Slashdot | Larry Wall On Perl, Religion, and . . .
If you look at all the RFCs at dev.perl.org, you’ll find that most of the feature requests are bogus on some level or other because they tend to suggest bandaid solutions. Nevertheless, I think it’s best to treat them all as a “cry for help”. With computer languages, about 75% of the bandaids have a bullet hole underneath.
remember the Beethoven beetle?
Programming tool makes bugs sing. (Link from GirlHacker.) Interesting if it works. There’s a similar idea in Bruce Sterling’s early novel Schismatrix: the control panel of the ship Red Consensus makes a sonic pattern designed to fade from conscious perception until it changes.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden greets me with:
Hi there. Looks like you’re using barfy ol’ Netscape 4.x. I don’t want to seem unkind or rejecting, but it’s a real pain to design a web page that’ll work with Netscape 4. . . .
Funny, I seem to have managed it (better) without half trying. Oh well, better that attitude than Bennett’s ‘get lost’.
As for why I’m still using barfy ol’ 4.79: it works for me, dammit. (Most of the time.) Housekeeping – managing bookmarks and mail – is much smoother than in NS6. For example: In NS4, if I’m reading mail and decide not to deal with the current item just now, I hit ‘u’ (for mark-as-Unread). That’s not even on the menu in NS6; I have to take the mouse to another window, figure out which entry there matches what I’m reading, and click a tiny icon. A petty matter, but ease-of-use is made of such minutiae.
NS6 Mail cannot respond properly to a digest – it thoughtfully cuts off everything after the first sig-bar (any line consisting only of “−− “); but that doesn’t matter, because there’s no way to tell it that my SMTP (outgoing mail) server is not the same as my POP (incoming mail) server!
TNH continues:
In the meantime, this raw-text version of my weblog should be accessible to just about everyone. It won’t be pretty, but it should be readable. Sorry about that. . . .
Furrfu!
State-of-the-art drive units insure your pages get served eventually. We have staff on hand in our NOC 8 hours a day to flip tapes. If your visitors want to see a page that’s on side 2, just give us a call!
Thanks to Astraea (whose host troubles ought to be resolved now, this time for sure) for the link.
Too cool! A Turing Machine in Conway’s Game Life, extendable to a Universal Turing Machine. Thanks to Andre Uratsuka Manoel for the link. (Link corrected 2004 Oct 6.)
2006: And the newer link is now dead. Never mind, just search for it.