wherein I continue to fail at being a dungeon master

February 23, 2011  โš”๏ธ

In 2005 or so, I started running a science fiction role-playing game, and it ran for a little under five years. I had a lot of fun, and I think the game had some merit, but I got frustrated with a lot of its failures and wrote a post mortem in which I put most of the blame on myself for a lot of problems that I brought down on my own. Below, I reproduce most of my report to the players:

my new sony reader

November 20, 2010  โš™๏ธ

My first ebook reader was a Sony PRS-300, which I bought just about a year ago. There was a lot to like about it, and I never felt particularly tempted to replace it with a Kindle. It really all comes down to one thing: the size. If you compare the Kindle and the Sony Reader sizes, you can see just how much bigger the Kindle 3 is than the PRS-300. The Sony reader fit much better in my pockets, so I could take it anywhere. Iโ€™d take it on walks to 7-11, to the playground with Martha, on short car trips, or anything. The Kindle is just a little too big for that to be as comfortable.

composing your own behavior across Moose class structures

November 5, 2010  ๐Ÿซ ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป

In my last entry, I wrote about how role composition and advice and BUILD interact. A number of times, Iโ€™ve wanted to get behavior that was like BUILD, but without needing the stub method hacks that are needed to get roles to participate in the method call. A very simple example came when I was writing Throwable::X, which had a mechanism for all of its contituent parts to contribute tags. The idea was that any class or role that was part of your class hierarchy could implement an x_tags method that would return a list of tag strings. These methods would all get called and the resulting set of tags would be uniqued and returned.

roles, advice, and BUILD in Moose

November 5, 2010  ๐Ÿซ ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป

A very common complaint on #moose is, โ€œBUILD is broken. I put BUILD methods in my code and they never got called.โ€ There are a lot of variations on this. They tend to come from the fact that BUILD is not called like almost any other method. Imagine the following class hierarchy:

what the heck is GVf_IMPORTED?

October 21, 2010  ๐Ÿซ ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป

I was happy to learn about this bizarre flag in Perl, even though it took a lot of aggravation to learn it.

finally started using dzil new

October 20, 2010  ๐Ÿซ ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป

Ages ago, I got a lot of requests for a way to let Dist::Zilla create new dists. Creating a useful command for doing that became part of the TPF grant work that I did, and dzil new started to work in May. By June, it reached the state itโ€™s been in for months now, which seemed pretty good โ€“ but I didnโ€™t really know, because I wasnโ€™t using it.

Throwable::X: common behavior for thrown exceptions

October 19, 2010  ๐Ÿซ ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป

When I first wrote about Test::Routine, I said it was a way of building a replacement for Test::Class that relied on Moose for all of its class composition. I compared it to replacing Exception::Class with Throwable, which let me get rid of a lot of features that were oriented toward building classes, and which were different from and inferior to those provided by Moose.

Test::Routine interface change

October 19, 2010  ๐Ÿซ ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป

Iโ€™ve been trying to learn more about different patterns people use while writing test code, and to make sure that Test::Routine accomodates them all fairly easily. So far, Iโ€™m happy with it, but Iโ€™ve had a few changes Iโ€™ve made. So far, only one is intended to be user visible. From now on, instead of writing: