I was attempting to take some unordered SQL values and order them today with a single line of ruby. Essentially, the sql values look like (1, "value1"), (2, "value2"), and so on. I started out with this, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the gsub statement wouldn’t work.

INCORRECT: ruby -e " y = []; STDIN.readlines.each { |x| if x=~/^\(/; y[x.gsub(/\(([0-9]+),.*/, $1.to_s).to_i]=x; end }; y.each { |z| puts z if ! z.nil?; } " < unordered.sql > ordered.sql

The weird thing is, if I take the if x=~ /^\(/; statement out, the code works. So, someone in #ruby-lang on Freenode reminded me that I need to use '\1' instead of $1.to_s in this case. I ran into this once before, however, I’m still not 100% sure on what the exact rules are for the syntax. So, this was the correct way to do it.

CORRECT: ruby -e " y = []; STDIN.readlines.each { |x| if x=~/^\(/; y[x.gsub(/\(([0-9]+),.*/, '\1').to_i]=x; end }; y.each { |z| puts z if ! z.nil?; } " < unordered.sql > ordered.sql

Today, Cap’n W.G. Fancypants and I were comiserating about all of the lame bands and people that spam you on myspace begging to be friended. We armchair psychoanalyzed this behavior as a consequence of bands trying to inflate their popularity and lonely people looking for attention. We came up with a brilliant money-making strategy whereby we’d send back a paypal link with a bill for how much cheddar it would take to friend them. We even developed a mathematical formula where the cost of friendship would vary in direct proportion with social ineptitude, lack of artistic signifigance, and whether or not they live in 78704. Fancypants then took it up a notch by suggesting some kind of insane, eHarmony-style online questionaire that would be automatically scored. He listed some of the potential friend criteria questions as, “Would you be willing to let a wasp sting you? If yes, how many?”, “Would you hit a wolf with a bat?”, “Did you ever hoard wet dynamite to keep it away from armadillos?” and “Does running in a rhombus whilst drinking Stewart’s Ginger Beer make you ambivalent?” You know… The normal things you ask a potential friend or coworker if you’ve lost your flippin’ mind.

I’ve been getting a massive torrent of comment spam directed at my server recently. What’s the best way to automatically fight it using Wordpress 1.x? I _really_ don’t want to upgrade to 2.x. I tried this in January and realized that it was going to be a massive hassle for an installation that is as custom as mine. I know that Typo require javascript in the browser to execute which combats these automated HTTP POST scripts that are running on botnets. Is there a plugin like this for Wordpress? I really don’t want to disable anonymous comments.