High school is bizarre enough, but a private high school is an environment uniquely removed from reality. S. and G., two sophomores at such a school in one of the United States' hot technology corridors, put up a couple of private websites with their unflattering thoughts about the school experience. Last week those sites got them suspended for two days. Worse -- because he wasn't familiar with the distinction between perl's scalar and list context, S. now has a police record. Update: 03/14 10:49 PM by J : We had some database trouble in the last couple hours, but all the comments seem to be back... whew.

An Anonymous Coward, who wears a Camel on his shirt, asks: "Dr. David Touretzky has done it again, posting a 7-line 526-byte Perl VOB descrambler on his ever-growing Gallery of CSS Descramblers. 'qrpff' was written by MIT Student Information Processing Board members Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz for a 6-hour seminar on 'Decrypting DVD' taught at MIT in January-February. Did those guys violate the DMCA by teaching the class?" Click below for the script, which is among the most obscure pieces of code I've ever seen. For something so small, this is quite an accomplishment. It's also a bit of an embarassment for Hollywood when you consider that the basis of a multi-billion dollar revenue-stream can be foiled by such a small piece of code!

Daniel Dvorkin asks: "A few months ago, the small but growing company I work for decided that our current FileMaker-based database solution wasn't working. As DBA, I recommended a MySQL server with a Perl or PHP-based front end. My boss, who despite being a Mac guy has recently developed an inexplicable mania for all things Microsoft, is insisting that I develop everything with Access as a front end. I'm deeply unhappy about this, but I'm hoping that I might be able to salvage a little bit of the situation by using MySQL on Linux rather than SQL Server on NT for the back end." Think something like this might be possible? Read on for more informaiton. Updated!

Foxxz writes "MSNBC has a story on online journals. personally, ive been writing in an online journal for almost a year using a perl script i whipped up. It can be a great outlet for a bitchfest." This is a great example of the whole "peer to peer" journalism that everyone wets their pants over about the Internet. Call it what you will, but the ease of accessibility to the materials is, IMHO, one of the most compelling reasons for web surfing.

xueexueg writes: "Dr. David Touretzky has posted a new piece of DeCSS art here, as well as his response to a threatening letter from the MPAA. Both are triumphantly good, one an epic haiku with the most intelligent and beautiful commentary I've heard in months, the other a response to the MPAA lawyers who evidently told Touretzky that his entire home page is a 'circumvention device.'" Both are good reads. I realize that posting this sort of thing on Slashdot is simply preaching to the choir, but some part of me hopes that in the end we'll still have a freedom of speech, a freedom to reverse engineer, and a freedom to watch the media we purchase. Sure seems less likely these days.

Ravagin asks: "OK, I'm trying to teach myself Perl, and I'm doing fairly well, but I'd like to be able to take it with me, as it were. I've got a Palm IIIxe and a Palm Portable Keyboard, and was wondering if there was a port of Perl to the Palm OS (as there is with C and BASIC)? It doesn't seem to me that it would be extremely difficult. And before you say it, my C skills are way too primitive to do it myself. The Ten Perl Myths Page says it's in the works, but that's from a year ago. None of the major palm software sites have anything, but is someone perhaps working on it?" Wow! Now this is something that would actually get me to dust off my (unused) Palm VII. Of course, you'd have to do quite a bit of coding to get a Perl interpreter (and base modules) to fit in 2 megs or less. Porters might have better luck with the 8MB Palm models but even that's kinda tight. Do any of you see Perl on the Palm platform anytime soon, or is it a pipe dream?

Years after the virtues of XML were first extolled (and plenty of uses both front-and-center and behind-the-scenes later), XML still isn't the do-all, be-all wonder we were led to believe. Book reviewing genius chromatic here dissects a book that sounds aimed at intermediate or advanced programmers (of other languages) who want extend their grasp with a greater understanding of the flexibility inherent to XML. How well it succeeds? Well, see what he's got to say about that.

An unnamed assailant writes: "I want to do a real nerdy project: My VCR has a plug in the back for a LAN-C/Control-L cable which connects to a serial port on a computer as well as a LAN-C connection on a camcorder. The VCR also came with some simple software to control a VCR and a camera through the cable. This was obviously before nonlinear editing was as common as it is now. Anyway, I want to see if there's any way to figure out what the codes are that the protocol uses so I can talk to the VCR using perl. Any suggestions?" Now this would be a great project, even (or especially?) without the whiz-bang eyecandy of B2K. There are a lot of middle- and high-schools with LAN-C equipped VCRs (most of which probably never get used that way), and it would be nice to be able to control them this way.

rednax asks: "We see a lot of discussion on /. regarding many 'high level' languages (PERL, Python and JAVA for example are all well covered) rather than assembly language. There are a few exceptions such as this discussion from waaaay back when, which touched on it. Assembly level languages obviously have a place in all systems at the lowest level to provide basic services, but what about other areas. Obviously there are trade offs. Speed and compact object code are the two main arguments for assembler, but how much do these matter when we can get 1GHz processors, and large amounts of RAM? How many /.ers do use assembler, and what for?"

rlauer writes "See http://www.openbedrock.org for a new open source server side scripting tool for Apache web servers. Bedrock is written in perl and available for use as a CGI or a mod_perl module. Bedrock is distributed under the GPL."

