This just showed up in my inbox. CGI.pm is probably the most used module for Perl web programming. Even if a patch is released, there are probably a lot of sites out there that won’t upgrade. While the world won’t end, it still could be a pain in the butt for a lot of people.
Posted on 21 July 2003
Lance Armstrong has finally decided to take control of the Tour de France with a fine stage win on the slopes of Luz-Ardiden. Despite a crash and a mechanical issue, Armstrong pulled away from the other favorites on the stage’s last climb and has now extended his narrow lead.
Interesting side note: we got to see a bit of the cycling peleton’s sense of ethics today. As Armstrong, Tyler Hamilton, Jan Ulrich, and others were trying to catch a breakaway, Armstrong went down. Typically, an American who isn’t versed in international cycling would say “sucks to be Lance…those guys are gonna take advantage of that.” But in reality, Ulrich and Hamilton held up the rest of the group until Armstrong could rejoin them, as one of the unwritten rules of cycling says you shouldn’t benefit from an opponents crash. Armstrong returned the favor by putting the hammer down on the last climb….
Posted on 21 July 2003
We took our climbing this weekend with the boy — to Coopers Rock (a couple of photos on the home page). It was good time, though we were only there for a few hours (since we left at 1pm). Seb seem to have a good time, taking all the nature in, so that’s a positive sign. Here are a couple of images.
In other news…we went to the Vintage Grand Prix this weekend. Saw my friend’s recently retooled Pantera. I believe it’s got about 610 horsepower at the moment. I should have taken some photos, but I was too in awe. I’ve also got it stuck in my head that I want a 1989 or 90 BMW M3 e30. My friend sold one of these to get his Pantera, and it was just an amazing car. It doesn’t have a huge engine, but the handling is simply amazing — a true track car. They aren’t terribly expensive to purchase used, and they generally retain their value as there are fewer and fewer of them on the streets (many owners convert them to full track cars), but maintanence can be bit expensive.
Posted on 21 July 2003
Larry Wall‘s 7th annual State of the Onion address is up on the O’Reilly site. These are always entertaining…Larry is a really bright guy (he created the first version of Perl by himself) and he knows a lot about a lot of things.
Posted on 17 July 2003
Lately, the project at work has been revolving around an application search engine. We’re storing data in a database, and documents uploaded by users, and one of the specs requires search functionality to quickly parse both datasets and return the results. We’re using the Jakarta Lucene search framework as the foundation. Basically, Lucene is a library to provide the under-the-hood search engine functionality — indexing the data according to specified keyword and stopword analysis, optimizing the index to provide the fastest possible searches, and providing the various search algorithms to parse queries. Interesting stuff.
The biggest hurdle with Lucene is the absolute lack of good documentation. There are a few brief tutorials on the web site, and there are a few other articles out there, but these provide little more than the classic “Hello, World” adapted to Lucene. After a week or so hacking around the indexing functionality, we’ve got that fairly well nailed down, but now I’m fighting through trying to parse the search results and return them to the UI in some sort of generic format. What really throws the process on its ear is the multiple data types that can be searched. If we were just dealing with documents, that wouldn’t be so bad….simply return the document name, path, and perhaps an excerpt with the search terms highlighted. Or, if it were just database data, that wouldn’t be so bad (though we still have to deal with pulling the data from various tables in the database). But combine the two and things get sticky….I think I’m going to approach it from both the document and database angles, developing a possible solution for each, then finding the common items between the two and going from there.
Posted on 17 July 2003
markko martin fans estonian badass
My dreams of being a well known WRC writer may come true yet….
Posted on 16 July 2003
Salon has an interesting article on what the new regulations for the telemarketing industry will mean for the economy.
I must admit, I had never really thought about the ramifications of the new national do-not-call lists to the bigger picture. While I certainly don’t feel bad for the telemarketers, all of us will feel the result of the do-not-call lists, and I don’t mean just a quiet phone during dinner.
The industry heads interviewed in the article obviously want to play up their case. They claim millions of people will be laid off in the coming year. Perhaps. I’m sure many more people will find themselves out of work. That will hurt the economy. But I’m not really interested in the telemarketers….I’m more interested in the politicians that pushed this throught.
First, note this about the do-not-call registry — political groups are exempt. That’s right, your local Republican/Democratic/Green/Libertarian group can still badger you during dinner, and there’s nothing you can do about it, besides tell them to go pound salt. So, let me get this straight — telemarketers can’t make a buck by annoying us with phone calls, but our politicans can? Interesting. Fortunately, a few smart politicians tried to change this aspect of the bill, but that opposition was promptly shut down.
I don’t want to rehash the whole article, so go and read it. It’s worth sitting through the ad to get a Salon Premium day pass. The article changed my mind a bit about the whole telemarketing issue…
I did sign up for the do-not-call registry. But, thanks to the marvelous invention of caller ID, we rarely ever speak to a telemarketer. 99% of time, their phone numbers come up on the screen as “Unavailable”, so we don’t even pick up the phone. If it happens to be someone we know, they’ll leave a message, and we’ll pick up. In retrospect, I should be more troubled by our government being so intrusive in the business world. I guess the citizens of nation want something like this, but shouldn’t everyone be concerned with more pressing issues? Perhaps the $4 billion a month bill from occupying Iraq? Nah, we’re more concerned with getting bothered with a phone call during dinner.
Posted on 15 July 2003
I almost never look at this site’s access logs, even though my hosting provider offers several nice reports on my admin page. I did, however, take a peek today, and I found this refering URL:
http://www.google.com/search?q=perl+socket+applications&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&start=10&sa=N
I had completely forgotten that I had posted my very own Perl lightning talk on the site a few months ago. I find it sorta nifty that if you do a search on “perl socket applications” my talk comes up in the first page of results.
Posted on 14 July 2003
I discoved a truly disappointing fact this weekend about Galeon this weekend — it doesn’t work with Gnome 2.2 (the latest greatest release I have running on the Slack box at home). Humm. I only running Gnome 2.0 here at work, which is still compatible with the Gnome 1.2 libraries that Galeon was designed against. Oh well. Soon enough, Galeon should be available. Good thing I still like Firebird.
Posted on 14 July 2003
Just a few quick items….
There are new Seb photos on the home page.
I posted a couple of climbing images from our last spring trip.
In case anyone cares, I added a “Current Reading” entry on the sidebar of this page.
I added a Creative Commons license to this page. Most of what I write isn’t really even worthy of being copied by anyone, but should I ever put effort into a piece, I don’t want anyone to nick it….
Posted on 14 July 2003