All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

$database='HUH'

ajt on 2002-09-16T20:55:13

I do from time to time visit "another" place, and see what is going on. I try to answer the odd question now and then, and point people to other places to obtain help.

Even when I try to answer the odd question I sometimes struggle to understand what the question is, even accounting for the fact I'm sure some of them are very young or don't speak English as their first language. It worries me that these people are running servers on the public Internet. For example here is one recent post:

"I just put a database on my server... I can ad and remove stuff out of it cuz I made it with front page. (I did that because I have no knowledge of database). Now, how do I access it and modify etc... from a perl script?"

Now I know that over on Perlmonks some people complain that too many newbies lowers the signal-to-noise ratio. Or that CGI isn't a safe place to learn Perl (which I tend to agree with), but things on PM are nothing when compared to the above site.

So what

bart on 2002-09-16T22:46:22

So these people's home PC is accessible from the Internet. So what. It's not like they're running a professional website. If they get hacked, if they get loads of viruses and trojans on their PC as a result, not much harm is done. Nothing that a simple FORMAT C: and a reinstall of Windows can't solve. Write it of as a learning experience...

I just can't bring up any sympathy at all. Ooh I'm getting bitter... :-)