News You Can Bruise for 2005 January 24

Even though I have so much to do and today I shoveled even more on my plate (more about this later), I figured I'd just go through some of the Software Roundup backlog and weed out the ones that turned out to not be interesting. I should have known. I got sucked into the shadowy world of software trying-out and another new Software Roundup was born. Here it is. Now I'm going to turn off the computer, except I need the computer for the stuff I'm supposed to be doing. Dang.

• wbumount dares to ask the question: who is blocking umount? This program finds the dastardly processes, and takes pictures of them and posts their process IDs on a website along with mocking commentary. Why, wbumount, why?
• News On The March presents: PERL! Used more than you'd think! Once thought only fit to drive lame CGIs that mix up the panels of penguin comics, Perl is now recognized for its true purpose: driving mission-critical database table management CGIs like ir.pl, which you put on your intranet if you're an airline and use as a ticket system for your flight delays.
• Someone goes through a lot of trouble to turn their MP3s into an Icecast stream, and then you go and use ficy and turn that stream right back into data files. It'd be ironic, if it weren't so not ironic.
• Mind AI has the right philosophy for a successful AI project, but not much else. The biggest file in the codebase is the IRC interface.
• Are you a real man? Prove it! Eat that beetle! Hm, yes, I guess it is true that in many cultures insects are consumed by both sexes without the act having any particular significance. We need something more universal, something less culturally bound. Wait! I've got it! The ultimate decision procedure for manitude: do you dare employ the Real Man's Compiler Collection? Instead of wasting your time with error messages and warnings, which ISO has declared effeminate, RMCC simply tells you whether or not your program compiled successfully. But I say why stop with compilers? We can make an arbitrary shell command more manly with my new manify.sh:

  #!/bin/sh
  $* &> /dev/null && echo "Yes." || echo "No.";

  Hm, actually this is basically what RMCC does. Time to take the masculinity up another notch! Now we must also amplify and embed in our culture the stigma of a nonzero return code. Why should our program dignify a "program that fails" (my new political code word) with a reponse? Surely ignoring failure altogether is more manly.

  #!/bin/sh
  $* &> /dev/null && echo "Yes.";

  And once we've started down that path, the masculine virtues of silence and fortitude will carry us the rest of the way:

  #!/bin/sh
  $* &> /dev/null;

  Now that's manly! Rrrrrrr!

• If you want to write a Python script that acts just like a web browser to some unsuspecting website, you have a myriad [Ed. note: actually 1/3333.33333... myriads] of options. Python Browser Poseur, Perl port mechanize, and mechanize fork mechanoid. In conjunction with Beautiful Soup, an unbeatable combination for prying open some difficult oyster shell of a site. Which is the best? How should I know? What does this look like, some sort of Software... Roundup... look over there!
• See? Isn't this more interesting? It's the Open Text Summarizer, which uses stemmers and such to find only the juicy parts of standard input. To prove its mettle I had it summarize Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. The result:

  For a long time I used to go to bed early. Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a d ifferent position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but--

  I'm sorry, time's up.

And now the winner. For fear of aspersions being cast upon my Y chromosome, I have no choice but to hand the award to the Real Man's Compiler Collection, that blackmailing constable of social norms. Enjoy this limerick, Real Man's Compiler Collection:

Yes.