Re: Fwd: SPUG: ActivePerl 623
On or about Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 04:44:20PM +, Mark Fowler typed: 4. Mission Impossible. Only if you don't know or didn't like the original - or if you can have your brain rewired so that you don't remember it. R
Re: Fwd: SPUG: ActivePerl 623
On or about Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 05:06:15PM +, Mark Fowler typed: 4. Mission Impossible. Only if you don't know or didn't like the original - or if you can have your brain rewired so that you don't remember it. I think you're missing the point. M.I. is crap. Don't even get me started on M.I.2.. But you probably want to have seen it so that you can get references. Well, yes; but the thing is, while I might have enjoyed it as a crap action film, that was spoiled for me because I liked the original MI. I have no problem with crap action films. (Commando remains one of my favourites.) R
Re: Perl Geek Code
On Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 07:45:56PM +, David Hodgkinson wrote: Michael Stevens [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 06:28:29PM +, David Hodgkinson wrote: We're meeting on Thursday, right? If we aren't I'm going to be getting pretty lonely drinking on my own... I'll join you. Leo said he was coming too. I may even make it this time. R
Re: FOOD
On or about Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 11:25:42AM +, David Hodgkinson typed: OK, Now I'm REALLY hungry. I'll be at the New World at one O'Clock. Are you going to set your machine's clock to the right time first? Roger
Re: FOOD
On or about Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 02:54:23PM -, Matthew Freake typed: ...and thinking about it, didn't the Wendy's on Shaftesbury Avenue used to be a Taco Bell as well ? I don't think so; there was one on the other side of Haymarket, though, towards Leicester Square. R
Re: blibble
On or about Fri, Jan 05, 2001 at 12:01:49AM +, Michael Stevens typed: You know you're drunk when, faced with the problem of getting through an underground ticket gate, you get out your house keys and start fiddling with them looking for the right one. Or when, faced with the problem of getting through your front door, you reach by reflex for the Leatherman on your belt. R
Re: Technical Meeting
On or about Fri, Jan 05, 2001 at 12:07:01AM +, alex typed: [better instructions soon, but it takes up most of rhoda street, bethnal green, nearest tubes are old street, shoreditch, liverpool street and bethnal green, or closest of all, bus route number 8] Oh dear oh dear oh dear... that's about five minutes' walk from where I'm working... expect a large Torrington contingent if I can persuade them. Roger
The crack is very good today
Given an array full of data which need to be output as a CSV...
return join(',',map{defined$_?s/"/''/g+1?/,/?"\"$_\"":$_:0:''}@{$ar})."\n";
Roger
Re: Feelers for London Open Source Convention
On Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 08:34:21PM +, Tony Bowden wrote: If you present the chart in a different format to how they did then there's nothing they can do... Take a look at http://www.bath.ac.uk/~bssnrw/getchart.html for a differing viewpoint. Roger
Re: Red Hat worm discovered
On or about Thu, Jan 18, 2001 at 10:37:27AM +, Steve Mynott typed: RH/Slackware/Debian/Solaris/FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD are all fine systems but they need to be setup by someone who knows what they are doing in the same way that Perl has to be written by clueful programmers. And competent *ix system builders/admins are about as easy to find as clueful programmers. And certifications are about as useful in finding them. R
Re: Compiling mod_perl on Debian
On or about Thu, Jan 18, 2001 at 10:28:13AM -0800, Paul Makepeace typed: apt-get install libapache-mod-perl gets you the dynamic version -- is there a particular advantage to having it statically built? Want mod_perl and mod_ssl? Debian stable doesn't do this easily without recompilation. R
Re: thoth
On or about Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 01:35:32AM -0500, Mark Rogaski typed: That would be c.l.p.m ... unless of course you aren't referring to Tom. You weren't at the technical meeting last night, were you? This thoth is a network monitoring system. R
Re: Holy War
On or about Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 10:39:47AM -0500, Dave Cross typed: It'll be purely for home use, so: I'd use Debian 'cos I like it. Downside: latest versions of stuff aren't usually available as packages. Upside: doesn't mess you about the way the Windowsy distributions (RH, SuSE) do. R
