Re: crazy golf
On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 02:31:39PM +, Redvers Davies wrote: Assuming you're not a Masai tribesperson. And assuming that the Romans weren't lying about the Celts (Though why would they want to do that?) It would seem to me to be counter-productive. If you want to conquer a country you don't spread rumours that they drink their victims blood. Well why not? It allows you to claim a moral reason for conquering them in the first place (which is as necessary for keeping morale and a sense of purpose among your own people as anything else), and quite possibly has longer-term military benefits, as in The Celts were a bunch of mad, blood-drinking nutters, But we conquered them anyway, so why don't you open your doors and play nicely, and we won't have to unleash our fearsome military power upon you. For some reason, the mental image of a horde of wild Celts quaffing blood keeps mixing in my head with that of a bunch of perl programmers in a cellar bar, quaffing TVRs... Must be the full moon :) -- simon batistoni | [EMAIL PROTECTED] stop right here cos i know where i'm going to
RE: (OT) constrained walk
Has anyone got a proper lundun map with tube lines indicated... that would be just chops. just posted to the crisps list, http://www.sitw.f2s.com/london/maps/geog.gif It's not a proper london map, and the resolution is terrible, but I'm sure a grafix wizard could do an overlay job
RE: Not Matt's Scripts
On Wed, 02 May 2001, you wrote: Just had a look, and apparently the Formmail scripts have been ported to Win32 and use something called Blat instead of sendmail. Is there any reason why we couldn't use Blat too? I'm looking into it to see if I can get it working. ahh yes ... trouble is .. there must be half a dozen 'popular' mailers for win32 ...blat is just one of many (or so I'm told) the only thing I remember is blat is a file based thing, you have to put your mail in a file on the disc and then tell blat to send it, at least thats the way formmial was using it. Blat can be used the command-line way, by specifying '-' as the input file (hey - a unix convention!) The following snippet works like a dream. $mail_program='c:\winnt\system32\blat.exe'; $from_field='My Lovely Site [EMAIL PROTECTED]'; open (MAIL, |$mail_program - -t \$recipient\ -i \$from_field\ -s \$subject\); Then just print to MAIL, and close the filehandle when you're done. Of course, this comes back to the fact that the user will need to have control of/know where the NT mailer exists, but I believe most NT hosting services do install blat, and tell people where it is.
RE: Not Matt's Scripts
more on blat/win32 mailers Arse, apologies for the two messages - I remembered the following and pressed send simultaneously... IMHO (and I've looked into this in some depth for various projects over the past 2 years), there aren't that many command-line mailers for win32. The only other anywhere-near-prolific one is W3JMail, which is an absolute arse to configure, and is only used in most outfits because it plugs very well into ASP pages. All the cheap hosting companies I've ever seen who do NT and offer mail-out facilities do blat. Any other command-line mailers which exist are generally unstable, unconfigurable or downright obscure. My advice would be to configure Win32 systems to use blat out of the box, and (possibly) invite input from people who use anything different. That's the OSS way, after all!
RE: Backslash
Mark: a) What and Why is backslash? b) Is this better/worse/indifferent? Should I use it instead? I'd love to know both of these. I can't find anything regarding backslash following a quick trawl of the slashcode site. I'm immediately pre-disposed against it simply because, even if only the name differs, simply because it adds to the standards (original RDF, RSS and now this) being used for site newsfeeds, and therefore makes the job of integrating newsfeeds a right pain in the arse. c) How do I parse it (XML::RSS doesn't work, am I going to have to code it from hand?) Dipsy seems to be able to cope with this.. The infobot code doesn't do a proper XML parse. It simply pulls in the file using LWP::UserAgent, and regexes for the title, url and time tags within the file, which happen not to have changed in the backslash format. sb
RE: Crazy Idea
Subject: Re: Crazy Idea marroons We once had a nuts teacher at school who let some 12-year-old kid (whose dad was a pyrotechnics expert) bring some of these in for a war scene in a production. I don't know whether they were made by LeMaitre, but the large ones were 10 inches long, with a 3 inch diameter. 2 nights out of 3, they caught fire after exploding, and had to be stamped on by yours truly (I was wearing combat boots, fortunately). We then stole one of the largest ones, wedged it in a fence in the village/housing estate crossbreed where I grew up, wrapped a large amount of paper tape around the end, and set fire to it. The electrical fuse rigups are supposed to control the detonation somewhat. Setting fire to the end doesn't. The explosion was heard at least 1/2 a mile away, and the police attended the scene, where they were puzzled by the fence containing a large hole, and the bits of paper and other unidentifed stuff from the casing, which was littered everywhere like confetti. We wanted to steal another one and put it in a dustbin, but we only just got away with covering the first theft by judicious lying...
Matt's Scripts Replacement - The name and sundry other things.
