Hi brian!

Thanks for your commentary and your on going work on books, the Perl Review, 
your Perl code, etc.

See below for my response. Sorry for the long email.

On Tuesday 17 April 2007, brian d foy wrote:
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Shlomi Fish
>
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 2. One cannot effectively contribute it. (I offered my help to revamp it,
> > but BDFOY said I couldn't).
>
> I missed this part earlier, but Shlomi, I'm going to have to call you a
> liar again, and remind you that this is why you are having problems
> with people.
>
> I don't have anything to do with learn.perl.org, so there's absolutely
> no way that I could give or withhold permission for you to do anything
> with it.  Furthermore, I never said that you couldn't or shouldn't
> contribute. I have exerted no influence to deny any activity of yours.
>
> I have, however, pointed out when you have not been honest, just as I
> am doing here.
>
> As I have told you many times before, you don't need anyone's
> permission to do anything. Make the Perl beginner's site that you think
> should exist, and stop worrying about some official blessing or what
> anyone else is doing.

You can label me as a "liar" as "dishonest" or as anything you want. I no 
longer mind, because you've already called me a liar once, and so it has lost 
its initial affect. Not to mention that many geeks have a tendency to abuse 
this word, so I always take it with a grain of salt.

Here's some advice though: calling someone a liar is a very strong label, 
which immediately causes this person to think you're hurting his feelings, 
and causes others to think you're trying to make a hyperbole. There are much 
better words: "inaccuracies", "not exactly", "not entirely correct", perhaps 
even "mis-information" or "dis-information".

I am a honest person. If you go to http://www.shlomifish.org/ or STFW me, 
you'll find links to many things of value that I created on my free time, and 
made available for public consumption under very liberal licences. However, 
I'm still human, and don't always perceive the facts accurately, and don't 
always convey them accurately. You and I are as susceptible to it as anyone 
else. I'm not doing it on purpose, but labelling me as a liar, won't help 
keep the record straight. Instead saying:

<<<<<<<<<
Hi Shlomi!

> Quoty quote

That's not quite accurate. The real picture is $explanation.

Best Regards,

        brian d. foy
>>>>>>>>>

What I said was that the source code for http://learn.perl.org/ is not 
publically or privately available. There are some things that I'd like to 
remedy, but so far am unable to do so. Is that true? And no, I'm not talking 
about writing a new site from scratch - I've already been doing it for the 
past few years. This is like saying that in order to fix a bug in Oracle, I 
should implement all the Oracle feature-set, with the bug there fixed, as 
open-source myself. And it especially doesn't help that there are many 
applications that work only with Oracle.

I hope I didn't make a false analogy here. I realise everyone is free to 
contribute. And I also hope that I can convince the webmasters of prominent 
Perl portals to link to Perl-Begin and recommend it. But getting help from 
the official perl.org people would also help a lot.

As for not being liked: I'm fully aware that I have had some bad reputation in 
the Perl world ( http://use.perl.org/~Shlomi Fish/journal/24040 for many 
links). However, I'm not optimising for being liked by everybody. There are 
some people I became friends for, and what they think about me is the most 
important. And I also noticed that with some people who I believed to had a 
grudge about me, I became good friends with after working together. For 
example, Ask Bjørn Hansen and I learned to like each other, after I did a lot 
of work on XML::RSS before my TPF grant and as part of it.

So I'm trying not to have prejudice and be judgemental of others. As people 
say "To err is human, to forgive - divine". I also say that to apologise is 
divine.

Another important pattern is for me to do the things I find to be of the most 
value and contribution to myself and others. And sometimes it means not 
saying what everybody likes to hear. I'm trying my best to say it in the most 
tactful way possible, but it doesn't always work. I'm trying to learn from my 
mistakes, and I seem to get better in some respects, but I'm still not 
perfect. Some people are mostly naturally tactful (Linus Torvalds and Larry 
Wall are my tactfulness gods), and some people are not as good or completely 
awful at that. But everyone can and should try to improve, and I'm no 
exception.

Where was I? Ah yes. Nevertheless, I'm not optimising for being liked or 
loved. I'm optimising for being respected and admired. And like I said, 
calling otherwise honest, productive, people who were not deliberately 
lying "liars" is not going to increase one's likability karma. 

----------------

I'm sorry that you found what I said to be inaccurate, but I would appreciate 
any factual corrections. What I meant was that learn.perl.org was:

1. Considered the official Perl portal.

2. Very hard to contribute to, as its source code was not made available.

3. Is worse on most respects than Perl-Begin.

4. I offered to help remedy learn.perl.org, but it was not accepted.

These (except perhaps #3 which is debatable) are the facts as I see them. If I 
got them wrong, please feel free to correct me.

In any case, I'll contact Andy about getting hosting for Perl-Begin. It would 
certainly be a productive and proactive thing to do. Then I'll also try to 
get more people to link there, which is also a productive action.

Best Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
one thing, and everything else says something else - E-mail will conquer.
    -- An Israeli Linuxer

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