Been a strange few days since my last journal entry.
Firstly I started quite a few... er... "discussions" with my views on where the Perl community is going (as seen around here and on the london.pm mailing list).
Then I tried out my Idiotic Perl talk at the london.pm technical meeting. It seemed to go OK. Needs a bit of tightening up. But people laughed in the right places.
Then I see that my Find CGI Scripts article has been published a week earlier than I expected. This is good as it ties in neatly with all the other stuff that's going on. My inbox fills with people saying how much they enjoyed the article (which is always nice) and the nms developers mailing list gets a dozen new subscribers (which is even nicer).
Then last night I get an email from Matt Wright. Finally we've managed to get his attention. He's a little upset that nms is still using a lot of his documentation largely unchanged. He, of course, has a point and this morning I've removed all of his documentation from the nms packages. Unfortunately, this leaves us with next to no documentation, so I know what I'm doing this weekend :)
But Matt's email included this quote. Which I'm just going to present with no editorial comment whatsoever.
I wrote that code years ago when I didn't know how to program, but have lost the time and motivation to keep it up
I wrote that code years ago when I didn't know how to program, but have lost the time and motivation to keep it up
Well, that didn't come as an earth-shattering revelation to me, since I had heard this as a rumour in several places where MSA was discussed. Still interesting to hear it straight from the author's mouth, though (well, nearly straight -- davorg could be lying through his teeth for all the proof I have).
And as was said on the london.pm mailing list -- perhaps he'd be open for volunteers to take over the running of MSA, including accepting bug reports and continuing the development of his scripts?
"I always have lots of stuff in the works, but most of it only gets about halfway finished before I get bored and give up. That's the way I work.:)"
Good attitude in a software distriburtor.
Re:It's in print
hfb on 2002-01-26T17:17:11
Well that line could pretty much describe about 60% of CPAN and a very large portion of open source projects in all languages. Just because you write something that becomes popular doesn't obligate you to finish it or even refine it.
Re:It's in print
chromatic on 2002-01-26T19:48:53
Only 60% in programming circles? That's pretty good compared to other disciplines. (Corporations are the suburban pre-adolescents of the business world.)
Re:Idiotic Perl stylesheet
davorg on 2002-01-31T19:41:51
What browser are you using? Of the ones I've tried, Mozilla and Galeon both work fine. Opera 6 has a little trouble with the overview page and Netscape 4 is a disaster
:( IE 5.5 works about as well as Opera.I guess CSS doesn't degrade as well as I thought it did!/p. Re:Idiotic Perl stylesheet
vsergu on 2002-02-01T05:27:37
I'm using IE 5.5. The text displays, but it's in virtually unreadable type, because that's what you asked for:.5em means half the size of normal-size type, but you're using it for the ordinary text on your pages. Re:Idiotic Perl stylesheet
davorg on 2002-02-01T12:01:36
I see what you're saying. There seems to be a difference of opinion between Mozilla and Galeon on one hand and IE and Opera on the other as to how to deal with this.
As I understand it (and Mozilla/Galeon seems to agree) because I have the body font size set to 3em, all other sizes are relative to that baseline. Therefore
.5em should be half of 3em or 1.5 times the size of normal type. Opera and IE disagree and use it as a absolute size. I'm no CSS expert, so I don't know which of these interpretations is closest to the CSS spec.
Re:Idiotic Perl stylesheet
vsergu on 2002-02-01T12:32:48
In a quick examination, I didn't find a clear explanation in the CSS spec, but my (possibly flawed) understanding is that em doesn't accumulate that way. That's what percentages are for. So if you change.5em to 50% it should work the way you want.
Hopefully it will have just the right impact on the booksellers for the new Perl programmers to spot it and spread the word.
