April 2013 Archives

Small but hideously formed

For several years I've been using a shell script that runs once a day from a cron job, and automagically subscribes me to the RSS feeds that rt.cpan creates for my modules. That means that whenever I release a new module, within a day or two I'll be subscribed to its bug reports, and within another day or so I'll start getting bug reports automatically emailed to me.

At some point RT got upgraded and my script broke. When I became aware of it, I fixed it, and I also put it on github. I hope you fin…

Learning from other industries, part 1 of n

My first job was as a bus conductor, and my second one was as a student trainee in an engineering company - proper engineering, with production lines, big machines, hot things, and "danger of death" notices on equipment. In both of these, safety was an important concern, and especially in the second one it was drilled in to me that safety and quality are closely related and arise from systems, not merely from individual endeavour. While I never completed my degree in manufacturing/systems engineering (I dropped out because I was fed up after too many years in the classroom) I still retain…

About David Cantrell

user-pic I'm in yur test resultz analyzn yr failz