I thought that 'EasyScripts' (or, even, 'EZScripts') had most people's approval. I thought it ws alright - well, taking the target audience into account :) ...which is the *only* important factor in this equation. I'm still enough of a newbie (those on IRC will have just experienced my joy at using an effective 'map' statement for the first time) that I can remember being tasked with building a site from scratch, and knowing no perl at all. I was ambitious enough to learn from scratch, but the 'free' scripts out there were tempting. I knew nothing but a few lines of any language at the time, and I almost grabbed the first thing I could make work, and shoved it up on the server. In the end, I had more curiosity and conscience than that, and I went through "Learning Perl" and a database-driven site tutorial, and wrote a system from scratch. However, from those people I've seen on communities like monkeyjunkies and evolt, as well as IRL, most people in the market for 'free scripts' aren't like that. They don't care if it's in perl or in swahili (or, more importantly, in PHP), if they can make it work without a headache. And at the moment, there are more free PHP scripts out there that work than there are perl ones. Generally, they hve generic product names, occasionally with a nod towards the language (phorum, for example), but really quite generic. We need the name of this archive to be similarly generic. The fact the scripts are in perl only matters to the target users 6 months to a year after they install them, when they want to tweak them, or finally get curious about how their site actually works. I'm a big fan of "EasyScripts" as a name. It may be cheesy, but I'm guessing the majority of the target audience will lap it up. And it's available (or was) as a domain. It's simple to remember, and simple to type, meaning it will get spread by word of mouth. And while I'm semi-ranting, there is *no* argument to be had on the .zip vs .tar.gz files front. Anyone who knows any Linux at all will be able to unzip .zips on a linux box, or unzip them in windows and upload the contents afterwards. OTOH, there are plenty of newbies who will be scared shitless by the sight of a .tar.gz, and be even more disconcerted by Winzip's frankly confusing method of opening them. Ergo, the scripts should be distributed as .zips (and no, a choice between 2 formats is not acceptable - people will get confused). point type="beaten to death" *Lowest* *Common* *Denominator* /point On a separate, but important note, I know a fair few people at evolt, so I will submit an article on the archive as soon as it's in a publically presentable state, explaining what's wrong with Matt, even from the "but-I-don't-care" user's point of view, and why these scripts are a few million times better. There are a *lot* of newbies over there, and it should give us a reasonable kick in terms of publicity. And (bear with me - I'm in a stream of consciousness now) has anyone given any thought to "powered-by" icons? Should the scripts incorporate them into their output (a bit intrusive for my tastes), or should we just make them optional? What does Matt do on this front? Who is a G1MP Ma573r? that is all. -- Simon Batistoni userfrenzy [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 7209 4117
RE: Pointless, Badly-Written Module.
a) a two reasons why this module should never have been written, and 1. It's redundant, other modules do this already. 2. MM DD YY is an evil date format, and should be abolished in favour of DD MM YY which is more sensible. Not to mention the fact that YY in itself is also bad from a medium to long-term perspective. , anyone? And YY(YY) MM DD is arguably an even more sensible date format than DD MM YY, in cases where you want to be able to efficiently sort data on the date. DD MM YY leads to 01-01-01 being sorted next to 01-02-01, with 02-01-01 appearing further down the list. MMDDYY is about as backwards and illogical as you can possibly get[0]. [0] - Although I wouldn't be surprised if the author of this module hasn't also got an MDYMDY date sort in the pipeline :)
RE: Matt's Scripts Projects
At 13:18 19/03/2001 +, Mark Fowler wrote: On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Simon Wilcox wrote: b) That is should have a name that appeals to newbies. How about EasyScripts ? the domain name is available, anyway. Not very perl, but I like it. Something similar though. EasyPerlScripts or even EZPerlScripts (for the American audience :) ? My own two-penn'orth would be that it's better without the 'perl'. It's easier to say, easier to type, and to be honest, the target audience for Matt's archive don't give a monkeys what language the script is written in. They're told they want "a guestbook script", they go get "a guestbook script." Perl can be emphasised in the text of the page, and brought to the fore when you come to optimise the page to be found in search engines, etc etc. It's also more generic, which means you can legitimately 'funnel in' websurfers who are looking for PHP scripts, and then brainwash^Weducate them as to why they don't want that shit, they want *this* shit. -- Simon Batistoni userfrenzy [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 7209 4117
Descrambling CSS w/ 7 Lines Of Perl
Wow! A perl post on london.pm...
I know most people here probably read Slashdot, but this was too sweet to
pass up.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# 526-byte qrpff, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED]
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file on stdin - descrambled output on stdout
# arguments: title key bytes in least to most-significant order
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$c=142;if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]48){$h=5;
$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$/;$d=
unxV,xb25,$_;$b=73;$e=256|(ord$b[4])9|ord$b[3];$d=$d8^($f=($t=255)($d
12^$d4^$d^$d/8))17,$e=$e8^($t($g=($q=$e147^$e)^$q*8^$q6))9
,$_=(map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=($m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])110;$t
^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16-2?0:$m17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271)
)
[$_]^(($h=8)+=$f+(~$g$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eva
l
Code originally at:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/qrpff.pl
Slasdot story:
http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/01/03/06/1954213.shtml
RE: Descrambling CSS w/ 7 Lines Of Perl
its at times like this, the fact we are archived suddenly seems a good thing (TM) That occurred to me as I was posting it, although it could actually make it a violation of the DMCA to read our archive anywhere inside the borders of the US... :) Anyway, the guy who originally posted the perl code to the web is archiving as many copies of DeCSS as he can get his hands on, going as far as the rock song which uses the code as the lyrics: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ He's already been approached by the MPAA's lawyers (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/mpaa-00-02-08.html), and his basic response was "do ya feel lucky? well? do ya?" (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/mpaa-reply-feb2001.html) They went away, tails between their ratty little legs...
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? You mean... there are enough internet companies left in London to form a cricket league? :)
RE: FOOD
on 4/1/01 11:03 am, David Hodgkinson wrote: Anyone fancy dim sum shortly? What, when McDonalds are doing 2-for-1? ;) Barf. Yeah, but at the moment you get to barf *twice* each visit :)
