Last week, I was thinking about how sometimes I do something I have to do and then feel great, and sometimes I do something I have to do and then feel lousy. I decided I should keep track of what I do and how it makes me feel. (I have some dark predictions, but am trying to hold off until I have more recorded.) To do this, I needed a way to record the facts, and it needed to be really, really easy to use. I’d never take the time to say “I did something” if it was a hassle.

At OSCON this past year, I was a just little surprised by the still-shrinking Perl track. What really surprised me, though, was the entirely absent Ruby track. I tried to figure out what it meant, and whether it meant anything, but I didn’t come to any conclusions. Even if I’d more carefully collected actual data, I’m not sure I could’ve made any really useful conclusions.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve done a bit of pair programming across the Internet, which I haven’t done in years. It was great! Most of this was with Ingy döt Net and Frew Schmidt.

I picked up DEFCON a few months ago on Steam. It’s a game inspired by the “big nuclear war boards” we saw in movies like Dr. Strangelove or, closer to the mark, WarGames. Each player controls a section of the world. The game starts with a few very short bits of placing units and quickly turns into a shooting war. Players launch fighters, deploy fleets, and eventually sound out bombers, subs, and ICBMs. The game looks gorgeous.

Over a decade ago, Paul Elliott wrote a tiny piece of counterfactual history called The Gygax/Arneson Tapes. It recounts the history of the world’s most famous role-playing game, Mazes & Minotaurs, in which the players take on larger-than-life Greek-style heroes in Sword and Sandal adventures.

I don’t use Module::Install or Module::Starter anymore. For the most part, I don’t think anyone should. I think there are better tools to use instead.

Preface

I’ve written a bunch of code that deals with APIs behind OAuth before. I wrote code for the Twitter API and for GitHub and for others. I knew roughly what happened when using OAuth, but in general everything was taken care of behind the scenes. Now as I work on furthering the control of my programmatic day planner, I need to deal with web services that don’t have pre-built Perl libraries, and that means dealing with OAuth. So far, it’s been a big pain, but I think it’s been a pain that’s helped me understand what I’m doing, so I won’t have to flail around as much next time.

A few years ago I heard about the game Microscope and it sounded way cool. In summary: it is.

In Perl 5.10, the idea of a lexical topic was introduced. The topic is $_, also known as “the default variable.” If you use a built-in routine that really requires a parameter, but don’t give it one, the odds are good that it will use $_. For example: