use disposable ramdisks!

May 8, 2015  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

Recently I wrote about my dumb CPAN metafile analyzer, and how I’d tried to keep it fast. One of the things I tried to speed it up was creating a ramdisk for all of the archive extraction. The speed boost in this case turned out to be low, but it isn’t always. (Also, I inexplicably used a journaling filesystem .) When you’re doing a ton of file operations, the difference between physical storage and in-memory can be huge.

my stupid CPAN "meta analyzer"

April 30, 2015  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

Just about exactly five years ago, I wrote a goofy little program that walked through all of the CPAN and produced a CSV file telling me what was used to produce most dists. That is: it looked at the generated_by field in the META files and categorized them. Here’s what the first report, from April 11, 2010, looked like:

the 2015 Perl QA Hackathon in Berlin

April 23, 2015  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

I spent last week in Berlin, at the 2015 Perl QA Hackathon. This is an annual event where a group of various programmers involved with the “CPAN toolchain” and closely related projects get together, hash out future plans, write code that is hard to get written in “free time,” and communicate in person the hard that is stuff to communicate over IRC and email.

notes on drawing programming for children

March 22, 2015  🧑🏽‍💻

Once in a while, my daughter asks me to teach her programming. We’ve done a number of little things together, including some Python, some Scratch, and other things. When I was trying to think of what I enjoyed doing with computers around that age, one of the things I remembered was drawing. We did turtle graphics with Logo in my school, and it was nice to get instant and visual feedback of what the program did. I thought this seemed like a fun idea.

why I'm not sold on YubiKey OTP

March 7, 2015  ⚙️ 🔐

[ update: I added a bit of an update at the end, in which I find that my fundamental worries were wrong, because the system is less convenient than I hoped! So it goes. ☹ I decided to post this anyway, because the thoughts were worth thinking, so maybe somebody else will find them interesting to see. Or not. Who even reads this thing? ]