Just like JavaScript, Flash is a technology that I did not fancy in the past, but that is beginning to grow on me. Flash seems to deliver what Java applets were supposed to do. And last week I discovered Ming, an open-source C library to create Flash movies, which also has a Perl interface. Using this module you can create Flash programmatically. Included in the Ming examples is a PHP script Flashdot that turns an RSS newsfeed into a (clickable !) animation. It was trivial to port it to Perl:

I finally got myself a rented dedicated server. I am not really sure what I want to do with it, but it seems like a good thing to have since playing around with the Internet has become my main hobby. The first thing that I will move here are the T-Files (and this article is already being delivered from there). The server also came with a free domain name, so the new official URL is http://files.thilosophy.com/.