NEILB's Blog

In the 14th Perl Weekly Challenge, the second part was to create the longest word out of US state postal codes. The challenge was attributed to me, but it's not quite what I intended. So here's an additional challenge — the one I intended. Think of it as challenge 2a: what's the longest word you can spell by traversing US states, taking the initial or initials of the states as you pass through them, without revisiting any states?

One of the Perl weekly challenges this week is to use the WordsAPI to look up information about a word. An English word. I was curious about the API, so ended up having a play with it.

For the first 20 or so years, PAUSE treated indexing permissions case sensitively. So Foobar was considered a different module from foobar. This caused problems on operating systems with case insensitive filesystems like MacOS and Windows. So at previous QA Hackathons and Toolchain Summits, it was decided that PAUSE should treat indexing permissions case insensitively. In 2016, at the Rugby QA Hackathon, I started a project to resolve the historical clashes in indexing permissions.

I went to the London Perl Workshop yesterday, and had the usual good time. I.e. catching up with friends, meeting some new people, giving a couple of talks, and attending talks. And as a bonus, I got two t-shirts this year.

December 2018 is the final month of the CPAN Pull Request Challenge (PRC). It started in January 2015, and the last four years have seen hundreds of contributions to hundreds of different CPAN distributions. It would be great to finish on a high note: if you previously signed up, why not re-join for just one month? And if you've not tried it before, why not try it now? You'll only have to do one pull request!

I'm currently trying out the Fira Code font for coding, which most of the time means Perl, Javascript, HTML, CSS. It's USP is a collection of ligatures for programmers. I'm really not sure what I think so far.

Earlier this week I posted, that this would be the final year of the CPAN Pull Request Challenge (PRC). A number of people have asked why I'm stopping, and offered to help keep it going. In this post I'll expand on why I think it's time to stop, and also share some thoughts on what could follow the PRC.

I'm going to run the CPAN Pull Request Challenge (PRC) again for 2018. This will be the fourth and final year, so if you've always fancied giving it a go, this is your chance! If you want to take part, email me (neil at bowers dot com) your github username, and your PAUSE id if you have one (PAUSE id is not required).

At the London Perl Workshop, we've often had cupcakes and the like during one of the coffee breaks. LEONT suggested that I bake 200 muffins, but I couldn't see how to get that many in on the train. It did prompt an idea though: could we crowd-source cakes, cookies, and muffins from the attendees?

Every release you do to CPAN stays in your author directory until you choose to delete it. Sometimes you might want your old releases to stay available, but most of the time you could happily delete them (they're always available on BackPAN). Space is getting short on the CPAN Master, so please tidy up your author directory. I've written a script to identify the biggest hoarders, and have started emailing the top of the list, asking them to free up some space. You can use the script to see (roughly) how much space you could free up.