use Perl

In case you hadn't seen this in a number of other blogs.

"Many of the survivors were loaded back in the containers with the corpses, then driven to a place in the desert called Dasht-i-Leili. In the presence of up to 40 US special forces, the living and the dead were dumped into ditches. Anyone who moved was shot. The German newspaper Die Zeit investigated the claims and concluded that: "No one doubted that the Americans had taken part. Even at higher levels there are no doubts on this issue. (...) The five soldiers dragged in front of the cameras [a little while ago] should thank their lucky stars that they are prisoners not of the American forces fighting for civilisation, but of the "barbaric and inhuman" Iraqis."
--One rule for them

Given a French keyboard where ~#{}[]|`@ are all accessible only through Alt-Gr would you have designed Perl the same way or would you have gone more in the direction of Python or Ruby? All those sigils do tend to be extremely ASCII-keyboard centric.

A while back merlyn posted a link to a fascinating article on HyperSound (unfortunately now it's for pay), a way to project sound in a beam a bit the way a laser is projected compared to natural light.

The article mentions it being at Radio Shack. I want to buy an HSS emitter, preferably the component. I couldn't find anything from Radio Shack's website. The parent company only sells largish ugly things (that I could find). Does anyone have any leads on this? I'd really like to have one.

The next G8 meeting is in Evian, Haute-Savoie, France, on June 01-03. I'm thinking about going, probably with a bunch of friends. Is anyone here planning on maybe attending as well?

It seems to me that mail.pm.org has a strange behaviour. You feed it:

  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

and you get back:

  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
  X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by mail.pm.org id h339XIO14283

Is there any reason for doing that? I'm not criticising the fine folks that make this run as it may be a good option, but it is mildly annoying at times so I'd like to know :)

This article is probably one of the worst and most boring articles on XML ever. It lists non-patterns (in one case, an anti-pattern) that are completely useless and either fail to address the problem they set out to or address a problem that doesn't really exist. Don't waste your time reading it. Oh, and it also has fun disparaging Perl perfectly gratuitously en passant.

Is it just me or is xml.com increasingly becoming a waste of otherwise perfectly good bytes?

I've only started seriously using Mozilla's keyboard-based navigation features recently, but just as it was for tabs I am now completely lost when it doesn't work and when it's not there. I always looked funny at people that over-used their mice (eg going to "File" then "Quit" instead of the keyboard shortcut to kill/close or at least the corresponding window decoration), now I look weird at people that use them to surf the Web. I can't help thinking they must have some kind of problem.

The principle is simple: you hit some keys and it matches them within any link. Hitting enter will activate the link (Ctrl+Enter for a new tab if that option is set). Starting with "/" will make it search throughout the entire text, which is less innovatively useful but more natural than Ctrl+F. You will quickly realise that two letters is what is needed at most for the better part of your browsing. Otherwise, F3 is your friend.

I wish they had something similar for forms, I still have to use my mouse to get to those when they're too many tabs away...

Seeing that Perl and Python are the two most advanced languages when it comes to XML support, there is some thinking about how we could get the two communities to exchange ideas. Both sides have really good ideas here and there that could be ported both ways, or could have been specified jointly.

We could kick some jAss (Java Application Server System).

So what do you think would be the best way of going about this? I've been talking with Uche Ogbuji and we're looking for ideas. Any suggestion, even silly, is welcome :)

When the war started, I expected someone to call on to Belgium's courts' declared universal competence for war crimes, crimes against mankind, etc. and try to sue Bush the way it happened to Sharon and to a variety of people involved in the Rwanda genocide.

I wondered how it was going to happen. Well, instead of waiting for something to go wrong in this war, people quite simply picked stuff from Oil War One, and are consequently sueing Bush Sr., Powell, Cheney, and Schwartzkopf[Le Monde, fr(eedom)] for the bombing of a shelter that killed 403 civilians.

I guess there will be political pressure for it not to be instructed, but I was surprised it happened this quick. Belgium is, after all, where NATO resides :)

Americans discussing the war situation, first week of March: "The French are so unpatriotic".

I wonder if bombing major US cities with dictionaries would be considered terrorism.