I noticed, recently, that I had enough Amex rewards points to get an Xbox 360. I thought about it for a while and then decided to go for it. As is my habit when ordering something, I obsessively checked the status of my order every few hours, and it kept sitting at “submitted.” I figured it could take quite a while, since I was buying with points.

Some time ago I wrote that I had moved my D&D wiki to TiddlyWiki. This has worked pretty well, although I’ve mostly given up storing YAML in my TiddlyWiki – mostly because I didn’t end up using the tools that used it all that much. Maybe next time.

We’ve been unhappy with the performance of some code, recently. I was pretty sure I knew where the problem was, but I thought I’d run NYTProf just to see how things looked. I’m running an older NYTprof, so it’s not 100% clear that my SQL-level optimization is what I need to do – but it’s the right thing to do anyway. Anyway, I figured I might see something sort of interesting, but I never expected this:

As suggested, I have run the code such that a dist’s mere appearance on the CPAN is not counted. In other words: code exists if it is used. If not, it is ignored entirely. It ends up not having much effect.

For a while, I’ve been keeping track of the total usage of my code on the CPAN. It helps me see what people have found useful, and lets me decide how scared to be of introducing back-incompat changes. Sometimes people talk about the sort of catastrophe that can occur if a highly-required module is broken. For example, over 11,000 dists require the code in Getopt-Long. If it broke badly and people installed the new code, it would be a nightmare.

As is our tradition, Gloria and I watched a bunch of horror movies this October. Here’s a quick recap:

There is a fairly well-respected charity that’s fairly active in Bethlehem. It’s called Hogar Crea. I’m sure they do lots of good stuff and help people. That’s the impression I’ve gotten from various people. That’s not what matters to me.

At the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop this year, I gave a lightning talk about Dist::Zilla, the system I am increasingly using to manage my CPAN distributions. I’m using it instead of writing a Makefile.PL, but it doesn’t do the same thing as Module::Build or ExtUtils::MakeMaker. I’m using it instead of running module-starter, but it doesn’t do the same things as Module::Starter. I’ve had some people say, “So should I stop using X and use Dist::Zilla instead?” The answer is complicated.

A long time ago, I wanted to write something to let my pod (documentation) contain its own coverage hints. I gave up when I found out that it was not going to be trivial to say something like this:

Programming email can leave you a bit … touched. Here are some recent gems from #email on irc.perl.org