Leisure Suit Larry

« Mushroom lamp. »

Inspired on this very rare occasion by /. and it's comments on the What is Perl 6? story, I thought I would share a vision with the few perl people with a sense of humour about perl6 left.

Envision a few perl freaks in leisure suits ala SNL and One Night at the Roxbury. Now, cue the music in the pub at some perl conference where they go around trying to enthuse perl guys by singing:

What is Perl?
Baby don't hurt me
Don't hurt me
No more

I sense there is either a lightning talk or a psychotherapy goldmine in there somewhere. :)

permalink Ω 17 January 2006, Helsinki

Lofty Ideals 0 Grim Reality 1

« The Aaargh! shop sign on Lastenkodinkuja in Töölö »

I heard about a rather unhappy turn of events for a friend of mine yesterday. Chip Salzenberg is one of the nicest people I know, most especially among those of the perl persuasion. It would appear that, in a fit of righteous indignation upon finding the unseemly underside of the company employing him, he sent a letter threatening legal action that elicited an unsurprising response from the company; he was fired, the company is suing him and police seized his personal computers since he worked from home and his computers contained proprietary data.

I have absolutely no doubt that what Chip wrote is an honest assessment, but being a cynic who has only rarely had low expectations of humanity be too pessimistic, I'm very sorry he didn't err on the side of seeking legal counsel before sending that letter and winding up on the defensive rather than the offensive side of the game. In a country where corporate crooks of the highest order walk every day, thinking that an angry letter would make a small-time criminal company go legit is, well, terribly näive. The moral of the story is always seek legal counsel if you think you're working for a bunch of crooks. Crooks aren't honest people and, lofty ideals be damned, they'll put a cap in your ass if you try something stupid like this. Welcome to grim reality.

I like to root for the underdog and for those getting screwed for trying to do the right thing. There's a website, GeeksUnite.net, that has a copy of the letter and a short bio of Chip that doesn't include his talent as a walking movie quote database or his love of MST3K, both of which are commendable character traits. I hope his lawyers are better than the MS Frontpage webpage design might suggest as he's in a serious bind and will need top notch legal counsel to extract his ass and his computers from the pit. Chip is a decent human being whom I'd hate to see get shafted by some sleazy grifters like this so donate if you can to his defense fund since I suspect he'll have an expensive case with a yet uncertain outcome. As always, follow the money and cover your ass.

permalink Ω 30 June 2005, Helsinki

All's Quiet

« The 'staff only' door to the now vacant office. One detail might give away which staff. :) »

Last night, the city was so quiet that even the local police commented in the paper today that it was half as rowdy as a normal Friday night. It's even rather quiet this morning which makes me nervous that people are gearing up for a 24-hour orgiastic drink-athon. It's like being back home when the sky goes dark and green, the wind dies and you're waiting for the torrential rain and the hail to begin. Happy Vappu/May Day/Walpurgis to all. :)

This week there was an Open Source conference in Moscow where, rather surprisingly, Larry gave a talk about community building with Open Source [.ppt ~3mb]. Old timers will notice it being a classic Larry talk by using a lot of pictures, being very vague and mentioning god at least once. There's really only one person who has put up with all the PITA Perl people over the past decade, including myself, who has actively tried to keep the community going but who has started to drift away from this role and it has begun to show; it's not Larry. Larry is the somewhat mythical god figure who very occasionally says something from the mount, these days usually about the similarly fabled perl6. When so many of the bright older guys who aren't given to personality worship have gone, the void is inadequately filled by starfucker/fanboys who haven't figured out that titles of "The" are only used for the infamous dead or artists whose careers are in a slump. It might have been interesting to talk about how Perl6 caused a schism and how the population surrounding the language has fundamentally changed since then, but that would require something a lot more concrete and insightful than, to summarize Larry's talk, people are people.

permalink Ω 30 April 2005, Helsinki

Electricians are Evil

« Even the trains don't run without electricity. »

The server was down for a day due to electricians cutting the power to the server room and the system didn't come back up on its own. Electricians and thunderstorms are the bane of system administrators as abruptly cutting the power tends to make systems rather unhappy. :) Thanks, again, to Ben for getting the system back online.

Also, someone who enjoys the search.cpan.org CPAN search engine, who works in an academic environment somewhere in the New England area, and who would be willing to host a 2U Sun for the search engine, please email me as we have a box that needs a good home.

permalink Ω 23 October 2004, Helsinki

Stairway to Heaven

« A contestant at the Finnish air guitar finals in Helsinki before competing in the Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu. [do watch the video as one of the winners is a pretty hot looking woman. :)] »

It has often been said that guitars and cars are phallic extensions and, at least with guitars, you can almost picture it as such but air guitar is like clothed public masturbation. :) It's more enjoyable than karaoke for the spectator, at least a sober one, and in the age of MTV who didn't want to play like Eddie Van Halen at one point or another? There was a bit of a judging scandal, too. What in the hell is it with sport scandals this year? If it's not doping or drugs it's a judging fiasco. It takes all the focus off the sport and puts it on the business side. At least no one jumped up on stage and tried to warn the contestants about the impending end of the world.

And, perl people should join me in a moment of silence for the valiant sparc formerly known as chaos.wustl.edu since it gave its last gasp on Friday and will be given to the boneyard for parts. Chaos had been in service for almost ten years and it took 3 years of hard beating when it served as the search.cpan.org host before it was rescued by an E450. I spent a lot of late nights and early morning keeping chaos running when it was getting pummeled and, I think, we bonded. I'm not a very sentimental person but I'm going to miss that poor old box. A special thanks to Alan Reuter and the whole CTS department at Washington University in St. Louis for hosting it for all these years. Chaos also hosted the cpan.org DNS which Ben Hockenhull has fixed for now until I work up the enthusiasm to work with NyetworkSolutions and move things around. So long chaos, I'll miss you. *sniff*

permalink Ω 31 August 2004, Helsinki

Glowing Colons with Barium

« A mannequin in Talinn sporting a t-shirt that reminded me of Perl people with the added bonus that it would make a splash with the apostrophic jihad. »

Last week was YAPC::NA and I am sorry I missed Gnat's Lightning Talk entitled What the Perl Community Needs is a Good Enema. I've heard Gnat give this sort of talk before as repetition is often an effective learning tool, but this time he's getting closer to the truth. Mark Twain, a fellow Missourian and cynic, once said, "Familiarity breeds contempt...and children."

Perl has a seriously dysfunctional family at some levels; there are sacred cows; there are needless politics; people suffer sociopaths for their 'code' and other mystifying reasons. And, like any family with problems who don't want to be confrontational, they tend to focus on the abstract and far more benign symptoms of dysfunction instead which usually does little to fix the problems, but does succeed in shifting the uncomfortable point of focus elsewhere. CPAN is often a very popular target of this phenomenon since it's easy to do, generally vague and it carries little risk that anyone might actually force you to put your money where your mouth is. The problem is people, that's certain, but if there were any leadership in the community the problems would, if not disappear, would at least be far less destructive.

Let's return to July 2000, when TPC4 was in Monterey, CA and I was invited on short notice to attend what was billed as a meeting to attempt to draft something of a "Constitution" for the Perl community. I was intrigued since, at the time, the community was as bitter, ugly, and pissy as a crowd of open source nerds ever were. There were about 11 people in this meeting. After an hour or so of discussion about what could be done to effect some positive social change in the community, Jon Orwant showed up, tried to break the hotel stonewear mugs built to outlast puny humans and somehow the idea of Perl6 became the shining new light that would save Perl from stagnation and doom. I felt a bit betrayed since I had originally pitched up for something I felt was far more important and noone wanted to answer my question "Why?".

I told Jarkko and a few others on the way out of that meeting that they could count on P6 never coming to fruition until the deep and vast social problems in the community were addressed. It wasn't a popular comment, but I remained and still remain firm in my conviction. The P6 project, in spite of itself, turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to P5P since it drew most of the problem people to the 'community rewrite' and left the folks who actually wrote code to get things done. However, I don't think that was really the point of the exercise and it has taken what was a fractured community and simply added another gaping fissure which seems to belch sulphurous gases at regular intervals.

Perl6 presaged what I have come to call "the age of the press release" in the timeline of perl. People not only are legends in their own minds and believe their own press releases, but many projects since have been more concerned with the press release than the actual project itself. It is a culture that has seriously lost sight of what brought us all together in the first place. A culture so incredibly pleased with itself that it forgets that volunteering for a job used to mean that you did the work first without talking it to death. The Perl Foundation is the only place I've EVER gotten bitched out for pressing the issue of sending thank-you notes to donors. ALWAYS thank your donors and volunteers, I don't care if you are some hopped up nerd king who claims Asperger ate your social cortex. I'll admit that I was a real PITA about it, but after 3 years and little improvement it wasn't entirely unwarranted. I think the person behind that particular clusterfuck is on both of our lists of what Nathan calls "Oldbies" and I call "sociopathic MFs". This is the part where I start waving my arms, cussing wildly and ranting about TPF but it, too, is just a victim of the symptoms of a far larger problem.

I was on the White Camel Awards committee Gnat mentions and, with a few other folks, subscribed to the list late but arrived just in time to see the tail end of a rant followed by 2 or 3 people sending "I quit!" messages. I wondered what in the hell was going on, got the lowdown from someone in a private email and thought how typical for perl people to make painful that which could be so easy and possibly even pleasant. I had been prepared to stump for and debate over candidates when I agreed to participate, but the enthusisam was gone after that. I have, for many years, argued that the recipients of the awards should be selected by the people in the community instead of an awards cabal since they are touted as awards for service in the community. The awards are important and they should reflect the opinion of more than 4 or so people in a small cabal of friends who bothered to vote. However, I'm not entirely certain that the community at large could be bothered to care or vote these days. HJ gets it even though he identifies the absence of the inner onion entourage as a symptom in spite of the fact that the YAPC::EU conferences rarely get the 'names' and are the conferences to be at for the active developers in the past few years. He has noted well the necrosis.

While I think Gnat needs to repeat his talk more often and in a more pointed fashion, it needs to focus on the one thing that many of us have pointed at for a long while; Perl needs some strong leadership. It needs leaders who are less concerned about playing politics and making nice to everyone while quietly bitching in the corner and leaders who are willing to defile the sacred cows and who won't be left twisting in the wind alone. Just inviting people to rewrite web pages and join committees sounds a lot like the Perl6 "community rewrite of Perl" call to glory which did little to solve any of the social problems which are the soul of the malaise. Nothing will change until those who enjoy all the benefits of being leaders without actually leading, lead.

When we are young we generally estimate an opinion by the size of the person that holds it, but later we find that is an uncertain rule, for we realize that there are times when a hornet's opinion disturbs us more than an emperor's. -- Mark Twain

I have, rather unexpectedly been getting a lot of quiet support and praise for this piece, but the best quote of all was:

I think the Perl 6 announcement is where Perl jumped the shark.

I suppose that noone is really saying much publicly because, well, few really give a damn anymore, but it's like watching something die a slow, theatrical death and it makes me sad for the days when things were good. I don't know if those for whom I chose my words most carefully for have read this but I can hope that I'm not just preaching to the choir who could fill a large cathedral at this point.

permalink Ω 21 June 2004, Helsinki

The Feng Shui of CPAN

«Palms create a moiré pattern at the Helsinki Botanical Garden.»

Friday morning began a bit more abruptly than usual since the normally rather inperturbable Jarkko grabbed my arm and pulled me out of bed. He noticed that the CPAN's main web page had somehow changed and thought that we had either been hacked or that someone had hijacked the DNS so I had to start poking around before being appropriately caffienated for the day. It was not an auspicious beginning. After a while, I determined that our main web host for CPAN, which is separate from the FUNET mothership since that host is ftp only, decided to redo the main index page, include a bunch of ads with a link to the 'real CPAN page'. I moved the DNS to another host inside the US which has a lot of bandwidth and who had offered previously to be the primary web host for CPAN while we figured out what was going on. The explanation we were offered was that they 'forgot' to tell us about the change in spite of remembering to show it to others. I have some beachfront poperty in Siberia to sell, too.

CPAN has, over the years, been a popular target for criticism since it's not a portal, an enterprise solution, or a myriad of other faddish things that seem to come and go every week on the internet. Many people from other languages have asked how to make their own CPAN and Jarkko wrote The Zen of Comprehensive Archive Networks to try to explain how and I've given the Grokking the CPAN talk at a few conferences attempting to explain how it all works. The CPAN is now, and will be for the foreseeable future, a simple ftp archive. This is all it is; no more, no less. This very simplicity is its strength and its secret to longevity. The various search engines, the RT queue, the testers results, and every other service in the CPAN domain is wholly separate from the archive itself. Those who wish to do something with CPAN and offer it to the world are encouraged to do so, but the second you mess with the heart and soul of the archive, you're going to meet a brick wall.

Since those of us who mind the archive have been on the net since 1985 or earlier, we tend to forget that the obvious for us is not common sense anymore in the post-AOL age of the internet. CPAN has very few rules as we'd like to think of it as one of the last and true holdouts of what the 'free' in free software democracy really means. Open Source is rife with cabals and politics, but unless you're an idiot who really goes out of your way to disturb the overall operation of CPAN, you're free to do what you like. With few exceptions, authors can share their non-commercial code freely via CPAN. People complain that there is a lot of crap on CPAN and, well, they're right, but there's a lot of good stuff there too. CPAN isn't an 'enterprise solution' and I've told people countless times over the years that creating bundles of their own favourite modules or mirroring a subset of CPAN is an attractive option, but CPAN itself isn't going to do that work for you.

There is one policy that we always thought was obvious, clear and self-evident; no ads. In an age of the internet where just about every page you visit has some sort of eyesore layout with blinking ads, CPAN, CTAN and others like us are sites who refuse to sell our souls to the lure of the easy lucre to be made. We can't prevent people who mirror CPAN from placing ads all over their site, but we won't ever list them in the public mirror index. When a few friends at Sun gave us 3 big systems to rescue the search engine, which was chugging on an old Sun Ultra1 with 4GB of diskspace, we settled on doing a little 'powered by Sun' logo addition to try and show our appreciation since it was a tremendous lifesaver. Sadly, it seems to have given folks the idea that it's open season on advertising via their CPAN mirrors. Over the weekend, the following was added to the comments in the index.html to make the policy more obvious;

LEGALESE

You are not allowed to remove or alter these comments.

You are not allowed to rename, remove, or add any files in your public mirror of CPAN.

You are not allowed to alter any file in you public mirror of CPAN EXCEPT that you can add a short acknowledgement for example for your hosting company, company, university, or sponsor into this CPAN top-level index.html by adding a small non-animated image and a hyperlink pointing to your organization with text like "hosted by", "powered by", or "sponsored by" by placing it visually next to the "CPAN master site hosted by FUNET" acknowledgement at the bottom of the page. The image used may not be larger than the one used for the FUNET logo.

Technical sidenote: if you do add an acknowledgement link, please do think of the consequences to your possible downstream CPAN mirrors.

Altering this index.html in any other way is not allowed. Altering any other files is not allowed.

Adding any advertisements or revenue-generating material is strictly forbidden.

