I’m Sorry I Dropped Your Comment

My blog has been getting absolutely flooded with spam recently (c. 4,000+ in the last few days), and I’ve accidentally sent some legit comments to the great spam filter in the sky. The various spam plugins I have caught the vast majority, but that still left a few dozen a day for me to review. My general policy is to approve all comments, even the obnoxious trolling stuff that follows any mention of a code of conduct.

Why Do People Use the System Perl?

Recently on the perl5-porters list, there have been several discussions about backwards compatibility and the future of Perl 5. Jesse’s plan is interesting, and in theory sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately, it brings up some incredibly thorny issues and may not be technically possible. Even if it is possible, it’s likely that lexically preserving backwards compatibility will not work for every proposed feature. This is an old discussion. The p5p list has been debating backwards compatibility versus evolution for years.

Visiting Chicago in November

I’m going to be in Chicago for Chicago VeganMania on Saturday, November 5. I’ll be arriving late afternoon on Thursday, November 3, and leaving in the afternoon on Sunday, November 6. I’ll be pretty busy, so I can’t promise to get together with everyone or anyone, but ping me via email if you want to get together and I’ll get back to you once I have a better sense of my schedule.

No Moose Class at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop

I won’t be at PPW this year, and thus the Moose class won’t be happening. I apologize to anyone who signed up for the Moose class, though last I heard that was just one person, which is the main reason the class isn’t happening. I think the upshot of this is that announcing a possible class isn’t a good idea. All this does is create uncertainty for potential students and discourage signups.

My New OO Docs for the Perl Core Have Been Merged

Back in March, I mentioned that I was working on a new OO tutorial for the Perl 5 core. I’ve been working this intermittently over the last eight months or so, with lots of useful feedback from the perl5-porters. Along the way, the project grew to include a rewrite of the perlobj document, the reference document for Perl OO. I’m happy to say that as of last week, all of my work has been merged into the blead branch of core, and will be in the next release of Perl.

Conference Code of Conduct Considered Crucial

I’ve decided to follow Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s lead and pledge that I won’t speak (or attend) any conference that does not publish an acceptable (to me) code of conduct/anti-harassment policy. I’ve already written about what should go into such a code, and I think Jacob’s post makes a number of good points on why a policy is important. What would a code need for me to consider it acceptable? First, it needs to define acceptable conduct.

My Code is Now Mirrored on GitHub

Per the request of various folks, all of my code is now mirrored on GitHub. I’m still pushing to my personal server, but I’ve set up hooks to then mirror to GitHub. I’ll be happy to accept patches via a github repo and/or pull request. I wrote some code to manage the mirroring, which can be found in my git-bits repo. It’s not ready for CPAN, but it might be useful to others who want to do something similar.

Distros Which Need Some Love

I have way too many modules. Want to take one or two? Here’s some modules that I own (or co-own) that need some love: DateTime-Format-Mail - has some open bugs that could use some attention. DateTime-Format-MySQL - I may have a new maintainer lined up, but the more the merrier, I suspect. DateTime-Format-Strptime - I took co-maint on this to do a few quick fixes, but it could use more attention.

Conference Code of Conduct Considerations

A recent discussion on the YAPC::NA blog reminded me of the importance of having a code of conduct for conferences. I wrote about this previously in the context of creating a policy for my animal rights group. Now that the issue’s come up with YAPC, I’m thinking about what the ideal policy for a conference should look like. I do sympathize with people who don’t like these policies, and think they should be as short as possible.

Google Plus Circles Don’t Solve My Problem

When I first saw Google Plus circles, I thought this was a great idea. On Facebook, I have a bunch of “friends”, most of whom are people I talk to only rarely, some of whom I haven’t spoken to in years. With Google Plus, I can categorize these “friends” into different circles. How awesome is that? Most of the people I’ve had contact with on Plus are people I know through programming, so I made a “Geeks” circle and started filling it in.