A Solri kind of weekend
Sunday, June 15th, 2003 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerI've had another very solri weekend:
On this last point, I'm amazed at the money some people have the nerve to charge for Perl scripts. The claendar I downloaded was free, with the option to get added security and a measure of technical support for a mere $5, but there are plenty of calendar scripts selling at around $50, and I even saw one for $799! I mean this is Perl, for god's sake - a programming language which is freely distributed, which needs nothing more for a development environment than a decent text editor, and which can be learned by a reasonably geeky person in a weekend (OK, a weekend in which you don't sleep and consume unsafe amounts of coffee). I downloaded the calendar program (Eventcalendar from Nermware), but looking at the code, I could have written it myself if I'd had the patience. It's a nice piece of software, and I hope people pay the $5 for the extra features so the author gets some dosh (I probably won't because I'm stubborn enough to try to work it out myself, but I might send it as a donation). $5 is very reasonable. $50 for any Perl script is steep - we're talking the same price as a computer game written in C with a load of professionally-produced 3D graphics. $799 is absurd- this is what you might pay for a specialist engineering CAD program. Either there are a lot of suckers working for IT departments, or the web page designer missed out a decimal point somewhere.
If that weren't enough, check out this description of Auto-GamesPro
The price? A mere $199! There must be a lot of suckers in cyberspace.
- Learnt some cool Korean sword techniques and taught some t'ai chi
- Finally got around to using .htaccess to password-protect directories on a website (the last time I tried that, I put the file in the wrong directory and made our whole department website inaccessible).
- Failed to do the same thing with Javascript.
- Did some work on my concordancing Perl script (was Concord, now called perlconc, since there's another program called Concord) and finally summoned the courage to apply for a Sourceforge project account for it.
- Downloaded a calendar program and hacked it into shape.
On this last point, I'm amazed at the money some people have the nerve to charge for Perl scripts. The claendar I downloaded was free, with the option to get added security and a measure of technical support for a mere $5, but there are plenty of calendar scripts selling at around $50, and I even saw one for $799! I mean this is Perl, for god's sake - a programming language which is freely distributed, which needs nothing more for a development environment than a decent text editor, and which can be learned by a reasonably geeky person in a weekend (OK, a weekend in which you don't sleep and consume unsafe amounts of coffee). I downloaded the calendar program (Eventcalendar from Nermware), but looking at the code, I could have written it myself if I'd had the patience. It's a nice piece of software, and I hope people pay the $5 for the extra features so the author gets some dosh (I probably won't because I'm stubborn enough to try to work it out myself, but I might send it as a donation). $5 is very reasonable. $50 for any Perl script is steep - we're talking the same price as a computer game written in C with a load of professionally-produced 3D graphics. $799 is absurd- this is what you might pay for a specialist engineering CAD program. Either there are a lot of suckers working for IT departments, or the web page designer missed out a decimal point somewhere.
If that weren't enough, check out this description of Auto-GamesPro
A package of fun games including Video Poker, BlackJack, Memory, Hangman, and more. The software works off a credits system. Members receive an amount of credits upon registration and can then earn more by playing games. Also earn credits by viewing your pages and clicking on banners. A tracking system is included.
The price? A mere $199! There must be a lot of suckers in cyberspace.
