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

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’”: