Joe McMahon

• Website: pemungkah.com
• About: Still blogging about Perl; co-posting at pemungkah.com.

Recent Actions

• Commented on What I learned in college because I had to use mainframes
  Yes, the "typeball nod" so you knew your connection hadn't dropped. :) My junior year I didn't yet have keys to the building (I got them senior year so I could have office hours for the business-school freshmen I was...
• Posted What I learned in college because I had to use mainframes to Joe McMahon

  Andy Lester's got a great article over at the New Relic site which makes me realize how lucky I was in college.

  I graduated in 1979; our computing platform was a 360/75, late up…

• Commented on A-tisket a-tasket a little perl hash basket
  I agree with Toby on this one: if you're checking the scalar value of a hash, it's almost guaranteed to keep changing. Better to test for a "reasonable" value - \d+/\d+ - instead of a specific one....
• Commented on My Favourite Test::* Modules
  You should take a look at Test::Routine?, which is my new favorite Test:: module....
• Posted Why code style is important to Joe McMahon

  Over at ImperialViolet, there's an interesting argument observation on Apple's recent SSL/TLS bug in iOS. This is the code in question:
  static OSStatus
  SSLVerifySignedServerKeyExchange(SS…

• Commented on Write a Perl tutorial and earn some $$$!!
  Looks like they pay $50 per article you write that they accept. Writing on spec....
• Posted Interview tools: "Walk me through this" to Joe McMahon

  I've been experimenting with something in the interviews I've been doing most recently. Turns out it works quite well, so I'm sharing this in the hope that it will help you as much as it has me.

  One of the most important things on a software team is code reading comprehension and communica…

• Commented on "You and your ilk are a tiny minority trying to impose your opinion upon the majority who actively and vocally disagree with you."
  It seems to be personal. Not sure why....
• Commented on "You and your ilk are a tiny minority trying to impose your opinion upon the majority who actively and vocally disagree with you."
  More that I contradicted their belief that everything's perfectly fine at Perlmonks, and I think they didn't like it....
• Commented on "You and your ilk are a tiny minority trying to impose your opinion upon the majority who actively and vocally disagree with you."
  A good friend has noted that she started getting a lot more done on things she cares about when she cut out participating in things that made her angry or upset. I think this is a good idea. http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=1074069 I...
• Posted "You and your ilk are a tiny minority trying to impose your opinion upon the majority who actively and vocally disagree with you." to Joe McMahon

  I will no longer be participating at Perlmonks.

• Commented on blogs.perl.org security breach
  I'l talk to the folks here at WhiteHat and see if I can talk them into giving the site one of our security assessments so we can see if there's anything else that might bite us again....
• Commented on PerlMotion - Perl For iOS
  Interesting. I'll experiment with this a bit and try to get back with a deeper evaluation. I've done some iOS programming, so it'll be interesting to compare this with native Objective-C apps....
• Posted Better interviews and better hiring to Joe McMahon

  So the tech interview is starting to change. I am very glad to see the end of the "puzzle palace" interview. Had a number of those and never did very well at them.

  To quote the meat of the article:

• Commented on What exactly is going on at Perlmonks?
  The problem with, "well, it was just one bad joke" is that it's the death of a thousand cuts. Yeah, that one little thing this person did "wasn't that big a deal". And the one this other person said wasn't...
• Commented on What exactly is going on at Perlmonks?
  To put it in software terms: I'm trying to say I'm seeing an error, cutting and pasting the message into the bug report - and you're insisting that the code is working just fine for you and I'm just a...
• Commented on What exactly is going on at Perlmonks?
  Its [sic] sexist to make statements like 'frat-boy humour scares women away', yet you don't seem to have a problem with that. Really. So it's sexist to point out that sexist behavior is off-putting to anyone who cares about it?...
• Commented on What exactly is going on at Perlmonks?
  Calling it "faux" says "I choose to deny your feelings about this because your expressing them make me feel bad, because only nasty people choose to make jokes that make other people feel bad, and I'm nice, so your feelings...
• Commented on What exactly is going on at Perlmonks?
  My point is that "man-hours" isn't necessary. You can say "hours" and not lose any essential meaning. That's why I said, okay, not enough to get too exercised about...but when point two specifically turned on having used "man-hours" to make...
• Posted What exactly is going on at Perlmonks? to Joe McMahon

  I went back to Perlmonks for the first time in quite some time, and was greeted with by a poll titled "How many man-hours would you estimate you have invested in learning Perl?" - okay, could have been hours, not enough to make a big deal of, I'm trying not to make every interaction on the site…

• Commented on "White knight", a meditation
  Exactly. It's a derail-in-a-label. "I've decided to change the conversation to talking about how you're a shallow, cynical, and manipulative person now, whether or not it's true, since I don't want to let anyone else think objectively about how much...
• Posted "White knight", a meditation to Joe McMahon

  If you think "white knight" is a crap term, a convenient argument-by-dismissal tactic, then you probably already know all this, but there may be some useful ideas for the next time someone attempts to spring this on you.

  On the other hand, if you're one of those who think it's the scored…

• Commented on Social diagnostics
  Therefore, you're entirely entitled to get annoyed, offended and even angry as imply a member of homo sapiens, on your own behalf. *forehead slap* Perfect. That is what I will do, because you're totally right. I didn't, and don't,...
• Posted Social diagnostics to Joe McMahon

  First, a huge thank-you to all the folks who have commented on my post (whether they agree with it or not) and who have followed up on Perlmonks to say "well, I think this might be correct" -…

• Posted Why I'm considering dropping Perlmonks to Joe McMahon

  A couple days ago, a comic strip was posted to Perlmonks that really got up my nose. For those of you who don’t want to bother linking through, the strip compares Perl with Moose to Perl having a “boob…

• Posted git svn vs. svn2git (vs. "svn2git") to Joe McMahon

  If you're ever in the position of needing to convert a large (in our case around 32000 revisions) Subversion repository to a Git repository, you should know
  

• git svn is agonizingly slow, and falls over at regular intervals (apparently memory problems; symptom is "git svn di…