Arc - Reddit Wars

Interesting phenomenon on Reddit; Arc-critical links, regardless of quality, are being voted down heavily.

Here's my own post, here are a couple of humour pieces, and here's a good post, which, though it is staying in the black, is doing so only by virtue of a LOT of up votes.

I wonder is this just a general anti-criticism thing, or an army of new Arc fans out there? Some of the posts (my own included) aren't much good, but a couple are really quite funny and/or interesting.

Nominated for Blog Awards!

One of my blog posts appears to have been nominated for best blog post in the Irish Blog Awards.

Mind you, it's in a category with 75 other posts, so I don't rate my chances particularly highly. Fun, though!

Another inexplicable image

In my earlier round-up of screenshots I took for this blog, I almost forgot this gem:

I'm not exactly sure what it is, where it came from, or why it exists, but it worries me deeply.

More Mugging Consequences

Remember I mentioned that I was mugged yesterday, and that it wasn't a big deal. Well, turns out that it was sort of a big deal. I was bloody terrified that everyone I went past going home today was going to pull a knife on me. Even babies. It should hopefully go away soonish, but annoying nonetheless.

The other thing. It turns out, you see, that the mugger may have done a minor service to humanity. He took my credit card, and as a result I had to invalidate it; it'll be a few days until I can get a new one. The thing is that the server that this blog and various other sites live on is paid for via that credit card, and the monthly payment is due in a few days. I'll try to sort it out, of course (I _think_ the bank may let me make an IBAN transfer), but, in the meantime; this blog may vanish for a little while next week. It' a worst case scenario (or best case, of course, if this blog is something that you are pestered with by some aggregator or other, rather than willingly subjecting yourself to it), but I've taken backups, and any interruption should be temporary.

Thank you, and goodnight.

Arc - the Hundred Second Language

Paul Graham's "hundred year language" is out (complete with mildly eccentric, though not horrible, license). You can read about it here.

Okay, so what is it? Well, at first glance, it's a Lisp-1 Common Lisp with lots of names changed, and no CLOS. Really. No obvious packages either; I haven't looked in any great detail yet, but can he really be embracing the PHP Way? Apparently PG has voiced anti-package sentiments in the past, so possibly. Anti-CLOS sentiments, too.

'cond' and 'loop' are right out. This isn't entirely unexpected; he isn't complementary in his books. Hmm, is this really more the "Paul Graham language" than the "hundred year language"? Possibly he's over-optimistic about his life expectancy.

In a shocking departure from tradition, it would appear to be case-insensitive. I'm ambivalent about this one, I must say.

From the documentation:

It seems to me that the solution is not to encourage the noob illusion that macro calls are function calls.

When did 'noob' become a word that one uses in documentation?

Now, I did mention that the big difference seems to be randomly changing names. Didn't believe me? Here you go:

(lambda (x) (+ x 1)) - [+ x 1]

defun - def

defmacro - mac

lambda - fn

setf - =

incf - ++

= - is

no - not

progn - do

mapcar - map

maphash - maptable

make-hash-table - table

with-output-to-string - tostring (sort of)

&optional a - (o a)

&rest a - . a

gensym - uniq

Still, could have been worse. He mentions in one of his essays (like blog posts, but without RSS feeds, in this case) that '+' was originally going to do string concatenation.

His example code has globals with a '*' at the end (as opposed to a '*' at both ends, as is more normal). Personal eccentricity, or the Arc Way? Who can tell? 

Please note that the docs contain digs at both cond and loop.

His built-in website creation stuff is table-centric; he seems oddly proud of this. Also, no Unicode. This is, of course, in the best traditions of languages that people feel compelled to write webapps in; neither PHP nor Ruby have proper Unicode support. Again, though, it seems almost like he thinks this is a feature.

All in all, then, really, really unimpressive. Quite disappointing, really; I actually thought that he was going to do something interesting.

Mugged

So, anyway, on my way home from work today I got mugged. Some guy held a knife in front of my face, and took my wallet and money. Not the end of the world, but bloody scary.

And fucking inconvenient, too, now I think of it. I had to cancel my credit card and such, and will have to get replacements. Fucking bastard. I hope he cuts himself on the (slightly cracked, and now quite useless) credit card.

Also had to make a police report; I'm sure that the police must get terribly sick of hearing this sort of thing...

On the Blog

Grandad, of Headrambles, asks 'why do you blog'? Well, why indeed? Let's take a look, shall we?

