hultberg.org: LinkLog

News.com: Blogger Pro for free

Blogger Pro, the paid for blogging service owned by Google, eliminates all user fees and offers the premium Blogger services for free.

Google-owned Web log-creation site Blogger is eliminating its paid version and folding premium functions into its free service, bucking a trend toward making people pay for Web site extras.

Is this an act of benevolence or a way of meeting the threat from perhaps superior service TypePad, the hosted version of Movable Type?

"Pro subscribers helped keep us going as a struggling start-up, when servers and bandwidth were at an extreme premium," Williams wrote. "We wanted to keep basic Blogger free, but we needed to start charging in order to keep the lights on…Today, as you may know, Blogger's situation is much different. For one thing, we're part of Google. Google has lots of computers and bandwidth. And Google believes blogs are important and good for the Web."

Blogger bucks premium-services trend | CNET News.com

Congrats to five year old Google!

This day marks Google's fifth b-day. Congratulations, and thank you for doing an excellent job! Please don't go Big Brother on us...

The search engine site moved to its first office, actually a garage, in Menlo Park, California on 7 September 1998. This move was helped by the $1m in funding it received from investors, family and friends shortly before. Back then, Google was just four employees, its search system was still being refined and it was handling little more than 10,000 queries per day. Now it handles more than 200 million and Google has become a phenomenon that has transcended its online origins.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google celebrates fifth birthday

Salon 21st: The joy of Perl

An old Salon article about Larry Wall and the origins of Perl. Bold words, about changing the culture of computing. And what car he drives.

Such flame wars are a favorite hobby for hackers who are fond of declaiming in terms that allow no wiggle room -- ambiguity being foreign to the fundamental either/or, yes/no, zero/one digitalness of the computing universe. But Wall and Perl are all about wiggle room, about messy imperfection and fuzzy creativity. After all, duct tape is valuable not because it offers a perfect solution to your plumbing problems, but because it gets the job done. Perl, to some eyes, may not seem elegant. But that's not Wall's concern. His humble goal is to be useful, to help people do what they need to do -- to facilitate the interconnection of programming languages, hardware platforms, assorted software universes and people working together into one cosmic entity. Which, if you think about it, is what the Web is all about, too. It's no accident that Perl, which Wall first invented more than a decade ago, didn't really start to explode until the Web took off in 1994. The Web is a hacked-together, messy, ad-hoc creation that requires fast thinking and faster reaction times. Perl is a Web hacker's best friend.

The third part of this article describes in detail what made me bond with Perl. This quote sums the power of Perl up pretty darn good IMHO:

I realized at that point that there was a huge ecological niche between the C language and Unix shells, says Wall. C was good for manipulating complex things -- you can call it 'manipulexity.' And the shells were good at whipping up things -- what I call 'whipupitude.' But there was this big blank area where neither C nor shell were good, and that's where I aimed Perl.

Salon 21st | The joy of Perl

Perl.com: Perl, the postmodern (de)programming lnguage

Speechless. This speech makes me speechless. Larry Wall has a way of talking that really makes me want to se him live. Some day I must do that.

The subject of the speech is insteresting in it self, but Larry Wall adds so many levels of interest that it is silly. Cheap references to his family, jokes based on Star Wars and Star trek (see if you can find the Star Wars reference...), a total jumble of so many things yet he never drops the thread. Amazing.

There is just so much stuff in this talk that makes me think. Excellent read.

I'm here to talk about why Perl and Linux have both been so successful. Note that I'm measuring success here not so much in terms of numbers of users, but in terms of satisfaction of users.

Nowadays people are actually somewhat jaded by the term ``postmodern''. Well, perhaps jaded is an understatement. Nauseated might be more like it. But, anyway, I still distinctly remember the first time I heard it back in the '70s. I think my jaw fell and bounced off the floor several times. To me it was utterly inconceivable that anything could follow modern. Isn't the very idea of ``modern'' always associated with the ideas ``new'' and ``now''? The idea was so inconceivable to me that it took me at least ten seconds to figure it out. Or to think I'd figured it out. As a musician, the pat answer occurred to me almost immediately. I was familiar with the periods of music: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern. Obviously, if there were to be a period of music following the Modern, it would have to be called something other than Modern. And postmodern is as good a name as any, especially since it's a bit of a joke on the ordinary meaning of modern. Obviously the Modern period was misnamed.

She said, Like, it's all about how you don't have justify everything with a reason anymore. You can just put in stuff because you like it, you know, because it's cool. With Modern stuff you always had to justify everything.

Heidi said, ``You wanna know something really funny. In my IMP class, our class slogan is, 'There's more than one way to do it.''' ``You're kidding,'' I said. (I should also say that that IMP stands for Interactive Math Program, which is a math curriculum in which you sort of learn everything at once. In sort of a postmodern way.) Anyway, I said, ``You're kidding.'' ``No,'' she said, ``That's why IMP is better for math students like me--we learn better when we can see the big picture, and how everything fits in. The old way of learning math never gave you any context''.

'Tsall good. If someone is depressed, we say: 'Tsall good.''' ``But you don't actually think everything is good, do you?'' ``No, of course not.'' ``Are you saying that everything has good elements in it?'' ``No, Dad, I think when we say that, we're saying that, overall, things are good. Like, look at the big picture, don't just focus in on the two or three bad things that are happening to you right now.''

This would bother a Modernist, because a Modernist has to decide whether this is true OR that is true. The Modernist believes in OR more than AND. Postmodernists believe in AND more than OR. In the very postmodern Stephen Sondheim musical, Into the Woods, one of the heroines laments, ``Is it always or, and never and?'' Of course, at the time, she was trying to rationalize an adulterous relationship, so perhaps we'd better drop that example. Well, hey. At least we can use Perl as an example. In Perl, AND has higher precedence than OR does. There you have it. That proves Perl is a postmodern language.

Simple. Wonderful. Greatness. Using the words of Tenacious D: Supreme.

You've all heard the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. That's actually a Modernistic saying. The postmodern version is: If all you have is duct tape, everything starts to look like a duct. Right. When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?

perl.com: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (Mar. 09, 1999)