Intermission on the livewire

Are you a stat whore? (And all webmasters are, although I don’t pay much attention to mine anymore. I used to, I just don’t these days.) Do you use awstats? Well, there is a prettification of that hoary old hacky script. I recommend it to all. Go get it.

jawstats. It rocks.

While we are talking of code (ish, as jawstats is all flash and trousers), consider this. It didn’t fox me, but it made me laugh.

  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  use Test::More tests => 2;
  use constant FILE => 'my_file';
  is -e FILE => undef, FILE . 'does not exist';
  ... # do stuff that creates file
  is -e FILE => 1, FILE . ' now exists';

So I run my test script, and it fails. Oh gn0es! But I look at it, with a little help of my colour syntax highlighting, and it is obvious. snort I laughed. See, I use fat commas in an is, because it looks nice. Sort of makes a visual association, nothing more than that. Just one of those little idomaticnesses that I do. Another is I never use foreach. In fact, I hate seeing foreach in code. Just use for, people, it makes a lot more sense. (In case you are wondering why I was testing for file existence, well, I was fetching from an external secure FTP site. And to make sure I can get there, I nab the .bashrc, then make sure it is on the local drive. Yes, I know.)

Because no one is actually reading at this point, here is another snippet of code:

  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  use Data::Dumper;
  use constant {
    FOO => 'invisible constant',
    BAR => [ 'do', 'not', 'want' ],
    BAZ => 'heylo',
  };

  my $one = join ' ', BAR;
  my $two = join ' ', (BAR);
  my $three = join ' ', map BAR->[$_],
    0 .. scalar @{ (BAR) } - 1;
  my $four = join ' ', @{ (BAR) };

  warn Dumper (BAR, $one, $two, $three, $four);

See what I did there? Ass. Bitten. Wasn’t. Thinking.

Java has returned to my life, so I am brushing up on that again. Been a long time, and I now remember how much of a pain it is. But there is reason.

Anyway, did I mention you should go get jawstats? Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with it.

Dear Electoral Commission…