use Perl

Trying to get the "blog" google juice going here, along with others, this is indeed my Perl Blog.

When I originally started posting here, this was my only blog, so early messages were about everything interesting. But I got a personal blog at vox.com, and since then have been keeping this Perl Blog to simply being a Perl Blog.

Recently, I've been learning, writing about, speaking about, and teaching Smalltalk, so I also have a Smalltalk Blog where I speak strictly about Smalltalk-related items.

For a rollup of all of my blogs and web presences, you can follow my Jaiku feed.

I was drawn to last week's podcast episode of The Command Line because they mentioned my name (thank you, EveryZing!). When I listened to the entire podcast, I heard some mis-statements about Perl as being strictly an interpreter, so I added comments to the show, as well as subscribing to the show for updates.

Well, it looks like my comments made it into the initial content in this week's show, which delighted me immensely. It's good to make sure people understand how compiled Perl has already existed for 20 years, and will be even more explicit in Perl 6.

Rob Griffiths IM'ed me saturday while I was sitting at ATL airport, asking what my day rates were.

My normal reply was "depends on the task", and asked him what he had in mind. As he described it, it fleshed out to all of 10 lines in my head, so I said "well, buy me lunch and we'll call it even". He couldn't believe that it could be that short to create or to write.

Ten minutes later, I showed him the code that he added to a hint for today about renaming old iChat logs.

Hadn't tried it on my own data, but told him "it should probably work". I'm pretty good at previewing code in my head. :) He tried it, and it worked fine for his data. Yeay.

So there I am, famous again. And got a free lunch for 10 minutes work. Not bad.

...I've come to the preliminary conclusion that PHP makes Perl look like Japanese for its sheer compact complexity and power. There's something about Perl that's scary, something that's beautiful, something that compels me to express myself with it. It's going to be addictive stuff, i can tell. ...

... from a recent livejournal post

Often, when I warn of security concerns for newbie web programmers, they retort "but I don't have anything of value... it's just my blog, so I don't care".

The point is, they have a server. It's a potential spamming location, or anonymous platform from which to launch more dangerous attacks. What they have is net and CPU. That's useful to someone.

Maybe there should be some sort of license before you're allowed to expose a web server to the public net. {sigh}