Diary of a Diary
Tags: google
lilo, apparently you don’t quite understand how the diary rating system works. I have personally rated approximately 4 diary entries, total. What you’ve seen in the report for myself, rasmus and others does not mean we sit here all day and rate people’s diaries. Please go re-read the code again. We have lives. Please consider worrying more about your own, than making assertions about ours.
These petty little attacks you make on those who don’t agree with your “philosophies” don’t bode well for your perceived status in the “community” you claim to support. Once again, you show how far you can read into a situation that has absolutely nothing at all to do with you. Nobody has a “personal agenda” that the rating system here on Advogato is being used to exploit.
Also, that little stunt with the FSF has generated some “offline” interest. Call have been made, and there are quite a few people (including at least two well-funded companies) who are now witholding their donations to the FSF, until they can guarantee that not one single cent of their FSF-destined funds makes its way to PDPC or the lilo-fund.
Other Advogato Abuse
The eBay laptop fraud saga continues. I was contacted on August 1st by an officer in the New York Police department regarding Brian Silverman, aka “electro_depot” from my diary entry about it here. Since the beginning, my diary was the only one that would show up in a google search on electro_depot. Over 120 people have contacted me regarding that diary entry, including one person who created his own website to combat the fraud. He also directly mentions why he started the site due to finding my diary entry here. There’s also a Yahoo group on it as well.
The end result is that I joined the Yahoo group, and was banned because I explained the details of the fraud, and because I received my laptop, after a very “firm” phone call with Brian Silverman. The replies I made to other people on that group were also deleted, preserving only the opinion of the original poster, which, I might add, was entirely incorrect and misleading to the victims of this fraud.
So now we have a spammer on Advogato, adam12497, who has used advogato like a classified advertisement in the newspaper, trying to draw people’s attention to his Yahoo group on the matter, abusing what Advogato stands for. I’ve emailed raph twice about it. I stand with raph on the issue of deleting persons here, but I think this one makes a very strong exception to that rule, since his only purpose was to hijack my diary entry and come up alphabetically before me in google, to get people to join Yahoo, instead of read the details of the real fraud that happened.
raph, I just came up with a great idea (spawned by the wonderful macros in The Everything Engine (prominently used on PerlMonks). Can we get a <diary>138</diary> tag pair here to link to older diary entries, instead of directly linking to them?
Other News..
E and I went out the other night and caught up with an old friend of mine from CT that I hadn’t seen in a few years. It was good to catch up and get out of the house for a bit.
I’ve been rebuilding boxes here, trying to get things set up for the SourceFubar scale-up. Lots of new neat stuff in store.. stay tuned!
I’ve also been spending a lot of time cranking out more perl code than I can shake two sticks at. I’ve finally gotten my updated copy of Programming Perl 3rd ed., aka “the Camel book”. My copy was 9 years old, and is quite out of date, given current concepts. I also picked up Perl & LWP to help with my current projects (spiders, screen scraping, lots and lots of HTML parsing). I also updated my copy of the C Primer Plus, another Waite Group gem. Mine was 2 editions too old. It’s interesting to walk through some old code and see how much you can squeeze out of it. Code reduction is really a wonderful thing, as long as it doesn’t slip into obfuscation. I managed to take 170 lines of perl in a CGI I wrote recently, and compress it down to 8 lines of code instead.
foreach my $line (@lines) {
$line =~ /@/ or next; # skip things without an @
$line =~ /([wx80-xFF]+)s([wx80-xFF]+)s<(.*?@.*?)>/g or next;
my ($fname, $lname, $addr) = ($1, $2, $3);
$addr =~ s/@/@/g;
$addr =~ s/././g;
print div({-style=>'float: left; text-align: left;'},
"$fname $lname");
print div({-style=>'text-align: right;'},
"<a href="mailto:$addr">$addr</a>");
}
This little gem actually is the tail end of a sub that parses the Plucker CREDITS file for names and emails listed therein, and obfuscates their email addresses to thwart spam harvesting engines, then wraps the code into some very pretty HTML that is shown to the user. It looks like this after these 8 lines are written out. The problem was that perl can’t natively regex unicode/UTF-8 characters as “words” when they contain non-[a-Z][0-9] in them. Sorting them by that is a whole other issue untouched yet.
More to come on these fronts soon..
Employment
Status: None, 290 days. I got so bored looking for work and finding none, I wrote a script that I wrapped in an iframe on my my PerlMonks home node that calculates how long I’ve been out of work:
<script language="JavaScript">
var today = new Date();
var stdate = new Date("Nov 16, 2001")
var msPerDay = 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000;
var days = ( today.getTime() - stdate.getTime() ) / msPerDay;
days = Math.round(days);
document.write("Status: Unemployed<br />Duration: " + days + " days");
</script>