Similarly, for your public CPAN mirrors "wrapping" the CPAN web pages into other sites by using e.g. HTML frames is not allowed.

You are allowed to use the files of CPAN to create your own web sites and services since we are just a distributor of the files, we do not own most of them. However, you may not call your creations "CPAN" or "CPAN mirrors". You may say that the files are "mirrored from CPAN".

I will likely add this to the CPAN FAQ as well. Yes, everybody has to eat, yadda, yadda, yadda. If you can't afford to be a public mirror without advertising, then don't be a mirror. Chris Nandor and OSDN have hosted use.perl.org for years and never has there been a single ad or blinking anything as they've been happy with the acknowledgements in the FAQ. If you enjoy using the search.cpan search engine, Webster University in St. Louis and Ben Hockenhull are the ones to blame and I don't get to St. Louis nearly often enough to buy him the countless beers I owe him in lieu of blinking banner ads. Numerous mirrors spread the CPAN to almost every continent on the globe [anyone in antarctica want to mirror CPAN? :)] without the expectation that someone owes them something for the service. At the very least, they should be able to mirror CPAN from somewhere other than the FUNET mirror and not get someone elses advertisements. It's not an advertising portal or a dessert topping or a floorwax; it's an ftp mirror. Remember that and if you see a mirror with google ads or other advertising, know that it is not to be called a CPAN mirror.

permalink Ω 31 May 2004, Helsinki

Is pumpkineer a word?

Alan Burlison has clearly bored of his old toy Solaris 10 and found himself a new one, Paint Shop Pro 8. In his copious spare time when he's not getting the Solaris 10 kernel ready or playing his drum in a samba band [ the biggest in the group he tells me but, well, boys do tend to fancy everything they have as 'the biggest' :) ] he has been keeping himself quite busy honing his rather good skill with PSP.

He first had a go with the Perl 6 Essentials book parody which I now have 2 t-shirts emblazoned with. Now he has done a rather nice spoof of Jarkko as the dark lord of 5.8.1 which was taken, in part, from a series of halloween photos I took a few years ago when I went all Martha Stewart on the pumpkins and made Jarkko pose with them. I made a composite photo just to see how much work Alan must have had to do to get this right. Not resting on his laurels he also made Perl Pumpking in a Nutshell which could deserve to be an actual book, though I suspect the wisdom required for this job cannot be merely learned from an ORA book.

I feel so unworthy of my copy of photoshop now. :) On the upside, Jarkko finally released 5.8.1 and, after more than 3 years of mistress perl, maybe he'll decide to obsess on something else for a change....

permalink Ω 26 September 2003, Helsinki

Peter Scott

Peter Scott is one of those quiet perl people whom I think too few people are really aware of these days. His first book, Perl Debugged is one of the best tech books on the subject out there and now he has a new title in the pipeline, Perl Medic: Maintaining Inherited Code, set for a September publication date from Addison-Wesley. It isn't very often I get a manuscript that I have only praise for with few nits here and there, but both of Peter's books have been such exceptions.

Every person who has ever had the distinct displeasure of inheriting someone else's perl code will find something of value in this book, including those who wish to improve their own code for posterity and for uploading to CPAN. I learned a few things myself since I'm a pretty typical sysadmin hacker where writing tests for code is a luxury when things are written in a 'I needed it 2 hours ago' fashion. Peter has a lovely style of writing and imparts a lot of valuable information in a little under 300 pages which makes it enjoyable to read without being a tech version of War and Peace. :)

Sure, the book doesn't have a cute animal on the cover, but this book should be on every perl programmer's desktop. Make CPAN a better place and perl code around the world easier to maintain, get this book when it's released! I'll stop gushing now :)

permalink Ω 21 August 2003, Helsinki

New Perl6 book out

And now I want the t-shirt. Really! :) The chimera needs a name.

Update: I have, in fact, ordered the t-shirt and now you can too! :) Download the large image of the cover, go to Fotango, create a login and upload the photo in to an album. Once you do that, all you need to do is select 'gifts', choose the right sized t-shirt and select 'shrink to fit' in the shopping cart then check out. For about 13 quid, it'll be on it's way to you shortly. :)

permalink Ω 13 August 2003, Helsinki

YAPC::EU 2003 Photos

The photos for YAPC::EU::Paris are finally on-line. There were over 400 photos which I trimmed down to 275 which I then weeded to 80 with thumbnails. The venue was difficult to get really good pictures since the lighting was dim in most of the lecture theatres and I didn't want to use a flash during the talks. Also, I had a new camera, the Canon 10D which replaced my Canon D30, which seemed to have a intermittent problem with backfocusing. Canon has yet to acknowledge this problem but I've used AF with all my Canon cameras and haven't ever had a problem so I'm hoping they fix it soon. So...I'm sorry there aren't as many really nice shots as I had expected.

• I tried to get pictures of everyone. If you don't see yourself anywhere, please don't take it personally.
• If you'd like a copy of the original JPEG from the camera, send ONE email with the IMG_* filename(s) [ I kept the iPhoto filenames just for this purpose ] to eashton at mac dot com and I'll send them to you. Please note that these are large files so if you can't take a 1.5mb file in your inbox, tell me and I'll put it somewhere on the web for download.
• Do send me corrections and additions for names. I am utterly awful with names so please don't be offended if I have forgotten or misspelled your name.
• Feel free to share them.

