Why Perl Programmers Should Worry

September 25th, 2004 • Perl

It’s pretty obvious that lately we’ve been hearing much less about Perl than we hear about “other” languages, PHP5 has been released, Java5 is almost there, Python is advancing quickly, and Perl6, well, it’s still under development.

Perl is my favorite language, I know it looks like line noise, I know it’s possible to write cryptic code that nobody can decipher, I know that $_ isn’t very liked, but I still love it. I don’t know many languages where you can create your own syntax in runtime, or add exception support when the language doesn’t have them, or filter the source code on the fly without self-modification or nasty tricks. I get emotional when it comes to Perl.

Read more »

5 Gmail Invites

September 18th, 2004 • 6 comments General

For those who still haven’t started using Gmail, I’m giving away 5 Gmail invites. If you’re interested, drop me an email to rami at ramikayyali dot com, trust me, 1GB of email is worth it.

Update: I’m out of invites right now, but I’ll update this as soon as I get more.

On RSS Scalability

September 13th, 2004 • 6 comments General

With all the recent talks about how RSS scales, and how it looks like DDoS, it’s pretty obvious that RSS is becoming a pain in the neck and is stirring a lot of concerns.

Tod Friendly on Kuro5hin says:

RSS is not a good mechanism for getting new content to a large number of people; it’s just too hit and miss.

He says that RSS is doomed to fail because it’s a pull rather than push aggregation. Personally, I think the main reason for RSS success is that it’s based on something we already have, namely HTTP, which is (mostly) a pull protocol. Anyone can come up with a structured news format, a competing DTD, or even start a whole new trend of XML feed formats, it’s the community who decides to either adopt a format, or just throw it away; now that’s hit and miss. But when it comes to finding a real solution , well, it’s just too damn difficult! Sure, HTTP headers can help, <skipHours> and <ttl> might help too, but that only happens in a perfect world, where feed readers obey the standards, where developers aren’t too lazy to implement these features, where we don’t have to know 9 "compatible" RSS formats just to figure out how to parse 2 or 3 news items.

Read more »

Got a Gmail, Finally

September 9th, 2004 • 3 comments General

Sandip Bhattacharyas (bhattacharyas at gmail dot com) was generous enough to invite me to Gmail, so now I finally have r.kayyali at gmail dot com; oh well, better late than never.

Thanks to redemption in a blog for the announcement.

UPDATE:

Sandip asked be to post his message on my site, so if you would like to get a Gmail invite, please drop him an email, and you better do it quick, he only has several invites left.

Quoting Sandip:

i have 20 gmail invites to give away. I actually have 7 gmail accounts myself. Receving so many invites per day. I have given this to everybody. Please post my thread in your website that I want to give away gmail invites to those who email me at the above mentioned email address. This is a serious email.