July 2009 Archives

No, I'm not talking about clean code. ;)

Contrary to popular belief and utter media ignorance, Perl doesn't just offer several powerful web frameworks (I'm totally in love with Sebastian Riedel's Mojo), it also has extremely powerful and underestimated GUI and graphic's bindings. Recently I toyed a little with the java-based "Processing" and while I was cursing several Java classes I was somehow too stupid to get up and running, I realized that I could have all the shiny and pretty shapes and animations in Perl the easy way. (What's missing is the overall well-rounded integration of Pretty Perl, sugarcoated with a nice GUI.)

Here's a little round-up of Perl all being pretty:

A reminder to everyone who forgot: The extremely powerful and flexible Image Magick still comes with the Perl API Perl Magick . Use it. If you need inspiration what to do with all the bitmap goodness, check out Mac-based "Pixelmator" which is a showcase of adding a GUI to Image Magick and make it an extremely impressive bitmap editor. (Why didn't the Open Source world do it with Gtk?)

Which leads us to the most impressive work the GtkPerl team has done over the years. Gtk2Perl is a must-install.

Another family member of GtkPerl is Cairo, the SVG library which also can produce PDF output and draw pretty things. ;)

Everyone wanting a basic browser written in Perl to get a look on Webkit-based rendering, can install Gtk2::WebKit which is a fully fledged Webkit view. If you have Flash installed correctly, it even does Flash out of the box. (I put a little example in my pretty Perl github)



If you're more of a KDE-kind-of-person: Yes, there is someone working on a new QtPerl version to support Qt/KDE 4.x.

Another really impressive library is "Clutter". Based on OpenGL and Cairo and that way bringing together the best of all worlds, Clutter can act as a canvas to be used in canvas-lacking Gtk. The Clutter module awaits your download.

While we're at it: Yes, there are Perl bindings to OpenGL - a project named POGL. If you're interested in the usal speed competitions between programming languages, read the POGL benchmark carefully. POGL is also available on CPAN

Another interesting library is libaosd which essentially allows no-fuss drawing directly on the screen. Of course, there's a X11::Aosd module on CPAN.



If you need the average run-of-the-mill canvas to use with Gtk, today's choice  (besides Clutter) is the Goo::Canvas module on CPAN.

Last, but not least - if you're planning to re-write OLPC's "Sugar" desktop in Perl, you'll have to get the X11 modules on CPAN There's the traditional X11::Protocol and I just found a new X11::Xlib module

If you are more into classics: Yes, TkPerl still exists.

And I totally forgot the Wx bindings for Perl which many people prefer over native widget sets.

German municipals try to forbid flashmobs. While I personally find a flashmob devastating dunes on the island of Sylt and leaving tons of party garbage behind plainly stupid (how about a garbage collecting flashmob in the woods or in the streets or the next park around the corner? Let's call it eco-mobs.. :), I really don't understand why everybody is crying after regulation immediately.

Let's sum up this little guide on how to beat the last freedom out of the digital age:

• Regulate. Regulate everything. Regulate users, bandwidth, frequences, browsers, the Internet, wlan usage and:
• Make it expensive! Claim taxes on everything from wlan adaptors to printers - ah hell, let's invent some tariff or tax (make it both) on paper itself - users can print out their emails after all.
  
• If regulation doesn't help: Prohibition and bans are classical methods every government should try at least three times every century whenever it seems appropriate
• Make everything digital look dangerous. Isn't WWW in principle absolutely the same like terrorism and isn't every gamer deep down in his heart a mass murderer? Also: Every man on the Internet seeks to rape little girls. One can't be too careful.
• Citizens need overparenting and patronizing. As everybody knows from political theory and philosophy, mankind is a beast (and childlike naive and uneducated) and has therefore be watched very carefully. The benevolent dictator works for Open Source projects, so let's apply the idea nationwide.
  
• If you can't gain anything by laws and regulations, go for industrial standards and data protection and DRM - never ever make something open and flexible in the first place and under no circumstances learn anything by the mistakes of others. So, while the music industry slowly learns its lesson about DRM, book publishers start all over with incompatible formats on ebook readers and tradtional customer lock-in services. No, noone will break DRM, because noone would want to read book X on reader Y. 
  
• If you're part of the industry, cry business-decline-wolf out loud and insist on protectionism by your government. By no means develop a new business model - insists even more on past models and ignore your customers. They will fall in line eventually and see the wrong in their doing and come back to watch TV like it's 1987. (Or buy newspapers and CDs.)
  
• If the downfall of business threat doesn't help, go more cassandra and proclaim The Decline of the West (sounds more dramatic in german, btw. - the translation doesn't do it justice. ;) Ebooks will destroy democracy As We Know It and not buying newspapers on paper will lead modern society directly into fascism, dictatorshop, rule of the mob, downfall of all freedom and to unemployment of overpaid editors anyway. Kittens will get killed.
  
• Don't forget to ignore privacy concerns in any case. Cross-border information exchanges in times of terror (can't be too careful...) is so much more important than petty privacy concern of some Tom, Dick and Harry (who doesn't understand anything about political business anyway - combine with the patronizing rule)

For this government services I pay a few hundred euros per months, so please by all means, govern me and rule over me!

Now that I have a (more or less) usable blog again, let's start with a major rant. ;)

DO NOT VOTE GRÜN OR SPD (and of course not CDU)!

Thankfully to the *censored* green party member (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) Matthias Güldner (Bremen) who disqualified not just himself but also the entire party with one swell swoop, the newly founded party "Die Piraten" will probably gain over 5% of the votes in the next national election in september. Read the wonderful quotes of Mr Güldner at Heise for details.

The Pirates have been founded as a reaction to the german family minister (Zens)Ursula von der L(ai)eyen's (heavy punning in the german blogospere, yes) now passed law to filter websites containing child pornography. Reminder: It's only just a "not showing" of the filtered webpage as child pornography is illegal anyway. Instead of the page, you'll get a (now very famous ;) stop sign. The federal police collects and assembles the filter list which has to be implemented by ISPs and everybody isp-like (universities for example) and is supervised by a group associated to the german federal privacy commissioner. Everyone can of course plainly use a different nameserver and circumvent censorship that way, but never mind..

As the german social democrats have already out-maneuvered themselves by supporting the web filtering law and the green also didn't look much better during the ballot (some didn't show up, several supported the filter and too few voted against it), they now discredited themselves completely.

Congratulations - I'll never vote you again. (And I've always voted green.)

That leaves us with the liberal FDP - and the Pirates.

And to the next fucking idiot who's (wrongly) suggesting that the Internet is a legal vacuum I'll feed the BGB (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch - civil law. Yeah, I know, child pornography is probably StGB, but BGB sounds better.. ;). It-is-not-and-never-was-stop-suggesting-otherwise.


As a reminder: Read Udo Vetter's lawblog posting about certain realities of child pornography.

Now I'm going to mail my local green chapter informing them about the loss of a voter of 20 years.