Blogging is, on the face of it, rather interesting. There are, I think, three things which make blogs interesting, and quite different to what went before.

First, accessibility. Twenty years ago, it didn't really matter how interesting your writing was; unless you were a journalist or author or similar, very few people were likely to see it. These days, anyone with access to the Internet, really, can have a blog, and blather to the cold, unfeeling web to their heart's content. Of course, most of it is complete crap, but one in a thousand or so are quite readable, and mostly by people whose writing would otherwise not have been read.

Second, comments. It's always interesting to see what other people have to say about a point of view expressed in an article. Incidentally, the quality of the comments generally seems to be in inverse proportion to the quality of the actual article; really big, popular, well-written blogs tend to attract awful comments, while smaller blogs often get quite interesting ones.

The third thing is a bit of a cheat; notifications and persistency. Before blogs, you could really have one or the other, but not both. People had email mailing lists, or, more commonly, personal websites. With the mailing list, you found out what was new, but had no personal record, or place to refer other people, while with the personal website, however interesting it might be, you're not going to check back every day on the off-chance that something might change. Blogs are different, here; you have an archive, to which you can refer people and read old articles, and you also have notification of new content in the form of syndication (Atom/RSS) feeds.

All of these things made blogging into a bit of a fad, a few years ago. Everyone had a blog; the only reason I have one is that everyone else did, for goodness sakes! The blogging boom had such an impact on the web that at one point, Google considered omitting them from its main index entirely; their incestuous linking patterns were messing with its results. I think that it's a good thing for everybody that they relented.

And yet, all was not entirely well. I suspect that we're really getting past the hey-day of blogging. All the celebrities have them, at this point, as do the politicians, and various other people that we really don't want to listen to blathering on. Many people, and even some very high-profile bloggers, who started a few years ago, have given up. Brief experiments in podcasting (voice blogging) and video blogging proved embarrassing, and are now confined to insane web celebrities.

Oh, yes. RSS. For all that it has, in all probability, contributed to the popularity of blogs and blogging more than any single other factor, RSS is really not all that great. RSS readers work by polling the RSS file, checking at intervals to see if it has changed. This is not a problem for a blog like this, which hovers around the 130 subscriber mark, but it can hardly fail to be a problem for something like, say, TechCrunch, which has 650,000 subscribers, and whose RSS files average over 100kB. Things like FeedBurner, and the popularity of web-based feed readers, reduce the problem a little, but still, I'm sure that RSS makes up a fair chunk of Internet traffic, and it's only going to get worse. Unfortunately, while it's a hack, it's a very popular, standard one, and is unlikely to be replaced by anything saner any time soon.

Okay, enough rattling on about blogs in general. Why do I blog?

Well, really, I've no idea. I started because it was, at the time, more or less the in thing, and I thought I'd give it a go. I continued because I actually found it to be great fun. It's a nice way to share interesting or funny things with your friends, it can be a great way to vent, and it can even serve as an archive of your thoughts. In addition, it's always nice to see that one or two random visitors are interested (or, perhaps, horrified) by my writing, and come back. This blog is linked to by people I don't even KNOW, at this point.

Unlike some, I absolutely don't write this stuff for money, or for fame. No-one actually makes money off blogging, and quite frankly I have no interest in joining the ranks of people who are solely famous for their blogs. One or two of them are decent, but most are awful. Funnily enough, I have actually bumped into one or two random people in bars who have read it, and identify me by the photo on the about page, but no, I'm not doing it for the guys either.

The idea of people I don't know reading this stuff has always seemed strange to me, by the way. When I started writing it, I more or less assumed that no-one would read it except for a few friends. It's flattering, of course, but when someone came up to me in the George and said "Are you Robert Synnott? Do you write that?" I was seriously freaked out. He was hot, too; sadly, I think he was only interested in the blog.

And will I continue to do it? Well, hopefully for a while, at least. Frequency and quality of posts has been dropping for a while, but I haven't quite lost interest yet. No doubt I will eventually have said all I want to say, but for the moment I'll keep filling your newsreader with nonsense, if it's all the same to you.

Oh, and I must admit, on the rare occasions that I've hit programming.reddit.com or similar, and gotten lots of visitors out of it, well, that was exciting. Maybe I'm not entirely immune to the allure of fake Internet fame, after all...

Should you have a blog? Absolutely! What is there to lose? Pop over to Blogger and get a free one today!

Images of uncertain purpose

As you might have noticed, I haven't been blogging as much lately as last year. Anyway, here are some pictures of largely unclear purpose which I took for my blog, but then forgot above them. Let's guess what I was thinking when I took them, shall we?

