divisionbyzero

I took a much needed vacation the latter part of last week. Prior to that, I was helping a few coworkers with getting PHP Web Applications developed on Fedora Core 5 to run on CentOS 5 with upgraded PHP, Apache, and libraries. Every time I work with PHP, it gives me serious perspective as to why the Modern Perl / Enlightened Perl / perl5i Projects are incredibly important. The Matt’s Scripts Perl era needs to die. This stagnant snapshot has poisoned Perl’s reputation for too long.

The main difference between Perl and PHP, is writing maintainable, intelligent Perl is only slightly more work at first than writing horrible Matt’s Scripts style Perl. With PHP, writing decent PHP is possible, but it’s incredibly difficult. The majority of the PHP I’ve come across is code written by a web developer with no programming experience and the language design and direction accommodate that demographic. PHP’s language design gets in the way of writing sane, maintainable code. It’s not impossible, but you have to really, really want it.

When you write good Perl, the programming experience becomes easier, and more fun.

I’m trying to get back to my programming projects, and thus back to writing more on Perl. For now, understand that if you think Perl and PHP are the same beast, you’re wrong. I’ve been paid to develop both for periods of years. Perl is much more eloquent, evolutionary, and intelligent.

Just a little comic to remind ourselves what we’re giving away for “Security.” This is not what our founding fathers had in mind. I’m disappointed in the US Government and it’s people.

Gizmodo is stepping up to declare March, Boycott the RIAA Month.

This needs to happen. Justice must be swift and unrelenting. Back when the RIAA conned Metallica to lead the charge against Napster, they killed a significant portion of the internet. I’d go as far as to blame them for being the catalyst of the dotCom Bust.

Both the RIAA and MPAA need to shut the hell up and embrace new technologies.

(I promise I’ll post the Proxy Evasion Article as soon as I can get my Virtual Machine running!)

So, I’ve had this domain for 7 years now. The concept behind the name goes back even further than that. In highschool in 1997, our AP Calculus teacher made the mistake of getting backed into a corner when displaying a graph of f(x)=1/x.

You see, the graph approaches positive infinity as you approach zero from the left, and negative infinity as you approach zero from the right. A group of us in the back of the classroom started playing with the justifications that division by zero was possible and yielded a result. Our teacher made the mistake of using this graph as a foray into the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. If division by zero is possible, it collapses the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.

Well, today a guy made a number and assigned it to be the value of dividing by zero. Hold there bud, me and four of my friends did that in AP Calculus at a private high school in Bel Air, MD in 1997. Had our results been taken seriously, we should have been excused from our AP Calculus course.

I can get more into the theory, but as you can see from the Way Back Machine, we documented our theory online as early as 2001.

This annoys me almost as much as Imaginary Numbers.

Bruce Schneier has an interesting comment thread going.

There’s also a new movie coming out called “Catch a Fire” that deals with what happens when you torture the wrong people. Turns out, you pissed them off and they tend to seek retribution.

Hard to imagine anything could go wrong with this Administration allowed to define “curel and unusual.”

This article goes right for the juggular. The sad fact is, he’s not off by much.

America is all but lost. I hope this pisses you off. Careful with your disgust and anger, misguided and it will seal our fate.

If you’re an American citizen, you should hang your head low today. The US Senate has passed the torture bill. Over at Bruce Schneier’s blog, there’s some interesting discussion on the matter. Torture is wrong. Military tribunals are biased. See this entry on Emergent Chaos. We’re throwing centuries of progress for human rights, freedom, liberty, and privacy out the window. We’re selling ourselves to the highest bidder for what?

Also, the House of Representatives passed the warrantless wire tapping bill. Granted, this isn’t quite as wild wild west as previously pitched, but the concept is disturbing. Besides, even if all the objectives aren’t met, we’ve significantly lowered the barrier to entry for more ridiculous legislation in the near future. I’d be surprised if more tyrannical legislation is not imposed in the coming 2 years.

Both of these bills embody the forces and ideals that drove our forefathers to forcefully over throw their tyrannical rulers. Yet, today we’re sitting by on the side lines, blogging about how this might suck. I’m just as guilty as you are. Consider this introspection, and try to learn something. I know I am.

The Bush Administration is incredibly good at manipulating the American populace. The fact is, collectively, we’re apathetic morons. You think it’s a huge coincidence that gas prices started plummetting so close to Midterm Elections? People, look at what it’s done to the approval rating of the Administration. It’s in every newspaper and on every TV station. They’re waiving it in your face and you’re still sitting there and saying “well, the news guy told me it was because it’s winter.”

What do we do about this? This cannot stand in this country. Aren’t we the land of the free and home of the brave? Why don’t we pull our heads out of our asses and stand up to this dictatorship?

As you may or may not know, I am gainfully employed by the Federal Government in the area of Information Security. Recently the Bush Administration responded to media hype to issue a Federal Mandate requiring all government owned laptops use encryption technologies to encrypt their data.

There are two interpretations of this memo.

• Encrypt the ENTIRE disk.
• Encrypt just the files containing the data.

So, what’s a lowly security administrator to do?! Choices are bad! Obviously you encrypt the entire disk! Right?! no? Why not?
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Bruce Schneier always has spot-on posts. Here’s his editorial on last week’s terror plots.

It’s really that simple. Stop being terrorized. Stop being scared to live. Stop taking life so seriously, you’re never gonna make it out alive. We don’t need billions of dollars of security screening software/hardware. Anyone with a week of spare time will be able to circumvent it anyways. This security is just a show, and I’m not entertained in the slightest.

I’m not flying again until these ridiculous regulations stop. We know we’re accepting a risk getting onto a plane. We’re 30,000 feet in the air, and if something mechanical fails, that’s a LONG way down. You’re accepting even more of a risk when you get in your car to go to work. You’re a billion times more likely to die in a car accident than a terror attack. So why aren’t we campaigning against ridiculous bullshit by insurance companies and state legislations that waste your tax dollars to make them money instead of fixing problems with automobile safety?

It doesn’t sell papers.

Update: It now appears that some people with some experience in Chemistry have questioned the plausability of the terrorist plot.
Update 2: More information about the acquisition of the information that led to the arrests and wide spread media terrorism.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I programmed in PHP for a mortgage company. I ended up leaving that job for personal reasons. Apparently, 40 hours/week truly is not enough. I was a Perl programmer prior to that excursion, and I guess I never grew out of it. I always felt uncomfortable there. For a while I thought it might be social, but after further reflection, it’s obvious it was actually PHP’s fault.

To frame this, I just got back from YAPC::NA. I learned all kinds of new techniques and tricks from MJD, chromatic, brian d. foy, Randal Schwartz, Damian Conway, and countless other acquaintances. What’s not to love about Mason, DBIx::Class, and the brain bending functional tricks you can learn from MJD and chromatic? I never knew that @INC could contain a subroutine reference, did you? I also never thought of something so clever as recursively calling an anonymous sub ref contained in a scalar by using another anonymous subroutine that dereferences that ref at runtime.

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