Re: Consultancy company
On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 10:28:13AM +, Piers Cawley wrote: One customer. On site. Full time. Absolute honesty. Nice idea if you have customers who can take the truth, and who know when to shut up and let people get on with things. I'd like to see it working, but I haven't yet. R
Re: ArsDigita working practices (was: Big Macs v The Naked Chef -- )
On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 08:37:02PM +, Kieran Barry wrote: Yup. There isn't enough talent around, so people get promoted beyond their competence. If you train your people they'll only leave. The only way out of that cycle is to train in-house, and treat people so well that they stay. Which implies that hassling them if they don't work 70-hour weeks is counterproductive. When I was looking for my current job, it took me a week from starting to search to getting two decent offers; so I know there's demand for people who can do what I do. In turn, my employers know it too: which means our relationship is a lot more civilised than it's been in other places where I worked. I don't think training is related to leaving; people leave anyway, all the time. Giving someone training might increase his market value, but if your company isn't prepared to pay for that, why train him in the first place? Roger
Re: Consultancy company
On or about Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 11:08:29PM +, Piers Cawley typed: And if the Big Cheese does hand down decisions that override the Minion then the contract between developer and client should stipulate that the client pays for the wasted time. Contracts _should_ say that the client pays for changes to what he originally said he wanted. Sometimes they do. It's quite rare, in my experience, for this payment actually to be demanded. (Usually some excuse along the lines of "it's a big customer and we don't want to annoy them".) This XP approach seems to require a lot more firmness in customer relations than I've ever seen - and if that firmness were present, we wouldn't need XP anyway... Roger
Re: Consultancy company
On or about Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 12:33:44PM +, Robin Szemeti typed:
there
is a whole class of clients so clueless (' I just want one of those
dot-com things') that you probably need another level of handholding ...
they discuss the artistic and 'feelgood' bits of the project in as
precise terms as they can and then direct the XP team as the customers
representative.
http://www.webreview.com/pub/2000/04/07/broken/index.html
Roger
Re: Consultancy company
On or about Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 01:09:40PM +, Robin Houston typed: Did you mean http://www.webreview.com/archives/broken/2000/04_07_00.shtml ? Yes. Been a while since I looked at that one. R
Re: odd -w effect
On or about Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 12:43:46PM +, Michael Stevens typed: We need to just get on with using linux, and other sensible stuff, and IF PEOPLE ASK QUESTIONS then we can tell them about it. But we shouldn't try to promote it as what they want, because invariably they start going "aargh, it' doesn't have all the shiny windows features, it must suck, and you said it was good", whereas if they get interested in it themselves, and come to you, you've made no promises so they can't be dissappointed. OTOH, that doesn't help us much with the desirable goal of getting unix used more in the workplace. I dunno. I think it's just like proactive evangelism vs "living a good life" - when your box hasn't crashed six times today, and it's running a clone of a production web site faster than the live box, and it's doing all the monitoring for the company, and... people start to say "ooh, how can I get some of that". This is a reaction that hitting them over the head with Debian CDs rarely engenders (though it's fun anyway). Roger
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On or about Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:07:02AM +, Michael Stevens typed: I imagine you could get a pc service contract on the same level as Sun do, but I have no experience in the area. Has anyone got any experience paying vast amounts of money for PC support? did you get much for your money? Dell offer this on some of their servers. IMHO this is always a waste of money - they don't provide anything that you couldn't do yourself by having a stock of spare parts and someone competent on call. OTOH, if you pay for the support, generally you get a machine that was put together by someone who knew how it was supposed to go, rather than the colour-blind monkeys they normally use. R
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On or about Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 12:08:22PM -, Jonathan Peterson typed: And then people wonder why I like open source... Even within OS software there's good support and bad support. There's plenty of OS software that _doesn't_ have helpful user groups, and has very poor documentation and so on. Oh, agreed entirely. The key thing is that nobody _expects_ a professional support service, so they're less disappointed when it doesn't happen. R
Re: London.pm nearly have a new server (fwd)
On or about Tue, Jan 30, 2001 at 02:11:41PM +0100, Philip Newton typed: Granitecanyon? The boxes that are chronically down? Which resulted in me getting mail from the domain registry telling me to get a working nameserver up with thein week or they might yank the domain? Where noone seems to care about support. I haven't had any problems with them, but I don't use them as primaries. Granitecanyon -- where You Get What You Pay For. IMO, at least. What you get is redundancy in the DNS. If they're down, so what? Roger
Re: irc problems
On or about Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 11:31:16AM +, Michael Stevens typed: On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 11:28:37AM +, Neil Ford wrote: I can't get onto any of rhizomatic.net. Is anyone else having problems? Michael we're all there fine in actuall fact as I type this you've just appeared :-) Having now got on I can state the problem was a complete inability to get rhizomatic dns. Still seeing that here. And oh dear: roger@dayspring:~$ host -t ns rhizomatic.net|wc -l 1 And whois gives: token.aliengods.com 199.245.105.172 token.aliengod.com 199.245.105.171 Ahem. Didn't they learn _anything_ from Microsoft? IRC's IP, anyone? R
Re: Amazon Sales Rank
On or about Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 01:39:08PM +, Michael Stevens typed: Now if they'd just actually send me the copy I ordered... (I think they said 3-5 weeks) Ditto. It's one of the 9 things remaining before they ship my latest order. Roger
Re: Penderel Configuration
On or about Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 03:26:27PM -, Robert Shiels typed: I'd like to know which perl modules are already installed. http://www.perlfaq.com/faqs/id/205 Roger
Re: DMP
On or about Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 11:26:02AM -, dcross - David Cross typed: Nah. That's what it's said for the last two weeks. They haven't got round changing it to '24 hours' yet. Mine's "1 on hand", but there are other things in that order. R
Re: Overheard on IRC
On or about Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 10:46:18AM +, Simon Wistow typed: yet another t-shirt idea methinks any(@londonpm) R
Re: geek cricket
On or about Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 12:29:19PM +, Amias Channer typed: Each company would have a team (or combine to make teams) and play 40 over matches on sunday afternoons in some sort of league . Does this appeal to anyone ? gambling is optional . You mean... actual physical exertion? Heretic! R
Re: Heretics' meeting
On or about Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 03:16:17PM +, Struan Donald typed: to be more helpful see above[1]. [1]: wondering how to make mutt do things in the right order when replying to multiple posts. Tag the posts you want, then reverse the sort order (shift-o whatsit). Roger
Re: Heretics' meeting
On or about Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 05:44:31PM +, Greg McCarroll typed: someone simplified this to ... meetings are held on the day after the first wednesday of the month Guilty. What can I say, it was my first meeting. Roger
Talking about xs...
This strikes me as something that needs a perl module... anyone feeling particularly bored and like playing with XS? ]librsync (http://freshmeat.net/projects/librsync/) ] by Martin Pool (http://freshmeat.net/users/bootswork/) ] ]librsync makes the network-delta functions of the popular rsync file ]transfer tool available to other programs. librsync has a streaming ]interface similar to zlib, and is designed to be embedded into diverse ]network applications. Roger
Re: Talking about xs...