The Complete FreeBSD, The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD, and The FreeBSD Handbook are among the most notable books available for BSD, but recently it was my pleasure to review a new book about FreeBSD, The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide by Ted Mittelstaedt.

An unnamed correspondent writes: "At least, that's the rumor on the street. Wonder what this will mean for Apple's Darwin project?" The rumor is confirmed, boys and girls, Wilfredo Sanchez has indeed left Apple. A statement is on his Advogato page; apparently he has gone to KnowNow. Sanchez says on that page too that he'll still be involved with Darwin maintaining Apache and Perl for that platform.

NiceGeek hooked us up with an amusing story about assorted legal wackiness surrounding CPU Fans. Apparently one company is suing another because they are (gasp) stealing advanced fan technology and violating patents! Horror! The sad part is that its probably true. Someone needs to write a perl script to take this story, and s/x/y/g the names and technologies, and then feed every company and technology into it. Then create an archive of every possible violation lawsuit. Then patent the idea, and sue anyone who violates it. Just cut me in for thinking of it ;)

SamMichaels writes "Zophar's Domain had news of a press release from Twin Galaxies, the people who've tracked the high scores in games since 1981 (got famous in 82). They're looking for the top gamers to be published in a special commemorative edition of Twin Galaxies' "Official Video Game & Pinball Book Of World Records", which is the industry's official record book. The search is for gamers of "every game, every genre and every platform, whether old or new"."

geoff lane asks: "Netscape, Mozilla and IE are all large programs capable of many functions which are mostly unused (Mozilla does attempt to shrink its runtime size by using DLLs.) Lynx, Chimera and a number of other browsers are smaller but with significantly fewer functions. A modern browser needs to support Javascript, Java and SSL. It doesn't need to support News, Gopher, FTP or e-mail - all of which have perfectly good applications available already (though there should be a way for the Web browser to sub-contract work to these applications). On occasion I've wondered if I could build a halfway decent Web browser from a few specialist program components (for the display and parsing of HTML mostly) and wget, tied together with shell script or Perl and using external programs for most of the necessary support functions. How small can a usable Web browser get? (assuming we define usable as meaning capable of displaying a Slashdot page reasonably correctly *grin!*)"

The webmaster responsible for putting Red Hat Linux in service for the Royal Family steps down, The A in ALS stands this year for "oAkland," DSS hackers can rejoice for the moment, and visions of Perl will soon adorn at least two continents. For more on these completely explicable statements, read on in tonight's episode of Slashback.

Kelly McNeill writes: "A recent editorial appearing on osOpinion.com (and linked to here on Slashdot last Thursday) dealt with comments made by Mac creator Jef Raskin and his opinion of Apple's upcoming next generation operating system OS X. The somewhat controversial editorial generated a ton of mixed response both here as well as on the publishing site. As it seems, Mr. Raskin's thoughts on OS X (and Unix) were very misunderstood and he has since stepped up to the plate to clear the air and responded to the technology community at large."

David Korn answers! You asked the questions a little while ago, and now David Korn has kindly responded with answers (some lengthy, some pithy, all appreciated) to queries about the eponymous shell, the famous Microsoft/Korn story (in short -- yep, it's like you've heard), and proper Unix behavior. He even made his son Adam write one of the answers.

drfalken writes "Interesting piece here about OS X from Jef Raskin's point-of-view (he was one of the wizards behind the original Mac GUI). He thinks that even the concept of an OS is a hold over from an older era, and that work should be done to get the user closer to the app. I dunno if I agree. "

We've been at LinuxWorld for the last couple days, and some interesting stuff has been going on: The SAMBA folks won the $25,000 IDG/Linus Torvalds award, and SGI announced the availability of RH7-based distro using XFS ^[?] . In other news, our BOF went well with many questions about Slashcode - and the Perl Monks booth has been doing great in donations. Update: 02/01 05:18 PM by CT : The highlight for me so far was judging the "Coveted" Golden Penguin Awards w/ Don. Actually, I seriously did covet the award, beautiful hand blown glass penguin made me wish I was a contestant. We judged that Linus got the definition of BogoMIPS wrong. Fortunately his still won, but it was truly joyous seeing the surprise on his face.