This is the peak and trough of my Perl career. I have been rejected from job after job for the past six months after always having 2-3 offers to choose from. And each rejection drags me deeper and deeper into a lack of self-esteem.
On the other hand, I am proud to announce that I am the official and sole maintainer of
dbi.perl.org. There is nothing that makes me prouder than knowing that each time I mock up a new version of the website on my laptop (we use HTML::Mason - I think most of the perl.org sites do), that it will be live and viewed hundreds if not thousands of people an hour or so after I cvs update to the perl.org CVS server. This way more than compensates for the current employment draught.
There is really a long way to go with the site and I would appreciate suggestions. One thing I want to do is come up with a classification of the DBI contributions, such as the recent DB Ix::Simple by Juerd or EZDBI by Dominus. I envision several categories such as:
- prepare-execute-fetch simplifiers
- schema creators
- dynamic sql generators
Please feel free to email me suggestions!
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Re: dbi.perl.org is live online!
by cjf (Parson) on Mar 30, 2002 at 05:12 UTC
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Congrats and thanks for working on this. I'm just starting to work with dbi and a resource like this really helps. :)
I really like the links you have up in the documentation section (I can't seem to access the DBI/DBD::mysql/Linux HOW-TO or DBI / MySQL FAQ ones right now though). The demonstrations are also a neat idea.
The only question I have is regarding the link to amazon.com on the main page. I've been seeing a lot of links to amazon on perl related sites lately, is there some reason for this? Shouldn't we boycott them due to their ridiculous patents? Even O'Reilly, who published the book you're linking to, sent a letter to amazon disaproving of the enforcement of the patent. Software patents can do a lot of harm, and I don't think that the Perl community should encourage and support companies that enforce ridiculous patents.
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While I agree that the patent is ridiculous, I don't believe that amazon should be totally to blame. The U.S. government granted it, after all. The dumb patent was issued almost 5 years ago, and back then their "business methods" were probably groundbreaking.
It's the USPTO that needs revamping, not the people who submit patent requests. Yep, software patents are BAD, so perhaps we should collectively let the USPTO know that they should get more technologically savvy before issuing patents they don't seem to understand the rippling effects of. And if patents are to be enforced by the patent-holder, they need to have a statute of limitations in which to do so. They shouldn't be allowed to wait until the patent is widely used and pop up with ludicrous licensing fees (Unisys, anyone?).
Sony has a patent for "a method for interactive network session tracking from inbound source to net sale includes storing a unique session ID (identifier) in an entry in a session database, and associating the session ID with an inbound source (origin) of the user of an interactive network site", but no one's complaining about them (and who hasn't done something like this?).
IMHO, amazon is only being pointed at because they chose to try to enforce their patent with one of their (big) competitors.
If I didn't already have the promoted DBI book, I'd have clicked dbi.perl.org's link, not for political reasons, but for supportive ones. The link is an affiliate link, and the way I see it, if I bought the dbi book from an affiliate link, Tim Bunce gets a royalty, O'Reilly gets another book sold, amazon shareholders may actually get a dividend and dbi.perl.org gets a few bucks in commission.
I expect there to be a few dissentions to this ideaology, but this is just my opinion -- I don't expect anyone else to share it :)
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While I agree that the patent is ridiculous, I don't believe that amazon should be totally to blame. The U.S. government granted it, after all.
Yes there are obvious problems with the U.S. patent office and their evaluation of patent claims. Yes they are a major part of the problem and more needs to be done to fix the U.S. (and other) patent offices. However, rewarding those who take advantage of these flaws only serves to damage the software industry by encouraging more companies to obtain and enforce questionable patents.
The dumb patent was issued almost 5 years ago, and back then their "business methods" were probably groundbreaking.
The patent in question was issued on September 28th, 1999. What the patent basically says is that you fill out a form and give them some info, they send you a cookie to store some information to identify you, next time you visit their site it gets sent back to them. This is not, and was not at the time, "groundbreaking."
Sony's patent seems to be another screw up of the U.S. patent office. I hadn't heard anything about it previously, probably because they haven't tried to enforce it (please inform me if I'm incorrect). If they do try, I'm sure there will be plenty of noise.
If I didn't already have the promoted DBI book, I'd have clicked dbi.perl.org's link, not for political reasons, but for supportive ones. The link is an affiliate link, and the way I see it, if I bought the dbi book from an affiliate link, Tim Bunce gets a royalty, O'Reilly gets another book sold, amazon shareholders may actually get a dividend and dbi.perl.org gets a few bucks in commission.
I think you missed the point. The only part of this that changes if the affiliate program was switched to fatbrain or somewhere else is that Amazon wouldn't make a profit off the sale and we wouldn't be supporting their enforcement of a ridiculous patent. See Boycott :).
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Re: dbi.perl.org is live online!
by Maclir (Curate) on Mar 30, 2002 at 03:40 UTC
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Congratulations and commiserations. I have been looking for work here for almost 10 months.
One suggestion on the "documentation" page - fix up the HTML so that there are no bullets without text next to them, and each new item has a bullet.
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