On or about Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 10:31:09AM +, Leon Brocard typed: Roger Burton West sent the following bits through the ether: ]librsync (http://freshmeat.net/projects/librsync/) I was *sure* something like this was already on CPAN[1]. H. I still don't really see what advantages having this in Perl would give you. What kind of applications were you thinking of? Ones where (a) one doesn't want to shell out and create an extra process or (b) one has control over the perl environment but not over the general system to install rsync. Roger
Re: MSA rewrite project
On or about Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 05:34:03PM +0100, Philip Newton typed: Generally, @INC contains '.', so it should work (though remember that Net::SMTP has to go into ./Net/SMTP.pm and not ./SMTP.pm or ./Net::SMTP.pm). Otherwise, use lib '.' should be your friend. I believe IIS does horribly evil things to the current execution directory. Roger
Re: Matt's Scripts
On or about Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 02:34:32PM +, Jon Eyre typed: is there an idiot-proof graphical front-end for scp? windows clients? PuTTY. my several users require them, or they'll just continue using ftp, because it's *easier*... People are lazy, and security measures which are a pain in the arse will fail to work because the users will bypass them (summarizing from Schneier's Secrets and Lies). Then you disable ftp and smb. (And telnet, of course.) "Sorry, we can't use these because of the ban on plain-text passwords." Roger
Re: Matt's Scripts
On or about Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 04:00:22PM +, Greg McCarroll typed: * Dave Cross ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: They won't if you stop running the ftp daemon on the server :) Rule one of security: Ensure availability for authorised users Rule zero of security: A system with no users is a system with no unauthorised users. For extra points, turn it off. Roger
Re: London.pm List Weekly Summary 2001-03-12
On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 09:39:12PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: * David Cantrell ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 06:19:54PM +, Michael Stevens wrote: Content-type: matter-transport/beer-stream Isn't that what happens in the bogs of Penderels Oak? Is it just me who has noticed the similarities between the bogs of Penderels Oak and the TARDIS? Yes. Definitely. Just you. None of the rest of us has noticed anything odd at all. (phew) Roger
Re: Version control
On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 09:45:34PM -, Jim Gillespie wrote: My main beef with CVS (and ClearCase) is that there doesn't seem to be any way to access the release string programatically - I can tag all my source as "FOO_R1-0" or whatever, but I can't tell from within the source that it has been so tagged. Unless someone knows different? You can get the _numeric_ version tag with $Version: $ (or whatever it is), in CVS at least, but I assume you already knew that. You can't have the symbolic tag, because it's entirely possible to have more than one symbolic tag applying to the same version of the source code - say, the large static module that's not in a part of the tree that's being worked on very much... Roger
Re: Dedrat 7.0 and PGP
On Sat, Mar 17, 2001 at 02:01:11PM +, Robin Szemeti wrote: I haven't considered the GPG option yet .. its going to be for a user thing .. and PGP is more common .. I am right in thinking that GPG and PGP are basically different and not interchangeable aren't I ? No. Itried importing PGP keyfile into GOG and it didn;t like it. Was it a PGP v2.x keyfile? v5.x and v6.x should (for the most part) work reasonably well. That is rather the point of GPG. If all else fails I'll jsut use GPG .. which will be a pain as Kmail (my mailer) works nicely with PGP .. but not GPG as yet .. hmmmph Search for pgpgpg; it's a wrapper to solve this problem. Roger
Re: Dedrat 7.0 and PGP
On Sun, Mar 18, 2001 at 01:58:14AM +, Robin Szemeti wrote: the keyfile was an ascii armoured v6.5.8 keyfile, 1024 bit RSA that I got with pgp -kxa .. GPG said 'unrecognised key format' since one of the things I need is for users to be able to export their public keys from PGP then being able to use PGP keys is a must have. AFAIR there may be some formats supported in one but not the other; I thought this had been solved, though. Check out www.gnupg.org for more info on the latest on this. Roger
Re: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.
On or about Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 11:40:18AM -0500, Dave Cross typed: I really think I should drop the author a polite note offering him a patch or three. s/entire_file/strftime/ ? Roger
Re: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.
On or about Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 12:24:38PM -0500, Chris Devers typed: Would a CPAN replacement have to be "drop-in"? I can see the argument behind making replacements for MSA code be functionally identical in most visible ways, but when you're dealing with CPAN code, presumably, you're dealing with somewhat more savvy programmers that could handle having to tweak a few things to get a replacement up running. When you're dealing with the sort of programmers who would choose to use this module in the first place...? Roger
Re: Debian question ...
On or about Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 01:43:28PM +, David Cantrell typed: is there an easy way of getting a list of all the packages which are currently installed? I dislike dselect intensely, and the docs for dpkg et al don't say anything useful. To make a local copy of the package selection states: dpkg --get-selections myselections Roger
Re: Job: I'm looking for one..
On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 05:19:12PM +0100, Leo Lapworth wrote: Just to let you all know I'm on the market again. Me too. Looking for senior developer/senior unix admin (ideally a blend of the two), permanent, London, no Windows. CV on request. Roger
Re: ISO8601 [was] Re: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.
On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 12:04:05PM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote: Anyway, the whole 'numbers' thing is long over due to be replaced by those new fangled 'letters'. Works for DNS... Oh @deity, let's not do that. Consider the mess the WIPO's causing now, and then think about competition for "good" phone names... Roger
Re: Crazy Idea
On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 02:38:44AM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote: any you have the ``right'' attitude when it comes to beer and explosives http://firedrake.org/roger/fireworks/ 'nuff said. R
Re:
On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 03:24:03PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: Unfortunately, while the disclaimer came out fine, my mailer (MS Outlook) displayed the real "body" (with your message) as an attachment. That would be because it was sent uuencoded. I'm sure there's a reason for this, but I don't care. Roger
Re: [HELP] Traceroute
On Thu, Apr 05, 2001 at 10:33:19AM -0400, Andy Williams wrote: Hi, Can any one tell me what this traceroute actually means... it has me completely confused (not that difficult actually!!) Yup. The machines on hops 11-24 aren't answering the traceroute packets, but are passing them on. Possibly a routeing loop if you'd normally expect to see fewer hops there. Roger (won't be along this evening, not getting paid for the last month's work. Gizza job!)
Re: JOB: Anyone interested
On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 10:11:47AM -0500, Dave Cross wrote: Warning - MSB used to have the reputation of being the biggest bunch of cowboys in the recruitment industry. I wouldn't normally pass this on but thought it might be of interest to some of the ex-Torrington people. FYI this particular role wasn't available; they tried to put me up for some other things but didn't even get as far as interviews. Roger (now working elsewhere)
Re: Good Accountants
On Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 10:33:36PM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote: actually .. nutscrape under Linux annoys me when it insists on looking up a hostname no matter how hard you click on the stop button .. bad threading. Excellent reason to use a proxy. Junkbuster's good... Roger
Re: DBD::*-bind_param() ?
On or about Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 01:46:16AM -0700, Paul Makepeace typed: Does anyone have any Real World experience with the speed-up (even hand-wavy vague anecdotes) of using bind values v. reparsing the SQL each time (for databases that support this obviously). Postgres and Oracle I'm particularly interested in. Oracle quite a bit - it parses the statement with placeholders and does large amounts of cacheing. Definitely worth it if you're fiddling with large dbs. For postgres it's a lot less important IME. Roger
Re: More revolting natives
On Sun, May 06, 2001 at 08:49:56PM -0500, Mike Jarvis wrote: A cow-orker of mine had to be told that Spain was in Europe, not South America. Cue story about Spanish woman being turned away from the Hispanic channel at US Immigration. Roger
Re: putting escape characters in files
On or about Thu, May 10, 2001 at 04:35:29PM +0100, Struan Donald typed: kind of off topic but how do you get things like ^M and such like into a file for, say, writing vi macros? ctrl-x 0 d but using it in a search/replace pattern is harder. Roger
Re: putting escape characters in files
On or about Fri, May 11, 2001 at 10:48:41AM +0100, Jonathan Peterson typed: You know, from the outside, Unix looks so well designed and clean and modern... From the outside, Windows looks as if it works. ObRant: computers and OSes in their current state are not consumer devices. They're not sufficiently reliable or intuitive. Bad marketing has made people think they need the things; most of them are wrong... Roger
Re: putting escape characters in files
On or about Fri, May 11, 2001 at 11:37:20AM +0100, Struan Donald typed: but then any reasonably flexible multi-purpose device is always going to have a hard time being a consumer device as by it's nature it's complex and trying to make complex things appear simple is very very hard. Yes. Things like the Amstrad word-processor are what people really want. (Just ask any secretary who was forced to upgrade from one to a PC.) R
Re: putting escape characters in files
On or about Fri, May 11, 2001 at 11:32:33AM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson typed: Roger Burton West [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: ObRant: computers and OSes in their current state are not consumer devices. They're not sufficiently reliable or intuitive. Bad marketing has made people think they need the things; most of them are wrong... OK, so what does it take? While using a computer is a skill considered harder than using a washing machine or mowing a lawn, they're not ready. Putting pretty interfaces on existing unstable systems does not help to make them simpler... R
Re: Politics (was RE: BOFHs requiring license)
On or about Mon, May 14, 2001 at 10:45:45AM +0100, Matthew Jones typed: I genuinely believe that the public are sick of watching the NHS, education system etc wasting away on a starvation diet and would be willing to pay a bit of extra tax to make sure that their kids can get schooled and that their sick can be healed. When have they ever been asked? You want to reduce waiting lists and class sizes? It all costs, people. Money isn't enough. America spends more on education per pupil than anywhere else in the world - think that works? Government-run projects don't work, even when they're heavily funded. Roger
Re: Politics (was RE: BOFHs requiring license)
On or about Mon, May 14, 2001 at 11:04:52AM +0100, Matthew Jones typed: When have they ever been asked? During elections. Like I say, in 1997, the UK voted in a party that was (I reckon) seen as the guardian of the public services, the party that is traditionally associated In 1997 the UK voted against the Conservatives. The policies being offered by the parties were close to identical. Money isn't enough. America spends more on education per pupil than anywhere else in the world - think that works? Yeah, but doesn't most of that go on flak jackets for the teachers? Heh, seriously, though, money may not be enough, but that doesn't translate to the education system doesn't need any more money. How about stopping and thinking about it _before_ throwing money at it just for a change, then? Government-run projects don't work, even when they're heavily funded. That's an awfully sweeping statement to make. Yes. Governments never get value for money on anything they do. Discuss. R
More politics (was Re: BOFHs requiring license)
On or about Mon, May 14, 2001 at 10:37:23AM +0100, Cross David - dcross typed: Here's a pretty fundamental issue. Why do so many people seem to think that low taxes are good? Because many people think that they are better judges of how their own money should be spent than the government (of whatever flavour) is. I suspect that if they were allowed to choose _how_ money was spent (and yes, I do know the arguments against this) they would be a lot more willing to pay it. Roger
Re: OT - Perl
On or about Mon, May 14, 2001 at 03:29:41AM -0500, will typed: Has anyone seen some perl around here? I thought I saw some earlier but it sems to have gone now :-) use Politics; use Quantum::Superpositions; (the rest I leave to your imagination)
Re: pc components
On or about Thu, May 17, 2001 at 10:57:23AM +0100, Greg McCarroll typed: Does anyone have a recommendation for an online provider of PC components, i'm looking for a couple of big hard drives (50Gb+). I've had success with DABS - just make sure the thing's in stock before ordering. Roger
Re: Some Northern Irish Fun and Games ...
On or about Fri, May 18, 2001 at 09:29:42AM +0100, Matthew Jones typed: As far as it being sensual, that is not a word you would attribute to country music. They obviously haven't been listening to The Archers recently. R
Re: [OT] Cordelia (was Re: They are all vampires!)
On or about Mon, May 21, 2001 at 05:09:50PM +0100, Jonathan Peterson typed: Ah, an excellent typo consisting of one additional character, one omitted character, and a transposed pair. I shall put it in my collection. I should say by the look of it, this one was speed induced. Goes off to start new thesis on typographical errors to be presented at the ICA. use Code::Approx;
Re: MIME stuff - Am I missing something?