I have no idea, really. I suppose I most have thought that it was funny at the time, for whatever reason.

Believe it or not, it's nothing to do with teenage girls; they're the bunch of evil Satanists who bring out UML.

Yes!

This was cruel of me, but I saw it, and I couldn't resist. The Matt in question is the one who runs Automattic, makers of Wordpress, which is, indeed, known for showing this sort of error.

Scary personals ad. All things vodka oriented!

Ewh. VERY scary personals ad.
Fun, eh? Sometimes I wonder about myself...

Best. Bill. Ever.

From iTunes:

(It was, in fact, a song called 'Cancer', by the Tiger Lillies. It's quite good, really.)

Java Syndrome

Around the turn of the century, people started to notice that there were... more frameworks around. At first it was subtle; a logging framework here, a unit testing framework there, a framework framework in the latest issue of Which Buzzword. Then, things started getting out of hand. Classes with names like STDIOMetaEnterpriseFrameworkFactory and AgileBitShiftingXPActor started showing up.

By 2015, a programmer's keyboard came with a button which, when pressed, typed the string 'org.apache.'. The average 'Hello World' demonstration, when put together, weighed in at 10 gigabytes, and required as much as six months of editing fiddly little XML files.

But that was just the start.

In 2027, with the release of Java 11 Enterprise Pair Programming For Transnationals Edition, UML came true.

Filth 2.0

Someone has done a pornographic version of Twitter.

I have not the words.

Well, could be worse; at least it wasn't Leah.

Scary bloggers!

Dave Winer, noted tedious old blogger, turns out to be scarier than you might think.

Adventures in Banking

Aren't banks fun? Hours of entertainment! Well, not really, no.

On Friday, I was privileged to interact with the bank (AIB) not once, but twice! First, I attempted to put some money on my credit card. Shouldn't be too hard, surely? After all, it appears as one of the accounts on the Internet banking thingy; I can probably just transfer money to it!

Oh, if only. It turns out that its status as an account there is very much read-only. So, I rang the bank. An annoying telephone menu, followed by waiting on hold for half an hour with American country music in the background, and finally I was connected to a nice lady (who must have the patience of a saint) who told me how to do it. It turns out, you go to 'Bill Pay', click 'Add bill', enter your credit card number, twice, in the field marked "Bill Reference Number", and enter a number from your code card. Easy once you know how, eh?

But that's not all! Once you actually make the transfer, the money leaves your account instantly. It doesn't appear on your card until the next day. Presumably it gets sent from branch to branch by carrier pigeon, or similar.

Note the interesting button placement choices made by the wonderfully skilled designer of AIB's beautiful, gorgeous, not in any way horribly confusing website.

And then, I went to the bank to withdraw money. Without an ATM card. Again, I had to wait a fair while, this time in a queue. The process turns out to be quite complicated; you fill in a long form, have it stamped a few times, and show your passport. This bit was interesting; while they clearly love the appearance of security, the actual passport verification was very brief. Then, the teller spent about ten minutes counting and re-counting the four(!) notes involved; whether this was an obsessive-compulsive thing, or some bizarre security requirement, I am not sure.

Finally, I escaped, after a further five minute wait in one of those funny little double-doored airlock things that most banks now seem to use for access. What fun!

Pownce - A Critical Review

Of course, in the past, this sort of review could be safely left to Uncov, which was better at it than most. However, Uncov is now dead, so I'm going to have a go.

First, what is Pownce? Well, what indeed? During its private beta period, I had always assumed that it was a social network for cats, or similar, but now that it is finally open to the public I've been able to find out for myself. Sort of.

Pownce is written by noted string-rounding expert Leah Culver, who I've mentioned before. Various other Web 2.0 celebs are involved, too.

Signing up
This was great fun. First, you tell it whether you're a boy or a girl. Well, sort of:
Disgustingly cutesy, as I'm sure you will agree. Please note that this is not the result of some silly application which adds whatever genders people type in; these are default values, put in by the authors. Ugh.

Pownce is disarmingly honest; they tell you up front that if, in a moment of madness, you decide to go for the paid plan (of which more later) they will bother you if you try to cancel.
They'd also like to know exactly where you live, but they're not saying why.
Finally, you are invited to upload an image of yourself. I responded with my usual picture. Perhaps understandably, the server choked in horror, and gave me this:
"You must be at least this good-looking to upload an image."

Thankfully, when I tried again I got a less shallow server process, and my image was put in place, no doubt shattering the hard disk platter. Here's my page, in case you're interested.


Using Pownce

So, finally I was able to find out what Pownce actually did. It's terribly exciting!

Have a guess?

Come on...

Well, it's the same as Twitter, really, except with no obvious mobile phone or instant messenger integration. You are also able to upload files, and define events. If you're a paid member, you can upload files of up to 100mb in size! How useful! You also don't see the ads (of which, also, more later), you get a little badge proclaiming you as the sort of person who gives crazed Web 2.0 entrepreneurs 20 dollars a year, and you are permitted, rather inevitably, to create your own hideous theme for your page.

Ah, the page. What does a user's page look like? Well, when they first sign up, it looks something like this:
Note the second sentence. What grammar!

Now, about those events. You can define events, giving a title, description, date and so forth. You can then click on an obscurely-icon-ed button; its URL implies that it will give you an iCal description of the event, to be imported into your favourite calendar app. What it actually does, of course, is gives you the same 500 error screen shown above. Lovely.

Revenue Model

('Revenue Model' is a term used by Web 2.0 people. It means, roughly, 'hopefully the government will come up with public funding for social networking sites for cats'.)

Perhaps realising that no-one in their right minds would pay for this crap, the authors have decided to diversify into ads. Ads are inserted into peoples' notes on the public pages. They are entirely untargeted, and cost $3 per thousand impressions. Yep. Those will sell well.

Bits and Bobs

Is Pownce fast? Well, what do you think, given Leah's renowned programming skills?

The answer is emphatically no. It has that same horrid, grinding slowness that so turned me against Twitter in the first place. Why can't someone make one of these things that actually performs properly?

I'm pretty sure, actually, that those stars were the subject of the famous and now-excised post in which Leah told us how to round numbers using lots of string operations and if statements.

Leah, by the way, seems to have her share of stalkers:

(Please note that I am one of those homosexual things, and thus am indemnified against anyone thinking that I might be one of those stalkers. She does seem to be rather popular with the gentlemen, though, as you can see from the absurd suck-up comments on her blog.)

Pownce also has an API. At time of writing, there is no documentation on, for instance, exactly what the various calls return, though.

Then, there's the desktop app. It apparently uses a beta Adobe desktop application development thing called Air, which requires a special VM. I didn't try it, as I don't really want my pristine MacOS desktop polluted with weird-looking non-native pseudo-Flash beta crap. It seems that even the Pownce staff share my misgivings to an extent:

Conclusion

Pownce is an odd creature. It's like Twitter, but without any of the useful features. It's also like Facebook, but without any of the useful features. It does allow you to send files, rather like email, or any instant messenger application from this decade. Presumably, the user is expected to sit there refreshing the page once every few minutes, or else use the scary desktop application.

Oh, and the company has an absurd name: Megatechtronium.

I think that the conclusion is obvious. I've decided to include, however, a nod to Uncov, which does this sort of thing so very much better than me:

Premature optimism is the root of all evil

(With apologies to Knuth. Well, I think that it was Knuth. Sounds like the sort of thing he'd say, doesn't it...)

Please note that this is a personal post. As far as I know, no games have exploded in relation to this post. I'm never optimistic about that sort of thing.

Anyway, basically, on Friday, for a change, I tried being optimistic about something. Didn't work out at all well. Spent most of last night crying on peoples' shoulders. I should have known better.

This should go some way to explaining why I've been particularly unpleasant today, by the way.

Just Say No to Optimism.

More Pownce Incompetence

Remember I mentioned that the person who writes Pownce, a much-feted-by-the-Techcrunch-style-press Web2.0 thing of unclear purpose, isn't as smart as you might expect?

Well, she's taken down that embarrassing piece of code, and put up another, instead. You have to wonder, really...

Pownce may be a bit like Twitter. Maybe. It's all terribly unclear.

Some highlights from WebFrigerator

Well, people have been making some interesting sentences on my afore-mentioned WebFrigerator game. I was tempted to do this entry as a podcast, as some of the phrases produced are so very poetic, but, realistically, my voice is pretty scary, and podcasts are so 2007! So, just read these aloud for full effect. Preferably when no-one else is in the room; don't want to look insane, now, do we? Let's begin.

"At what time on Wednesday did the furtive Pope test unpleasantly moist weasel?"

"Yes Minister, I enjoy putrid shags." Also, "defenestrate slovenly Jesus" and "Pope Turnip".

"Jesus said penile iPhone,"

"Someone aged Lisp"

I enjoy his wobbly cheese" - ewh

"I enjoy turnip in floppy blancmange"

"Hello heaving Margaret" and "Turnip tweet polarity"

This one is something special, and will require a few quotes:

"Priestess with a beautiful hamper make love happily at the beach"

"When you love somebody with your bottom don't run away"

"Furtive soul kiss"

"Hot anal sex, Pope on bottom"

"Halibut are running rampant"

Please note that the author has also arranged the thing in an artistic manner. Beautiful. Moving on...

"C'est ne pas une turnip" and "Trout Bottom"

"Wednesday the troll splashed water into the hamper and drowned his floppy hat. What a silly old soul."

"Bush shags American Pope with revolting TSA shuffling", "It's cautiously floppy and slovenly", and "defenestrate shuffling weasel".

"My arse said what?"

"Rotund lunatic gets fatter, buy more meringue pie" and "run fat American, page someone".

There. Wasn't that lovely? As many predicted, in 2008 the world continues to obsess over politics, religion, bodily functions, Apple and fish.

Do feel free to contribute your own gems!

WebFrigerator now on Facebook!

WebFrigerator is now also available as a Facebook app. You can add it by clicking here, and it gives you a board which is uniquely associated with your profile. Other users can still modify your board, of course.

Note that Facebook integration is still a bit primitive; I hope to improve it when I have the time. It uses cl-facebook, a mostly-undocumented Facebook library for Common Lisp.

Previous posts on WebFrigerator here.

An attractive Microsoft beta

The other day, I visited Microsoft's software update page, only to be presented with this:

Why, yes, I'd love to use dubious beta software to update my computer, so that I can have an allegedly nicer interface!

On the plus side, it is interesting in that it's the first time I've ever seen MS pushing .NET software for anything even vaguely system-related. I assume that it's basically the old update thing in un-managed C++, wrapped with a Silverlight UI, but still, it's progress. I wonder is this an indicator of where the next version of Windows is going?

For any given medium, there exists a local form of spam

Yesterday, I mentioned that I'd written a little web word game, and Damien, of the very popular blog, graciously mentioned it.

Today, someone tried to use it to advertise their website! A tile bearing the URL 'downloadmusic.ie' (nofollowed link; PageRank, you know...) appeared; it has since been removed. I suppose that the person in question may simply have been unfamiliar with Internet ettiquete, but really, what were they trying to acheive?

By the way, if you like the game, and have a Reddit or Digg account, please do vote it up on the relevant services (links on site).

Also, I've confirmed that it does indeed work on IE.

One BILLION Dollars!

So, Sun has apparently bought MySQL, of all things, for a billion dollars (roughly two and a half packets of crisps at today's exchange rate).

Interesting move. On the one hand, does the company really have anything much of value? Its only decent backend, InnoDB, is actually owned by competitor Oracle. On the other, MySQL is currently known for its poor performance on multi-processor machines, and Sun is currently championing multi-processor, with its 8 core, 64 hardware thread Niagara II, and various development tools. Potentially a match made in heaven, but the price seems very high...

WebFrigerator - a little word game

I spent this evening writing a little AJAX-y word game, called WebFrigerator. The idea is simple. You know those word magnets that you can get to stick on fridges? Hours of entertainment! You can re-arrange peoples' sentences, make your own horribly inappropriate sentences, and so forth.

Well, anyway, I've done a simple online version. Any changes you make to a given board will be saved, and there when you come back to it... unless someone has already re-arranged it! Each board gives a URL, so you can share it with your friends. As with most of my webapps, it's written in Common Lisp, using the Hunchentoot webserver and CLSQL for database access.

You can play here, or see (or modify) the fridge I've arranged here. Please do contribute words, by the way; its dictionary is rather empty at the moment, and adding words could hardly be simpler; just click 'Enter a Word', and type it.

Also, I'm not, as yet, sure whether it works properly with Internet Explorer; I haven't had a chance to check. It does work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and nearly works on the iPod Touch; unfortunately, the iPhone interface doesn't really let you drag and drop... Most annoying. Anyway, please let me know if it works (or doesn't work) in IE for you.

Your PHP Hell

I'm sure that most of you think that when I rant and rave about the horrors of PHP, I'm just being an elitist old bitch, with my closures and namespaces and garbage collection which works properly, and what-not. PHP is perfect, really, and so easy!

Well, feast your eyes on this, Mr. Web Designer. And this! I mean, really.

For those of you who couldn't be bothered to click the links, summary: DEAL WITH NUMBERS GREATER THAN 2E31 AT YOUR PERIL! The correct approach seems to be to use floats, and render them as strings with printf, or something similarly ludicrous.

Google downsizes AdSense Referrals

Google is effectively killing off AdSense referrals by returning to their original pricing structure for North American and Japanese users, and abolishing it for other users. Their original structure was considered unattractive by most because it required the referred user to generate 100 dollars in 180 days before the original user saw any money, which apparently didn't happen much.

Users who no longer qualify won't get paid AT ALL, even under the original terms, unless their referred user reaches a payment point by the end of this month. This seems a little stingy; you'd think they'd have set it to 180 days from now for goodwill purposes...

This doesn't effect me, as I make 100% of my AdSense money through AdSense for content, but I'd imagine a lot of people won't be at all happy. Presumably the new price rates were just too expensive; they'd have involved some payout for almost all users, and I'd imagine a lot of popular bloggers, in particular, made a small fortune off them.

I await the response of the AdSense-running community with interest.

My (Temporary) Desktop

This is my current home computer setup:

Yes, it's on the kitchen table. Not ideal, I know, but I don't have a desk at the moment. Really should consider getting one...

Bonus shot of my old desktop at work; note world's shortest and pinkest ethernet cable:

God, I'm pathetic, aren't I?

So, last night, I was sick, and had trouble sleeping. That's of no real relevance....

Anyway, tonight, I went out with friends. It was fun, but I ultimately ended up in the George.

Two cute guys came on to me. Three, if you count friend of first cute guy. (For reference, the last time anyone under 40 and not in immediate danger of drowning in their own fat came on to me in the George was about 2001 or 2002. And in that case, by coming onto me, I mean putting his hand down my jeans. He was cute, though (though very short; I'm short, and he was about half a foot shorter than me.) I ran away.)

The point is that I didn't really know how to respond to this, and more or less ran away in both cases, just like I did five years ago.

Maybe I should become a monk or something.

Hello? Yes, I've got my MSN Passport... Yes, I'll hold...

From MSN Instant Messenger:

 

(7:16:15 PM) Message could not be sent because an error with the switchboard occurred:

I must say, I'm amused by the idea of a switchboard for MSN. Win2k3 wasn't up to the job, evidently...

Google Fuhrer (Beta)

From a now-removed-but-mirrored-by-Valleywag page from Google's job site:

... and there are always people [in Google] who know more than you, be it C++, Java, Cryptic crosswords or even Hitler.

Remember, kids, in Google, there's always someone who knows more than you about Hitler.

That's because he's on staff.

As an aside, the phrase "or even Hitler!" makes a perfect ending to any sentence!

Scoble's Hubris

Robert Scoble is a well-known blogger who used to write for Microsoft, and is these days involved in some startup or other. He is almost painfully enthusiastic about just about everything Web 2.0, and has hordes of adoring fans. As famous bloggers go, he's probably one of the more likeable ones; he condemned PayPerPost back in the day, for instance.

He made a rather amusing post a couple of days ago, talking about a series of videos he did; he also indulges in video-blogging incessantly. From the post:

So, out of these seven posts which one got the most participants? Got me seen as a thought leader?

(Emphasis mine.)

Now, I'm sorry, but whatever Scoble is, and whatever a 'thought leader' is, Scoble is not a thought leader. Scoble is, at best, a mildly engaging writer whose reactions to new Web 2.0 stuff tends to indicate that of the great unwashed. I mean, honestly, how full of yourself do you have to be to go around calling yourself a 'thought leader'?

Dating with C++

OKCupid, a popular free dating website, is currently advertising for developers. Given that it is a website, you might imagine that they'd be looking for something in the Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby line, or possibly Java, or, at the outside, C#. These, after all, are the programming languages used in practically all interactive websites today.

They're not, though. They want C++ programmers. OKCupid is written in C++. Except for the image upload stuff, which is apparently written in PHP; ours it is not to reason why. It consists of 200,000 lines of C++. Terrifying.

How's it done? I first assumed that it'd use FastCGI, or possibly an Apache module. It turns out, though, that it actually uses a special webserver written for the purpose. Said server is open-source, and seems to use macros and templates heavily. Here's one line from the charmingly simple tutorial:

    BLOCK { pub2 ()->run (&out, file, @(rc), &aarr, opts); }

And another:

okclnt_simple_t (ptr<ahttpcon> x, oksrvc_simple_t *o)