There are a few different ways you can view and/or obtain the pictures:

• YAPC::EU::Paris - part 1 and YAPC::EU::Paris - part 2
• a big tarball [12mb] which includes all of the HTML and an /other directory with all the photos that didn't make the gallery cut.
• Copenhagen.pm's photo gallery offered to host the full selection of photos.
• and Claes, too.

Thanks again to the Paris.pm for hosting such a terrific conference and I hope the photos live up to your expectations :) I'll be sending a CD with the raw images on them to you.

It has also occured to me that I'd like to archive many of the photos from the conferences over the years in the history.perl.org archive so if you've got photos you'd like archived, make a tarball and send me an URL where I can download them. :)

permalink Ω 7 August 2003, Helsinki

Your YAPC::EU Moment of Zen

permalink Ω 25 July 2003, Helsinki

St. Bernard? Nay. Dachshund.

Danny O'Brien, of NTK, made a funny comment about Perl people in his blog from OSCON.

One of the big themes for me was hearing the Perl guys wanting to help out everyone else, whether the other languages wanted them or not. That fits in with what's best described as the irrational exuberance of the Perlees. They run around like big slobbering St Bernards, knocking over the quietly studious Python guys and barging into the BOFS, barking and licking people whenever they found them. They really, really want everyone else to have a CPAN, for instance. That's one of the aims of the freepan project.

I think that's pretty hilarious. But Danny, if you read this, I have a St. Bernard and they're loving, affectionate, and very laid back. You chose the wrong dog, they are Dachshunds, in every sense of wiener dog.

permalink Ω 11 July 2003, Helsinki

Perl Poetry without the Fridge

If you use OmniGraffle and aren't always near a fridge when you get a hankering to wax poetic with Perl don't despair as there is a Perl magnet stencil to plug into your OmniGraffle to entertain yourself with for hours.

Note: when you download the file it appears to be a .txt file. Rename the extension to .graffle and relocate it to your /Library/Application Support/OmniGraffle/Palettes folder.

permalink Ω 22 May 2003, Helsinki

Ingy the mad Finn

It's election time here in Finland so around the corner where I walk Honeybear every morning and evening is a row of political posters featuring mugshots of all the hopeful candidates for parliament. Going along the numerous posters for the 10+ different parties there was one at the end that made me giggle; no. 225, Heikki "Brian Ingerson" Rosti running as an independent. Heikki and Ingy look almost like twins and it makes me feel a little bit more at home here in Helsinki...even if I don't have any clue what he's on about with that YAML stuff :)

permalink Ω 28 February 2003, Helsinki

Digital Babel

The June issue of Wired has a nifty timeline tracing the roots of computer languages [ caution: 500k file ] from 1954 through 2001. It is interesting to see what has lived and what has not and that Perl sorta stops at Perl4.000 :) A sidebar also mentions Larry as a charismatic leader which is something I don't think has had that much influence on Perl's continued usage and survival as a computational tongue since Larry isn't that active outside of a small developer circle.

One visual effect of the timeline is just how much congestion in the number of languages there is after 1990, a computational Tower of Babel. Diversity isn't a good thing everywhere and, since Microsoft gained much of it's monopoly through Microsoft Office as the standard application which eased file exchanges, I suspect a majority of these languages will die off in the next few years. Speak: A Short History of Language may also provide some insight into survival of the fittest languages. After reading the 5th Apocalypse I have a feeling that Perl6 will need all the help it can get to survive.

permalink Ω 10 June 2002, Helsinki

A different kind of getty

Whenever I add a new CPAN Mirror to the CPAN Mirror Database I usually have to go look up the latitutde and longitude for the entry. I have come to adore the Getty Geographic Thesaurus for finding the coordinates as well as random factoids about the location.

permalink Ω 7 April 2002, Helsinki

PSA: Pudge has Spawned!

Pudge and Jen spawned, on Good Friday no less, March 29, 2002 at 8:06 p.m bringing forth an 8 pound and 6 ounce, brown hair, blue eyed Riley Utahna Nandor. [ Utahna is also a native american indian name for 'woman of my country' which is a nice touch :) ]. Naming is a tricky thing, did you know that Naomi is 'I Moan' spelled backwards? Kids are so cruel :)

Congratulations! :)

permalink Ω 30 March 2002, Helsinki

Frost on the Gates of Hell

All too often people have nothing but complaints and rarely take the time to say something nice in any situation much less the little backwater of the internet. I would like to enshrine the following thank you note we received today at CPAN from a guy named James in some large US government institution. I'm going to smarten it up a bit in Pagemaker, print it on good acid-free paper with the Phaser and frame it to remind us daily that not all perl people are whiny assholes.

"I was just surfing around CPAN looking at stuff, and I read your sig at the bottom of the page and chuckled happily (I too am a Pratchett fan), and then it just hit me, out of the blue. I have been using CPAN for years to find new tools, solve problems, and generally make my job easier - and I have never bothered to stop to say "thanks".

My mother would just slap me for such rudeness. As the curator of several Web sites myself (it doesn't matter which ones), I find it nice to be appreciated once in a while, just so I know someone out there actually SAW what I did, and found it useful.

