use Perl

As Slashdot reports, there seems to be this thought that the Star Wars prequel is going to cost $300m in lost productivity... my question is, why ? I'm presuming most places have some sort of flexitime procedure in place, which means you basically work the hours at the time period of your own choosing (I prefer 1000 to 2000 myself).... I can see how some jobs wouldn't really allow this, but techies, surely, should be able to decide for themselves ? so, what price "lost" productivity there ?? but I guess I'm spoilt, my office is perfectly ok with me dropping out of work for a half hour or so to play a tiny river raid or even Quake or Broodwar, so they'd certainly not mind me taking an afternoon off for a movie... (well, heaven only knows when Attack of the Clones is going to reach this part of the planet :p)

In other news: A continuation of the soap opera that I call my quest for the full featured, low memory footprint tabbed browser (heh heh heh), led me to rediscover Opera.. I used it in my student days, when it was in v. 3 or 4, but the most recent incarnation (6.01) is REALLY something..(one low point: mouse gestures, eeeek !!! I still can't figure out how to do most of them, and I prefer using the keyboard anyway).. but it's still slick, fast, I like the skins on offer, and it seems to handle a lot of different sorts of websites quite well. nice...! ;o)

Yesterday was also the day that I downloaded and installed Junkbuster for the first time... a bit quirky, the syntax, but it really seemed to make a difference in how fast pages load up.. essentially, it's just a filtering proxy, so you can specify which URLs (or regex patterns of URLs) you don't want to see... what brought this on, you may ask... well, some moronic popup or the other happened to drop a DLL IDed as "Trojan.StartPage" on my machine, and NortonAV refuses to delete it.. bah.. so, blanket popup blocking is my answer, it still can't do Javascript or applets, but at least its a start ;o) (yes, I'm one of the idiots who surf with javascript turned on more often than not, that's another habit I need to get out of..).. interestingly, I've heard discussion that blocking popups and other forms of advertising isn't really ethical, because you're "sorta" stealing the content without the advertising, but this sort of advertising is a bit much :p

Hmmm... what else... well, for the moment, I'm doing this monstrosity known as Oracle forms.. ugh.. I never really liked UI design, and I'd much rather prefer to do PL/SQL programming (if I need to do anything at all with Oracle, PL/SQL is the answer ;o), but blimey, its fast to develop :o) (Swing takes about twice as long just to code up a basic frontend), and messed around a few hours last night trying to install Gnats bug tracking on a Solaris machine (what fun :p)