All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Fun is not not banging your head against a wall

Alias on 2007-07-15T06:14:53

A few times now, I've heard the oldbies and greybeards quote "Fun is not banging your head against a wall".

The phrase came to mind today, when I was dreading working on TinyAuth, my repository manager, because I really really hate Apache::Htpasswd, but I really don't want to write a replacement. I really honestly do try to treat rewriting modules as a last resort, I swear! (::Tiny modules notwithstanding)

Taking another look through CPAN on the train I noticed Authen::Htpasswd, which I somehow missed when I was looking on search.cpan.org.

Apart from the fact the tests break on Win32 (which I'll be fixing shortly) it's a MUCH nicer module, does what I want, looks more like Perl, and appears well implemented (apart from the broken on Windows thing).

So I replaced the current code with it in about 3 minutes between Artamon and Chatswood stations, and now all of a sudden I'm excited about continuing TinyAuth development again.

But this isn't fun, although I'd be tempted to compare them.

No, I think this is RELIEF.

Fun would need to be something that even people that had never tried to use any .htpasswd modules before would experience.

Relief is only experienced by the people that have been banging their heads against the wall.

Hurrah!

ChrisDolan on 2007-07-16T01:05:15

I agree that Apache::Htpasswd is a less-than-ideal module. I exchanged messages with the author and was not really satisfied with his solution to a security hole. Apparently Smylers agrees with us

the fun is anticipating the relief

mr_bean on 2007-07-16T10:44:58

I once told some teachers that a 'game' was something that you could not adequately define. There is only a family resemblance between all the things we can call a game, and no way of describing that resemblance in words. Fun is not even a characteristic distinguishing what is a game from what isn't.

I gave the example of football, which is a game, but not fun.

One teacher said, it's fun if you win.

So the motto is, No under the gun, no fun. I can't think of a good word to rhyme with anticipation.