CPAN Ratings are a great idea. Unfortunately it seems that in some cases they are either unused (in places where they should be) or misused (in places where they shouldn't be used).

While some distributions (which are very recommended to use by the Perl community) do not enjoy having ratings at all, I've noticed some people putting their personal gripes as ratings.

Theoretically you should be able to do that, true, but these ratings don't act the way you might assume they would. If you have a dist and I rate your first version as one star (for lack of tests, or becaus…

I've been continually discouraged recently with various projects and endeavors. I've found that - while "stupid" is too strong of a word, "ignorant" should suffice - I will likely be unable to pursue certain paths while yielding positive results. "An intellectual FAIL," one might say.

It is not just in the realm of code, but well beyond it. I have a tendency for drama, I suppose, but it is still overwhelmingly clear that spreading oneself thin makes for... well, a rather thin layer. I've contemplated throwing the towel (and the water bottle, and the spit bucket, and half of the locker…

Today, during a routine check of a new server, a co-worker found an authorized_keys file that isn't ours. The keys in the file (two of them) were of the VPS company that provided the server. One of them is of a specific user there and the other is a generic one.

This grants them password-less access to our server. We have no idea if the private keys are shared between people and whether they are even password protected or not. If they aren't password protected and shared between users (which is likely), it means that we have a completely unknown number…

My Perl Android talk was accepted to YAPC::EU 2010 (!!!!) and I want to book the room reservation for my girlfriend and I.

Unfortunately, the hotel (MyHotel - where the conference is taking place) only accepts the credit card details via Email. I've suggested simply calling them and - once I've verified that I'm speaking to the right person - give the details via phone.

However, they insist on getting it via Email. They even suggesting sending two emails, one with half the details, the other with the rest of the details.

Now.. is it just me or is sending it via Email c…

After struggling with ExtJS for a while, I've decided to let go of it. Not in favor of jQueryUI or any other UI. Not even if favor of writing a UI myself (other than, perhaps, a few loose forms that make you want to vomit). I've decided to work on what I do - the backend.

This is actually something that took me a while to understand. I don't write UIs, I don't write websites, I don't write frontend. I'm not good at that, it doesn't even interest me. I love working on backend, I like writing the engine, I like fiddling with the Perl code. I don't enjoy Javascript, I don't enjoy …

Many years ago, when I was... roughly 15 (I think), I met Theodor Ts'o (one of the first hardcore Linux Kernel hackers, since version 0.90, I believe) at a Linux event IBM organized in Israel. I should note that he is a very nice person.

After the event, we got to talk a bit. We talked about our favorite games. Mine was "avoiding segfaults". This was back when I was programming in C.

Today I wrote the following regex:
qr/^([\w|\.]+)\s+(?(\d+)\s+)?(\w+)\s+(?:(\d+)\s+)?([\w|\d|\.]+)$/;

Then got a Segmentation fault

Can you spot the error?…

Warning: something's wrong at /home/sawyer/code/private/KiokuDB-Backend-DBI-0.08/lib//KiokuDB/Backend/DBI.pm line 563.

Really? I could've never figured something was wrong there. I wouldn't assume you feel like... telling me what's wrong, would you?

Oh, and whoever read my last post via RSS and wondered why there's no code, it's because I was using Github Gists and it doesn't pass some RSS readers. Open the entry and you could view it.

<rant>

Rapidshare deletes illegal files, so instead of sharing Rapidshare links, sites nowadays apparently started sharing .dlc files (or so I've heard). DLC is an encrypted container format. It is very very stupid. I'll elaborate.

Let's break it down:

• Only one server decrypts - single point of failure.


• Disregarding the necessity for internet, this binds you to specific programs that have the keys hardcoded in them to be able to access the server.


• The protocol is secret, the key is secret, the programs are cl…