Pun Salad

• Tim Worstall's article at Tech Central Station today is much worth reading. He claims recent studies show (a) the sensitivity of global temperature to CO₂ levels is less than thought and (b) economic models estimating future CO₂ emissions have a systematic error that cause them to swing high. But unfortunately (c) the UN panel charged with investigating this isn't interested in straightening out this issue expeditiously.

  We are (depending upon which side of the argument you are on) either facing the greatest threat to the health of the planet or we're about to spend trillions upon trillions of dollars on fixing something that doesn't actually need fixing.

  Worstall advocates figuring out which, as would most reasonable people.

• Cathy Seipp describes why she's a skeptic on gay marriage. For example:

  What agitators for gay marriage never address is why a homosexual domestic partnership should be more worthy of government approval (or employee benefits) than a myriad of other domestic partnerships. Why not two single moms who live together with their children, like Kate & Allie? Or a straight woman and her gay male best friend, like Will & Grace? Or two unmarried heterosexual sisters who live together and share all expenses — kind of an old-fashioned arrangement, but certainly not extinct; I happen to be friends with a pair like this myself. Why can't they get a tax break?

  Maybe Andrew Sullivan should take this up. It'd be more interesting than the over-and-over Bush-bashing.

• And via the Bleat, your new philosophy: goat on the pole. Some misguided people think the goat is not on the pole; they're wrong, those theories are passé.

Don't do a lot of programming-blogging here, but I thought I'd mention a recent overhaul of the script that generates the very page you're currently reading. Folks with no interest in Perl or web programming should probably move on.

It involved converting from the original plain old CGI script (using Lincoln Stein's famous CGI.pm) to use of the HTML::Template Perl module. Briefly, HTML::Template allows you to factor out the HTML structure of your web page into a template file; your Perl code then simply (heh!) "fills in the blanks" in the template, then blasts out the resulting page to you, dear reader.

Don't see any difference in the blog? That's the idea.

The instructive metric is (probably) total code size.

Old CGI script:

297 lines, 8334 bytes

New CGI script:

213 lines, 6541 bytes

New Template:

120 lines, 3050 bytes

The slight downside is that you have to keep your template tag names consistent between the Perl code and your template. No big deal. (Or shouldn't be a big deal for a disciplined coder; for me, on the other hand … fortunately, the generated error messages are clear and not too insulting.)

The major time taken in the conversion was that dippy little month calendar over there on the right. This required nested template loops, with an associated nested Perl data structure constructed in the script. My brain hurt badly afterwards; it didn't help that the official documentation was kind of weak on this point. Fortunately, the Google allowed me to find a Linux Gazette article where some brilliant hacker, Ben Okopnik, had figured it out.

I am, admittedly, a latecomer looking at HTML::Template, but in case you find yourself spending a little too much time trying to maintain HTML-generating Perl code, you might want to check it out.