On or about Tue, May 22, 2001 at 02:48:17PM +0100, Robert Thompson typed: Open up the file, read in the first few bytes and grab the magic number. Most types of binary file have a marker of some kind to designate what they are. Any half decent book on graphics programming should be able to tell you what the magic numbers are for the main graphics types. man 1 file man 5 magic less /usr/share/misc/magic # on many systems Roger
Re: Election Manifestos
On or about Tue, May 22, 2001 at 04:02:33PM +0100, Simon Wistow typed: According to the Register ... http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/19112.html the Tory's want to repeal IR35, make RIPA less strict and speed up Local Loop unbundling, whereas Labour want to introduce laws meaning that if you pretend to be a teenager on the Net you can be jailed for 5 years (bad luck bK). Being that most of the people here seem to be more Left than right (especially the contarctors) how do you lot feel about this. How about don't believe a word of it, anything said between now and the election is purely an attempt to woo gullible representatives of special-interest groups? Labour don't care about actual competent net users (who will probably vote for them anyway, they reckon, and by last week's experience they may be right) but want to look as if they regard crime as a bad thing (still fighting the 1980s council stories, really); the Conservatives reckon that people who want politicians to do something about crime will vote for them anyway, but that competent net users might be wooed. Roger
Re: Election Manifestos
On or about Tue, May 22, 2001 at 05:23:32PM +0100, Cross David - dcross typed: I've not actually seen the manifesto, but from what I'm told it really means If you can't be bothered to take a few minutes to look, why the hell are you posting about it? The actual text is: A future Conservative Government will repeal IR35 and replace it with legislation that addresses genuine abuses. In other words, it'll be in the pockets of whichever lobby group pays them most at the time, just as the Labour one was. The information contained in this communication is confidential, is intended only for the use of the recipient named above, and may be legally privileged. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please re-send this communication to the sender and delete the original message or any copy of it from your computer system. And get a shell account, why don't you?
Re: Windows Perl - how?
On or about Thu, May 31, 2001 at 12:37:22PM +0100, Mark Fowler typed: I seem to remember downloading an .exe last week (which I no longer have and no longer seems to be where it was on thier site.) Are they randomly switching between MSI and .exe and haven't bothered to upload the installer when they switched back. http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActivePerl/Requirements gives download sites from MS for 9x and NT. Roger
Re: Windows Perl - how?
On or about Thu, May 31, 2001 at 01:07:31PM +0100, Greg McCarroll typed: yip i've seen this format as well, does anyone know what advantages it has? does it enforce any standards for the software? is it just a M$ ploy to control the standard install packages? I'll take option C for six million dollars, Bob... It makes a certain amount of sense. Rather than having to distribute an installer program with every package, have a standard installer program that you only need to download once. Copying files, of course, is _much_ too difficult. R
Re: crazy golf
On or about Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 01:27:44PM +0100, Paul Mison typed: (Isn't there an extra bank holiday next year for Golden Jubilee shenanigans?) http://www.dti.gov.uk/er/bankhol.htm
Re: General Election
On or about Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 02:39:03PM +0100, David Cantrell typed: Pah! Sing to the Motherland, home of the free, Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong. O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people, To Communism's triumph lead us on! Humbug! The people's flag is black as night From top to bottom, left to right. What better symbol for our cause Then torn umbrellas, old black drawers, And Guinness, gowns and pirate flags Darth Vader's cloak and oily rags: Oh, wave it proudly o'er your head, The flag that's better dead than red!
Re: tape changes
On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 08:04:46PM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote: is 15 quid a shot cheap [ ] normal [ ] expensive [ ] for lobbing a dat tape into a box and slinging in a new one? It's not Telehouse prices, but it sounds expensive to me. R
Re: M$ SQueaLServer
On or about Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 04:58:11PM -0700, Paul Makepeace typed: At the end of the day, the simple fact is that Windows 2000 crashes more frequently than *n[ui]x does -- this surely is unquestioned fact. Bear in mind also this item from Monday's RISKS (21.44): Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 12:20:53 +0400 (MSD) From: Oleg Broytmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Insurer considers Microsoft NT high-risk [...] An insurance company has started to charge 5-15% more if you use Windows NT as a base for Internet services: We saw that our NT-based clients were having more downtime due to hacking, says John Wurzler, founder and CEO of the Michigan company, which has been selling hacker insurance since 1998. Wurzler said the decision to charge higher premiums was not mandated by the syndicates affiliated with Lloyd's of London that underwrite the insurance he sells. Instead, the move was based on findings from 400 security assessments that his firm has done on small and midsize businesses over the past three years. Wurzler found that system administrators working on open-source systems tend to be better trained and stay with their employers longer than those at firms using Windows software, where turnover can exceed 33 percent per year. http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2766045,00.html Oleg Broytmann http://phd.pp.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Sony Clie (was: Re: Social meet)
On or about Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 11:40:20AM +0100, Robin Szemeti typed: I just dont get why they wont release specs .. surel;y the plan is to sell as many memory sticks as possible? ..or hav I missed someting? Yup. The plan is (a) not to get kicked out of bed by MS and (b) not to have cheap memory-stick-compatible devices (cf Apple clones). R
Re: downloady filenames
On or about Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 09:10:32AM +0100, Robin Szemeti typed: someone somewhere a few weeks ago posted something about an extra line you could put not dissimilar to 'Apparent-filename: something.xyz' .. its not so much a mime types thing but a browser thing .. Content-Disposition. R
Re: *Buffy's Not Included
On or about Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 10:01:33AM +0100, Robert Thompson typed: CSV is an option - except that an awful lot of the data will need to be escaped out before it goes into the file, and I would rather only have to do when its rendered out to the browser. DBD::CSV is your friend. Sits on top of Text::CSV_XS and gives you a basic SQLish interface. Roger
Re: Maths Problem
On Sun, Jun 17, 2001 at 06:52:04PM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote: Ok, now how can you distribute N points around the origin in _3_ dimensions, again all of them at the same distance from the origin? Obviously there will be an imaginary sphere again, but where do you put the points. Best general treatment of this I've seen is at http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/spheres.html which has the summary: * uniformly distributed has more than one meaning; * for most n there is no answer which is particularly elegant; * quick-and-dirty approximations are easy. R
Re: Maths Problem
On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 12:01:05AM +0100, Chris Benson wrote: Mmmm, so if there are 3 water lilies with circular leaves, what is the largest they can grow on the surface of a sphere without overlap? On a circle it's easy to see it's just less than the radius of the circle. Not so easy with a sphere. Looks like evenly-spaced around the equator. With only three points, they'll _have_ to be coplanar by definition. And, of course, a belt of n points around the equator is even spacing, but doesn't look good... Roger
Re: Government Websites
On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 11:41:57AM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: Users will say: I don't have Flash and don't want to download it. Therefore, I should leave out the Flash bits of the site. Users will say: I read that JavaScript can expose security holes, so I'll turn it off. Therefore, I will make all my navigation work without JavaScript turned on. Sounds like a good idea to me so far. Users will say: Ooh! Shiny!. R
Re: Templating Solutions
On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 04:36:00PM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote: First, are there any others that I should look at? Also I'd really like any objective input people have about templating with these modules. It is important to me to try and not just get the article done and dusted, but for once to write a piece of text that I am happy with. Key distinction is: what sort of code is going into the page? Is it something fairly basic (H::T, T::T in some ways of using it) or something closer to actual perl? (In the latter case, of course, it is Evil, because it removes any possibility of separation of code and data - you might as well be writing PHP.) The main reason I prefer H::T to T::T is that H::T templates can be given to Dreamweaver monkeys to edit without my having to worry that they'll screw them up. Roger
Re: Templating Solutions
On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 06:30:24PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: Simon Wilcox wrote: I avoided HTML::Embperl, HTML::Mason Apache::ASP because they all embed perl into the template which is a Bad Thing (tm). Why is that so evil? I'm willing to be enlightened here. Separation of code and data - or in this case, layout, content and logic. You can have multiple template files (say, for HTML, WAP, I-mode, and whatnot) while keeping a single, fairly simple program as the back-end (which doesn't need to know what sort of platform it's filling in a template for, just which template file to load). Roger
