Another year, another thirty-one days of horror movies! I think our selections this year had fewer losers than some past years, but probably also fewer stand-out winners.

So, it turns out I never posted a summary of our Horror Movie Month for 2015! I tried to recreate our viewing list by looking up my tweets, but there are a bunch of days with no movie tweet. What happened? I’m not sure. Anyway, here’s a very late summary, missing days, and with a year’s clouding of my memory. How accurate will it be? Who knows!

Every once in a while I hear or see somebody using one of the two obsolete secure SMTP transports for Email::Sender, and I wanted to make one more attempt to get people to switch, or to get them to tell me why switching won’t work.

I’ve been meaning to learn Rust for a long time. I read the book a while ago, and did some trivial exercises, but I didn’t write any real programs. This is a pretty common problem for me: I learn the basics of a language, but don’t put it to any real use. Writing my stupid 24 game solver in Forth definitely helped me think about writing real Forth programs, even if it was just a goof.

About a month ago, Mark Jason Dominus posted a simple but difficult arithmetic puzzle, in which the solver had to use the basic four arithmetic operations to get from the numbers (6, 6, 5, 2) to 17. This reminded me of the 24 Game, which I played when I paid my infrequent visits to middle school math club. I knew I could solve this with a very simple Perl program that would do something like this:

I’ve been meaning, for a while, to make a little post about a library I wrote a while ago.

Who’s ready to live in the past? Me!

JMAP is a protocol that is meant to replace IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, SMTP, ACAP (ha ha), and probably some other protocols that aren’t springing to mind. Like IMAP, it’s meant to make it easy to synchronize offline work with an authoritative server. It does this by dividing up the data model into collections of discrete types, with each collection in a known and addressable state.

I’ve long said that the Perl QA Hackathon is my favorite professional event of the year. It’s better than any conference, where there are some good talks and some bad talks, and some nice socializing. At the Perl QA Hackathon, stuff gets done. I usually leave feeling like a champ, and that was generally the case this time, too.

I’ve been meaning to release Dist::Zilla v6 for quite a while now, but I’ve finally done it as a trial release. I’ll make a stable release in a week or two. So far, I see no breakage, which is about what I expected. Here’s the scoop: