Randal L. Schwartz

I was tweaking my procmailrc today. My procmailrc recognizes a number of common pattern-based spam items and logs those into logs that I rotate on a regular basis. Anything else gets fed into a Mail::Audit-based "Sortmail" script. As I was testing a minor tweak, I noticed that the logfile for Sortmail (driven by the Mail::Audit object) wasn't getting any messages.

Long story short... I had opened the Mail::Audit logfile as "-", because I wanted it to use stdout, which in my procmailrc I had directed to the proper log.

But RJBS recently changed Mail::Audit from using the two-…

Had a great chat with the Thousand Oaks PerlMongers last night, as an ongoing series of conversations I've been having recently about finding a compelling reason for Perl6.

I was inspired by Larry's Onion talk to continue thinking about the relation of Perl5 and Perl6 (and frankly, me and Stonehenge as well).

First, Perl6 is not "the next Perl5". Perl5 will be alive and well for another decade at least, independently maintained and released. That's happening quite efficiently and effectively already. (Translated: "I will quite possibly be able to continue making money off Per…

The NNTP injection host that I use to feed comp.lang.perl.announce had moved, and for some reason I had hardwired the old IP address into my posting script. Once I got that sorted out, it looks like it'll be business as usual for CLPA once again.

When I moved from OpenBSD to FreeBSD a year ago, I also had to move the email being handled by my server. As things were a bit different, I added a "Just-in-case" MailDir for one of my users so that no matter what else happened to the rest of their procmailrc, they'd have a backup copy.

Flash forward a year.

Yeah, you guessed it... we never turned that off. It's been accumulating spam at the rate of a few messages a second. For a year. I couldn't figure out why my 80GB of freespace a year ago was now dangerously under 15GB.

The MailDir/new directory was 2.5GB. Not t…

You know, when I look at Russian Cyrillic, or Greek letters, it looks like squiggles. I've never studied it, so I have no means to relate it to sounds, let alone meanings.

So, when people say, "I can't read Perl", it only tells me they haven't studied it.

And if people choose to be vocal about their own ignorance, saying "Perl is unreadable!", that's saying a lot more about them than it does about Perl.

As far as I can tell, millions of people speak Greek and Russian. I'm not one of them, and that's ok. I don't keep saying "Russian is impossible", simply because I per…