Re: General Election

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 01:55:20PM +0100, Cross David - dcross wrote:
> The New Labour version starts like this:
> 
> "The people's flag is lightest pink,
> It's not as red as you might think."

How things have changed.

'Mr Heseltine, whose mane of golden hair has given him the nickname
 of Tarzan, apologised for waving the ceremonial mace around his head
 like a mediaeval battle axe. "I was unwarrantably provoked by the
 singing of the Red Flag," he said.'

http://www.guardiancentury.co.uk/1970-1979/Story/0,6051,106906,00.html


The internationale is a better song though.

 .robin.

Re: Forthcoming Meetings

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 11:28:20AM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:
> Robin Houston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > But I could do something about Perl regular expressions and
> > algorithmic complexity. That would be fun :-)
> 
> Robin, can we have a whip round and pay you NOT to do it? My head
> always hurts after one of your talks...

I *think* that's a compliment ;-)

BTW, I'm going on holiday tonight, for two weeks.
So if you start to wonder why I'm not answering email, that's why :)

 .robin.

-- 
select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,'''','''''')) from (
select 'select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,'''''''','''''''''''')) from (
select ''X'' a from dual)' a from dual)

Re: Forthcoming Meetings

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, May 29, 2001 at 02:09:56PM +0100, Cross David - dcross wrote:
> Technical Meeting: Thursday 21st June
> 
> Need a venue for this please people. And speakers. If any speakers want to
> practise TPC or YAPC::E talks, then this might be a good time to do it.

Since I've already practiced my YAPC::E submission on you lot, it
would be unfair to do it again.

But I could do something about Perl regular expressions and
algorithmic complexity. That would be fun :-)

 .robin.

Re: O'Reilly Safari - anyone use it?

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 11:30:28PM +0100, Barry Pretsell wrote:
> It sounds like a good idea (must be better than having 3 editions
> of Programming Perl) and I'm tempted to give it a go, so any Safari
> subscribers out there with an opinion?

Don't forget the ever-fabulous http://corvin.spb.ru/

 .robin.

-- 
God! a red nugget: a fat egg under a dog.

Re: Ken Campbell is a god (was: pc components)

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 06:05:44AM +1000, Damian Conway wrote:
> Im nogat samting til ridim insait long pastaim Klingon!
> 
> Damian (longlong tisa Perlpela)

Lingua::TokPisin::Perlpela?

 .robin.

-- 
"Have you been certain you came to me the real reason explain anything
else that I came to you the real reason explain anything else that I
came to you the real reason explain anything else?" --eliza

Ken Campbell is a god (was: pc components)

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 05:27:17PM +0100, Dominic Mitchell wrote:
> Now Ken Campbell was worth watching, but a bit of a head fuck.

Ken Campbell is a god.
Here is my proof:
http://www.puffinry.freeserve.co.uk/wol-wantok/narafaladei.mp3

 .robin.

ps. The other day I randomly met someone who speaks fluent
Melanesian Pidgin.


"What's it like then, Macbeth in Wol Wantok? An improvement. Reducing
iambic pentameters to rude voodoo telegrams is just the thing the
piece has been needing. The plot seems much more likely in Pidgin -
there are a couple of holes which become apparent when you
de-soporificise the text and these I've deftly bunged. Like, for
example, Fleance (Flanis). The witches (Klevas) tell Banquo (Banekhu)
that his kids and his kids' kids are going to be kings (bigfala jifs)
in the future (bambae). The only child we meet is Fleance, and he gets
away, but then some arse makes Malcolm (Melekem) jif (king, I mean). I
don't think the New Millennium Wol wants to be served this sort of
dramatic sloppiness, so I've fixed that. (Mi bin fiksimap.)"

-- 
"Images have limits.  i am grateful for that." --Catherine Milne

Re: Shoot out

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 03:28:13PM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote:
> But the question is, are they generating C code from Ocaml code
> and compiling it,

I don't think so. I think the Ocaml compiler compiles directly to
machine code. But what difference does it make, ultimately?

> this would explain the performance.

It might help to explain why it's faster than interpreted languages.
But C++ is a compiled language too, and Ocaml seemed to be
consistently faster than C++ in those benchmarks.

I don't think the picture is so simple any more, anyway.
Optimising JITs seem to be catching up...

 .robin.

-- 
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Re: Shoot out

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 03:06:45PM +0100, Dominic Mitchell wrote:
> On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 03:04:47PM +0100, Robin Houston wrote:
> 
> Statement:
> 
> > (And _boy_ can you write obfuscated Ocaml programs if you try!
> > User-definable infix operators are an especially nice touch in
> > that regard)
> 
> Answer:
> 
> > Why isn't Ocaml more popular? Is there a good reason?

:-)

I don't find that enormously convincing as a reason, though.
You may have noticed that it's possible to write obfuscated
Perl programs ;)

C++ is also pretty bad in that respect (I still don't *quite*
believe that overloadable typecasting isn't a joke...), and
is pretty popular...

I suppose one reason is that in order to be popular, a language
has to syntactically resemble C to make it easier for existing
programmers to learn.

 .robin.

-- 
"It really depends on the architraves." --Harl

Re: Shoot out

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 01:19:27PM +0200, Merijn Broeren wrote:
> My pike loving friend was amused to see Perl and Python trounced. But
> the testing rig was written in Perl at least. 

I was astounded by the performance of Ocaml.

Being forced by an insane lecturer to debug an obfuscated Ocaml
program when I was a student rather put me off the language.
(And _boy_ can you write obfuscated Ocaml programs if you try!
User-definable infix operators are an especially nice touch in
that regard)

Why isn't Ocaml more popular? Is there a good reason?

 .robin.

-- 
"Sometimes I sit in front of my washing machine and contemplate the
 worthlessness of life.  My washing machine isn't even plugged in."
--alex

Re: A look over the shoulder of an XP programmer (auf deutsch)

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 02:37:25PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote:
> "Felix: How extreme! But good..."
> 
> Extreme indeed... but it *does* satisfy the test cases they've written so
> far, and it contains no unnecessary flexibility ;)

Do you think it's possible to take XP too far?
*Too* extreme?

