use Perl

The local Staples had some refurbished P-touch RPT-11xx label makers near the register. $29.95 minus a $20 mail in rebate. They're $24.95 on the website, plus shipping.

Seems like a pretty good deal, so I got one. The best part, the rebate can be applied for online. No stamps to lick!

All is not perfect. The rebate website uses the user agent to block out Linux, (but works fine with firefox/mozilla once you lie about the UA). But, after that, it was the easiest rebate form I've ever filled out. And, the device takes six AAA batteries, not AA as the box says.

You are going to OSCON this year, right?

You're coming to my talks? And hearing all the other great speakers?

The price goes up on Monday. Remember to register now.

(Ok, now that I'm done shilling, really, this is the Open Source event to be at. Maybe I've been living in LA too long, but Portland is a beautiful city, with great weather the week of the conference.)

What would you want to see on a site for people who want to learn perl? (Probably beginners mostly.) Email me at new-learn at perl.org with your ideas.

You can misspell street names, and it's still happy. Try it.

• eternalflame.mp3
• longest-path.mp3

I should have been doing something productive last night, but instead I ran some analysis and aggregation against perl.org's caught spam mailboxes.

The end result, a lot of numbers, not enough pretty graphs. What I really want to do is put the data into RRDtool, and update it regularly -- but properly configuring RRDtool to do fancy things is a black art I have not mastered yet.

In the end, we get a whole lot of spam and viruses every day. We get around the same number of messages -- but the viruses take up an order of magnitude more space. (And don't compress very well either.)

On the positive side, we're not passing this stuff on to the mailing lists or @cpan.org users. On the negative side, there's no sign of this tapering off. The spam level has stayed relatively constant for the past few months, although we've begun trapping a bunch more since we started using SURBL. Virus levels fluctuate widely.

If anyone is interested in playing with the data, let me know. I'd expect some pretty graphs in return.

I'd plug National Shoot a Spammer Day, but really it's the virus writers. Why can't they write small viruses? In some ways, the latest MyDoom variant is progress. In my book, it gets classified as spam.

When two threads try and use the same database handle at the same time, bad things happen. Kaboom!

Temporary Workaround: set ThreadPerChild to 1.

Eventual Workaround: make it thread safe.