I've recommended Disastercast here before, and I know that some of you have since subscribed. However, for those that haven't, episode 13 is worth listening to. It is about safety issues arising from software, in particular looking at the Therac-25, a medical device which which, because of race conditions, killed people.

I've recently been listening to Software Test Podcast. And I was particularly struck by episode 41, in which the presenters interview James Whittaker. He used to be Head Testing Honcho at Google until moving to Microsoft a year and a bit ago.

Almost all of what he says is good news for the perl community. The way we value testing and make it part of the community and how in our day jobs with perl most of us have "testing as an activity not a role", as he puts …