It Never Ends

Another week+weekend of nothing but programming assignments.  (Well, that’s not exactly true; I had two big music papers to write during the week...)  I had begun to take for granted the extent to which Perl is a DWIMmer language ("Do What I Mean"); there are forty different ways to program any given task, and they all just do what I mean with minimal fuss.  In contrast, the Java and C++ programming that I’ve been doing lately is more like "Please Do Something Reasonably Similar to What I Mean," combined with a lot of "Why The Heck Can’t You Understand What I Mean??"  After a couple months of this crap, s!(c\++|java)!perl!gi is all I have to say.

My brother asked me if my website was down last night.  He’d been trying to visit www.nodivisions.com and it wasn’t working.  Of course, nodivisions.com has worked fine even across the move to my new server a couple months ago, but I never use www.nodivisions.com so I didn’t know it wasn’t working.  It turns out that when I updated the DNS for my website to accommodate the new server, I forgot to add an alias for the www subdomain.  I added it this morning, and it should be available to everyone within a couple days, if not right now.  (And it will simply bounce you, transparently, to the non-www version, like it did before I moved servers.)  The moral of this story is: 1) do your DNS correctly, but also 2) if www.whatever.com doesn’t work, try just whatever.com, or vice-versa.  They virtually always point to the same place; the only time you’re likely to see an exception is when someone’s server is configured incorrectly.

While searching for a way to work with strings in C++ that’s slightly better than using character arrays (I don’t pretend to believe I’ll find something that’s much better than that, and certainly not anything that approaches the ease of regular expressions in Perl), I came across this post on some guy’s site.  It’s hilarious.  Just what I needed.  Go read it.