On this date in 1987, Larry Wall released Perl to a newsgroup.  For you non-geeks, this is the equivelant of celebrating the day that someone first demonstrated super glue to the masses.

Perl is one of my favorites.  Honestly, I learned to script in Perl before I learned shell scripting in sh or ksh.  My first tech job in the Army was big on Perl, so I learned Perl as I was learning to be a SysAd.

Perl is a bit of a jack of all trades scripting language, being good at a lot of things, but not as good at most of them as languages that are specialized.  For example, a lot of Internet code used to be written in Perl, but most now is written in PHP or some other language that is specific to the web.

I get the feeling that I’ll still be using Perl in one form or another for a long time.

OK, bear with me.  Geek talk ahead.  This is important only in that it gets a series of thoughts out of my head that have been swishing around and around for a while.

Like I mentioned yesterday, I just finished watching the last movie in the Harry Potter series.  It’s a good yarn, and the writers and directors did an excellent job in entertaining me.  But some things have been nagging at me.

The finale of the entire series is a huge battle between the hordes of evil Voldemort followers and the small, but plucky band of good wizards centered around Harry Potter.  The good wizards are holed up in Hogwarts and are preparing for a battle to the death.  The entire scope of their protection is to put up some force fields, mine a bridge, and banish the untrustworthy students to the dungeons for the duration.  Once their protection spell on the castle is defeated, the battle pretty much falls down to a large series of single combat encounters.  Individual wizards face off, with the winner living and the loser becoming something to be squeegeed up.  The battle doesn’t go well for our intrepid heroes, and they win only because Harry Potter defeats Voldemort in single combat.

Basically, the wizards are conducting combat in the same way that ancient barbarian warriors and medieval knights did:  single combat between heroes.  There is no magical version of the phalanx or the maniple.  There didn’t seem to be the wizard version of the archer or crew served weapon, and there certainly wasn’t any use of the castle as an urban warfare trap.

Now remember, the good guys have spent several years demonstrating that they are stronger because they depend on each other and work together.  But when it finally comes down to the big battle, they dissolve into little one and two man fighting teams.

Remember, these are beings who have the ability to turn ordinary substances into deadly explosives and poisons, are armed almost exclusively with ranged weapons in the form of spells, and with the aid of brooms can fly like birds.  Where was the “You guys on the Quidditch team take these flasks and start dropping them on all of those bad guys.  Don’t get caught up in the vapors from the explosions.”  or “You guys go down to the owlery and lay down a base of fire with the “Mess a Guy Up” curse while we draw them into the halls of the castle so we can ambush them.”?

This also brings me to something that bothered me about an incident in “The Half Blood Prince”.  Harry Potter learns a pretty effective spell, sectumsempra. Basically, it’s a “Cut that guy into little pieces” kind of curse.  He uses it once, then is so shocked by its effectiveness that he gets rid of the book he found it in.  As far as I can see, he never taught it to anyone else, even knowing that a battle was coming and that his friends would need as many tricks in their bag as they could in order to survive.  This mentality seems to run through the entire story.  “Let’s do the minimum necessary to defeat Voldemort, but let’s never do anything we might have regrets about later.”   Again, the attitude of individual combat and personal limits on how to fight peaks through.

And what do the good wizards do once the battle is won?  Voldemort is dead, and so are a lot of his top lieutenants.  But a lot of bad guys are still around, and what are the victors going to do about them?  Also, the Ministry of Magic is probably still controlled by a Voldemort toady, so what was done to reform the government?  Since we know that Harry’s family is alive 19 years later, we can infer that something was done so that he could show his face in public without someone trying to burn it off, but what?  After the last wizard war, they seem to have held Truth and Reconciliation hearings, where sins were forgiven for all but the worst criminals.  After seeing how badly that worked, can we assume that the good wizards then went on a hunt for the bad guys and exacted some justice in a rather sticky and smoky manner?  If you’ve tried just forgiving and forgetting and got another war as soon as the bad guys could find one, isn’t the next logical step to start putting a whole bunch of people against a wall?

What bothers me about all this is the message it conveys to the young readers.  The bad guys in this tale are basically a gang of bullies and thugs.  The good guys are good ladies and gentlemen.  The good guys fight as gentlemen; the bad guys pull out all the stops.  What I teach my kids is that when faced with a bully, you hold nothing back.  Kick, bite, scratch, grab whatever is handy as a weapon, but the final goal is to stop the threat.   The good guys in these stories seem to be willing to only go so far in fighting, but no further, which seems to be the reason they tend to get their heads handed to them until some hero comes along to save the day.

Anyway, I’m putting way too much thought into a children’s book and movie, but things like this tend to get stuck in a loop somewhere in my cranium, and this is the best way to get them out.  Y’all got any thoughts?

Scientists in Washington have announced that the use of an online video game has advanced the science behind anti-AIDS drugs.  The game, Foldit, encouraged game players to find the best way to fold proteins in a virus, and scientists have been able to use the solutions to the puzzles to increase their understanding of the structure and work of viruses.

Crowd-sourcing research is nothing new.  The BOINC focuses on bio-medical and mathematical research.  Basically, a problem is broken down into small bits, and PC’s around the world spend their idle time going through the data and sort the wheat from the chaff to allow for more efficient use of dedicated computing resources.

But this is the first time I’ve heard of actual human interaction being used to do something like this.  Imagine the uses.  It could be used to find solutions to problems that are now done primarily by experts in their field.  Need a new human-usable traffic plan for your city?  Create a driving game that gives points for getting from point A to point B quickest without driving on the sidewalk.  Need to find and bomb the living crap out of some countries nuclear weapons program?  Create a video game that gets hundreds of thousands of people to go through every possible way to do it until you find the best way.  Bonus points if you give the players realistic simulations of military and intelligence units to fight with.

Hopefully, this method is used again.  I might give up my personal moratorium on playing video games to contribute.

Today I learned that Dennis Ritchie, another person who created the technology that has greatly influenced my life, has died:

Ritchie is credited with creating the programming language C, one of the most widely used and influential languages today. He was also one of the creators of operating system UNIX, whose variants — most notably Linux and OS X — are also widely used today.

I’ve been using and taking care of Unix systems since 1990, and was using computer programs written in C long before that.  It’s the technology that I use to make my living, and I don’t think that’s going to change for a very long time.  Yes, there are a lot of newer languages and OS’s out there, but almost all of them are either based on something that Ritchie created or borrow concepts from his work.  There’s something comforting and home-like about getting into a command shell on a Unix box, be it Solaris, HPUX, AIX, or Linux.

Rest in peace, Mr. Ritchie.  An entire generation of geeks owes a lot to you.

#include <stdio.h>
 
int main (void)
{
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
    return 0;
}