use Perl

Whenever I read anything by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, I feel somehow like the book was written for me to read at that precise moment in my life. Actually, that's been happening a lot lately, with many books I've been reading, like the Red Mars , Green Mars , Blue Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and slightly more recently both The Forever War and Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman. I suppose there's a pretty prosaic explanation for this.

I'm not sure exactly what the connection is, this time to Pattern Recognition , but I think that part of it is the illustration (which happens to be very useful at the moment) of a woman who is very, very interesting, but entirely unlike the woman who briefly, but quite utterly, replaced Stella in my heart.

It is entirely possible that, as of two minutes ago, I have seen Stella for the last time ever.

Schwern and I are on a plane to Vienna in seven hours.

At one intersection an Iranian man who expects to become a U.S. citizen soon could hardly believe what he was seeing.

"What sickens me, you see these second, third, fourth-generation Americans criticizing their own country that so many died trying to get to," said Josh Bakhshi, 25.

"To see this kind of demonstration, and I disagree with this demonstration, the fact that people are not getting shot is incredible.

"You do this in Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, at best you would be shot, if not your whole family," said Bakhshi, who said he had just passed his citizenship test.

Contra Costa Times: SF cops arrest more than 1,000 in struggle for city's streets

Yow! Am I HEAVY yet?

Favorite quote:

One of our associates, Bill Strauss of California suggested the use of a homeopathic reagent derived from a radionic query process. We sent him the atomic frequency of Deuterium, taken from standard NMR charts which he then had made up into a 2 dimensional geometric pattern designed to reverse the deuterium frequency by 180 degrees.

My girlfriend, who calls herself a chemist, says this is gibberish! What's wrong with taking the atomic frequency of Deuterium from NMR charts and making it into a two-dimensional geometric pattern? Huh?

This is make testdb using Devel::DProf on JavaScript::Tokenizer to tokenize a largish bit of real-world JS code when regular expressions include such Unicodey things as \p{Nd} and \x{000A}:

01:20:18 [cogent@birthday] Parser>$ dprofpp
Total Elapsed Time = 167.9217 Seconds
  User+System Time = 151.5851 Seconds
Exclusive Times
%Time ExclSec CumulS #Calls sec/call Csec/c  Name
88.6   134.3 263.93  32590   0.0041 0.0081  utf8::SWASHNEW
7.75   11.74 150.49  22400   0.0005 0.0067  JavaScript::Token::try
3.91   5.930  7.911  32590   0.0002 0.0002  utf8::SWASHGET
3.01   4.562 155.29   1602   0.0028 0.0969  JavaScript::Tokenizer::pop
0.40   0.609  0.235  32579   0.0000 0.0000  utf8::DESTROY
0.31   0.469  0.231  20787   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::__ANON__
0.12   0.189  0.091   1600   0.0001 0.0001  JavaScript::Token::newlines
0.11   0.170  0.114   4892   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::length
0.09   0.140  0.128   3258   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::bool
0.07   0.110  0.073   3200   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Tokenizer::state
0.07   0.110  0.072   3209   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::BEGIN
0.07   0.110  0.128   1600   0.0001 0.0001  JavaScript::Tokenizer::token_types
0.07   0.100  0.062   3261   0.0000 0.0000  UNIVERSAL::isa
0.05   0.080  0.025   4800   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::lexeme
0.05   0.080  0.062   1600   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::line

And this is the same code, when the unicode is replaced with similar (though obviously not identical) entities such as \d and \n

02:14:27 [cogent@birthday] Parser>$ dprofpp
Total Elapsed Time = 3.985910 Seconds
  User+System Time = 3.932676 Seconds
Exclusive Times
%Time ExclSec CumulS #Calls sec/call Csec/c  Name
111.   4.389  4.051  20230   0.0002 0.0002  JavaScript::Token::try
31.5   1.239  5.505   1447   0.0009 0.0038  JavaScript::Tokenizer::pop
12.1   0.479  0.198  21661   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::__ANON__
6.84   0.269  0.259   1445   0.0002 0.0002  JavaScript::Token::newlines
4.55   0.179  0.136   1445   0.0001 0.0001  JavaScript::Tokenizer::token_types
3.81   0.150  0.109   3181   0.0000 0.0000  UNIVERSAL::isa
3.05   0.120  0.146   3178   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::bool
2.54   0.100  0.044   4335   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::lexeme
2.03   0.080  0.019   4658   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::length
1.53   0.060  0.041   1445   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Tokenizer::line
1.27   0.050  0.012   2890   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Tokenizer::state
1.27   0.050  0.031   1445   0.0000 0.0000  JavaScript::Token::line
1.02   0.040  0.147      4   0.0100 0.0367  main::BEGIN
0.76   0.030 -0.006   1445   0.0000      -  JavaScript::Token::string
0.76   0.030  0.029      8   0.0037 0.0037  JavaScript::Token::BEGIN

autrijus says this is a well-known problem. <sigh.> Out comes Unicode support from JavaScript::Token::Regex .

So, I posted my first bug report to rt.cpan.org. With a patch and everything. Wow.

Oh, why not. Ev ery body's doing it.

So, I just uploaded my very first Perl module: GD::SIRDS

I'm pretty fuckin' jazzed.

So, like email me! Tell me whether the module sucks, or rocks, or what. Even better: give me ideas for good source images and good source-image creation.

Or just play around with it and forget about it. Which is just fine with me, too. :-)

So, I was able to make test with bleadperl on Mac OS X with zero errors. This apparently surprised Jarkko, among others, since (I presume) nobody's been able to get DB_File to work. ('Twas super-easy. I installed the most recent version of Berkeley DB, and things Just Worked.)

Schwern told me to tell p5p, so I finally took the plunge and joined the mailing list. This has been the high point of my weekend. :-)

host -l ru. | grep 'name server' | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | wc -l

I'm gonna get arrested. The answer is 107164, tho.

host -l gov. | grep -i 'sucks|porn'

Nothin'. Damn.

host -l mil.

Query refused. Damn again. And now I'm *really* gonna get arrested.