I’ve been wanting to do some mucking around with POD. I started a little down this route a few weeks ago with Pod::Coverage::TrustPod, and what I found was that it was really a pain in the butt to easily say, “this file contains POD. Give me the content of hunks between =begin foo and =end foo. I’m sure it’s possible, and that if you understand Pod::Simple you can do it fairly quickly, but I just got too confused and side-tracked trying to figure it out. I really just wanted to get a hunk of data by saying something like:

I was almost led astray into the den of releasing a module with a name ending in ::Tiny, but then I saved myself.

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.