Re: Maths Problem
On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 07:29:28AM +0100, Roger Burton West wrote: 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? 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... But that limits the diameter of each to 1/3 the circumference ... I was sort of thinking that you'd get a larger area by offsetting them O O O , that doesn't really cut it does it? I'm going off to cut out some circles and look for a ball ... -- Chris Benson
Re: Maths Problem
On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 11:56:59AM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 08:29:18AM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: 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 Well, first off, the circles won't be circles as we know them since they're not 2D circles but have a 3D component (or they wouldn't be on the surface of the sphere but rather cutting a slice through it). Leaves aren't that strong -- they'd flop into curve to fit the sphere :-) However, I'd imagine that with three such bulgy circles, the best you can do is space them equally around the equator. Yes. However you arrange them they're going to be on a plane, and so to have them the maximum distance apart you make sure the plane also contains the centre of the sphere. It gets interesting for N3 I thought N=4 was the easy one: points of a tetrahedron! -- Chris Benson
Re: Maths Problem
On Sun, Jun 17, 2001 at 06:58:03PM +0100, Roger Burton West wrote: 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. Neat question for a Sunday evening: I've been wondering about that for a while. Best general treatment of this I've seen is at http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/spheres.html and that page also has a link to Easy method for a fairly good point distribution at http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/97/spherefaq An excellent site. -- Chris Benson
Re: www.gateway.gov.uk
On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 08:15:36AM +0100, Robert Thompson wrote: From: Chris Benson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Why, when the sun is shining (almost) and there is a popular (?) govt. do I feel like I did in early/mid 70's: like the end of the world was nigh? Hmm, not sure... but is the feeling helped buy having someone in the White House who has no real idea of foreign policy (and doesn't seem to care that much), and is sitting at his desk thinking (and I use the term advisedly) - 'I wonder what this big red button does...' Oh yes, I vaguely thought on reading about the floods in The South that maybe this was supposed to be a message like Repent your sins or I wash you off the face of the Earth. If so it missed Washington DC by about a 1,000 miles and Texas by 500. It probably missed GWB by a couple of light years. No, I thought not. Thank you for the cheery thought anyway. -- Chris Benson
Re: www.gateway.gov.uk
On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 10:10:28PM -0500, Mike Jarvis wrote: Tuesday, June 12, 2001, 2:55:38 PM, Chris Benson wrote: CB I wash you off the face of the Earth. If so it missed Washington DC CB by about a 1,000 miles and Texas by 500. It probably missed GWB by a CB couple of light years. Missed Texas by 500 miles? I think not. I was in Houston. Worst place on earth. I most definatly did NOT miss Texas. I need to read the news more often, I was thinking about Louisiana! I also need to get a better grip of the geography: I thought LA. was the Florida side of Mississippi and Alabama. -- Chris Benson
Re: www.gateway.gov.uk
On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 11:26:39AM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: (If I understand the current requirements, you have to buy MacOS (from Apple) or Windows (from Microsoft) to run your free (no cost) browser) IIUIC IE on MacOS lets you look at the site, but you can't do anything useful due to lack of certificates. (Is it legal to be anticompetitive by encouraging a duopoly?) Hardly a duopoly! Anyone see the Steve Bell cartoon in the Gaudrian: on Saturday: Light conquers the forces of darkness ... with the light in question shining from the arse of a fat cat with no noticable resemblance to anyone in Redmond. However, it's hardly the end of the world It will be when you get the Go to Jail card because you haven't filled in your on-line tax return. Best start shouting now. No, but it is the start of the long slippery slope. Which most of us hope to avoid travelling down. I agree. It's the not the end of the world. Just the beginning of the end. Amen. Why, when the sun is shining (almost) and there is a popular (?) govt. do I feel like I did in early/mid 70's: like the end of the world was nigh? -- Chris Benson -- It ain't dark yet, but it's getting there.
