Month: March 2005

Live Sex Chet

OK, so the single best reason to analyze ones weblog access logs is not to find out how many people are hitting your site or any shit like that–although I have to admit to a certain bafflement at how many hits I get, even if you carve out bloglines.com’s constant polling.

No, the best reason to analyse ones access logs is to see the absolutely hilarious searches that people follow to your site. I’ve mentioned “milla jovovich naked” before–I don’t think the person using that got what they wanted, “since it was a result of me bashing ??Resident Evil??”:/2004/09/dinner-rush.html. Anne and I spent a few minutes a week or so ago lauging about some.

You must see where this is going…

I can’t say how amused I was to find the all-time-best-search today: Live Sex Chet.

Chet, of course, demanded that I make it the headline, which I’ve agreed to do for a day or two.

I have to say, there’s an awful lot of other amusing ones, and some that I just don’t understand how they got to me:

* gas treatment dupont (no frigging idea)
* kernels that stick in your teeth (err, linux + new Nine Inch Nails album?)
* free porn that you can watch for free (no idea)
* a boy bow down to his parents (the old title, bet this wasn’t what they expected)
* all sorts of warts (no idea, don’t want to think about it)
* dogs fuck women novels (whoa, where’d that come from!)
* naked librians (yeah!)
* wachowski brothers and sex change (v for vendetta and…uh…)
* how to tell someone you hate them (I’m kinda amused, but baffled)
* get out of this shitty marriage (this kinda makes me sad)
* how to give a lap dance (u2 + who knows)

Football, racism and suppressing speech

It was a grim joke during my time at the University of Alabama that we only ever got in the news for football and racism–because of our revolving door policy on coaches and such lovely incidents as parties at sorority houses involving girls in black-face respectively.

Now it appears that UA’s going to add another negative category: suppressing speech.

So, the story would seem to be that some student decided to stick a confederate battle flag in his window. Whatever your feelings about the conflict of 1861-1865, whether you call it the Civil War or the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression–and I have to say that, over time I have come to believe that the third construction may not be that far from the truth, however much I am disgusted by what the South was fighting to preserve–you have to be an idiot to not realize that the flag has been appropriated by racist bigots as their symbol. To display it, whatever your motivation, is *at least* impolite.

Oh, well, so much for Southern manners.

Anyway, this would have been bad enough–being yet another score in the second category of the title–but the University decided, in response, that they would arbitrarily ban all window displays.

So a bunch of other students put the stars-and-bars in their windows as a protest. Which apparently led some dolt on the Volokh Conspiracy “to assert that they were prohibiting the display of American flags on campus”:http://volokh.com/posts/1109629158.shtml, which is, at least, a misstatement of the situation.

Me? I wonder who the protesters were. I’d like to think that this is just sort of Molotov cocktail that would be lobbed by the “Mallet Assembly”:http://www.mallet-assembly.org/, an organization to which I belonged (and for which I still do stuff, like hosting a few mailing list and maintaining a domain registration), because I think they’d do it for the right reasons.

But you never know.

Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5

Though it pains me somewhat to say it, I cannot recommend this book.

Let me first emphasise that it’s not that there’s probably not a lot of good information in it–there is. I have continually stumbled across interesting tidbits about how Perl 6 will do things.

The problem is with that verb: *stumbled*. The book eschews a reference-book sort of setup, and in its own words:

bq. […] I wrote this book in the style of a plain programming-language manual with basic concepts coming first and later chapters building on them.

But if the point of the book is to show moderately-proficient Perl 5 programmers how to do things in idiomatic Perl 6, I don’t believe you need that build-up. And even if you do think it’s appropriate, consider that on that same page (xxix) there is a diagram of how the chapters relate to one another, and _it’s not anywhere near a straight line_.

So, I find myself wondering why the author made the choice to impose what seems an inappropriate structure on the material.

And then there’s a lot of material that seems to be either filler or just out of place. For instance, Chapter 7 runs from page 105 to page 127. Of this, 3/4 of page 106 covers Perl 6, while all the rest is about using PDL with Perl 5. That’s not what I wanted from this book.

As I said before, I’m sure there’s a lot of good stuff buried in this book, but it’s been a disappointing slog to find it. I couldn’t recommend this to anyone.