So, I don't want anything from you, or have a complaint, or even need a reply of any kind. I just want to offer you and anyone else who gives of their time to make CPAN work a great big THANK YOU for providing this excellent resource, that I have found so useful on so many countless occaisions. Have a great day, and may all your dreams be of bananas. ;-)"

Thank you James for engaging the power of Thank You and making our day by dropping the temperature in hell a few degrees. :)

permalink Ω 7 March 2002, Helsinki

Captain Obvious

<yrlnry> Thanks! As a professional writer, it's my job to make the obvious clear.
<clintp> Then why man, for God's sake, do you program in Perl? :)
<yrlnry> Because I'm naturally lazy, and in Perl, the realm of the obvious is so small that I have little to do.

It's funny because it's true :)

permalink Ω 6 March 2002, Helsinki

beeer is my hero :)

Right after Christmas we replaced the hme card in the 2nd search.cpan box due to a really high number of TCP retransmissions in spite of tuning the box and trying other ways to nail down the problem. Initially after replacing the network card the problem subsided but returned again about a week later. Ben Hockenhull caught up with me on #perl earlier today and asked me if I was still seeing the same behaviour as he had found something rather odd on the network....and it would appear the problem has been solved :) This brings me great relief as I was already considering shipping him a new box to replace the current one in lieu of wasting a lot of time tracking down the problem with the box remotely. THANK YOU BEN! :) So you may notice the search engine being a bit zippier now. :)

permalink Ω 15 February 2002, Helsinki

Ad astra per alia porci

I really despise the idiots who write little perl scripts to crawl the living *beep*beep*beep* out of search.cpan.org as they completely ignore the robots.txt and bring the server to its knees forcing me to put explicit 'deny' directives in the httpd.conf. I don't understand why people do this and find it especially irritating when they keep on hammering the website even after all they receive is a 403. I've found 5 in the last few days doing this so if this shoe fits, please find another hobby...soon. I think I'm going to have to create a rather explicit 403 page so maybe they'll get the hint. Sometimes, it takes a hammer and a blowtorch.

The book of the day is Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck. Charley is a poodle who accompanies Steinbeck on a road trip around the US in 1961. Even if you hated the Grapes of Wrath you'll likely enjoy this travelogue which has been republished by Penguin in honor of the Centennial of Steinbeck's birth.

permalink Ω 13 February 2002, Helsinki

Honk if U *heart* CPAN

/. recently had a blurb about the main linux kernel mirror going offline due to some hardware errors followed by a range of sad and amusing comments by people who have probably no idea what it takes to run a service like that for free. In spite of all the criticism CPAN seems to receive it is now in it's 7th year of nearly continuous service. Andreas König and speed-link in .de run the PAUSE and Jarkko Hietaniemi and FUNET in .fi run the CPAN which is, in turn, propagated by over 200 public mirrors and countless private mirrors around the globe. All of these people and institutions who supply the box, power and bandwidth do so for nothing more than a smile and a thank you now and then. Love it or hate it we should be glad it is rather than is not in this world of sites being forced into subscriptions and ads to support such sorts of services.

permalink Ω 21 January 2002, Helsinki

Be careful what you wish for...

darobin recently wished for more Perl songs and this one was mentioned on the Boston.pm mailing list today. My lightning talk submission this year will be a song as well though I may have to have it videotaped since I don't think I'll be able to sing it without laughing :)

permalink Ω 16 January 2002, Helsinki

All I want for Christmas....

A couple of years ago the Perl Packrats, who were originally responsible for creating PAUSE and CPAN, tossed a few ideas around for "The 12 days of Perl Christmas" and "A Christmas Camel". When I was doing the research for the Perl history I actually found something called 'A Christmas Camel' but was disappointed when Larry informed me it wasn't a Dickensian Tale of Perl. I remembered this today and fortunately I kept an archive of these email from Jeff Okamoto, Grep and myself so I thought I'd share a slightly updated version of "The 12 Days of Perl Christmas";

• On the 12th day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me 12 "Thanks Applied!" email.
• On the 11th day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 11 P5 Porters porting.
• On the 10th day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 10 pedants picking.
• On the 9th day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 9 warnings about Locale.
• On the 8th day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 8 happy hackers.
• On the 7th day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 7 files flocking.
• On the 6th day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 6 years of CPAN.
• On the 5th day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 5 Subroutines!
• On the 4th day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 4 new platforms
• On the 3rd day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 3 pragmas
• On the 2nd day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 2 Haiku
• On the 1st day of Christmas my pumpking gave to me, 1 5.8 release and no more weekends hacking perl! :)

permalink Ω 12 December 2001, Helsinki

All-American Open Source?

Every once in a while we get an interesting question on the CPAN list and today someone asked if "Are all the modules on this site U.S.? If so, where can i find proof of it on the site?" Jarkko noted that the email address was that of a government security contractor so the question became even more curious. I sent the person an email asking the reason behind the question and, apparently, it is a requirement the government has that security stuff be all verifiable 'US' code.

Interesting.

So, what I want to know now is how does one define 100% US Choice Code and how do they plan to keep it that way considering the internet blurs lines of nationality. So...how does someone define "US" code?

permalink Ω 10 December 2001, Helsinki

There's life out there....

CPAN is joining the quest for intelligent life in the universe and now has a CPAN SETI Team so that we can use SETI::Stats, read Beyond Contact and hope the aliens we find aren't like the martians in Mars Attacks!

So, put those spare cycles to good use and come help Perl find intelligent life in the universe :)

permalink Ω 7 November 2001, Helsinki

Good Things™

I have this dirty little secret: I subscribe to, read and actually like Martha Stewart Magazine. I know, I think it's rather odd too but I like her simple tastes even if I don't have a staff of 50 in the house to make my home look like hers. I sent in a suggestion for them to do an article on the 'brightening up the basement server farm' and 'wireless networking in the home and base station camoflage techniques' but haven't heard back from them just yet.

Two years ago I bought one of her Noah's Ark cookie cutter sets as it had a camel and made christmas tree ornaments last year. This year Martha has a 3rd set which include a Llama, owl and monkey. I think ORA and Martha should get together and release an ORA animal menagerie set of cookie cutters so that geeks can bake cookies and such in all their favourite animal shapes :)

permalink Ω 2 November 2001, Helsinki

Passage to India

I've always wanted my very own Camel and National Geographic this month has a blurb about the Pushkar Fair;

"In the market for a high-load camel in beige? Even if you're not, the popular Pushkar Fair, November 23-30, is an amazing spectacle that attracts over 200,000 camel and cattle traders and tourists to Pushkar Lake, in the desert state of Rajasthan. In addition to more than 30,000 camels, highlights include camel races and tug-of-wars, a huge tent city and marketplace, and sideshows ranging from puppeteers to fire swallowers. The fair culminates in a group dip in the lake, during the festival's last four days. During this auspicious time of the Hindu month of Kartik, about one million pilgrims flock to Pushkar, one of Hinduism's five holy lakes, as they believe that a bath in the sacred waters confers special blessings on the pilgrim. The beginning of this ritual signals the end of the fair<92>s camel commerce."

Nomad Travels offers a tour to Pushkar and a Camel Safari too. Maybe we could have a Perl conference on a Camel Safari! :)

permalink Ω 27 October 2001, Helsinki

I wonder what flag she flies...

As you know, the father of Perl is Larry Wall, but who would have thought the Mother of Perl would be a 45' ketch?! Wouldn't it be cool to have Perl pirates, attach a camel figurehead to the bow and fly a Perl flag of some sort sailing around the Caribbean?

Avast ye FORTRAN programmers, use Perl and gimme that bottle of dark rum you have there! I could even get a sassy giant talking parrot, stylish black pirate fashion and a wicked cool eyepatch!

permalink Ω 23 October 2001, Helsinki

Wherefore art thou innovation?

Recently I was thinking when the last really cool really new thing caught my attention and I began to realise it has been nearly a decade. Most of the features of the current internet were old news to me by 1992. Much of the software I use is the same, many of the OSs are the same just with larger footprints, nicer GUIs and more features. Ho Hum. The internet 'revolution' came along and while the number of people using the internet and websites increased the paradigm of using the net today is still much the same as in 1991 with my SE/30 and a SLIP connection.

So where is the innovation in computing these days or is computing doomed to be the like the combustion engine in an age with too much infrastructure and oil lobbies to consider innovation? I am not encouraged by the corporate world where new ideas can be a political minefield yet Jakob Nielson makes a point about open source innovation in The Register;

"On Linux desktops... Will Linux desktops innovate? No. I don't think of that as being the solution: because it's open source.

It doesn't lend itself to coming up with new paradigms. The one thing it's very good thing at is designing software for other hackers, for other nerds, really.

That's their skill and that's their strength - there's a thousand nerds to look at it. If something doesn't work it's going to be a debate on the mailing lists and it's going to be fixed.

But that's a bad method for complex decision management or business professionals or this next generation of home users, because that requires a very different project management approach, a clear vision.

They're great programmers and that's very nice, and it generates good stuff for that environment, but it's a little sandbox.

For example they're so proud once they've ported [sic] PowerPoint. But that doesn't give us a new way of doing presentations.

To do that you 've got to follow business people around all day and study them and ask them what they need.

Microsoft did that and finally got a feature I like out of that: where you get a preview of the next slide while you're giving a presentation. Everyone who's ever given a talk will tell you that: I have to print an extra copy of the presentation off - even with my 1Ghz computer I have no extra benefit, because I can only see what the audience can see.

But why did it take them years?"

I think it's interesting for him to say this as I think, in principle, that he's right. Software, both opensource and non-opensource, seems to be the same-old same-old these days. This is not to say that there aren't good things happening out there but when the internet and computing transformed from a research medium to a commercial smorgasboard of web applets and hype it seems like the focus, the fun and the excitement were replaced by greed and complacency of one form or another.

Whether or not he's just another gassy pompous windbag like so many others in this business today , the truth is that my browser is much the same as 7 years ago, my email application is nearly 15 years old and I surf the web far less than ever these days due to a lack of content and annoying presentation, opensource or not.

