This past weekend was the DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop in Silver Spring, Maryland, and I was in attendance! The venue was good, and the location was awesome, in downtown Silver Spring. Highlights, for me, included:

I sat on the idea of writing this replay entry for a long time, because my replay of Suspended was almost necessarily perfunctory. I have played the game many, many times. Before writing this entry, I sat down to do a run after months of not playing it, and beat the game in ten minutes. (I got a lousy score, but I’m pretty sure that with a picture of the map in front of me, I could probably get a perfect score with a few more tries, from memory.)

I still use The Daily Practice to track the things I’m trying to do reliably. I like it. It helps.

Last week, Yahoo! changed their DMARC policy. Since that event, I have grown to loathe email even more.

On Tuesday, Gloria and I celebrated our 14th anniversary! We went out to Tulum (yum!) and Vegan Treats (yum!) and it wasn’t quite late enough that we wanted to go pick up the kid, so we decided to go walk around Target. I said I’d been thinking about buying a Wii U, and Gloria said I should. (Or maybe she just didn’t say “I strongly object.” I’m not splitting hairs, here.)

I like using Remember the Milk. It’s a to do list tracker. I use it for lots of little one-off tasks (blog ideas, games to try) and for simple projects that don’t have GitHub repositories. It’s got an API (which is kind of weird) and an iOS app (which is very good) and a bunch of other interesting little services.

There’s a file in every CPAN mirror called 03modlist.data that contains the “registered module list.” It’s got no indenting, but if it did, it would look something like this:

Today is my first full day back in Pennsylvania after the Perl QA Hackathon in Lyon, and I’m feeling remarkably recovered from four long days of hacking and conferring followed by a long day of travel. I can only credit my quick recovery to my significantly increased intake of Chartreuse over the last week.

Everybody knows, I hope, that you have to be really careful when dealing with time in programs. This isn’t a problem only in Perl. Things are bad all over. If you know what you’re doing when you start, you can avoid many, many problems. Unfortunately, not all our code is being bulit anew by our present selves. Quite a lot of it exists already, written by other, less experienced programmers, and often (to our great shame) our younger selves.

Sometimes, the example code in documentation or teaching material is really bad. When the code’s dead wrong, that might not be the worst. The worst may be code that’s misleading without being wrong. The code does just what it says it does, but it doesn’t keep its concepts clear, and students get annoyed and write frustrated blog posts. This code might be good enough for production, but not for pedagogy.