Computer says "no."

[reddragdiva]

• Betty Ford Clinic pics up. Usual rules. Please assist with names.

We have all finished reading Aslan Saves Middle Earth from the NAZIS! Not that it took long. At least it was a better finish than The Many-Coloured Land, where by the ninth book you could tell the author was hating every word individually and could hear her bludgeoning the keyboard with her face. Fantasy epics: Just Say Fuck No.

I'm on a Perl training course this week. I am told that my initial assessment that it consists entirely of quirks and silly tricks and that they then bolted on flow control, OO, etc around version 4 or 5 is reasonably near the money. It's like what people who learnt programming in TRS-80 BASIC would go on to invent when given real computers. (In reality, the people who would have been programming in TRS-80 BASIC invented PHP instead, writing the interpreter in C code inspired by TRS-80 BASIC.)

(Perl programmers: please stop by perlsurvey.org, being done by damned_colonial.)

There is somewhat of a cultural divide in those on the course: myself, the other sysadmin and the deaf webmaster (whose signing translators are tearing their hair out keeping up with the fast-flowing tech speak) on one side and the other webmasters on the other. It took one two hours yesterday to realise that computers follow a precise list of instructions for every single thing they do — she'd never consciously understood this before. I would have thought it a prerequisite for a, y'know, programming course. And she's not stupid.

I realise this is what leads to goatseing MySpace. I'm not sure what can be done about it — how to communicate this disastrously lacking piece of cultural literacy more widely. IT'S NOT A HARD CONCEPT, SURELY.

Tomorrow I shall be drinking to seph_hazard's increasing age.

Freda is still ridiculously cute.

Comments

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

"A couple years ago some wannabe goth chickie used a Byzantine Chant mp3 I had made as her MySpace background sound. I used an Apache rule to redirect to a MIDI file of the Macarena.

As of last month nobody is accessing it anymore"

From the comments on that page..

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I was kinda happy with the many coloured land.

It was the galactic millieu series that I thought all went a bit wrong towards the end.

[reddragdiva]

That's what I meant. She shoulda just got Kevin to finish it for her.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pimping. I got as far as "I'm on a Perl training course" and opened up the comment field to say "pimp the survey!" before noticing that you already have. But do please mention it at the training, if you can; I don't just want to get the usual suspects.

[lunrwolf.livejournal.com]

I had an interesting and relevant comment about Perl. But I'm just too tired. So I'll settle for this:

Stay away from Template Toolkit. It doesn't have any math support beyond +-*/...

(Yes, I did have to reimplement the wheel. Why do you ask?)

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

> seph_hazard's increasing age

So is she legal now?

Inquiring minds want to know.

[reddragdiva]

I think she shall remain outside the law until her dying day. Or until they rewrite it all from embarrassment.

[jauncourt.livejournal.com]

The goatse revenge for myspace hotlinking made my day.

Considering that mysapce is the internet equivalent of handing out guns or driving licenses to thousands of spastic, blind chimpanzees, the overall response made it even funnier.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Personally, I can't think of anything you could use Perl for that wouldn't be better off doing in Python. I stopped all effort to learn Perl once I realised that - any further effort to learn would just be pathology, a close examination of the disease.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Good point on the 'please let it stop' feeling. Even fantasy series mostly like often start to suffer from that. George R.R. Martin gives me that distinct impression at the moment. You can just about hear him going "oh god, why am I still having to write this thing? Why did I make the story so long? Oh, thats right, all those millions of dollars."

[drpete.livejournal.com]

Good pics - (but that's Russ the Tango teacher)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Perl is beautiful if you want to relearn regular expressions which are almost the same as the shell scripts your used to.

I don't have much love for Perl.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

"You are", "you're" etc

Friggin' wrong userpic as well.

[reddragdiva]

I don't know what you're talking about. *cough*

[gths.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've had to resort to giving Myspace leechers a nasty surprise myself.

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

Betty Ford pics - img_6800 is Andrew (me) and Eszter. A good one of us, too; thank you.