another plea to test and use strict

August 7, 2008  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻 🤤

A few months ago, I spend a few days (yes, days) rewriting an extremely complex set of procmail programs into modern Perl. Replacing procmail with Moose? Priceless.

my current most played music

August 5, 2008  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

Bryan posted his most played tracks to his blog. I used to publish a daily log of what tracks I’d played in iTunes, but its records bugged me and I gave up on it. Still, it seemed like very slightly entertaining information to share. For example, Bryan listened to The District Sleeps Alone about three times as often as the next contender. Either he needs to obsess less or use smart playlists more!

how do you find user groups?

August 4, 2008

I “run” the local Perl Mongers. All that really means it that I’m responsible for sending out the “okay, remember: we’re going to McGrady’s next week!” email.

mobileme: ugh

July 31, 2008  🍏 💾 🤤

Okay, I’m being overly dramatic. MobileMe has been mostly okay to me. It’s nice that it syncs things, and I guess having them pushed over the air is kind of neat. It doesn’t really excite me. I dumped a crapload of my files onto my iDisk and maybe some day that will pay off.

blast from my programming past

July 30, 2008  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

Despite all my attempts to convince myself that it was a bad idea and not needed (I mean, I even tried to solve the problem with XML), I have found myself working on a schema and data validation system.

strange night and being grounded

July 30, 2008

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and Gloria was restless. She was fidgeting around and I asked what was wrong. “It’s this damn bug in the bed,” she said.

iphone apps, part 1

July 27, 2008

So, right. I got an iPhone. Among other things, this means that I will now start writing about what apps I like, once in a while.

my oscon experience

July 26, 2008

Once again, I’m writing a look back instead of a travelogue. Oh well!

on the hiring process

July 19, 2008

I am not Andy Lester. I do not have piles and piles of advice on getting hired. Every time I go through the hiring process, though, I gain a bit more wisdom to share with applicants. Here is some for you today.

validation is hard

July 18, 2008  🧑🏽‍💻

More and more, I’m dealing with lots of mostly-JSON web service APIs. I enjoy this. It’s simple, and tends to work well. I think JSON is a really nice format to work with. I had a discussion with Ingy and a bit of the #yaml gang about things I don’t like about YAML (largely it’s implicit types) and I ended up thinking that YAML wasn’t quite as insane as I’d thought. Still, from the perspective of clarity, JSON blows it out of the water.