use Perl

Been poking around at it, debating about whether it would be useful for Wirebird.

But I'm not sure I can bring myself to use it, because I keep looking it up on CPAN via the search. And I habitually use all lowercase.

And my brain just will *not* stop parsing "moosex" wrong.

Either the simultaneous-user limit on NT's ftp is pretty low by default, or there are a *lot* of suckers out there.

Got an eBay phishing spam, and happened to notice that the destination URL was ftp instead of http. Huh. And not just anon ftp, but an ftp url with the NT administrator password in it. Narshty.

The URL gets a 421 nineteen hits out of twenty, which apparently means it's getting a lot of bites (even if it only allows one connection, how long does it take to serve a little page where all the graphics probably come from eBay? And why doesn't eBay examine referers and track these things down proactively?)

Wish I knew how to shut down an NT server from the Internet...

• Girls don't exist!
• In which much needed light is shed upon the Vanderbilt Physics department

It just keeps coming up, and it's kind of freaking me out.
Because I just don't see this. Am I blind? Does this only happen to attractive young women? (I was young once, but... well, I was young once.)
I mean, I've certainly seen real sexual harrassment, and been the target of it, and been on the winning side in a lawsuit about it, but it never had anything to do with my technical ability. (Indeed, at my very first job I dealt with a middle manager who couldn't keep his hands off me, but at the same time he never had an issue with my technical ability, even though it *was* my first job out of college (and not with a finished degree, either). I was a better programmer than he was, and he was okay with that.)
I have never, not ever, run into a "you can't be good at X" or "you shouldn't do X" or stunned silence in a game or any such thing.
Maybe because it's because I'm so amazingly awesome that it was pointless to try to deny my awesomeness based merely on my gender, but that seems somehow unlikely. Maybe it's happened to me but I've just been oblivious, but given the egregious examples other people report, that seems unlikely too. Maybe my nerdiness simply transcends gender; that seems most plausible.

• If you thought Physics was misogynistic, try open source software!
• The Myth of the Easy Answer and Women in IT

And on the flip side:

• My recipe for happiness: no quince jelly

Apparently it's no longer okay for women to enjoy traditionally-feminine things, and certainly not okay to admit that you believe that men are more likely than women to be geeks, even if you otherwise level the playing field, whatever the heck THAT's supposed to mean.

Hi. My name's Karen. I'm a woman in IT/open source. And I wouldn't have known that was a problem til everybody told me it was.

And OMGWFTBBQ!!1!! I'm also a craftblogger. I SEW TEDDY BEARS! I'm setting back women's lib (is it still called that?) by decades!

Yyyyyyeah. Clearly I'm missing the seriousness of the issue(s).

Possibly I should remember to save after I preview. Or possible I'm double-posting.

In any event, Carl has achieved fame: http://yapc.org/

Good thing I dragged him along, I guess.

So yesterday jrockway recommended XML::Liberal as a solution to my corrupted RSS feed problem.

I initially pooh-pooh'd the idea, because I wanted to use an RSS-specific package out of laziness. Then it occurred to me that maybe I could use XML::Liberal to feed *into* XML::RSS, and in the course of researching it, I discovered XML::RSS::Liberal. And installed it. (Perhaps badly, because my cpan installer just can't cope with using /opt/perl/lib, for some reason. That's a whole 'nother entry.)

Assuming I installed it correctly, though, it's not as liberal as XML::RSS, because now it's choking on feeds that worked before ("a namespace prefix should look like [a-z_][a-z0-9.\-_]*") XML::RSS::LibXML does the same thing. And that's on things that W3C validates as good feeds (del.icio.us tag feeds, for instance), so I'm not at all sure it's installed correctly.

The original corrupted feed is still choked on, and I'm not sure I'm going to struggle much to get LibXML installed right, because I don't think it'll help. It's just *that bad*... definitely going to take XML::RSS::Liberal::Commie::Pinko to parse something like that.