 .robin. (can't stop laughing)

-- 
"You are bound to be in a state of mental unrest, even turmoil.
 And of course there can be no inner peace: be proud of it!"
-- Electric Posters, Piotr Szyhalski

Re: A look over the shoulder of an XP programmer (auf deutsch)

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 12:41:18PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote:
> (or trust Babelfish),

 One XP day passes fast, since you programmed all day long long
 exerted with your colleagues. That means it not that you look your
 partner with the work over the shoulder. In the opposite. To be in the
 pair to program meant attentively into the programming episode
 involved.


Well it isn't English, but it's *almost* comprehensible...


 Ulrich: Okay, this test will not run.

 Felix: From where do you know that? Schau after, you never knows!

 Ulrich: We say ourselves simply, I are rather safe.

 Felix: Well, if you it *** TRANSLATION ENDS HERE ***also weisst und
 nehmen wir an, der Test zeigt grün, würde das demnach bedeuten, daß
 entweder unser Test falsch ist oder aber der Code Dinge tut, die er
 nicht machen darf, richtig? Mach den Test!


Thanks, babelfish.

 .robin.

-- 
"I would like to load you to become acquainted with the handicraft of
 XP and the life feeling of a easy-weighty process."

Re: Latest Perl Journal

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 10:05:25AM +0100, Cross David - dcross wrote:
> > Loved the footnote on page 78.
> 
> Thanks very much. It's one of my favourite jokes. It was trialed at a
> london.pm technical meeting some months ago :)

What's the footnote on page 78, Dave?

 .robin.

-- 
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal--Panama!
--Guy Jacobson

Re: Enough!

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 07:12:02PM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote:
> 
> well if I was intending to base my filtering on withheld/unavailable I
> would make sure my phone *did* make the distinction .. most do. Also BT
> are intending to introduce a service called 'choose to refuse'

They already offer it.
You can bar up to ten numbers (IIRC). I don't know how it deals
with withheld numbers. Never checked.

 .robin.

-- 
"It really depends on the architraves." --Harl

Re: Politics (was RE: BOFHs requiring license)

[Robin Houston]

On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 01:06:42PM +0100, Lucy McWilliam wrote:
> Is this the point where I can try and recruit some of you compscis to the
> bioinformatics revolution?

I've always thought it sounded like fun.

How does one go about joining the bioinformatics revolution, then?

 .robin.

-- 
"It really depends on the architraves." --Harl

Re: Schroedingers Computer

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, May 11, 2001 at 04:55:47PM +0100, Barbie wrote:
> "So far, demonstrations of quantum computing have been limited to the most
> rudimentary of calculations, involving only two or three bits of
> information. "
> 
> I'm sure Damian could them straight on that one ;-P

Hmm, I think Damian's module ought to be called
Classical::NonDeterminism. Lovely though it is,
it's (theoretically) more powerful than quantum
computers are known to be...

 .robin.

-- 
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal--Panama!
--Guy Jacobson

Re: putting escape characters in files

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 04:35:29PM +0100, Struan Donald wrote:
> kind of off topic but how do you get things like ^M and such like into
> a file for, say, writing vi macros?

perl -e 'print "\cM"' >> my-file

>;-)
 .robin.


ps. Dominic's already given a proper answer...

-- 
Flee to me, remote elf!

Re: (Ab)Using substr

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 09:16:25AM +0100, Cross David - dcross wrote:
> #!/usr/bin/perl -w   # how to (ab)use substr
> use strict;
> my $pi='3.14159210535152623346475240375062163750446240333543375062';

Well, it's more just taking advantage of the fact that most people
don't know more than six decimal places of Pi :-)

Actually it is a thing of great beauty.

 .robin.

-- 
Flee to me, remote elf!

Re: Movies (was Re: Buffy musings ...)

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, May 09, 2001 at 08:55:16AM -0600, Nathan Torkington wrote:
> On the subject of music (despite the Subject: of movies) ... anyone
> here into trad. Irish instrumental music?

I'm rather fond of Sharon Shannon.
Does she count?

 .robin.

-- 
select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,,'')) from (
select 'select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,,)) from (
select ''X'' a from dual)' a from dual)

Apocalypse Two

[Robin Houston]

http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/03/wall.html

Some quite exciting stuff in there. Array dereferencing will be
@foo[23] rather than $foo[23]. Everything will be an object (or at
least work like one). No more typeglobs. User-definable quoting
operators.

And much, much more!

 .robin.

-- 
"I dreamt the other night that my nose had fallen off" --john melesky

Re: cocktails

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 11:47:25AM +0100, Chris Heathcote wrote:
> Off the top of my head:
> ICA bar, Match (Noho/Farringdon/Sosho), lab (on Old Compton St.), aka...
> also heard about Smiths of Smithfield, but never been there.
> 
> Dunno about Sun afternoon opening on all those...

The ICA bar is certainly open on Sunday afternoon, but will be
serving more coffee than cocktails. I suppose they'd make you
cocktails if you asked, but I wonder how expertly...

 .robin.

-- 
"You are bound to be in a state of mental unrest, even turmoil.
 And of course there can be no inner peace: be proud of it!"
-- Electric Posters, Piotr Szyhalski

YAPC::E abstract

[Robin Houston]

Any comments before I send this off?

 .robin.


Type: talk
Duration: 40 mins
Title: Mutagenic Modules
Slides (draft version): http://London.pm.org/~robin/semantic-talk/0.title.html
Abstract:

It's possible to write a Perl module which will change the meaning of
subsequent code in some way. Pragmas (eg "use integer") alter meaning
in this way, but require significant co-operation from the perl
interpreter. However, there are many different ways that you can write
your own "mutagenic modules". Mechanisms that make this possible include:

 * AUTOLOAD
 * CORE::UNIVERSAL::
 * overload::constant
 * source filters
 * CHECK blocks
 * tie()

...and many more.

You can do a lot of fun, interesting tricks using these mechanisms, and
I shall demonstrate several different examples; but there are limits to
what you can do. To take a simple example, there's no general way to
change the behaviour of the print function. I'll briefly mention the
difficulties I encountered trying to implement the mythical
Symbol::Approx::Scalar module.

Next I present a brief overview of the internal workings of the perl
interpreter: How it parses your code and compiles it into an optree,
and how the optree is then executed. A compiler backend (or, to speak
more generally, a CHECK block) interposes itself between these two
stages, and converts the optree into some other form. My favourite
compiler backend is B::Deparse, which just converts the optree back
into Perl source code!

