Suppose you are in a corporate network environment and often times find yourself manually setting/unsetting the HTTP_PROXY environment variable in order to access different hosts (for instance, "yay proxy" for the external hosts and "nay proxy" for the internal ones). Sounds familiar? In this case, a pure-Perl tool I've written might help you :)
This was the biggest Perl event I've attended so far.
Also, it was the first one I've attended outside of Brazil.
And I'm happy to see that there is so many people in Ukraine who are passionate about Perl!
So, listing some of my impressions below.
Yep, indeed, contributing to the Perl community can be a very ludic activity (not to be confused with luddite!). I tried to list every Perl-related web resource where participants are encouraged to build up some kind of score. Most have charts where participants compete for the highest rank while some has an absolute goal (like 100% test coverage). The list has no specific order. Feel free to post the resources I forgot/am unaware of in comments!
So, once upon a time I had a crazy idea: to put an almost complete resource meter into the tmux status bar. You know, the clock is so boring. Let's add a battery indicator there. And the load numbers. And the memory usage...
Needless to say, this resulted in an unbearable user experience:
Actually, the data is OK, the "gauges" work fine on every Unix I tested them. If only it was a bit fancier...
Puke rainbows!
Then I discovered Battery. And then, Spark. I just couldn't resist myself, so I revamped my messy Perl usage data parser to output this gorgeous ANSI art scrolling chart:
It was tested on Mac OS X 10.8.2, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 11.10, Debian 6.0.6 and works fine with the default system Perl; there are no external dependencies at all.