So, Michael (who works in the Archæology library at UT, I believe) apparently mentioned RFIDing all the books in the library to a guy there, and got a lecture on why he was stupid for even talking about it.

The recap Bryan (and I, being nosy) received was: 'Michael, there are twelve million volumes in the library.'

There are numerous reasons why this is a bad objection:

1. Firstly, have the publishers do it, or just do it as books are acquired.
   
2. Every time a book is checked out, RFID tag it. Now the most popular books, at any rate, have been tagged.
   
3. Undergrads are cheap--bordering on free. Unleash them on the stacks.
   

The benefits are many:

1. Even if you only get the 20% most popular books (see item two), you've probably covered the vast majority of activity.
   
2. You don't even need to sort the books anymore. Better, you can sort them by popularity. (Caveat: being able to browse the physical volumes is a very useful capability--just a list of metadata is frequently insufficient. You usually want to browse by subject, not browse random books.)
   
3. If someone fails to return a book, you assemble a strike team and visit its locale. 'Overdue fine? Oh, no, we figure the collateral damage to your apartment during extraction is penalty enough.'
   
4. Now you don't need an expensive television to give you cancer. The books can do it too!
   

I've proposed that we (about twenty Senecans) purchase some twelve million RFID tags and spend a night tagging every volume in the building. Naysayer heed this warning!

(2007-09-14 16:20:30) haiciM: Oh, the price of the ticket has gone down 3 DKK since I last checked. Cool.
(2007-09-14 16:21:04) haiciM: Even so, it is so close that I worry about it going up. I think that I'll just buy now.
(2007-09-14 16:21:13) lkbm: Saving you nearly $0.56. Whoohoo.

Someone elsewhere commented that 3DKK is nothing, so I was going to start a 'give me nothing' campaign using PayPal. Sadly, that may be against their AUP:

You may not use the PayPal service for activities that:
...relate to transactions that..(b) support pyramid or ponzi schemes, matrix programs, other "get rich quick" schemes or certain multi-level marketing programs'

So donate 3DKK (~0.56USD) to me because you like my blog, not because I want to get rich quick...from my three readers. (I use a sitename@wescnet.cjb.net email address for each site, so my PayPal account is paypal@...)

(Or support the ACLU, but they need more than 3DKK.)

This rule from Perl Best Practices made me laugh and finally realise what twisted, sick-minded individuals Perl programmers really are.

The correct rule is obviously 'Don't cascade ternary operators. Just don't. Use if-else.' But Perl programmers do it our way, and it's as beautiful as it is evil.

In the array and hash naming convention guideline in Perl Best Practices, they have this lovely example of when an array name should be singular (answer: when used as a random access table like a hash):

sub factorial {
my ($n) = @_;

croak "Can't compute factorial($n)"
if $n < 0 || $n > $MAX_FACT;

return $factorial[$n];
}

Factorials not pre-calculated for the cache are simply declared incomputable. Talk about lazy programming!

(Code snippet from:
Perl Best Practices, by Damian Conway, Copyright 2005 O'Reilly Media, Inc., ISBN 0-596-00173-8
Good book.)

'Best seafood in town' -- Sign in front of the only seafood restaurant in Chocowinity.

Luca: She's reading the copyright page first.
Lilani, reading HP7: You always read the copyright page first.
Luca: Of course.
Lilani: I always do.