LOLCODE

One development that has been cooking for months but has gotten a lot of attention lately is Joshua “eggyknap” Tolley's PL/LOLCODE. It's a procedural language flavor of LOLCODE used to access PostgreSQL databases. One of the things that really sold it for me was Selena Deckelmann's exemplary slides that she gave for a local PerlMongers meeting.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION 
gimmeh_dinnr() RETURNS TEXT AS $$ 
HAI 
  GIMMEH OUTTA DATABUKKIT "SELECT food FROM bowl ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 1" 
        FOUND YR IT 
KTHXBYE 
$$ LANGUAGE PLLOLCODE;

If you want to check out or contribute to the project, it's available right on the pgFoundry.

LOLCODE has now been featured as the DokuWiki of the Month for May 2008. It was really the first interview I had conducted about LOLCODE, and I was grateful for the chance: for me, working with the underlying DokuWiki software has been nearly all pleasure, with very little pain.

I launched at the end of May 2007, using DokuWiki alone. The week following the launch was full of sleepless nights, just buzzing on the volume of attention the site was getting. …[It] quickly made the front pages of Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, BoingBoing and StumbleUpon, [and] we served over a million pages in less than a week. The site still gets thousands of new visitors a week from people who still haven't seen the joke.

If you need to run a Wiki for a project, unless you have specific requirements leading you elsewhere, I would readily recommend DokuWiki.

LOLCODE is cropping up everywhere I look. It's becoming unsettling. First, I learned of Leah Culver's work on the Pownce API. LOLCODE is a legitimate return format: just append .lol to your request:

http://api.pownce.com/users/atl.lol:

OH HAI
INVISIBLE FLICKR API OM NOM NOM NOM
  GIMME USER
    I CAN HAS USERNAME
      atl
    KTHX.
    I CAN HAS FRIEND_COUNT
      27
    KTHX.
    I CAN HAS PERMALINK
      http://pownce.com/atl/
    KTHX.
    ...
  I IS BORED
KTHXBYE.

But then I learned it was just in emulation of the Flickr API (as implied by the second line of the response), where, thanks to Cal Henderson, format=lolcode sits proudly next to xmlrpc and json.

http://api.flickr.com/services/...&format=lolcode:

HAI
IM IN UR BUCKETS MAKING UP FORMATS
GIMME A_T_LS FAVORITES
  I CAN HAS PHOTO 2008_04_25_ROFLCON_10
    ITZ AT http://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/2442343070/
    INVISIBLE METADATA
    LOL
  KTHX.
  I CAN HAS PHOTO ICANHASCASESTUDY
    ITZ AT http://www.flickr.com/photos/stoast/2444666738/
    INVISIBLE METADATA
    LOL
  KTHX.
  I CAN HAS PHOTO ICANHASCASESTUDY2
    ITZ AT http://www.flickr.com/photos/stoast/2443843469/
    INVISIBLE METADATA
    LOL
  KTHX.
...

Really, you have to admit that as API formats go, this is pretty easy to read. I look forward to seeing it elsewhere: if you spot it, as always, you can send a note to lolcode@lolcode.com.

(DSC_0059, originally uploaded by davefishernc on Flickr)

Speaking on the LOLCats discussion panel (“LOLCATS: I CAN HAZ CASE STUDY?”) was fantastic. I shared the stage with some thoughtful, humble, and very funny people in the same lecture hall where I had once taken a bunch of Comp Sci classes a long time ago.

What people have written about the panel has been very generous. David Weinberger, whose keynote and subsequent panel set a very high bar for the rest of the Con, wrote some very nice things about our panel. Anna Pickard from The Guardian also wrote up the panel, and reports some of my non-cat LOL shout-outs. The ROFLCon blog itself had an abbreviated live-blog of the event. Justin Ellis of the Portland Press Herald also gave some insights into the panel, as did Gunnar and Joel.

I'm sure more coverage will come out later, but for now, some more pictures (showing off my shirt):