Rumsfeld and missile defense. I really think that we need to carefully and realistically analyze which course of action will maximize the security of the United States. I haven’t read anything yet that leads me to believe that spending a bunch of money to build an unreliable system that will also piss off half the world is the way to go. ...

I hated the idea of missile defense under the Clinton administration, and I will hate it under the Bush administration. Unfortunately, while Clinton was toying with missile defense, Bush seems to have made it one of his highest defense priorities. Let’s pretend for a minute that it will actually work (it won’t). Even a working system would make the world a more dangerous place than a world without missile defense altogether. Slate’s Robert Wright explains a way in which the Bush administration’s obsession with missile defense will hurt international relations that I hadn’t seen discussed before. My greatest fear when it comes to missile defense is that it will actually lead people in power to believe that if we have it, we could win a nuclear war. And a war you think you can win might be a war worth having, God forbid. ...

If you’re an Emacs user, byte compilation can make your life much nicer. Now if I could only figure out why I can’t get byte compilation to work in batch mode, I’d be much happier. K5 has a great explanation of the current power problems in California, and what’s being done to address those problems. I was surprised that during the Presidential campaign, Dubya didn’t talk more about tort reform, because when he ran for governor in Texas, it was a huge part of his platform. There’s little doubt in my mind that even though it wasn’t a big part of his campaign, it will be a big part of his legislative agenda – his corporate patrons would absolutely love nationwide tort reform. For those of you not from Texas, “tort reform” is code for “no longer holding corporations and other monied interests liable for their actions.” ...