Re: www.gateway.gov.uk
On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 11:26:39AM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: (If I understand the current requirements, you have to buy MacOS (from Apple) or Windows (from Microsoft) to run your free (no cost) browser) Looking at open.gov.uk, there is mention of the move to ukonline.gov.uk but no mention of gateway.gov.uk. Didn't ukonline.co.uk complain about trademark infringement a while back? Is gateway.gov.uk the result? and is there any possible trademark confusion with this address? -- Chris Benson
Re: Religion (was Re: M$ SQueaLServer)
On Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 10:11:13AM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote: * GUI I really don't want to have a server running a GUI, it adds at least some overhead, encourages people to `work on the server' and as its an additional process may add additional security concerns. And huge numbers of people think it's neat to run the GL screen saver using 100% CPU, disabling interrupts so much the system clock drifts by ~10min/hour While its possible (at least it was) to configure NT not to have a GUI, the whole toolset is designed to have a GUI and GUI tools available. So with Windows you are pretty much stuck with it, with UNIX, X isn't tightly integrated into the OS. Remote text-based access ... without additional software. * Mature Server Software Windows leads the world in desktop software, however it doesn't have as much mature server side software, and i'm not just talking about server processes, i'm thinking about Cron, Procmail, Perl, etc. And what there is, is integrated with the o/s (also applies to GUI): if the service goes AWOL it takes out the whole O/S. * No compiler Why can't there be a compiler? Please just a simple one, so that if i want to write some little program for myself I can do it there and then. Its not that much to ask, it would just mean that when you get ActiveState Perl lets you do all the damage you need shurely :-) a fresh windows box you dont have to go and waste time installing additional software, and there are other examples of this ... VNC vi.exe/emacs.exe bash.exe Win/SSH Anti-virus s/ware Intrusion Detection s/ware Lynx Editor Scripting language Cron * Final reason (for now) I don't trust them. Amen -- Chris Benson
Re: tape changes
On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 08:04:46PM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote: umm .. so .. you people with boxen in various places .. quick show of hands: is 15 quid a shot cheap [ ] normal[ ] expensive [ ] for lobbing a dat tape into a box and slinging in a new one? That seemed the going rate for the dirt-cheap boxhosters I looked at. OTOH It makes Nildram's gbp2000 p.a. including 15mins of technician/day to do whatever you need seem very good value. RANTThis is the difference between a company looking at every person as a cost centre who has to earn their keep (by screwing the customer as often and as deeply as possible) and someone looking to provide a service by offering the customer what they need./RANT (I also liked that boxen at Nildram were only a link or two from LYNX while a couple of the large co-locators I considered were 10 hops inside BT's tangled web away). -- Chris Benson * unsolicited free recommendations a speciality *
Re: XML
On Tue, May 29, 2001 at 09:48:28AM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote: Anyway, does anyone know of any XML authoring tools (any platform) that let you compose XML against a Schema (latest spec), enforcing validation as you go? XML-Spy seems great in most respects but appears to have bugs in this last one. We've been using 0.9x versions of epcEdit for the last few months (http://www.tksgml.de/ maybe moved to http://www.epcedit.de/) but the recently released v1.0 only gives 60?90? days use before requiring payment. It has crashed a few times (usually on Widnos) but we've used it to create a 300+ page book and will do a second next month. Win32, Linux/i386 and Solaris versions available. Uses Tcl/Tk and a custom library. Some niggles with the user interface (cursor moving off-screen during a large paste, ...) but it absolutely enforces the schema and can show list the valid tags at each point. We'll be buying it before the end of June for I think c. us$400 -- Chris Benson
Re: [OT] Food exports?
On Tue, May 22, 2001 at 07:22:11PM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: Someone just laid what I think is a fresh urban myth on me, but is there any kind of embargo on comestibles going from England to France? Like even wrapped chocolate? A sign at Barcelona airport says that passengers to GB and Netherlands will have all dairy products removed on arrival or something like that (the English version was rather worn away by people who have to point at words). I bought non-milk xocolate with my remaining pesetas. -- Chris Benson
Re: [OT] Food exports?
