I am a big fan of emoji. I don’t have a position on their suitability for inclusion in Unicode on first principles or anything. I just think they’re fun, and using them is convenient and makes life a little more whimsical.

Another year, another thirty-one days of horror movies. I’ve changed roles at work recently, which has led to a big dip in evening calls, which meant I was present for a lot more viewings. Excellent!

I found a note to myself that I should post about my per-host colors. I don’t know whether it’s of general interest to whoever reads this thing, but I guess I thought that once, so here we go.

When I bought my Nanoleaf panels, which I wrote about in my previous two posts, I didn’t realize that they’re not just programmable lights. They’re also touch sensors. Or so they claim! The truth is, I haven’t been able to use the touch interface reliably. This post will recount my efforts.

In my last post about Nanoleaf, I ended by saying that I wrote a program to light up each panel a different color, to help me pick out which panel had which panel id. I also said that I didn’t make that program using the custom animation API. It’s true! I used the streaming interface. I actually got that going before the custom animations. It felt like what I’d want: a way to send a never-ending stream of instructions doing something like tracking log events or keystrokes or I don’t know what.

For my birthday, some family sent me a $200 gift card for Amazon. I wasn’t sure what I’d like. I have too many books queued up already, and just sort of enough stuff. I knew there’d be some toy or luxury that would be a good pick, but nothing sprang to mind. I mentioned this conundrum to Rob N, who said “Why not Nanoleaf?”

my stupid CPAN “meta analyzer” (again)

Email, indexing, and error reporting

In past years, one of my big areas of work at PTS has been PAUSE. If you’re not a CPAN wonk, here’s a tiny explainer: PAUSE is the Perl Author Upload SErver. It’s where you go to upload new software to the CPAN, and to manage the permissions on packages for which you’re the administrator. It’s got a number of interrelated pieces, but the two easiest units to describe are the web interface and the indexer.

Ten years ago, the “toolchain gang” who manage the libraries most central to deploying and testing CPAN libraries came to an agreement on the minimum supported version of perl. Nobody needed to keep maintaining v5.6, and everyone who hadn’t already, moved to v5.8. That was ten years ago, but the toolchain was still pinned to v5.8. I am not enthusiastic about targeting v5.8, and have written about this before. I bumped some modules to v5.12, earlier this year. I got some feedback, both positive and negative, but I felt good about it.