The Ford Model-T automobile evolved and we have nice cars like the Porsche 911 but the basic concept, design and engine remain largely the same. I am beginning to suspect the computer and applications are doomed to the same stagnation.

The bubble burst on the internet boom when stupid ideas lost billions of dollars and noone could actually say what they did in the last 5 years sitting at their desk doing but remember a profound sense of boredom and have moved on to a exciting new career in landscape architecture. Well, who really needs middle managers anyway, really.

Maybe the tanking tech economy will clean out the cruft, make people lean and hungry again, and spur some new ideas to change the way we think about the computer finally.

permalink Ω 15 October 2001, Helsinki

Good Things™ for Halloween

Halloween is my favourite holiday of the year probably because it involves candy and no family or religious obligations. Last year I carved up a pumpkin and extorted a few photos out of Jarkko for fun and giggles.

This year I thought I'd embrace the Martha within and share how I made the 'Perl pumpkin' so you too can terrify everyone on your block :).

1. Purchase a resonably large and smooth skinned pumpkin. This is a key step :)
2. Remove guts of pumpkin. Save goo for later to torment the obnoxious kids in the neighborhood or drunken adults trick-or-treating when they show up at your door.
3. Print out 2 copies of the pattern and tape one copy on clean and dry pumpkin. You may need to make vertical slits along the sides to make pattern lie flat on pumpkin.
4. Get out your tools. You will need an exacto or box knife, sharp utility knife and a speedball linoleum cutter found at most art stores (unless you live in MA which seems to be devoid of linoleum cutters) or you can order a really deluxe set of tools from Martha. I'll confess to owning this and it is a really nice set if you are into carving pumpkins. Some stores carry a cheap-o set of tools from the pumpkin masters but they are frustratingly cheap and you are better off carving the pumpkin with a dremel.
5. Use the exacto or box knife to trace around the white areas. Do the inside of the P and the E first, then the others. After these are all done, leaving only black paper, trace around the edge of the black.
6. Look at your 2nd copy of the pattern and take a black marker to mark the parts that are black on the pattern as a reminder which parts are going to be scraped.
7. Get out your speedball linoleum cutter and start from the right side of the design and, in clean vertical cuts, start removing the skin. You need only make one pass per cut since you seek only to remove the orange skin and give it a woodcut-like appearance.
8. When done scraping the marked areas, use utility knife inside the pumpkin to carefully cut away a bit of the rind in the area of the design.
9. Use drill or other instrument to create air holes in back or on on the bottom of the pumpkin for the candle
10. Insert candle, display and watch those neighborhood kids run screaming from your house.
11. If a guy with long hair calling himself "St. Ignucius" shows up at your door, hand him an AOL CD and point to the pumpkin before shutting the door. :)

permalink Ω 14 October 2001, Helsinki

Buy a piece of history....:)

Jarkko submitted to iBook envy and is now autioning his Powerbook on eBay. Most of Perl 5.8 development was done on this powerbook. You know you want it :)

permalink Ω 14 October 2001, Helsinki

Operation Endless Ennui

Well, I figure if Graham has started writing in one of these blog things, the apocalypse is upon us and I should maybe write a few words before the world comes to a complete end :)

Mac OS X v.10.1 was released this weekend and shows signs of being a major improvement over 10.0 and is helping to get me into working with Carbon and Cocoa for fun and killing time.

I recently had my Airport Basestation replaced by Apple due to a random bit of luck leading me to the Airport Power Supply Repair Experience site where it mentions that Apple is quietly replacing airports within a range of serial numbers due to bad capacitors. I felt a little guilty receiving a new airport after I had gotten over 2 years of reliable service from my original airport but...free beats $300 any day of the week. I also was a bit disappo
inted not to do the repair myself since my soldering iron is getting kinda rusty but...Thanks Apple :)

For any old farts who had macs back in the mid-80s and who remember 'Dark Castle' I recently found Color Dark Castle which has been ported to run on MacPPC. Try the demo and it will bring back all those hours of squinting at a 9" b&w crt trying to master rock throwing :) I'm still stuck on 70s and 80s arcade games while JHI is having fun with Diablo II and Summoner.

Since 11 September I've been trying to find something to read about the Middle East that is interesting to read and not written recently and I came across 2 titles Knopf has just re-released; "The Valleys of the Assassins" and "The Southern Gates of Arabia : A Journey in the Hadhramaut" by Freya Stark. I highly recommend them both as her writing is brilliant, engaging and a pleasure to read.

I bought a DYMO label printer with my tax refund from the US gov. There, I've done my patriotic duty of spending money on something I didn't really need. It was either that or a gas mask from the military surplus store...;)

There's an interview with Larry in the October issue of Linux Magazine. I read it in Borders and thought it was a nice interview if a complete rehash of the same old same old...and raised an eyebrow at the use of 'Perl guys' ...:)' Not worth paying for but if you see it on the rack have a browse and I'll make a pdf of the article once it makes it online.

email is 30 years old and is *STILL* the killer app.

....and Jarkko has iBook envy :) I've grown to love my little chiclet of joy so I think you'll soon see Mr. Jark hacking away at ugly Perl on a cute little iBook..:)

permalink Ω 2 October 2001, Helsinki