I still hate email

April 19, 2014  📧

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

I bought a Wii U!

April 11, 2014  👾

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.)

lazyweb request tracker

April 4, 2014

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.

so long, module list!

March 26, 2014  📚 🐪

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:

the 2014 Perl QA Hackathon in Lyon: the work

March 19, 2014  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

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.

today's timezone rant

March 8, 2014  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

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.

that might be good enough for production...

February 27, 2014  🧑🏽‍💻

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.

freemium: the abomination of desolation

February 24, 2014  🎲

I’ve never been a fan of “freemium,” although I understand that game developers need to get paid. It often feels like the way freemium games are developed goes something like this: