I’ve been writing mini-articles about some of 5.10’s new features for ABE.pm, this past week. It’s been fun, and I’ve learned a few things that I didn’t know in the process. The feature that I knew the least before covering it, so far, has been assertions. Assertions let you have code that only runs if some set of assertions are enabled. It’s something like this:

First:

The last bug of the day was, “Why is this process getting so big?” See, it was getting an HTTP upload, creating an Email::Simple::FromHandle, then delivering it. It should all have been streaming around, nothing in memory.

Even hardware has heisenbugs!

The svideo out on my MacBook has never, as far as I know, worked. I didn’t bother getting it repaired because I never needed to use it. Now a larger problem has cropped up: I no longer seem able to connect my flat panel to my MacBook. I can use my work flat panel, presumably because I’m using an analog connection. At home, using a DVI connection, it fails. Another laptop works on my flat panel, but I can only test it with analog. I need to get someone with a DVI out on his laptop to come swing by.

I’ve long been meaning to install a new operating system and services on my home server, cheshirecat. Mostly it only exists to host my big old RAID that stores ~rjbs, my MP3’s, and a few other personal things. It used to host my website, the primary MX for manxome.org, and some other important things, so replacing it was going to be a pain. Still, it was running Slackware 7, dating from 1999, and it had only been patchily upgraded here and there.

I’ve been wanted to get rid of the stupid concrete walkway in my back yard ever since (or before) we moved in. Last week I found a local place that does concrete recycling. I mentioned this to Kip and asked if, at some unspecified time in the future, he’d give me a hand getting rid of the walkway.

So, I’ve done a bit more hacking on addex, some of which was to make it usable by a larger group of people. More on that in another entry, though.

Gabor recenly posted some reports about what version of what CPAN dists were in what OS distributions.

Recently, Daniel Jalkut was doing that thing that has, sadly, become pretty popular in modern blogging: announcing his hot new product before telling us what it’s for. (Did this start with Segway? I’m sure there are some prior examples that I can’t think of.) Anyway, it turned out to be Black Ink, a really nice looking Cocoa-based crossword puzzle program. It started out pretty buggy, but has gotten a little better. It costs $25, which probably isn’t too unreasonable, but I can’t see myself spending that much on a game that I’ll only play now and then.