On Mon, May 28, 2001 at 12:45:30PM +, Redvers Davies wrote: A sign at Barcelona airport says that passengers to GB and Netherlands I went to Barcelona during the height of FMD. They told us on the plane that we were going to be sterilised on arrival. ... and did they?? :-) Who didn't... hmmm... Did you go to Menserat(bad spelling) by any chance? Pick up some of their xocolate or wonderfull liquers? This was an exploratory trip to see if we liked it. I'll add those to the todo/toget list for the real visit: thank you. I read your final sentence as wonderful xocolate liquers and wondered (a) how come I hadn't heard of same and (b) what on earth it would be like! -- Chris Benson
Re: [gnat@frii.com: Damian Conway's Exegesis 2]
On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 10:13:23AM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote: p.s. I have never used Delphi. scores 8/10 as a BD language (it *is* related to Pascal :-) scores 9/10 for does-what-you-expect OTOH the documentation (when I used it) scored -1. (Whereas VB3 (or was it VB4) scored -INFINITY because it would permanently change the size of windows on it's own initiative and of course be trashed by every single piece of s/ware that installed a .DLL) -- Chris Benson if you can't do it in Perl in half-an-hour it's not worth doing.
Re: TPC Quiz Team
On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 06:45:33AM -0600, Nathan Torkington wrote: It's been so long, I have to ask: what was my article in the most recent TPJ? :-) You want me type it in?? All about arrays, Basics, Positions, Position vs count, foreach loops, reverse and sort, ... Sound familiar? -- Chris Benson
Re: putting escape characters in files
On Fri, May 11, 2001 at 11:14:08AM +0100, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote: On Fri, 11 May 2001, Dominic Mitchell wrote: On Fri, May 11, 2001 at 11:41:20AM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: Dominic Mitchell wrote: assuming you can get into a bourne shell, you can still do things like write cat(1) in sh, as well. This is not going to help you pause output. Although it'd be hard to control without ^S and ^Q, ...which was what the original post was all about. No, you'd need the maths operators that came with later shells, so you could work out lines. Dammit, I'm going to have to write shmore now. #!/bin/sh lineno=1 while read line do lineno=$((lineno+1)) if [ $(($lineno % 24)) = 0 ] ; then echo -n -- more -- read ans /dev/tty test $ans = q exit 0 fi done That breaks if the line is longer than the width of your screen. echo $line --- echo `echo $line | dd bs=79 count=1 2/dev/null` -- Chris Benson P.S. Why are we doing this in sh(1)??
Re: More revolting natives
On Sun, May 06, 2001 at 08:49:56PM -0500, Mike Jarvis wrote: Saturday, May 05, 2001, 5:33:47 AM, Brad Bowman wrote: BB An Irish friend once had trouble convincing a Mid-Westerner BB that Ireland was a country in Europe not a State near the BB Canadian border. A cow-orker of mine had to be told that Spain was in Europe, not South America. Mmmm, what if these Yanks are masters of windup ... and think *we* don't have a sense of humour? :- -- Chris Benson
Re: Beginners Guide
On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 11:34:02AM +0100, Robert Shiels wrote: - Original Message - From: "Matthew Byng-Maddick" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Personally I don't mind funding the beeb, as long as the quality of content they produce is high. I do object to funding random corporations whose interests are to their shareholders... Sorry, I don't mind funding the BBC either, I think I get very good value for money at the moment, it's worth it for Radio4 alone. What I object to is paying twice, which is what would be happening if I paid a monthly subscription to see the digital BBC channels that nobody actually wants[1]. Hear, Hear! I don't mind funding the BBC either, but I won't pay for a TV license when I don't have a TV: **BRING BACK THE RADIO LICENSE** I am annoyed that I am now paying for this digital stuff indirectly, and I can't watch it. I'm going to go to the BBC website and gripe some more about this :-) Of course when Demon Internet finally sort out my Premier Connect Plus subscription I'll go to the BBC website and listen to Radio4 for free and feel even more guilty. Actually I'll probably listen to www.todayfm.ie: 17:00-19:00 "Last Word" with Eamon Dunfy? giving politicans a hard time, then at 19:00 to 22:00 "Pet Sounds" with Neil Dunn and 22:00 onwards "Into the Night". (or on Sunday nights "Dad Rock" - sounds of the '70s :-) -- Chris Benson -- waiting for the next round of letters accusing me of criminality because I don't have a TV license. If anyone else is interested the directors of Envision Licensing Limited t/a TVLA are: Nigel Howlett, Ms Kim Lambert, Jonathan Evans. John Jack is the Chairman. The registered address is Hardwick House, Prospect Place, Swindon, SN1 3LJ. I was planning to ask them all to prove that they were not paedophiles, but the SO suggests this may be too outrageous and therefore ignored, so I think I will instead offer them a buffet from: /(paedophilia|(income |corporation )?tax fraud|software theft|patent infringement)/ This suggests to me that I should report the FAST to BSA for software license fraud and vice versa! Wow, do you think I should patent that idea?? Or maybe I should stop drinking.
Re: (Don't Laugh) Buying PGP
On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 02:26:54PM +0100, dcross - David Cross wrote: Hah! If I can't get them to use GPG, I have _no_ chance with Samba. The Unix box in question is running AIX. *Cough* several IBM people I've spoken to believe that IBM's FastConnect(tm) "PC integration software for AIX" or whatever, *is* SAMBA ... and IBM were listed as supporters on the 2.x release notes this week ... (an the "IBM HTTP server" is Apache ...). I wouldn't know because we've just mke2fs'd the last FAT filesystem in the company :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: Broadcast datagrams
On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 03:25:09AM -0700, Paul Makepeace wrote:
Anyone hackers here sent broadcast packets? I think this is how you
do it:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Socket;
my $dst = inet_aton("172.30.255.255");
socket(SOCKET, PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, getprotobyname("udp"))
or die "socket: $!";
setsockopt(SOCKET, SOL_SOCKET, SO_BROADCAST, pack("l", 1))
or die "setsockopt: $!";
send(SOCKET, "hello", 0, sockaddr_in(6868, INADDR_BROADCAST))
#send(SOCKET, "hello", 0, sockaddr_in(6868, $dst))
or die "send: $!";
I'd agree, tho' I don't think you need to pack() the last arg to
setsockopt().
For some reason I'm getting "send: Can't assign requested address"
for INADDR_BROADCAST. How can it *not* assign that? Flipping the
I had a lot of fungames with this (before LDS's book came out!):
Trying both IO::Socket and Socket.pm, I could do either read or
write but not both ... and had that msg.
My definitely working version is:
socket(SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, getprotobyname('udp'))
|| die "$prog: socket: $!\n";
...
my $rip = INADDR_BROADCAST;
$rip = inet_aton($opt{d}) if defined $opt{d};
my $raddr = sockaddr_in($opt{p}, $rip);
setsockopt(SOCK, SOL_SOCKET, SO_BROADCAST, 1)
|| die "$prog: setsockopt: $!\n";
send(SOCK, $msg . "\015\012", 0, $raddr)
|| die "$prog: send: $!\n";
Which looks the same but for the pack().
--
Chris Benson
Re: Errors Building HTML::Parser on AIX
On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 03:21:07PM +0100, Jonathan Stowe wrote: Is AIX one of those OS that requires you to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or some equivalent to load a shared library - although this shouldnt be the case for the binary part of a module because dynaloader searches in a bunch of places relative to @INC ... export LIBPATH=colon:separated:list:of:dirs on planet AIX. If that is the problem. -- Chris Benson
Re: [HELP] Quick question about Red Hat and gb keyboards
On Fri, Apr 06, 2001 at 11:43:56AM +0200, Merijn Broeren wrote: looked with jwz's [1] xkeycaps. Xmodmap seems to make no difference. [1] Correct single quote usage? Yup :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: Job: I'm looking for one..
On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 01:03:14AM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 12:56:37PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: Try doing Java in Lynx. Or Mosaic. Is there even a plugin for Netscape 3.0? Lynx Mosaic practically don't exist, demographically speaking. Bzzzt! Lynx doesn't exist *in*the*logs* because a Lynx user d/loads one page sees that the company is basically saying "FUCK OFF I DON'T WANT YOUR BUSINESS" and never comes back. Whereas Nescape/IE d/loads 500 separate line segments, icons, title-bars, tool-bars, spinning logos and other crap and instantly become "demographic-leaders". Mmmm, I think I better chill-out a bit. -- Chris Benson -- Lynx user when I can, Netscape for the crap.
Re: ISO8601 [was] Re: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.
On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 02:46:48PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 10:23:12AM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: Roger Burton West [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: You show me a DNS server which supports kanji :-) This is a big bugbear of mine. Yes, you can register domains in all these weird scripts, but there's bugger all software support for them, and it will take *years* to replace all that's out there with new versions. Look at how slowly crypto use is spreading, or how little-used IPv6 is. IMNSHO, the registrars who are hyping their furrin-language domain registrations are committing a gross fraud, as registrants are led to believe that their new gobbledigook.com will be usable when it ain't. And according to http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/28/1755243.shtml Xanni writes "Intellectual property claims have blindsided the Internet Engineering Task Force and could derail the group's efforts to develop a common scheme for supporting foreign-language domain names across the Internet. NWFusion is carrying the story." Great! get the lawyers involved :-( -- Chris Benson
Re: ISO8601 [was] Re: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.
On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 12:26:46PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: Chris Benson wrote: () - Wouldn't that be rather wasteful? After all, population is distributed What are you wasting? Numbers? What is the cost of extra numbers? Some people in small places have to type 8 digits instead of 3. People in more populous places dial 8 instead of 7 AND DON'T HAVE TO GET NEW SIGNS, STATIONERY, INFORM ALL CONTACTS EVERY YEAR OR TWO. unevenly. You have some cities with lots of inhabitants, and then you have rural areas with a much smaller population density. Does that mean that in rural areas, you (a) have an area code covering a *huge* area, or (b) waste lots of phone numbers? As I see, it's one or the other. But you end up with the situation we've current got - everything is a special case: * London (after 10? 12? years) back with 1 code (01 - 0[78]1 - 01[78]1 - 020) . * Variable length area codes means a lookup table containing every code because the system doesn't know what's area and what's number ... and that table being consulted at every digit. Having short prefixes with many digits for big places and longer prefixes with fewer digits for small places seems to make sense to me. It's how But it doesn't make for simple/fast/scalable computer programs :-( * And when more numbers are needed because of the new business park/housing estate/... ?? Have you never heard messages like: "You have called an invalid number, 4 digit numbers starting with 5 now have a 62 on the front, 4 digit number starting with 4 now have 52 on the front, 5 digit numbers starting with 2 now have a 7 on the front ...". Stamford Lincs. has had several such changes, when I worked there the local printers loved it: an extra Christmas every other April. However, USA and France seem to be doing all right with fixed-length numbers The US numbering plan worked well for ~50 years, but is now showing signs of stress: number exhaustion, overlapping area codes, and others. They are looking at alternatives: 4/3/4, 3/4/4, ... but also appear to be mired in UK-like short-termism. Think ahead, think big: Vint Cerf was thinking big in the late '60s with 32 bit IP addresses and got it way too small. He backed 128 bit IP addresses in the early '90s. And all this has what to do with Buffy? Keep awake at the back there! Try dialing "Northumbria Police" on a number pad, it seems a lot like the 8uffy code mentioned in another thread :-) (Using capitalisation to denote 0/1 bits: oNe BiT eAcH lEtTeR = 010 101 0101 010101 = 01010101, 01010101 = "UU"). -- Chris Benson
Re: ISO8601 [was] Re: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.
On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 03:29:21PM +0100, Paul Mison wrote: There must have been *some* way Oftel could have made something similar work here. The people in uk.telecom were suggesting a one-off-this-will-hurt-but- it'll-only-happen-once change where the entire country moved to () - format, back in the early '90s to my knowledge (some of them were probably suggesting it back in the '60s, they'd been there long enough :-). Instead we get a numbering system consisting entirely of patches :-( -- Chris Benson
Re: ISO8601 [was] Re: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.
On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 10:04:34AM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 02:09:50PM +0100, Piers Cawley wrote: the fuckwits at Oftel lumbered us with 01[78]1 in the first place is something of a mystery to me... Was it Oftel that made that choice or BT? I was assumed it was the lumbering ineptitude of The World's Most Evil Phone Company (to whom it's customary, and justified, to attribute both malice ** stupidity). The word (again from uk.telecom) was that it was officially Oftel, but BT told them to do it: "Alternatives were [] technically impossible, [] would confuse the subscribers [] would confuse the elderly [] would cost business too much". Pick any that might just possibly apply. This may be related to how Oftel was originally staffed: my impression was that it was just the bit of the Post Office that monitored the Telephone bits: they got split off into Oftel. -- Chris Benson
Re: ISO8601 [was] Re: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.
On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 12:04:05PM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 07:28:31PM +0100, Chris Benson wrote: it'll-only-happen-once change where the entire country moved to () - Twelve and eight digit phone numbers? So phalanxes of psychologists noting that the human brain has the magic number seven genetically imprinted into it should just be tossed out the window? That's 7+/-2 remember and the 7-2 crowd are screwed anyway :-) so why not up the ante a bit more! Anyway who remembers full telephone numbers? my GF used to be tyneside(0191), jesmond(281), 1143, the taxi is tyneside(0191), newcastle-centre(261), . I still don't see what's wrong with the US system. Sure, it's filling up but then the population is 5x the UK and I'd bet they have more per capita business (i.e. allocated business lines) than the UK. But it *is* filling up now: the aim being, like with IPng, to not have to change again: neat quote from the Economist about IPv6 ... 4 billion addresses for each of 4 billion people on each of 4 billion planets in each of 4 billion galaxies. This should be enough to cope with expected growth in numbers of mobile devices, Internet-capable household appliances and so on for the next few millenia. /neat Anyway, the whole 'numbers' thing is long over due to be replaced by those new fangled 'letters'. Works for DNS... But DNS maps onto ... numbers, 4-12 digit numbers, soon to be luvverly 8 x 4 hex digits! And I'd rather dial 999^W112 than mm,mmm,r,rrr,fff,u,m,aa,r,i,a,#,p,mmm, or whatever "northumbria police" translates to :-) Hey, maybe this is another 8uffy encoding system? Instead we get a numbering system consisting entirely of patches :-( Yes, it's embarrassing. "So, why *is* your country's phone system so utterly hosed?" I'm assuming that's a rhetorical question since you've asked it in polite company :-) But you have to wonder: BT, RailTrack the ToCs, Water Co.s, ... The Dome, ... I've actually started sending DepressoGrams(tm) to homesick friends in New Zealand to make them feel better! -- Chris Benson
Re: Fwd: Sheffield LUG: Linux 2.4 kernel meeting
On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 09:18:51PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: Just in case any of our northerly lurkers are interested ... This northerly lurker thanks you. Of course Sheffield-Newcastle direct is via Virgin, the alternative is GNER to Doncaster. Neither of these seem particularly appealing! Sheffield Linux Users Group (ShefLUG) 1 pm Saturday 14th April 2001 finish at about 4 p.m. ShefLUG Venue: Blackwell's Bookshop West Street Sheffield S1 3ST for the location of Blackwell's bookshop see http://www.multimap.co.uk -- Chris Benson
Re: TPC5
On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 12:08:04PM +, David Cantrell wrote: Good point. Sometimes it's hard to remember that there is life outside the M25. Errm ... if you *really* want to have it in the UK, consider manchester and birmingham. Both have international airports, large hotels and conference centres. I expect Edinburgh does too although I'm not sure if there are direct flights to .us - but that's OK, there's no direct flights from .eu to Monterey :-) And NCL (Newcastle) has 6 flights/day to Schiphol (a way better hub than any of the London 'ports) and a *much* better QoL ... but it's a looong way from the money. And of course the Metro won't be on strike 3 Mondays in February either! -- Chris Benson - who needs to get to Liverpool St. for 0830 Monday 19th Feb :-(tm)
Re: ArsDigita working practices (was: Big Macs v The Naked Chef -- )
On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 09:04:24PM +, Robin Houston wrote: 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 :-) I suspect it is *not* tongue-in-cheek -- he wants only the best and does expect 70-80 hour weeks ... during a project. In some discussion I saw about this he justified it two ways that I remember: (1) not everyone worked on projects all the time and (2) if people did work full time on projects they'd be getting about ~us$500k / year. (Having spent the entire 80's doing 70-80 hour weeks for less than gbp10k I'd liked to have had the chance!). There are also good bits there which have been mentioned in other threads: quote The average home cannot accomodate a pinball machine. An office can. The average home can have video games, which are very popular with young programmers, but not people with whom to play. The average home cannot have a grand piano but almost any office can. Attractive A worthwhile goal is to have at least one thing that is extremely attractive about the physical enivronment for any particular prospective software engineer. Here's a possible list: * dog-friendly policy * grand piano * climbing wall * indoor garden * aquarium * koi pond * exercise room with fancy machines * pinball machine /quote I don't think I'd like to work for them though ... I'm getting old'n'soft :-( and I find the attitude that comes over in Phil Greenspun's writing rather (very!) arrogant. And of course they use shudder TCL. But the organisational structure and strategy/vision *is* interesting. Who might come to PO on Monday night (with chqbook for the machine) to see what people are thinking of doing. -- Chris Benson
Re: Perl commandments - index .vs. //
On Tue, Jan 09, 2001 at 12:50:08PM +, Piers Cawley wrote:
David Cantrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Also index. These two snippets are equivalent:
if($foo=~/foo/) { ... }
if(index($foo, 'foo')!=-1) { ... }
I always want to do just plain if(index(...)) though.
ISTR that (for weird reasons), the regex version of that is faster.
If it is, it appears to be hidden by the other code ...
beta:~ $ perl match-cmp
Name "main::words" used only once: possible typo at match-cmp line 5.
Benchmark: running index, index_, regex, regex_, each for at least 10 CPU seconds...
index: 19 wallclock secs (18.71 usr + 0.00 sys = 18.71 CPU) @ 1.50/s (n=28)
index_: 19 wallclock secs (19.41 usr + 0.00 sys = 19.41 CPU) @ 1.49/s (n=29)
regex: 19 wallclock secs (19.11 usr + 0.01 sys = 19.12 CPU) @ 1.36/s (n=26)
regex_: 19 wallclock secs (18.62 usr + 0.00 sys = 18.62 CPU) @ 1.50/s (n=28)
beta:~ $ cat match-cmp
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Benchmark;
push @ARGV, '/usr/dict/words';
@words = ;
timethese( -10, {
regex = 'foreach $word (@words) { $word =~ /foo/ }',
regex_ = 'foreach (@words) { /foo/ }',
index = 'foreach $word (@words) { index $word, "foo" }',
index_ = 'foreach (@words) { index $_, "foo" }',
}
);
--
Chris Benson
Re: Books
On Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 01:26:25PM +, David Hodgkinson wrote: It took me three bookshops on Charing Cross Road to get a perl library together for the guys I'm working with, but I managed it without having to go into Foyle's. Yeah! The bonus was a second edition of Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls". A classic. Aha, you've left yourself open to pedants here: ... Is that 2nd edition as in with updates? Or as in "Reprinted with corrections May, 1989"? If the first, what's the difference? Is it worth getting it if you've already got 1.ed? Also, are you going to get them "More Programming Pearls, Confessions of a Coder" as well? -- Chris Benson
