Some time ago, I wrote about Addex’s config, which used a slight variation on INI files and really hit the spot for what I needed. It was possible because of the way Config::INI::Reader acts like a state machine, turning each line into a simple event that can be handled however you want. By default, of course, it mostly collects data and adds it to a structure.

Oh, Keynote. So simple, so pretty, so annoying.

Andy Lester posted his YAPC::NA schedule, so I thought I’d post my tentative plan. I often change my mind at the last minute, but:

Last night, looking at my bookshelf, I noticed my copy of Animal Farm and decided to re-read it. By the time I was finishing the first chapter, the entirety of the rest of the book flooded back into my memory, and I felt like weeping for the tragedy I knew was coming, eventually.

The autobox pragma first showed up a few years ago. It lets you do something like this:

Quite a while ago, I suggested to ABE.pm that we should get together and do some group hacking. When someone said, “HACKATHON??” I said, “Good grief, no!” I just wanted to do some messing about and have fun, without worrying about goals or accomplishments. Also, “hackathon” sounds like the hacking equivalent of running 26.2 miles: gruelling. I wanted to make sure it was clear that the point was to hang out, and that hacking was just the entertainment.

In case anyone has been thinking, “Gosh, I haven’t seen anything from rjbs lately,” the reason is ridiculous. It’s not that I’ve been busy (but I have) or lazy (but I am). It’s that I’ve been stupid.

Here’s an idea that occurs to me frequently when making slides for conference tutorials. Sometimes I make a slide and I know that it might be too advanced, but it’s a crap shoot. If the vast majority of the audience understands the slide, I can save several slides by not explaining it. If enough people look confused, I want to display those slides. I don’t mind making the slides up front, but I’d like to be able to only show them if I think it’s needed.

muxtape.com is a site where you can build mix tapes by uploading mp3 files. You can find other people’s uploads and listen to them. It’s the flea market tape swape of 2008. I like it.

The old FAT filesystem, still used by many USB mass storage devices like my new USB key drive, does not have a good concept of permissions. That is: not even as good a concept as UNIX. It’s common that the default behavior when mounting a FAT filesystem on unix is to set everything a+rwx. I’d rather not have files mounted a+x, so normally I could set a mask in my fstab options. On OS X, though an automounter is used that doesn’t seem to be configurable on a per-filesystem-type level.