I did some overhauling to a module a few months ago. I added a new interface to it, and left the old one in with a deprecation warning. After a little while, the original author uploaded a new release that totally removed the old interface. Within a day or two I’d received comments on IRC and via email. They were all something like, “The new interface is definitely better, but I had code using the old one!”

This looks sort of neat: it lets you build automator-like actions and assign them to different kinds of triggers like keypresses or mouse gestures. I’m afraid that it will lack the ability to usefully script things I want to do, that it won’t talk to Growl, and that it will stagnate when it’s abandoned and its source is never released.

Someone I know wrote something like this in his blog, this week:

I bought my current laptop just before OSCON ‘03, and my plan was to keep it for three years. That was the deprecation schedule for laptops at IQE, as I recall, and it seemed like a reasonable number to latch on to. That time is quickly approaching, and isn’t it just my luck that the kind of hardware I’m likely to want isn’t currently on the market, exactly.

This neat little application keeps track of your power status on your Mac. If you disconnect or reconnect your power, it tells you about it with Growl. Since my laptop AC adaptor doesn’t have a little ring of light on it, sometimes I lose power without noticing. This makes sure I notice.

Adam has a module called Params::Util. It provides a bunch of routines that let you say something like “is this value an X value?” X might be “array” or “valid identifier” or so on. In general, I don’t put that module to a lot of use. Maybe I should, but I don’t.

Why is AppleScript so slow? Whenever I try to do a bunch of things repeated tasks with it, it feels like it takes forever. I assume it isn’t really AppleScript per se, but the underlying Apple Events layer. When I’ve used Mac::Glue, it’s been about as slow.

An unedited transcript from #vim:

This morning, Adam wrote his faux pitch to become TPF President. There were a decent number of replies, many of which were on the order of, “We actually don’t need to raise more money” or “people don’t actually want Perl certification.” The problem is that his “platform” outshone what I think is a real issue: TPF still seems like a black box.

I just love this blog entry from Guido. It’s just about a year old now – it was resent verbatim (replacing Python with Scheme) to some Scheme lists as an April Fool’s joke. Guido is talking about how he’d like to drop filter, reduce, and map. He says: