LoonyPandora

• Website: loonypandora.co.uk
• About: I blog about Perl. I'm on Twitter, GitHub, and everywhere else as @LoonyPandora. Except the CPAN, where I'm JAITKEN. Silly character limits...

Recent Actions

• Commented on Pumpkin Perl Breakdown
  To be clear: I think the rename is a great idea. It's a first step, and that's awesome. With that in mind, for this to be successful we as a community have to go all in. Doing a rename like...
• Posted Documentation for Fun and Profit to James Aitken

  Last week at the London Perl Workshop, I gave my first ever talk. 20 minutes on the subject of documentation. I'm pleased to say it went very well, and I've had some fantastic feedback from everyone who saw it.

  I thought the wider perl community would appreciate having a look at my slides.…

• Commented on DIY personal analytics
  This is a fantastic idea! I've just implemented it myself. Looking forward to checking the results in a few months....
• Commented on What is your release process?
  Care to explain? Doesn't this defeat the purpose of using dzil? I do think, for practical reason, the modules in the repo should be directly loadable by Perl (e.g. using 'perl -Ilib') but this is not always possible: for...
• Commented on What is your release process?
  I’m a little more cautious, in that a lot of my process is manual. I do use Dist::Zilla heavily, but committing to GitHub and tagging is a manual process. I believe that the module that is in the repo on...
• Commented on How does your module's abstract fare?
  I love this idea! Sad to say that I fall foul of a few rules presented here through ignorance. How was one supposed to know not to end an abstract with a full stop? Now it's clear, and all is...
• Commented on A Look At Arrays
  This is a fantastic article on the basic building blocks you use everyday. It's very useful for someone like me, without a background in computer science. I had only a vague idea of what a "linked list" was. Looking forward...
• Commented on MetaCPAN Undergoes "Unplanned Re-index"
  Appreciate the heads up, I'll do what I can to help out. Can you provide more details about what went wrong? I think data-loss on that scale is too large an issue to explain away with a vague "unfortunate side-effect"....
• Commented on To switch or not to switch - The MySQL Question
  Nice story, there is a trade-off between maintainability and performance. We'd all be writing in an Assembly language otherwise! It's a good choice to stick with the tools that are best supported. I will say though, InnoDB COUNT() is not...
• Commented on Safely Storing Passwords
  @Mithaldu - I just merged a pull request that provides that feature, expect it to land soon :) @Carey Tilden - https would be the way to do that. If you calculate the md5 hash client side and use that...
• Posted Safely Storing Passwords to James Aitken

  My first post on here, hope it's well received!

  In light of recent database hacks (MtGox, Sony, etc) - How to safely store passwords is at the front of every developers mind.

  Almost every dev knows that storing plaintext passwords is a bad idea, but most don't realise that storing …

• Commented on Bringing Mojolicious to the dancefloor
  Sweet! That's my module - and my first on cpan. It was really easy :)...
• Commented on Working For Bletchley Park
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Macrae_Aitken - My Grandfather (Who I was named after, but never met) worked at bletchley park during the war. It's a worthy cause....
• Commented on Perl.com - initial relaunch
  I kinda like the bauhaus treatment on the logo. Is it part of a full rebranding?...
• Commented on iCPAN: CPAN on your iPhone
  Seems like a nice idea - Any reason why you didn't do it as a web app with local storage? Too much data to store?...
• Commented on Looking for work in London?
  So what is the best way to drop you a line? I clicked around a few of your profiles (here, LJ, use.perl, twitter, etc) , and couldn't see an "email" link anywhere....

Comment Threads

• Joel Berger commented on What is your release process?

  Yeah, I guess you are right.

  In point of fact, that "contributor" was usually me on another computer or perlbrew-installation. dzil is good stuff, but once I learned other mechanisms they are easy enough too.

• shawnhcorey commented on DIY personal analytics

  $ alias g
  alias g='history|grep'
  $
  

  List history and grep out commands. For example, to list all commands with "perl":

  $ g perl

• lordarthas.myopenid.com commented on Pumpkin Perl Breakdown

  There are so many reasons to support this idea.
  One of those I really like is that people will be able to use search engines and find something up to date when typing "pumpkin perl": there's so many outdated stone-age perl-related material that we won't be able to get rid of that without a change like this.

  So, for this and many other reasons, it's +1.

  And willing to help where I can, of course.
  

• raiph commented on Pumpkin Perl Breakdown

  I liked everything about mst's original Pumpkin post with one small exception -- the specific qualifier Pumpkin.

  In most ways it's outstandingly good. But it didn't leave me 100% satisfied.

  I've just seen someone's suggestion of Modern Perl, and I have to say I like it a lot. I checked whois, and shadowcat owns modernperl.com...

• Christopher Cashell commented on Pumpkin Perl Breakdown

  I like it.

  The name "Pumpkin" isn't necessarily my favorite, but I'm pretty sure that's just pure personal opinion; I can't think of any real objections to it, nor can I think of a better suggestion. There's certainly nothing wrong with it.

  I do still like the idea of year-based versioning, ideally along with the name change. If you're going to do releases based on a scheduled time-table, it makes sense to match your versions to it. However, that's something that can be considered in the future.

  I'm feeling good about this change.