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:

First, a refresher…

These replay write-ups get shorter and shorter as I go. I think it’s because I’m growing more and more confident in what I like and don’t like, and what I will and won’t spend my time on. Infidel has a nice setup. I liked the setting, the starting plot, and the way the game got started. Soon enough, though, I got a “you’re quite thirsty” message, and I groaned.

At work, a fair bit of our web stuff is Catalyst. That’s not just the user-facing website, but also internal HTTP services. For a long time, we were stuck on v5.7012, from late 2007. That’s pre-Moose (which was 5.8000) and pre-Plack (which was 5.9000). It wasn’t that we didn’t want to upgrade, but it was a bunch of work and all the benefits we’d see immediately were little ones. It was going to free us up for a lot of future gain, but who has the time to invest in that?