I’ve been playing around with perl programming for a little while now (mainly because of a two-month research project at the hospital that was perl-centric), and yesterday, I started delving into CGI.pm. Tres cool — it is to perl what mainResponder is to Frontier, namely a very powerful way to quickly put together server-side scripts that do all those things that you have always needed web pages to do.

Perl-related CGI question, though: is there a way to make a system call from a CGI and have the output of that call buffered back to perl in a way that it can be incrementally displayed? Specifically, I want to do a traceroute, and have the lines from the traceroute come back one at a time, instead of perl having to wait for the entire trace to finish before any of it is returned to perl. UPDATE: I figured out how to do what I want to do.

Ahhhh, how beautiful situational ethics can be… (Yes, most people understand that this has become about the use of “defaced” graphics, but how do you think Alan Diaz feels about his photos, defaced, appearing on Scripting News? Oh, that’s doing one’s part “for free speech on the Internet.” Gotcha. However do I keep all this straight?) It will be interesting seeing how they deal with the “defaced” graphics once they’re on a non-Userland site.

Just doing my part for free speech on the Internet.

How fast would this guy have to have been driving in order to launch his multi-ton SUV into the second floor of a house? Jeez.

OK, question: say you’re the guy who wrote the “I Love You” worm/trojan. Now say you read this news story about how authorities have you under surveillance, and are ready to arrest you and search your computers as soon as they get a warrant. Don’t you start wiping those discs clean? Put big pacemaker magnets on top of the disc platters? It seems that if they are really serious about this suspect, then all this information wouldn’t be in the news.

The judge who issued the ruling against MP3.com says that the legal reasoning wasn’t even a close call. The big quote: “Stripped to its essence, defendant’s ‘consumer protection’ argument amounts to nothing more than a bald claim that defendants should be able to misappropriate plaintiffs’ property simply because there is a consumer demand for it. This hardly appeals to the conscience of equity.”