Over the past few years, the Perl Foundation received a bunch of nice big donations to be used for Perl 5. Some of this money has been used to pay for work by Dave Mitchell and Nicholas Clark to work on difficult problems in the Perl 5 core. This has, in my opinion, been money well spent. Dave and Nick know the Perl core very well, and they’ve worked seemingly tirelessly to make progress where progress is not easy, and to fix things that nobody else wanted to touch.

Last weekend, I went to Las Vegas for a one-day trip to attend a party in honor of my father’s many years coaching rugby. It was a great event, but the travel was, as usual, not a big bowl of cherries. I decided to make the most of it, though, and play Deadline on the plane.

Yesterday I released Email::Sender 1.300003. This is a pretty important release!

In my memory, before I “came back” to adventure games in the mid-nineties, Zork Ⅰ was an important classic and Zork Ⅲ was the serious, thoughtful capstone to the trilogy. Zork Ⅱ was, in my mind, an afterthought. It was something I had to get through before I could get to the trilogy’s endgame.

Zork Ⅰ is a really important game to work through, if you’re going to try to understand where interactive fiction came from. It’s not the first, but it’s a major early milestone of the golden age of commercial IF, and its book is alluded to repeatedly throughout later works. I’m really glad that I’ve played Zork Ⅰ, but my feeling after playing it again is that once was probably enough.

Quite a while ago, I decided that I had too many petty interests, and that I should pick one and pursue it. I thought I’d work on running some really good D&D, but basically it hasn’t worked out. I have been unable to establish a regular-enough group of players, and have not felt entirely compatible with some of the players who I was able to attract. It has been a big let down.

Last week I wrote about the speed of Perl file finders, including a somewhat difficult to read chart of their relative speeds in a pretty contrived race. My intent wasn’t really to compare the “good” ones, but to call out the “bad” ones. Looking at that graph, it should be clear that you “never” want to use Path::Class::Rule or File::Find::Rule. Their behavior is vastly worse than their competition’s.

Sometimes you need to walk a directory tree, pick out files, and do stuff. If you’re working in the shell, you can use find — at least if you have GNU find. Those other finds… shudder.

I really liked using OmniWeb. Back before Safari existed, OmniWeb was, for me, a much better option than Firefox. It was very fast, did a good job saving my session, had per-site preferences, and had workspaces. I am stymied, deeply and daily, by the lack of good workspace support in every other browser.

…it probably shouldn’t be this one. Instead, go read Breno G. de Oliveira’s piece on hash randomization.