Testing something

Tätää, tätää!

Helau!

IO, Perl, blocking, and other stuff

(Cross-posted to perl)

be IO Barbie
reading is HARD!

Read this thread from the archive of the perl5-porters mailing list to see how hard it is.

Enjoy the subtle and often incomprehensible distinctions between blocking, buffering, and other concepts, and how they play along with Perl's read() and sysread() commands, C's read(2) and fread(3) calls, PerlIO, sockets-vs-regular-files, and more.

My brane hurts.

Since everybody's doing it

( The birth month meme )

( Find your month )

Reminiscing

(Warning: slightly rambling stream-of-consciousness entry ahead.)

For some reason I can't remember, I was looking at rahaeli's userinfo page, and read her offer:

If you want an invite code, write me a sestina telling me how much you want one and why you want it, and email it to the email address above. If you don't know what a sestina is, don't bother.

That reminded me of the first time I read that… it was before I had started helping out in support, and I only knew of rahaeli, in the sense that it was a name I had picked up somewhere. Maybe the support highscore list, I don't know. Somewhere.

And I read her userinfo page with that invite code offer. Even looked up what a "sestina" was. (I didn't need an invite code from her, though. I was simply intrigued by what this thing might be she was requiring.)

And when I re-read that passage just now, I thought to myself, weird; now I know rahaeli. Or at least, I've talked to her on IRC several times. I didn't know her at all then. It was an interesting experience.

Come to think of it, I did get some invite codes from reading people's userinfo. I saw an entry in someone's memory categories with pointers to invite code offers, and one of them mentioned someone's userinfo. They no longer have this offer on their userinfo, and have changed their name since then, too. But they had this offer then.

The offer was: one invite code in return for a haiku on the subject of "cheese". They reserved the right to post any haikus received on a website somewhere. Limie one code per person per month. I sent them a haiku and got a code. I don't remember which journal I created from it, though. A bit later, the next time I looked, they had changed the topic of the haiku. I thought it would always be about cheese.