Rules of Optimization

For that coworker who won’t stop “optimizing” his or her code, I give you my rules of optimization: Don’t optimize Don’t optimize, I’m serious Don’t optimize without benchmarking first Don’t benchmark without profiling first See rule #1 Edit: A co-worker suggested a step 4.5 of “Take a coffee break”. I don’t like coffee, but I like the spirit of the suggestion. Comments Chas. Owens, on 2012-04-26 07:43, said: Shouldn’t profiling be before benchmarking?

git-age-report

At work we have some git repos that were converted from CVS originally created back in 2002 or so. A lot of the things in these repos is cruft and could be deleted. I wrote a little git command to report the most recent commit date for each thing in the current directory. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 #!

My LWN Article on the Perl 5 Release Process

I wrote an article for LWN (Linux Weekly News) about the Perl 5 release process a couple weeks back. It was originally behind a paywall but it’s now readable by anyone. Another article I wrote will be published later today. I’ll post a link here once it’s out from behind the paywall. Please consider subscribing to LWN if you like this sort of thing, of course.

Are Perl 5 Committers Increasing?

I feel that Perl 5 activity has increased over the past few years, but is that an illusion? I brought this topic up on the #p5p IRC channel and Nicholas Clark said, “everyone assumes growth. If you look at the ‘committers’ graph on https://www.ohloh.net/p/perl/analyses/latest I don’t think there’s been any marked growth (or reduction) in the past 10 years. Just a lot of noise”. So is he right? I wanted to figure it out.

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▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬. ▬▬▬▬ ▬▬ ▬▬▬ ▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬. Comments Nick Patch, on 2012-01-19 15:36, said: █ █████, ████ ████ ███ ████!

Netflix Has the Weirdest Categories

I’m going through the Netflix movie rating interface right now rating films & tv shows to try to improve my recommendations. Sometimes after you rate something it asks you how often you watch films of a certain category. Presumably the category the thing you just rated belonged to. Some of the categories make sense, and some are completely insane. I can’t figure out how they could possibly be useful in determining what I like.

The Perl 5.15.6 Epigraph

Today I had the privilege (or punishment?) of releasing Perl 5.15.6, the latest monthly dev release of Perl 5. Part of the Perl release tradition is to include an epigraph with each release. The epigraph is a quote of some sort that goes at the beginning of the release announcement. I can’t find the first epigraph but if I had to guess it must be a quote from Tolkien accompanying one of the releases Larry Wall did.

VegGuide Needs a New Host

For many years, the VegGuide site has been hosted for free at Xmission, courtesy of Eric Waters. Eric has recently moved to a new position and is no longer at Xmission, so it’s time for us to find a new host. Update: The site is owned by my animal rights group, Compassionate Action for Animals, and we are a 501(c)(3) non profit organization. If anyone in the lights of these pixels could offer free or cheap hosting for this site, please let me know.

Compact “with-ish” statement for CoffeeScript

I’ve been playing with CoffeeScript (CS) lately, and I really like it. JavaScript (JS) is full of annoyances that make coding more tedious and error-prone that it needs to be. CofeeScript does a good job of fixing many of those annoyances. CS doesn’t provide anything like JS’s with block. That makes sense, because with in JS is completely insane and broken. But sometimes you want to be able to say “given this object, call a bunch of methods on it”.