In discussions on Hacker News I’ve said several times that I think copyright should be abolished. Some people agree, but I often get a reply asking how I expect programmers, musicians, or authors to make a living in such a world. Before I address that question, I’ll take a brief digression. While I’m all for abolishing copyright, that doesn’t mean I’m against all property rights. Physical property rights are a good thing.

I’ve removed the per-category Atom feeds from the sidebar, and I’m going to stop categorizing new entries. There are a couple reasons. First, the three categories are somewhat limiting. My next entry will not fall strictly into the AR-Veg, Personal, or Programming categories. Second, the vast majority of my entries are about programming, and that will probably continue to be true. I realized that most anything I’d categorize as Personal is either trivial or something I don’t want to share on a blog.

I recently uploaded a new distro to CPAN recently called Type. The concepts are largely on Moose’s built-in type system, but it’s a standalone distribution. Right now this is all very alpha, and the current release is not intended for use by anyone. I’ve released so people can take a look at critique the design. I’ve tried to remedy some of the problems that Moose’s type system has. MooseX::Types fixes some of these problems but then introduces its own.

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?

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 #!

I wrote another article for LWN that has just come out from behind the paywall, Perl 5.16 and beyond. This covers changes in Perl 5.16 and future plans for Perl 5.

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.

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.

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

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.