Finally I'll describe some work (currently still in the planning phase)
to use a Deparse-like module to convert the optree into a structured
object model which represents the original code. This object model can
serialise itself as Perl code; but serialisation of any specific
construct can be over-ridden to produce different code. (The objects
will also have methods which enumerate the lexical variables which
are in-scope at that point in the program.)

This then amounts to a perfectly general mechanism for applying any
kind of semantic transformation to any Perl code.

Re: Funny thing

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 02:28:04PM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
> $foo =~ /bar/ and {print "yes"; print "yes again";}

A block is syntactically a statement, not an expression.
You can use:

  $foo =~ /bar/ and do {print "yes"; print "yes again";};

or:

  $foo =~ /bar/ and (print ("yes"), print ("yes again"));

or even:

  $foo =~ /bar/ and print "yes" and print "yes again";

(the last works because print returns a true value)

 .robin.

-- 
Flee to me, remote elf!

Installing Oracle (was: DBD::*->bind_param() ?)

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 11:31:16PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote:
> Does anyone?  Every time I've used Oracle, it's been installed by someone
> else who was supposedly an expert.  Although I remain to be convinced that
> any of them really *was* an expert.

I've installed Oracle a few times, and I'm certainly not a Jedi-level
DBA. It really helps to have some DBA experience, and if you want
it to run efficiently you have to be prepared to hand-tune the caches,
block sizes etc. I tend to get it started using the GUI, then tweak it
manually and run the rest from the command line using svrmgrl.

And if you want to use JDBC, then don't be tempted to use the
ISO-8859-15 charset. Changing the charset without reinstalling the
database is very scary indeed, and entirely unsupported and
undocumented. I had to update SYS.COL$ manually, and still can't
quite believe that it worked...

 .robin.

-- 
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Re: require Module; and filehandles

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 01:32:24PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote:
> Ian Brayshaw wrote:
> > it's the internal workings of require that stop the tie 
> > from being honoured. I presume that the require burrows
> > down into the internals and isn't aware that it's a tie'd
> > handle. As far as I can tell the code within the require
> > call is unaware that this handle is an object. If you place
> > an AUTOLOAD method in TrueHandle instead of the READ and 
> > READLINE methods, only DESTROY is called.
> 
> Did you tell p5p about this? Perhaps they can do something about it, if they
> consider this a bug.

Having looked at the implementation yesterday, I pity the person
who's *so* certain it's a bug that they try and fix it. It would
not be an easy thing to do, I don't think. (Anyway, PerlIO layers
will save us all!)

 .robin.

-- 
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Re: require Module; and filehandles

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 02:11:07AM +1000, Ian Brayshaw wrote:
> Thanks Robin. The TrueHandle package is essentially what I had implemented, 
> but it's the internal workings of require that stop the tie from being 
> honoured.

Yes, you're quite right. Sorry.

The first (PerlIO) method ought to work though, because PerlIO
layers are lower-level than tied filehandles. So if you can
use perl 5.7.1...

 .robin.

-- 
"I dreamt the other night that my nose had fallen off" --john melesky

Re: require Module; and filehandles

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 12:32:47AM +1000, Ian Brayshaw wrote:
>  Sometimes, however, no recompilation is necessary, and so I'd like 
> to return a filehandle that "evaluates to true" (in the 'do ' sense of 
> evaluates)
> 
> Is there a way to do this without creating a dummy file (i.e. can we do this 
> in memory)?

In bleadperl (and hence in the forthcoming 5.8) it's really easy to
do this. Just:

  sub true_filehandle {
my $true = "1";
open (my $fh, "<", \$true);
return $fh;
  }

In earlier perls, you'll need to make a tied filehandle:

package TrueHandle;
sub TIEHANDLE {
bless {};
}

sub READ {
my $self = shift;
return 0 if $self->{done} || $_[1] == 0;
substr($_[0], $_[2], 1) = "1";
$self->{done}=1;
return 1;
}

sub READLINE {
return if $self->{done};
$self->{done}=1;
return "1";
}

package main;
sub true_filehandle {
use Symbol;
my $fh = gensym();
tie *$fh, "TrueHandle";
return $fh;
}


.robin.

Re: perlismybitch.com

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 10:14:02PM -0500, will wrote:
> 
> An old boss of mine wanted a domain that was expiring in a few weeks once so
> he ran a cron task that checked the status of the domain every hour and
> automatically registered it when it became available.

That's how we got kitsite.com, except that it became available while
Jamie was still testing the script. The gods were smiling on us that
day.

 .robin.

-- 
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal--Panama!
--Guy Jacobson

Re: Mutagenic modules: online slides

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 11:57:01PM +0100, Simon Cozens wrote:
> 
> Funny. You've come across the same idea I did.
> http://simon-cozens.org/pg.pdf

Having now read your paper, I think that in some ways it's the
*opposite* idea; or at least a complementary one.

You want to take arbitrary languages, and execute them as if they
were Perl. I want to take Perl and execute it as if it were an
arbitrary language :-)

 .robin.

-- 
"There is a global coincidence of desires for this"

Mutagenic modules: online slides

[Robin Houston]

The slides for the talk I gave this evening are online at
http://London.pm.org/~robin/semantic-talk/0.title.html ff.

 .robin.

Re: Komodo

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 04:36:08PM +0100, Dean wrote:
> Whats MPW?

Macintosh Programmers' Workshop. Delicious...

> Does OS X come with GNU tools like GCC and make then?

Yes (on the optional developers CD)

 .robin.

-- 
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Win32 perl (was: Komodo)

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 04:34:17PM +0100, Dean wrote:
> 
> Your right, the perls are the same ActiveState are just a lot more aware of
> what the OS can do and lacks the ability to do and tries to compensate for
> them. If you have a stocked Windows box with nmake, VC++ and a bit of time
> you can get CPAN working on it.

You don't even need to pander to the evil empire. dmake will
work in place of nmake, and mingw32 (ie. egcs) works fine for
building perl and modules.

Last time I did this was a couple of years ago, and it took
a _long_ time to compile perl itself. Maybe they've made it
faster now.

 .robin.

-- 
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal--Panama!
--Guy Jacobson

Re: Mentioned in Dispatches

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 02:38:26PM +0100, dcross - David Cross wrote:
> 
> Maybe Robin would care to comment on this :)
> 
>  ton_Left_On_ALL_WEEK>

I don't have a lot of time on my hands; I work quickly ;-)

I also have a secret mission, which I'll be partially revealing
tomorrow...

 .robin.

-- 
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Re: Tech mtg?

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 02:30:01PM +0100, Richard Clamp wrote:
> 
> Now all that remains is me remebering to bring it tomorrow.

Cool :-)
Now I've got no excuse for not finishing my slides... :/

 .robin.

-- 
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Tech mtg?

[Robin Houston]

Do we yet know if there's going to be a data projector for
the tech meeting? If not, will there be _any_ kind of mechanism
for showing things to people? (OHP, blackboard, whatever)

 .robin.

Re: Technical Meeting - 19th April

[Robin Houston]

On Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 04:09:14PM +0100, dcross - David Cross wrote:
> As usual I'll aim at having four or five lightning talks and two or three
> longer talks.

I'd like to give a (preferably "longer") talk about parsing and
semantic transformation of Perl code. I promise to think of a
less scary title, and try not to say "semantic transformation".

Should take about 20 minutes.

 .robin.

-- 
select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,,'')) from (
select 'select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,,)) from (
select ''X'' a from dual)' a from dual)

Re: Test

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 03:09:02PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> [...] the HTML hanger on serves no purpose except to consume
> my disk space at 4 times the rate.

You mean you *archive* this bollocks?

:-)

 .robin. (reads london-pm with the 'D' key)

-- 
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Re: Test

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 02:25:50PM +0100, Clarke, Darren wrote:
> Sorry all - this is a test... :¬P
> 
> Bloomin' Outlook & HTML ... *grumble*

It's coming through as multipart/alternative, which is fine IMO.
People with broken mail clients may disagree :-)

 .robin.

-- 
select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,,'')) from (
select 'select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,,)) from (
select ''X'' a from dual)' a from dual)

Re: Grammar (was: Re: Linux.com Online Chat)

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 10:00:08AM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:
> 
> I'm as liberal as anyone here as far as creativity, expression,
> society and the rest go, but there are certain fundamentals that you
> need before you can go out and break the rules. Like having the
> musical basics before you go out and become a punk or a heavy metal
> god.

I agree with you about education, but all the best punk bands
started off without the first idea how to play any of their
instruments :-)

 .robin.

-- 
Beware. The paranoids are watching you.

Re: archiving

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 01:36:54PM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote:
> 
> Did you all know that i used to blow up pressurised butane
> cannisters as a child?

We *all* used to do *that* :-)

 .robin.

-- 
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal--Panama!
--Guy Jacobson

Re: Buffy riding a pony!

[Robin Houston]

That's the most addled thing I've seen for a long, long time.
Congratulations!

 .robin.

Re: Job: I'm looking for one..

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 11:32:57AM +0100, Piers Cawley wrote:
> 
> Hmm... not quite sure what happens if either of the COMMITs fail.

That's exactly the problem. And what if you crash after the
first COMMIT?

This is not an easy problem. The usual solution is
called "two-phase commit". See
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str/descriptions/dtpc.html
for example.

> And I'd bemused as to how Java would handle it too...

It's not a language issue per se.
J2EE is (a lot!) more than just the Java language.

http://www.subrahmanyam.com/articles/jts/JTS.html

 .robin.

-- 
"Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod. 

Re: Job: I'm looking for one..

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 08:08:00PM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> > Can Perl do distributed database transactions? 
> 
> probably .. simple multi threaded app, fork a few child processes,
> establish the odd DBI connection, execute a query each return when the
> last child is reaped ... 100 lines?

I think the key word in Paul's question was "transactions".
In other words, you have more than one database, possibly
in different physical (and network) locations, and you need
to perform a transaction - an _atomic_ transaction - across
several of them.

No partial failure allowed, it has to either succeed completely
or fail completely.

The obvious example is a bank transfer. Add the money to one
account, remove it from the other. Oops, the second part failed.
Double your money!

Actually, any e-commerce operation has the same problem. You
need to fulfil the order *and* charge the customer - those
two things almost certainly can't happen on the same machine.
If you do one and not the other, then either the supplier or
the customer is obviously losing out. It has to be neither or
both.


I think that's what Paul was talking about. He can correct me
if I'm wrong :-)

 .robin.

-- 
select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,,'')) from (
select 'select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,,)) from (
select ''X'' a from dual)' a from dual)

Re: Buffycode (was Re: "That book")

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 11:35:33AM -0500, Dave Cross wrote:
> 
> Would this be an appropriate time to point out that my TPC talk 
> proposes the creation of a Parse::Perl::Approx module :)

What does it do?

 .robin.

-- 
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Re: Job: I'm looking for one..

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 01:59:40PM +, Greg Cope wrote:
> I was thinking about this the otherday - can you recommend some (pref
> open source) Java regex libs ?

OROMatcher.
http://jakarta.apache.org/oro/index.html

There's also gnu.regexp, for LGPL fans:
http://www.cacas.org/~wes/java/

Both support perl5 syntax, more or less.

 .robin.

-- 
"Sometimes I sit in front of my washing machine and contemplate the
 worthlessness of life.  My washing machine isn't even plugged in."
--alex

Re: Perl Auto-RPC

[Robin Houston]

Is the intention simply that it be possible to use modules
which aren't available locally?

If so, you could do something like:

 - use request is passed to module server
 - module server "require"s module (will do nothing if it's already
been required. That's a good thing)
 - server serialises module stash (including subs) and passes it
   back to client
 - client deserialises stash, calls import()
 - client can now use module without actually having it.

Major problems:

 1. (de)serialisation would be hard, but not impossible
(the hard bit, code, can be done with B::Deparse)
 2. XS won't work


(2) is the killer, I fear.

 .robin.

Re: Perl Auto-RPC

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 01:31:36PM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote:
> 
> You use the RPC::Automagic module and pass it a RPC server/port/user
> name/password/whatever. From that point on it overloads the use keyword
> and anything you try and use it will actually connect to the RPC server
> and pass it all the parameters. Any modules you didn't want froma 
> remote server you just use them before you use the RPC module. Or tell
> it to ignore those. 

What a lovely idea!
You could also push a code-ref onto @INC, so that modules which
aren't found locally get used remotely. Probably less useful though,
because you'd want to know which modules 

> It then use AUTOLOAD to intercept any calls to these modules that have
> been included remotley and passes those onto the remote server which
> executes them and then passes the results back.

So you'd serialise the whole object with every method call?
Could be rather slow...

A stateful server would definitely help here.

> There might be some problems with special cases (references?)

I don't see why.
File::Find might behave differently than it would locally though :-)

> I think too much Java has rotted my brain.

Ditto,

 .robin.

-- 
Flee to me, remote elf!

Re: Job: I'm looking for one..

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 01:23:01PM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote:
>
> I concur.  There is simply too much of the important stuff missing from
> Java to make it useable for web content delivery as far as I can tell. 
> 
> I just couldn't do half of what I do without regexes

Since excellent regex libraries are freely available, this
is akin to claiming that Perl is useless for writing HTTP
clients because LWP isn't in the core ;-)

 .robin.

-- 
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal--Panama!
--Guy Jacobson

Re: Job: I'm looking for one..

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 12:16:07PM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
> 
> I'd also add that Java, to my eyes, seems dreadfully uncooperative. Is it
> really as hard as it seems to get a non Java program to talk to j2ee stuff?
> Or is it all just part of the Java marketing? Is it me or is COM actually
> way easier to use than CORBA?

The "J2EE platform" consists of so many disparate technologies
that it's very hard to generalise about it. It's quite easy
to get a non-Java program to talk to an HTTP servlet, for
example :-)

Which parts of J2EE tend to get used the most in enterprise
environments? Anyone got any ideas/experience?

Presumably most people build solutions around e.g. weblogic,
rather than doing everything from raw ingredients.

 .robin.

-- 
"You are bound to be in a state of mental unrest, even turmoil.
 And of course there can be no inner peace: be proud of it!"

Re: four-argument select()s

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 05:02:40PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote:
> Some of you will have seen me posting in #london.pm asking about the
> four-arg form of select().

IO::Select will take the pain away.
use IO::Select;

 .robin.

my @sockets = IO::Select->new(values %sockets)->can_read(10);
# A, the relief!

-- 
Straw? No, too stupid a fad! I put soot on warts.

Re: Benchmarking [was] Re: Not Matt's Scripts

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 05:40:19PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote:
> Well, remember that the sub effecticaly recalculates (what amounts to) the
> array each time. To be fair, you should include the array initialisation
> inside the loop and see who wins then.

Hey, that's not _fair_!
The whole point of using an array is that you can pre-populate it.
(also it's more concise, and I find it more comprehensible. YMMV)

 .robin.

-- 
Beware. The paranoids are watching you.

Re: Not Matt's Scripts

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 01:29:57PM +, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:

> > my @th=(qw(th st nd rd),("th")x16)x2; $th[31]="st";
> 
> That's an evil and gross hack.
> 
> sub th{(($_[0]-10-$_[0]%10)/10%10)?(qw(th st nd rd),('th')x6)[$_[0]%10]:"th"}


TIMTOWTDI, thank ghod ;-)

 .robin.

-- 
"It really depends on the architraves." --Harl

Re: Not Matt's Scripts

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 10:14:22PM +0100, Robert Shiels wrote:
> 
> %e seems to be Linux specific. %d works on both Linux and Windows.

Not Linux-specific, it's part of the Single Unix Specification.

Point taken about Win32.

 .robin.

-- 
select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,,'')) from (
select 'select replace(a, CHR(88), replace(a,,)) from (
select ''X'' a from dual)' a from dual)

Re: Not Matt's Scripts

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 02:08:11PM +0100, Mark Fowler wrote:
> 2) How do I get strftime to produce th/st/nd for the date?  I can't see it
> on man strftime, but I might just be going blind.

use POSIX 'strftime';
my @th=(qw(th st nd rd),("th")x16)x2; $th[31]="st";

my @time=localtime;
print strftime("%e$th[$time[3]] %b %Y\n", @time);

:-)

 .robin.

-- 
Flee to me, remote elf!

Re: Fruit flies like a banana

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 06:17:13PM +, Lucy McWilliam wrote:
> Yeah, like where they knock out the alcohol dehydrogenase gene and get all
> the flies absolutely bladdered :-))

I think that having extra legs growing out of your head
would be weirder than being drunk all the time.

Not that I've tried either personally...

 .robin.

-- 
"do not assume that you are in control of your own actions,
 but take responsibility for them anyway."

Fruit flies like a banana

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 06:05:21PM +, Leon Brocard wrote:
> AEF sent the following bits through the ether:
> > On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Lucy McWilliam wrote:
> > > Love and fruit flies,
> >  I only really want /one/ of those things...
> Really? How many flies do you have?

There's an interactive fruit fly on the interweb.
Really!

 http://sdb.bio.purdue.edu/fly/aimain/1aahome.htm

Antennapedia is my favourite mutation, but I expect Lucy
knows some better ones :-)

 .robin.

-- 
God! a red nugget: a fat egg under a dog.

HAL (was: ISO8601 (was: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.))

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 05:48:42PM +, Robin Szemeti wrote:
> and for a bonus half point (cos its easy) .. why was HAL called HAL?

Supposedly because
  join ("", map chr(1+ord), split"", "HAL") eq "IBM"

though apparently that's accidental.


"When someone pointed out the spurious
 association between HAL and IBM, Kubrick wanted to change the
 computer's name and refilm the scenes but was dissuaded because of
 production costs."

--http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/learn/html/e.8.1b.html

 .robin.

-- 
"It really depends on the architraves." --Harl

script archive naming

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 05:40:21PM +, Robin Szemeti wrote:
> 
> and I can tell you that ezscripts.org is still available 

There is already a site called ezscripts though:

http://www.bytchandbytes.com/ezscripts/

Simplescripts is http://www.simplescripts.co.uk/ - they
sell perl scripts (and have some free for download).

Scripteasy seems to be some sort of programming language -
http://www.scripteasy.com/

Webscripts is an MSA-like archive. I haven't looked at the
code. http://awsd.com/scripts/


Your search - "london script archive" - did not match any documents.

 .robin.

-- 
"Sometimes I sit in front of my washing machine and contemplate the
 worthlessness of life.  My washing machine isn't even plugged in."
--alex

Re: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 05:07:28PM +, Leon Brocard wrote:
> This isn't such a crazy idea. People keep on complaining about the
> quality of modules on CPAN. So pick a random one and make it better
> ;-P

Well, with a module like Date::MMDDYY the implementation
_is_ broken - it uses gmtime() instead of localtime() for
example;

but worse than that, the design and conception are flawed.
Any drop-in replacement would inevitably suffer from the
same flaws of conception and interface.

There's no reason at all for anybody to use this module.
Compare:

  use Date::MMDDYY 'datecon';
  print "The date is ", datecon(time()), "\n";

to

  use POSIX 'strftime';
  print "The date is ", strftime("%m-%d-%y", localtime()), "\n";


The module is redundant, not just poorly implemented.

 .robin.

-- 
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal--Panama!

Re: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 11:40:18AM -0500, Dave Cross wrote:
> I really think I should drop the author a polite note offering him a 
> patch or three.

A patch? It needs taking outside and shooting!

package Date::MMDDYY;
use strict;
use vars qw(@ISA @EXPORT_OK);
require Exporter;
@ISA = qw(Exporter);
@EXPORT_OK='datecon';

use POSIX 'strftime';

sub datecon {
my ($time, $format, $delim) = @_;
$time   = time() if !defined $time;
$format = 'MM,DD,YY' if !defined $format;
$delim  = '-'if !defined $delim;

for ($format) {
s:,:$delim:g;
s:(MM|DD|YY):"%".lc(substr($1,0,1)):eg;
}
return strftime($format, localtime($time));
}


Should we also do a series of drop-in replacements for
crappy CPAN modules? ;-)

 .robin.

-- 
Straw? No, too stupid a fad! I put soot on warts.

Re: LWP::Simple

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 02:59:13PM +0100, Philip Newton wrote:
> 
> Well, isn't being precise part of being a programmer? "Pedantic" is
> basically just "precise", only a little more extreme. But "you can't just
> make sh*t up and expect the computer to understand what you want,
> Retardo!"[1] -- standards *do* serve a purpose and referring to them can be
> helpful.

Yeah, I suppose so. And I'm certainly capable of being pedantic
myself, as I'm sure others here can attest :-)

Standards evolve though, and they evolve based on the way
that they're used in the real world. They're not infallible
scriptures.

When we're talking about an *extension* to the standard
which is
  - compatible with the basic standard
  - very very widely implemented
  - simple and obvious

we should be trying to get the "standard" improved IMO,
rather than saying "Don't use it, it's not standard".

This is how we make progress.

 .robin.

-- 
Beware. The paranoids are watching you.

Re: LWP::Simple

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 02:44:30PM +0100, Philip Newton wrote:
> 
> For FTP URLs: don't know. For HTTP URLs: no such thing.

Technically you're right. LWP does support it though.

And so does every other user agent in the universe,
pretty much; so you'd have to be a pretty severe
standards pedant to say there was no such thing ;-)

 .robin.

-- 
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Re: LWP::Simple

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 01:38:41PM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Does anybody know if LWP::Simple allow for @: convention?

Yes it does.

Wouldn't it have been quicker to try it than to write that
message? ;-)

 .robin.

-- 
Flee to me, remote elf!

Re: Strange Request

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 03:09:42PM +, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:

> /usr/lib/sendmail -t -oem

Use -oi as well.
You don't want "\n.\n" to terminate the message prematurely.

 .robin.

-- 
"Sometimes I sit in front of my washing machine and contemplate the
 worthlessness of life.  My washing machine isn't even plugged in."
--alex

Re: Descrambling CSS w/ 7 Lines Of Perl

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 04:44:54PM +0100, Philip Newton wrote:
> Try posting to Fun With Perl; they like playing golf there.

What do you think I did, immediately after posting here? :-)

FWP is so bloody slow though, that it hasn't got there yet
AFAICT...

 .robin.

-- 
God! a red nugget: a fat egg under a dog.

Re: Descrambling CSS w/ 7 Lines Of Perl

[Robin Houston]

Nice. I'm sure it can easily be shortened some more.

Without even understanding what it does, it seems pretty clear
that we can shave 2 bytes by changing:

  $_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){

into

  $_='$/=\2048;while(){


Any more obvious shavings?

 .robin.

-- 
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Re: That thesis generator

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 02:57:45PM -, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
> Can anyone remember the URL for the thesis generator that Damian Conway
> mentioned in his talk?

http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/DadaEngine


 .robin.

-- 
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Re: London.pm List Weekly Summary 2001-02-26

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 06:59:10PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote:
> 
> No, definetly not. The partial set of prime numbers increases over
> the journey through integers. 1 is the logical starting point,
> and so it is added. This is the very spirit of primality. However
> this may be the rantings of a madman, it's just i feel like a jockey
> sometimes as i ride the sequence of prime numbers, jumping each
> new one and then feeling their occurence decrease.

Debates about definition tend to become dogmatic, and I don't think
you're being serious anyway :-)  Still...

There is one excellent pragmatic reason for not considering 1 to be
prime, which is that by ordinary definitions every integer >1 has
a unique prime factorisation. 12=2*2*3, 100=2*2*5*5 etc.
If you allow 1 as a prime, then you lose that because 100 is also
1*2*2*5*5, 1*1*2*2*5*5, etc ad infinitum.

I'll resist the temptation to go into Ring Theory, the difference
between prime and irreducible etc. But even though it seems obvious
that 1 should be prime, there are good reasons to say that it's not,
(the best of which I've just mentioned).

[The reason for the confusion, I think, is that we tend to assume
that whole numbers are either prime or composite (ie can be made
by multiplying smaller numbers together). But 1 is neither -- it's
what ring theorists would call a unit.]

There's no reason you can't say that 1 is prime if you like though.
(What do you think about -1?)

 .robin.

-- 
"do not assume that you are in control of your own actions,
 but take responsibility for them anyway."

Re: New London PM Shirt Designs

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Mar 01, 2001 at 02:21:36PM +0100, Philip Newton wrote:
> push @us, all(@base);

use Quantum::Superpositions;
@belong_to_us { all (@Your::base) } = 1;
?

 .robin.

-- 
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal--Panama!

Re: Quantum Weirdness

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 05:48:27PM +, Rob Partington wrote:
> 
> They already did that on IRC!  Keep up, that man!

I'm trying to cut down on IRC. It's becoming too distracting.
But you miss so much by not being there.

 irc+-

 .robin.

-- 
"Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod. 

Quantum Weirdness

[Robin Houston]

I just bought a Mars bar, and it's

*drum roll*

sixty-five grams!

 .robin.

Re: SRN (was: lvalue subroutines)

[Robin Houston]

I've also found
 http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/issues/comsci95/compsci95-07.html
 "The Square Root of NOT"

which seems to be a good non-experts introduction to *real* QC.

 .robin.

SRN (was: lvalue subroutines)

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 02:39:35PM +, Piers Cawley wrote:
> (I note that, in the slide, (¬)^0.5 is refered to as U_SRN. Presumably
> because the idea gives the mathematicians headaches too, so they hide
> it slightly behind another symbol)

Apparently SRN stands for "Square Root of Not", so they're not hiding
it too much.

http://www.qtc.ecs.soton.ac.uk/lecture1/lecture1d.html
is interesting.

I agree about generalisation. I think it's perfectly reasonable
to call such an operator the "square root of not" in context;
as long as you understand that by the same definition, adding
one is the "square root" of adding two ;-)

 .robin.

-- 
"Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod. 

Re: lvalue subroutines

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 10:50:26PM +1100, Ian Brayshaw wrote:
> Given the following lvalue subroutine
> 
>   sub mysub : lvalue {
>   $value;
>   }
> 
> is there any way for mysub() to be able to determine that it
> was called in an lvalue context?

Yeah there is, but you're not going to like it :-)

 .robin.

use v5.6;
use Inline C => <

Re: lvalue subroutines

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 11:38:40PM +1100, Ian Brayshaw wrote:
> 
> I'm new to the discussion of Perl6, so are there any discussions around 
> providing operators such as wantlvalue and wantvoid
> to perform similar queries to wantarray?

Yes. Damian has proposed
 http://dev.perl.org/rfc/21.html

which seems sufficiently generic

 .robin.


PS:  You know that "wantvoid" is just !defined(wantarray())
 ?

Re: Penderel Configuration

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 03:26:27PM -, Robert Shiels wrote:
> 
> I'd like to know which perl modules are already installed.

Add this handy alias to your ~/.bashrc and you'll be able to
find out whenever you like :-)

alias lsmodules='perldoc -m perllocal | perl -nle '\''print $1 if /L<(.*?)>/'\'' | 
sort -u | column'

Output follows.

 .robin.

Apache::AuthCookie  Digest::MD5 Parse::Yapp
Apache::DB  Getopt::LongSet::Object
Apache::DBI HTML::ParserStorable
Apache::Reload  HTML::TagsetTangram
Apache::SandwichlibapreqTemplate
Apache::Session libwww-perl Text::Autoformat
Apache::Stage   libxml-enno Tie::IxHash
AppConfig   libxml-perl URI
CGI MIME::Base64XML::Parser
Data::ShowTable mod_perlXML::RSS
Date::Manip Msql-Mysql-modules  XML::XPath
DBI Net
Devel::Symdump  Net::IRC

Re: London.pm List Weekly Summary 2001-02-12

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 10:17:42AM +0100, Philip Newton wrote:
> [...] summaries of #london.pm traffic :)

Now _there's_ an idea :-)

Is anyone feeling really, really bored?

 .robin.

Re: [OT] symlinks to symlinks

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 04:07:34PM +, David Cantrell wrote:
> -l will tell we whether it's a symlink, but I can't see any way of telling
> what it points to

perldoc -f readlink

 .robin.

Re: Technical Meeting Sponsorship

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 07:29:53AM -0500, Dave Cross wrote:
> I've been investigating places to hold Damian's meeting and I've already
> got some interesting leads (the Conway Hall looks like it might well
> work out!)

Conway Hall would be a great venue, for the name alone!

It can't be too expensive, because it's used by any number of
fringe anarcho groups, who presumably don't have too much cash
spilling around.

 .robin.

Re: Mailing List Stuff

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Feb 02, 2001 at 12:40:18PM +, Michael Stevens wrote:
> >purl< pony
> [purl] pony is Gimme a Pony! Pony! Pony! Pony Pony Pony! Pony
> Pony Pony!  Pony Pony Pony! Pony Pony Pony! Pony Pony Pony! Pony
> Pony Pony! Pony Pony Pony!

 literal pony pony pony
 robin: pony pony pony =is= GLUE GLUE GLUE|
  RHAPSODY in Glue!

 glue glue glue?
 glue glue glue is PONY PONY PONY


hmm
It must be a US cultural reference of some sort...

 .robin.

Re: Mailing List Stuff

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Feb 02, 2001 at 12:27:16PM +, Struan Donald wrote:
> * at 02/02 12:29 + Jonathan Stowe said:
> > On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Dave Cross wrote:
> > >
> > > Any questions?
> > >
> > 
> > Yeah, can I have a pony ?
> 
> what is it with ponys?

I've wondered that too.
Seems to be a #perl obsession...

 .robin.

-- 
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Re: Perl Books

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 11:57:20AM -0700, Nathan Torkington wrote:
> [...] brain surgery tech support [...]

Have you got the number?
I'm having a spot of bother with my hypothalamus.

 .robin.

Re: website directory access

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 02:24:08PM +0100, Philip Newton wrote:
> Michael Stevens wrote:
> > You could give out urls with the usernames and passwords in?
> 
> Were you thinking of
> http://username:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/pics/drunkenperlmongers.jpg ? No
> such thing; RTFRFC for more info.

There may well be no such thing, but since it works in just about
every user agent, including LWP, that's a pretty bad argument against
using it here in the Real World.

It's a pretty obvious and compatible extension the the standard...

 .robin.

-- 
"do not assume that you are in control of your own actions,
 but take responsibility for them anyway."

Re: Opening Files using OO Modules

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 05:01:37AM -0500, Dave Cross wrote:
> 
> Within the script, the lines output to different files depending on
> a $type data field. The files are used like this:
> 
> my $fh = "FH$type";
> open $fh, ">&=$streamnum{$type}" or die $!;
> print $fh "some data from the input file";
> 
> Where %streamnum maps a $type to an output file descriptor.
> 
> This, of course, breaks under 'use strict' [...]

If you have perl 5.6, you can do it even more simply
(and in a way which works under 'strict'):


open my $fh, ">&=$streamnum{$type}" or die $!;
print $fh "some data from the input file"; 


I like that!

 .robin.

Re: irc problems

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 11:18:04AM +, Michael Stevens wrote:
> I can't get onto any of rhizomatic.net. Is anyone else having problems?

Not I.
London tolerates my caresses.

Bullfrog seems to be doing some spletnit shenannigans though.

 .robin.

-- 
Straw? No, too stupid a fad! I put soot on warts.

