Honeymonster's Lair

All links removed as per request from the File Extension IFO site owner. The blog entry will remain here minus the links.

OK, so some of you might be wondering why I’m posting yet another File Extension related site (this one being File Extension IFO ). Well, truth be told, while the sites aren’t my own, and I have no vested interest in seeing you go there, I do gain a small sum for every review I do. So there we have it, the cat is out of the bag; which wasn’t very well sealed as the company I do these reviews for is linked-to prominantly in the footer of my site. So, anyway, to the point of this article, the review of the File Extension IFO site.

The File Extension IFO site has a large proportion of the body dedicated to the advertisement of the Driver Detective software which purports to download and upgrade any drivers which you either don’t have or are outdated. I have downloaded this software and scanned it with norton and adaware, and both come up clean. Running the software does indeed list all my hardware correctly and prompts me to upgrade any outdated ones. However, this upgrading is a paid-for feature of the software, and I didn’t want to pay, so I can’t tell you how reliable it is.

Despite advertising Driver Detective, File Extension IFO does have some relevant information about the file extension that it is named after (i.e. ‘.ifo’ files). That, however, is all you’re going to get from this site. While the information is accurate, it doesn’t link to any vendor websites where you can download software that actually reads the file. The File Extension IFO site is purely an advertisement for Driver Detective, and you shouldn’t expect much more from it. The Driver Detective software is listed as able to fix registry problems, which I saw no evidence of, so that you can read the file type that the site is named after. This is absolute rubbish, as if you don’t have software capable of reading the file, no amount of messing with the registry or downloading hardware drivers is going to help!

It appears that a new probe is being used to gain credentials which will allow users to post comment spam to (possibly only wordpress?) blogs: I’ve had a spate, since last night, of comments which include random names and email addresses (all at yahoo.com) and the comment of “google http://google.com/ yahoo http://yahoo.com”. That’s it! Nothing else, just the two words and links. I’ve come to the conclusion that these are probes which seem innocuous to the casual blog owner, and therefore are approved to be listed. Once the comment is listed, however, wordpress automatically allows future comments using the same name and email address details. This means that the rogue spammer would be able to spam your blog at will until you unapprove all his previous comments.

I am lucky in that I have an antispam system enabled on my blog, which caught all these spams as being from bots rather than real humans. This means that all the comments were flagged for moderation in addition to the requirement for at least one previous posting that has been approved.

Perl6 has been in development for a few years now, and there seems to be no sign of a public release. While I understand that the Perl developers don’t want to force themselves into a fixed cycle it would be nice to know what the state of development is.

PUGS has been available for some time, which is an implementation of Perl6, but I don’t know how closely it tracks the design process [of Perl6]. PUGS is written in haskell, due to the similarity of features available. PUGS, however, seems far from even matching Perl5 in terms of speed and capability, let alone being able to track the latest and greatest from Larry Wall et al, despite being a project started way back in 2005.

So, with there being no capable Perl6 implementation that I’m aware of, and the Perl6 developers being tight lipped and not having released their version despite having a mostly-finalised set of design schematics in 2004: will Perl6 ever be released to the wide world?

It is this lack of obvious movement that leads me to question whether Perl6 is still viable when there are other projects that seem to have stolen Perl* users. I’m thinking here about Python, Ruby and PHP.

It would seem that many system utilities that would have been written in Perl “back in the day” are now being written in Python; while Ruby and PHP are battling it out for the Web Crown which was once held by Perl with CGI Scripting. Both Python and Ruby are fully objectified, while Perl continues to provide headaches to anyone trying to use object-oriented design patterns. PHP still hasn’t got the namespace thing down, but it’s object orientation isn’t too bad, however Ruby seems to be increasingly stealing PHP’s web thunder like Python with Perl in the System Utilities department.

Is Python the harbinger of death for Perl6?

Is Ruby the same for PHP? Or will newbies always gravitate to PHP for it’s deceptive easyness. Which brings me on to another issue: PHP is too easy! PHP encourages new programmers to not “sanitise” inputs from web forms, and therefore expose themselves to the multitude of internet-bourne attacks. The problem is that even long-time PHP “developers” still won’t have picked up the skills necessary to mitigate these attacks, as exemplified by PHPBB (the forum system).

This is how my blog will appear in Safari and FireFox (I think version 3.0 and above of both browsers). Click the thumbnail below to see the image fullsize. (I’ve only taken a snapshot of the important parts, so you should be able to view the image even on small screens without too much scrolling about.) The red text is added after I took the shot, and describes what you’re seeing.