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:

I must have done something right when I attended YAPC::Asia 2011, because they invited me back this year. I was delighted to accept the invitation, and I’m glad I did.

One of the big new experimental features in Perl 5.18.0 is lexical subroutines. In other words, you can write this:

Having finished the Zork trilogy, it was time for me to continue on into the great post-Zork canon. I was excited for this, because it means lots of games that I haven’t played yet. First up: Starcross. I was especially excited for Starcross! It’s the first of Infocom’s sci-fi games, and I only remembered hearing good things. I’d meant to get started on the flight to YAPC::Asia, but didn’t manage until I’d begun coming home. On the train to Narita, things got off to a weird start.

I always feel a little amazed when I realize how many of the things that really interest me, today, are things that I was introduced to by my father. Often, they’re not even things that I think he’s passionate about. They’re just things we did together, and that was enough.

This post is tagged programming and dnd. I don’t get to do that often, and I am pleased.

Earlier this year, I lamented the state of “workspaces” in Chrome. I said that I’d settled on using Tabs Outliner, but that I basically didn’t like it. The author of the plugin asked me to elaborate, and I said I would. It has been sitting in my todo list for months and I have felt bad about that. Today, Gregory Meyers commented on that blog post, and it’s gotten me motivated enough to want to elaborate.

I’ve been slowly switching all my code projects to use GitHub’s bug tracking (GitHub Issues) in addition to their code hosting. So far I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. It’s got a tagging system so that you can categorize your issues according to whatever set of tags you want. The tags are called labels.

I’ve finally finished (for now, anyway) another hunk of code in my ever-growing suite of half-baked productivity tools. I’m tentatively calling the whole mess “Ywar”, and would paste the dictionary entry here, but all it says is “obsolete form of ‘aware’”. So, there you go. I may change that later. Anyway, a rose by any other name, or something, right?