HaHaHa ROTFL , that was very funny Rory, i started laughing when Ozzy starts to speak and haven't stopped yet.

a TEN! funny funny boy.

Wonderful punch line! Only someone who's been forced to write perl would be able to come up with that. What was your particular perl punishment?

What a perfect mix of disturbing and excellent.

I think there will be quite a few University of Texas alumn surprised to hear that Hanselman invented the "longhorn" hand sign.

Great punchline.

Steve -

"What was your particular perl punishment?"

When I was first getting into Java, I didn't have a clue as to what I was doing. However, this didn't stop me from deciding that my first Java app should be a browser chat applet - I had never coded in Java before, and had never done any sockets coding, so it was a bit of an interesting project to say the least :)

Anyway, I got it working, and one of its features was that it populated a box with the IP address of the person with whom I was chatting. That was fine for a while, but I came to find that the IP address was only so useful - a person only has so much brain space in which to store weird, unattached numbers, so I decided to create an app that return the host/domain of the person rather than just IP - it would be significantly easier for me to remember the host/domain for future chat sessions than to try to match a person to an IP address.

This is where ignorance made my life difficult.

I don't remember exactly how it worked, but it eventually came to be that someone would come to my web site, click on a "Chat with the Rodawgg" button, the applet would hook up with a VB server piece on my Windows box, the VB piece would grab the user's IP address and then send it to a Linux box where I had a Perl app running 24/7. The Perl app took the IP address and passed it off to "nslookup," instructed nslookup to dump all results in a text file, and then the Perl app read that text file, parsed it, grabbed the host/domain name, and sent it back to my VB app.

It was... well, it was pretty shameful, and the messiest part was easily the Perl. It was easy enough to get a Perl sockets app up and running (*much* easier than Java/VB), but I hated the syntax and all the weirdness. Perl reminded me a *lot* of the gigantic Lego constructions I made as a child - a big car with rocket boosters, ladders all over the place, flower pots strewn about, and half of a Lego person sticking out of the floor - I just added, added, added, and kept on adding things. To me, it feels like Perl was made using this same technique.

A few more Perl experiments had me convinced that it wasn't for me. It made some things *very* easy, but I didn't like *how* it made them easy. I dropped Perl entirely just a couple months after I first messed with it, and I'm quite glad.

You don't "code" with Perl so much as you throw digital tea leaves and then try to read them...

Josh -

"I think there will be quite a few University of Texas alumn surprised to hear that Hanselman invented the "longhorn" hand sign."

I didn't have much space to clarify - Hanselman was simply the first to *associate* the traditional "devil" sign with Longhorn.

Actually, whether it's true or not, he's certainly the most passionate person I know about it, so I'm happy to agree with him and say, "Yeah - Scott did it first" :)

Um.. that sign means "I love you" in sign language. John Lennon was the first (or one of the first) to use it in pop culture - look at Yellow Submarine as a reference - and it was later used by fans of heavy metal groups during concerts as a way to show thier love for the band, so to speak... not a devil sign... at least in my world.

I believe you have to have the thumb out to show I love you, otherwise you're all hardcore with the \,,/ sign

Love. Devil. "Hook 'em Horns". Longhorn.

Let's not get too far off the subject here, which is...umm...that coders can become Rock Starz. Right?

> I believe you have to have the thumb out to show I love you

Ah.. yes of course. I retract my comment out of complete embarrassment :-)

Actually, in Italy it means "You have horns". That in turn means "your wife/husband is cheating on you". It's usually shown to soccer referees and their hellish ilk :)

Paolo -

"That in turn means 'your wife/husband is cheating on you'."

That's absolutely fascinating - so cheating is common enough in Italy that the populous has adopted an easy-to-use bit of sign-language for communicating to each other about it?

Like, you say "hi" to one of your friends, flash him the "hey, bud - you've been cuckolded" sign, he shrugs, and then you go for lunch (or something)?

Rory, How in hell did Ozzy go from the late 90's greasy hair in #4, to the late 80's Mad Housewife hair in #5, and then back to the greasy hair in #6. Did Satan have anything to do with the quick transformation? Or was it just giving the horns? BTW, on Anthrax's Volume 8 re-issue, they have a song called "Giving The Horns". I think we should use that for the Longhorn theme song.

DonXML Demsak

Don -

"Rory, How in hell did Ozzy go from the late 90's greasy hair in #4, to the late 80's Mad Housewife hair in #5, and then back to the greasy hair in #6"

I was drinking, OK! :)

Rory, On your note about the longhorn hand-sign originating from Hanselman:

That hand-sign is also home to the University of Texas Longhorns, founded in 1883, and the largest university in the nation, www.utexas.edu.

Either way, I like it and I am ready to roll with it.

"I was drinking, OK! :)"

Alcahol... the impetus to all great works.

<tangent>
Why does everybody get so uptight when they find you drinking on the job (programming) -- it makes code reviews much easier, and the end product is sooo much more facinating.

Reviewer: "Hey, why did you loop through that recordset 15 times back-to-back, keeping track of the total iterations, only to later divide it by 15 to derive the record count?"
Me: "Shut up, buddy! I was drinking, OK?"
Reviewer: "Oh, sure. Stupid me. Hey let's throw back another Jello shot before we write that next XAML file..."
</tangent>

;)

Keep up the good work.

ow! yow!!!

Um.. that sign means "I love you" in sign language. John Lennon was the first (or one of the first) to use it in pop culture.

Komiksy

Working for the Perl Team

Logical splits across tiers