TLDR: Helped my father move. Then I shaved all the yaks. Fur everywhere. Very messy. Because of the way holidays at ActiveState work, it’s very economical in terms of vacation days to take the last two weeks of the year off (Christmas and New year’s weeks). I had a fair bit of vacation left, so I decided to take the first week of the new year off as well, for a total of three weeks of vacation.

My last post was about my local COVID tracker tool. While it worked well, I found having to re-run the report.pl script every time I wanted an update annoying. Plus, I wanted to share this on Facebook, but I have non-technical friends who would not be able to run it for themselves. So I decided to put up a hosted version, but I challenged myself. I wanted it to run entirely on someone else’s machines.

For many months now, I’ve been following the COVID stats in the Star Tribune, the local Minneapolis newspaper. There’s a lot of interesting info there, but it’s not really useful for reaching conclusions about the safety of various activities. The problem is that the data is either for the wrong-sized area or I can’t group together the bits I care about. Most of the stats are state-wide. But I don’t care about the whole state.

Note: Technically, this post qualifies as paid promotion, because I work for ActiveState. But I volunteered to write about our new Platform and put it on my personal blog because I think what we’re doing is really cool and might be of interest to the Perl community at large. TLDR We have an entirely new system that supports Windows and Linux (macOS coming soon), providing you binary builds of the Perl core, Perl distros, and supporting C/C++ libraries1.

I did it! For the last twenty years I’ve uploaded at least one new release to CPAN every month. How do I know? Neil Bowers has been keeping track on his CPAN Regular Releasers page for quite some time. I’ve had the montly release quite a long time there. The second place for monthly release streaks is Chris Williams (BINGOS), at 177 months, which is 14 years and 9 months. Also of note is Karen Etheridge (ETHER), who has maintained a weekly streak for 457 weeks (8+ years)!

It’s a tiny doc patch, but this brings my language core contribution count to two languages. I feel unreasonably proud of this.

I wrote a prototype of a tool to “declare bankruptcy” on your Sqitch migrations and start over. If you have a project with 50, 100, or more migrations, this might be useful for you. The details are in the blog post I wrote on the ActiveState blog.

I’ve recently been puttering about attempting to write a Postgres SQL & PL/pgSQL tidier in Rust called pg-pretty. If you’ve always wanted such a thing, don’t get too excited. It isn’t even close to usable yet. But this post is about Perltidy and Black. These are both source code tidiers (aka formatter aka pretty printers). Black is for Python. These two tidiers reflect their respective languages. Perltidy is all about TIMTOWTDI1 and Black is very much a TOOWTDI2 project.

I’ve now moved all of my sites from my Linode box to Render. This includes: This blog - Uses Hugo. Repo houseabsolute.com - Contains my resume and links to conference slides. Also uses Hugo. Repo presentations.houseabsolute.com - A new hostname for my slides. See below for more details. Repo masonbook.houseabsolute.com - Just a static site. Repo vegguide.org - Just another static site. Repo I really like Render! It’s incredibly easy to use.

Many, many years ago, in the flower of my youth (June, 1999), I registered the urth.org domain. I can’t remember when I started hosting my own email, but it was around that time. For many years after, I had a server in my home that hosted my email, various websites, and some web applications. Eventually VPS’s became cheap and powerful enough that I ditched the home server and moved everything to the cloud (Linode, specifically).