CVS might be considered an easy target for software hate, but that doesn’t stop it annoying the hell out of you. Here’s an instance I encountered today, trying to use cvs annotate.

I’ve been a fan of I Can Has Cheezburger? for a while, and I tend to find that the pictures I like most are the ones with cats doing, you know, cat things — sod the captions.

So, now that I’ve found Cute Overload, well, this seems likely to be my new favourite website.

How about a few samples? Oh, go on then.

I’ve just released version 1.00 of my Text::Match::FastAlternatives Perl module. Since I’m apparently declaring it stable, I thought it was worth writing up a description of what it does, and how it does it.

Suppose you have a large list of strings, and a set of keys, and you need to determine, for each of the strings, whether any of the keys occur in it. For example, the list of strings might be a list of user-agent headers sent to a web server, and the keys a set of strings that are good indicators of robots accessing your site; you want to calculate some server statistics, but disregard any robotic traffic.

How do you go about doing that?