My experiment to crowd fund Jeff Thalhammer's Pinto development is going well. It's 87% of the way there. We need $503 to reach the campaign minimum. We have a week left to get that remaining 13% to get the campaign to "tilt", and I think we can get even more than that. Our secondary money goal is $5,000, all of which goes to Jeff to work on open source features of Pinto. I like $6425 (two perfect squares next to each other). That's 0b0001100100011001 (repeats the bit pattern) or 0x1919 (repeated, and the…

I've been playing with Heroku (a platform as a service) and Mojolicious, which works very well if all of the modules install. Greg Hinkle shows you how to do it. Create your mojo app and deploy it easily to Heroku. As you do, it's dependencies are installed for you.

Pure Perl modules are usually fine, but Heroku is a limited Ubuntu environment that doesn't have all the libraries you probably expect to already be there. One of the modules I needed had DB_File as a deep dependency, so deploying my app (with Heroku toolbelt and Mojolicious::Command::deploy::heroku) fails. I get the rainbow barf from the uni-raptor.

Get rid of your old distributions on CPAN! A couple of years ago, I asked CPAN authors to visit their delete files PAUSE page to "increase their Schwartz". Sadly, the use.Perl page has disappeared; the Schwartz Factor is the ratio of latest distros to the total size of CPAN. I named it after Randal Schwartz, who invented MiniCPAN.

Wendy noted that deleting distros was a topic at the recent Lancaster Q…

Can the Perl community directly fund a major project? I think we can, and we're 15% of the way there to funding Specify module version ranges in Pinto. There are some developers who are so valuable that I think the community should step up to release them from the shackles of the day job.

I've been pla…