More and more, we’re eliminating Linux boxes in favor of Solaris. This is generally not a huge deal, but one of the niggling details has been Sun’s cron. It sucks. It sucks because it uses a constant as the subject of its alert messages. If you have a lot of servers running a lot of cron jobs, generating a lot of output, you end up with a display that looks like this:

In general, I am a very, very happy cardholder. Just recently, when my EVDO modem died, American Express paid for me to replace it with nearly no questions asked. That saved me about $250, since the modem had just gone out of warranty. That pays for over half my annual membership. They also paid for some MacBook repairs earlier this year, which was a real plus.

App::Cmd::Tester lets you test that an App::Cmd program output the right things to standard error and standard out, and did so in the right order. It does stuff Test::Output can do, but also just a bit more.

From Zap2It’s “premise of ‘Curious George’”:

I remember in 2005 or so when I first started using Subversion, I liked it so much. It was much easier to use than CVS. Everyone said it would be make tagging and branching easier than CVS. In CVS, tagging was fine, but branching was such a pain that I never bothered.

Ever wonder how much of our programming style is dictated by our desire to see the right pretty colors? In Perl, I think it’s a good bit.

I feel like I’m living in Brazil. No, not the nation, the film.

I work for Pobox. We provide identity management. For the most part, it’s about email. You register an email address with us and we handle the mail for you. We send it to an IMAP store, or your current ISP, or some flash in the pan webmail provider like Google. We do other things, though, like web and URL redirection. It’s about managing services that relate to your identity.

I’ve uploaded a new Email::MessageID, version 1.400. It has two major improvements. First, the result of its new method is now an Email::MessageID object, where it was previously an Email::Address object(!). This means that it can now have its own message-id-specific methods. It has one: in_brackets. This is a very common mistake:

One of the earliest libraries I wrote for Pobox is ICG::CLI. It makes it easy to write CLI programs by tying together Getopt::Long::Descriptive with some common options (like help and verbose) and a few bits of code to make them work. So, you got three routines, whisper, say, and yell, which were like printf, but respected the verbose and quiet flags. (This got refactored into Log::Speak, which I don’t think was ever released. Oh well.)