Slashdot

I have realized that Zoo has some unexpected side effects. Or, rather, that the /. community hasn't done what I expected with Zoo.

I have expected the well known /.ers to have lots of fans. I had expected that /.ers would want to see comments made by the guy who co-wrote the Perl Cookbook - I thought that everyone would set gnat as a friend, and toggle the widget which raises the scores of friends. But it seems that I was wrong.

This list shows the number of fans for each person, as listed Saturday night.

• CmdrTaco has ~850 (the man who needs no intro)
• Hemos has ~240 (the man who needs a small intro [uid #2, does that tell you something?])
• CowboyNeal has ~160 (the man, the legend, the poll option :)
• chrisd has ~120 (Yet Another Slashdot Editor)
• krow has ~90 (YASE)
• jamie has ~90 (YASE)
• Cliff has ~70 (YASE)
• timothy has ~60 (YASE)
• pudge has ~60 (YASE)
• Bruce Perens has ~400 (Open Source, have you heard of it?)
• CleverNickName has ~ 350 (Wil Wheaton. Remember Star Trek: Next Generation - you may have heard of it.)
• merlyn has ~40 (Randal L. Schwartz wrote about perl)
• ESR has 14 (wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, if this really is him. :)
• gnat has 9 [nine] (Nat Torkington, you probably have his book near your desk, and he is project manager for perl 6)
• I have 12 (your lowely journal-ist ;)

Some of that is expected. CmdrTaco, Hemos, CowboyNeal, I expected them to have bunches of fans. Wheaton & Perens, sure, makes sense. But why are so many Slashdot editors & major software figures so, well, unpopular? That doesn't seem to be the right word, but I'm not sure what better describes it.

I have gone through the lists of slashdot editors, & major figures who seem to have a presense on /., and marked them all as friends. I also have comment bonuses for friends. Therefore, I'm more likely to see comments made by the "big shots". I thought that many people would do this. Looks like I'm wrong. Now I'm left to ponder why others did not do what I thought natural. [scratches chin] No answers here, do you have any ideas?

My Powerbook G4 (800 MHz, 1 Gb RAM, 60 Gb drive) came last week, and one of the first things I did was go to the command line and start looking at the unix underneath. I ran perl -v, and found out that my version has 5.6.0 - not 5.6.1. OK, so I upgrade. But which version to upgrade to, and should I keep the current install available in some way?

Here's the hard part, I would upgrade to 5.6.1 automatically, but 5.8 just came out. However, 5.8 has been reported to be slow. No info on how slow, AFAIK. And I can't find any advice specific to Mac OS X (10.2, specifically), like whether MacPerl is still a good idea, what with unix and perl underneath. Not to mention that I'm learning perl, so I don't have much experience to fall back on. So I'm searching the perl sites, and the mac sites for info on versions. And I'm looking for Mac OS X specific info about perl. And I can't find any. And I'm getting frustrated. And I'm using horrible grammar. :)

I hope that someone at tonight's SPUG meeting will be able to shed some light on my dark predicament. All I need is a pointer, a place to start looking, somewhere I can get info. Heck, I'd like to find some info on what the consequence of not upgrading are. Is there a security flaw in 5.6.0 which was corrected in 5.6.1?

It seems that I have much to learn of "the perl".

Good Grief.

Microsoft might be right about the concept behind .NET - and that irritates me. OK, so MS has a good idea, that's happened before. Yeah, they'll use it to do things I don't like, like expose my information to insecure systems and collate information I don't want harvested. OK, ok, they're planning for the future.

But why is it that the very thing I'm obsessing over is at the core of Microsoft's strategy? Are they that good? Am I that unlucky?

Basically, my problem is that I use a stringently controlled computer at work, a Linux box at home (which also boots into WinXP for games), and I just added a Mac PowerBook running MacOS X 10.2. So that's three computers, in two locations, with four operating systems. And I want seamless access to email, bookmarks, calendar, addressbook ... heck, I'd like to be able to develop my church's web site from anywhere as well. (Which means emacs and perl and mozilla, BTW.)

Maybe my solution is using my Linux box as a server, and ssh-ing to it when I need terminal access. But what about everything else? Even if I use my own box, how do I set up email access & contacts & bookmarking of websites? I can't ssh from my work box, it's pretty obvious that I can't get to my linux partition from the windows partition of the same box. In fact, unless I get myself another computer, the only way that hosting my own solutions would work would be if I was using my powerbook. Sigh.

OK, I'm complaining. I know. But this doesn't really seem like "Ask Slashdot" material, and I don't even know where to start searching for all of this. Well, not quite true. I've looked on Sourceforge for bookmarking solutions, and tried to find email solutions there as well. But I'm not really a programmer (I'm learning perl, but I'm just beginning.), so making sense out of the where the projects are, or what they actually do (as opposed to what they say they want in the description), or how easy they are to use, or how robust ... well, I'm looking at a lot of 'solutions' to each seperate problem I listed, but nothing seems appropriate.

I've thought about rolling my own solution to the bookmarking problem, and I could probably do it in a month or so. But that's just the most obvious symptom to my underlying problem - I want continual access to all of my data, no matter where I am or what kind of computer I'm using. And, to complete the circle, that's just what Microsoft is planning for .NET. They say that I'll be able to get to all of my info, my settings, my data, from anywhere. Great. Now, just let me do that without giving up all of my personal information, or exposing all of my data to crackers, or tying me to one particular platform. If Open Source / Free Software is going to continue to be some of the best software in the world, we (Yes, we. I want to make this happen, and I want to work for it. Even if it's only testing/documentation.) will have to address the problem of letting people access their data from remote locations.

Well, I'm off to look for what's been done in the "alternate .NET" world. Maybe I'll find it and be happy. Or maybe I'll make it happen. Or maybe I'll just remain unhappy and unmotivated.

OK, I have to meet some friends for breakfast at 7am ... today. In 5 hours. And I'm tweaking the new version of my website. (FWIW, the current version of my website is ~3 pages. With the index being a link page. Whoop-dee-doo. :)

What is it about this magical electron gun which draws me to it at all hours, and compels me to forsake all others for its glow? Is it the DSL plugged into the back? Is it the music which caresses my ears? Is it the nearly infinite combinations of placement, style, and color which I can use to modify the lowly text of my web page to create an artistic masterpiece? Is it the balancing act of finding background and text colors for each area of the web page which work together harmoniously to ease reading that section, while still retaining a common theme across the entire page? Is it the challenge of accomplishing all of the above while coding only valid XHTML/CSS which won't die horribly on Netscape 4.xx?

Or did I have way too much coffee after dinner?

Grrrrr.

My computer at work is missing most of the file changes I've made since the begining of the month. The server my files are stored on died (actually had a boo-boo during "upgrade" to Win2k), and last week's backup apparently wasn't good (why wasn't that checked before the upgrade?) - so I don't have any file changes since Aug 31. That's nine ( 9!!! ) days of lost computer time! I'm ticked off.

The only silver lining is that in the last month I've been doing mostly offline work. Boeing may be a "high-tech 21st Century Company" in the advertisements, but the 767 is still largely maintained on traditional (20 year old) drawings. Two dimensional drawings. Produced and changed by hand. With a pen in your hand, and a straight edge on the drafting board. ... But that means that a lot of my work lately has been on paper. Quick comparisons, one-offs, literally combining parts by tracing them onto the same paper. So most of my work is still sitting on my desk. (So don't burn down the Everett facility, then I'd be really mad.) But all of my summaries were electronic. The listings of part numbers, the collection of data, heh, even the collation of data. And now I have to take my last paper copies of all of that data and see if they match what has now been restored to my computer. Aarrgghh.

The point of this journal.

The real kicker is that I now have motivation (lost time & effort is a good motivator) to find/create a way to bookmark websites from my work computer which won't disappear. I've been thinking of this for a while, since I surf the net from work, from my home computer in Linux & from Windows - that's 2 computers with 3 operating systems. This week my PowerBook should arrive, so I'll be adding a computer/OS. And I want to see ALL of my bookmarks from any computer. I want to connect to my website from work and find the site I bookmarked last night. I want to surf from work, and bookmark someplace, and be able to access that bookmark from home. Or from my friends computer at his house. I need an automated system which stores, sorts, categorizes, and presents my bookmarks. Well, I can do the sorting and categorization, but I need a cross-platform, web accessible method to store bookmarks. I'll deal with email after I'm done with this. :)