Re: Perl Books

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 02:32:21PM +, Struan Donald wrote:
> 
> er... this unweldy thing would seem to be it:
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/4045/107-2581489-8245353

A handy hint for amazon URLs: you can knock off the long number
on the end, and the thing will still work. 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/4045


The same trick works for any amazon URL.
This has been a public service announcement.

 .robin.

-- 
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Re: .emacs

[Robin Houston]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 08:13:11PM +, Mark Fowler wrote:
> 
> Hmm. Can you do something to save directly via scp?

http://ls6-www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/~grossjoh/emacs/tramp.html

 .robin.

-- 
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal--Panama!

Re: LAMP Stuff

[Robin Houston]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 01:58:44PM +, Michael Stevens wrote:
> And the url is?
> 
> (I had a quick look at ora.com but I couldn't see anything obvious)

I had a slightly slower look, and found http://www.onlamp.com/
I suppose that's probably it.

 .robin.

-- 
"do not assume that you are in control of your own actions,
 but take responsibility for them anyway."

Re: List Archive ( was SUBSCRIBE london-list archive@jab.org (fwd))

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 07:02:48AM -0500, Dave Cross wrote:
> I wonder what mail-archive would do if we just unsubbed their bot?

Nothing, presumably.

I don't think that mail-archive subbed their bot to the list -
I think someone from here must have done it. They seem like a
decent bunch, and don't seem to be the types to actively search
out lists.

 .robin.

Re: Mailing List Archive

[Robin Houston]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 06:50:59AM -0500, Dave Cross wrote:
> 
> This is all a fine plan, but it doesn't prevent external people from
> achiving us in the same way that mail-archive do. I really don't think
> there's a foolproof way to prevent it.

I doubt that's a serious problem.

I assume that someone deliberately added mail-archive's bot to the
list, because mail-archive certainly don't hunt down lists themselves.

If we have an explicit "no public archives" policy then presumably
people will have the decency to honour it, and not subscrive archive
bots to the list.

 .robin.

-- 
Flee to me, remote elf!

Re: Mailing List Archive

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 09:14:08PM +, Leon Brocard wrote:
>   o grow up

Hey! No need to get defensive till you lose the vote :-)

 .robin.

Re: Mailing List Archive

[Robin Houston]

Well, this discussion has been beaten to death on IRC,
so I feel like I'm repeating myself here. But for the
public record: ;-)


- This is a public list. Anyone can subscribe using an advertised
  address.
- We're not plotting to bring down the government.
- "Information wants to be free."  Old emails live for ever.


However:

- Google already knows more about me than I'd like ;-)
- We don't need an archive: it's not exactly going to
  contain useful information.
- The hoarders among us will have our own archives.


So I vote against a public archive.

 .robin.

Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms

[Robin Houston]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 10:08:10AM +, Steve Mynott wrote:
> 
> BTW does any know why Sun refer to cpu0 and cpu2 and not 0 and 1?  Is
> it a marketing thing so the number 2 appears as an obvious second
> processor or is there a real reason?

Well, if you have four processors they're numbered 0,1,2,3 I think;
so perhaps there is a technical reason...

(Sadly I no longer have shell access to any four-processor Sun
machines to confirm this.)

 .robin.

-- 
Flee to me, remote elf!

Re: Dumb-assed question

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 12:42:58PM -0600, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> 
> Exercise: Implement the "except the last" in a regex :-)
> Extra points for squeezing it into a single regex rather than
> a while / $' solution


s/\.(?=.*\.)/_/g;

 .robin.

-- 
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Re: Dumb-assed question

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 06:02:25PM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 
>   Dreamweaver (I know, don't ask) nicely escapes the spaces to
>   %20 but when I try and download these, the %20 appears in the
>   Netscape file save as box instead of spaces.
> 
>   Does anyone know how or if I can get the browsers to save the
>   files with spaces ?

The only way I've found is simple but tedious:

 1.  Choose "Save As..." or shift-click on a link or whatever
 2.  If the filename doesn't contain %20 then click OK and you're done
 3.  Use your mouse to highlight the first %20 in the filename
 4.  Press the space bar once
 5.  GOTO 2


I suppose you were hoping for a simpler procedure, but this is
the simplest I've found. Possibly IE doesn't have that problem.

 .robin.

Re: word processors

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 05:11:25PM +, Michael Stevens wrote:
> 
> Much as I love Computer Modern for technical work, using it for fiction
> would just be WRONG WRONG WRONG.

In a good way :-)

 .robin.

Re: word processors

[Robin Houston]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 04:35:17PM -, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
> 
> I wonder if anyone has written a novel in Latex?

That sounds like a challenge to me :-)
You have to set it in Computer Modern as well though.

 .robin.

Re: Consultancy company

[Robin Houston]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 12:49:45PM +, Roger Burton West wrote:
> http://www.webreview.com/pub/2000/04/07/broken/index.html

Eh? I get a four-oh-four.

Did you mean
http://www.webreview.com/archives/broken/2000/04_07_00.shtml
?

 .robin.

-- 
"You are bound to be in a state of mental unrest, even turmoil.
 And of course there can be no inner peace: be proud of it!"

Re: Munging Reply-To

[Robin Houston]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 05:10:57PM +, alex wrote:

> there is only one right way, and that's to give people the choice.
> 
> that's what i do, and in my experience the majority prefer to have their
> reply-to's munged on discussive lists such as this one.

I wonder whether that's really true, or if it's simply that
most people don't bother to change from the default because
they're not that interested?

If the default was an unmunged (void) and (void-munged) was
also available for the munging fanatics, which would be the
majority then?

Don't know, but wondering...

 .robin.

Reply-to (was: Conslutancy)

[Robin Houston]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 03:47:03PM +, Andy Wardley wrote:
> 
> So without wishing to start another holy war, is it possible to change
> the mailing list configuration to have a more sensible default Reply-to?

I doubt it.

There is an obstinate minority of list members who refuse to
countenance such a change.

The fools!

 .robin.

-- 
Straw? No, too stupid a fad! I put soot on warts.

Re: Big Macs v The Naked Chef -- pitfalls of scaling consultancies

[Robin Houston]

On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 08:01:51PM +, Chris Benson wrote:

> Another link is 
> 
> http://www.arsdigita.com/careers/
> 
> They seem to be a very good model for a consultancy business 

Personally I wouldn't like to work anywhere that thinks like this:
  http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/managing-software-engineers/

Even if that article is slightly tongue-in-cheek, it disturbs me :-)

 .robin.