Kegler spam

Kegler apparently has a script to auto-spam this site with content from his blog, explicitly ignores replies here, and flouts the policy on front-page posts. Is there a chance we can automatically reject his abuse?

Slideshare? Really?

While I enjoy reading the presentations people post here, I've never been that happy with their using Slideshare. What's wrong with just putting a PDF somewhere? As it turns out, Slideshare is actually somewhat slimy -- they got caught using ETags to force tracking cookies on people who explicitly block them. (Do a search for "slideshare kissmetrics" and you'll see that they were proud of it.)

They're welcome to whatever business model they choose, as long as they're open and honest about it. But really, you're better …

Holy bloat, Batman!

Let's compare the latest constant.pm to a minimal equivalent: $ ./perl -Ilib -le 'print $^V'; /usr/bin/time -l ./perl -Ilib -le 'use constant X => 1..5; print X' 2>&1 | grep 'maximum resident' v5.17.10 3829760 maximum resident set size $ /usr/bin/time -l ./perl -I/tmp -le 'use constant X => 1..5; print X' 2>&1 | grep 'maximum resident' 1200128 maximum resident set size That's 2.6MB bloat to define a constant. (The culprit turns out to be utf8, natch, to handle Unicode constants. (Why, God?!)). For reference, /tmp/constant.pm…

Same feeds, less spam

I subscribe to both blogs.perl.org and ironman.enlightenedperl.org, so whenever "JT Smith" posts something, I receive 2-3 copies, when I would rather receive 0. Today, I finally took a few minutes to fix this with one of the few useful things Yahoo has ever created: Pipes. Enjoy Perl news with less spam (RSS).

The date matches MM/01/YYYY -- it's a release!

Calling whatever happens to be lying around on a particular date a "stable release" is a laughably bad idea (the "rhythm method" is also lousy birth control). A "release" is something you want lots of people to use; "the stuff in version control on the first of the month" is something else entirely.

Perl releases used to take awhile -- so do releases of POSIX, HTML, C, and C++ -- and that was not a bad thing. It's the difference between a platform and a fad.