I Wrote Some Perl

Ok, yes, I’ve been writing Perl for over twenty years. But Perl 5.26 was released this week and for the first time, my name is mentioned in the release notes. Because I have not one, but two fixes in this release of Perl. The first is this commit which fixes a piece of documentation to […]

Shaving Last.FM Yaks

Long-time readers might remember that I once had a bit of an obsession with aggregating web feeds on sites that I called “planets”. I wrote Perlanet to make this job easier and I registered the domain theplanetarium.org to host these planets. The planets I built were of varying levels of usefulness – but of all […]

Two Weekend Projects

It’s far too long since I’ve posted anything here. I’ve no excuse really. Following the end of my contract in Canary Wharf, I was off work for seven weeks. OK, I was on holiday for two of those weeks, but that still leaves five weeks when I could have been doing something constructive, but actually […]

Hacking Symbol::Approx::Sub

In October, for (I think) the second year, Digital Ocean ran Hacktoberfest – a campaign encouraging people to submit pull requests to Github repos in exchange for free t-shirts. A few of us thought that this might be a good way to do a small bit of easy Perl advocacy, so we tagged some issues […]

Code Archaeology

Long-time readers will have seen some older posts where I criticised Perl code that I’ve found in various places on the web. I thought it was about time that I admitted to some of the dodgier corners of my programming career. You may know that one of my hobbies is genealogy. You might also know […]