fuzzix

Compare this with Rubygems - the only test results I see for that ecosystem are the many recent remote shell exploits showing up on seclists.org.

Even Pypi doesn't really compare with CPAN. They've done good work there but the simple idea of author names and source archives on a file server you can builds tools around has proved more robust and extensible than a focus on the web services and tools upfront.

Because absolutely everything has to be framed as a dichotomy these days. Drama and conflict are, apparently, the only way to hold the reader's interest.

"Grim Fandango is at the top of my short list of games I replay once a year"

It seems work on ResidualVM is coming along, so Grim Fandango may be playable on my laptop - might finally get to finish it.

I still play Full Throttle frequently, maybe as often as once a year. I've played through The Dig around 3 or 4 times too.

An aside, but I like this series of articles on design patterns in Perl, first here:

http://www.perl.com/pub/2003/06/13/design1.html

"If a pattern is really valuable, then it should be part of the core language"

I don't smoke it - it makes me introspective, paranoid and miserable.

I also laugh like a jackass at George Carlin and get the munchies, but the other stuff happens too.

Annoying, as the entries are user submitted.

The site should be more upfront about its intent.

There are still many free (beer) texts on there.

"We all make fun of the 15 min blog today, but at the time"

I made fun of it at the time. "Great! Now audit and deploy it."

'The usage of "cloud" really annoys me. When people use that word, they mean specific server(s) on the Internet'

When we hear "cloud" it means servers on the net.

To your manager, it's another term for outsourcing. If I put mail and calendars in "the cloud", would I need so many sysadmins?

These are simply code samples to use the Kinect SDK, not any code to interact with the hardware, right?

Just to echo this, I do much the same with Slackware. I use -current on some machines. Every time a release is pending, work on -current slows down (or does it ramp up?) and it is stablised.

It's essentially a development release rather than being explicitly labelled "rolling" (and, in fact, its use as a day-to-day distribution is generally considered A Bad Thing if you're not a Slackware developer/tester). It just happens to have the bonus of also being a pretty bleeding-edge, yet stable rolling release.

So, it's possible to achieve both a rolling release and "stable", versioned releases.

I've managed this with a couple of projects. With one, it was C source, pretty discrete set of modifications so used git to do the leg work - one remote was our own repository, the other was upstream. I can't recall seeing a conflict when rebasing from upstream branches.

The other project explicitly allows for code modifications and accomodates them in a separate directory you can keep in revision control. Again, no memory of major conflicts in stuff we did correctly - i.e. used the provided overlays or callbacks.

So, when is it a bad idea? When you step outside certain constraints (like our callbacks example above) and override or replace or modify directly the project's own code in some significant fashion.

So, modification of open source for your own needs is a major plus if the project accomodates it sanely or the scale and nature of the changes are controllable.

edit Removed "and only if" in last paragraph, attempts to preclude people from providing better ideas.

Until your highly subjective question gets closed:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/188455/why-do...

TIOBE's methodology is pretty controversial[0], I wouldn't read anything into changes as small as this.

[0] http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/05/17/tiobe-index-is-being-gam...

'First I want to get off my chest; are we still using the phrase "computer genius" in 2013? Something about it just rings 1980's to me. I dunno. It seems quaint and silly'

Hey, at least they didn't say "whizz-kid".

In this particular instance, for reasons of a self-imposed contraint to favour ease of deployment and use by the target audience, I have no parser.

Using xpath (or just about anything else) would be smashing.

The likelihood of the markup changing to the point where the code breaks is unlikely, the target pages are open source mirrors exposed over HTTP. It even winds up being nicer code than the FTP handler.

In practical terms, how often are you actually parsing HTML? Building a DOM, rendering...

A knee-jerk reaction to 'HTML' and 'regular expression' being used in the same sentence is like someone seeing 'goto' without understanding the context and shouting "goto considered harmful!"

I recently use some combination of perl's split() and regexes to trivially pull all links from a piece of markup. I had to suppress the "Don't parse HTML with regular expressions!" voices echoing in my head the whole time I was writing it. I'm OK with the code now, of course.

I was expecting something a little more like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3355453

I've brought it up here before, but I really like the fact that (large) pixel art is still appreciated and produced. Coming from the inventiveness of the ZX Spectrum days I had a genuine sense of loss when SVGA and "photo-realistic" graphics turned up in the late 80s/early 90s.

It wasn't that some 256 colour demo in a computer shop wasn't impressive, they blew my tiny litle mind - it was more that I saw a pattern of "Some day people will be looking at photos and videos on these screens as if they were TV!" - abhorrent idea at the time to someone who liked a memory mapped display. It was as if the intricately crafted, detailed pixel art I had grown to love would become obsolete.

These days I'm less of a stickler and look forward to owning a high colour depth "retina" 28" monitor to use vim on, but I'll never stop pining for the days when a pixel could be seen from across the room on a 14" TV with blurry RF.

Anyway, I believe this counts as rambling... tl;dr, this game looks ace and plays really well, performance is great. Great work!

Maz Spork released the Z80 ASM source[0] of Buggy Boy[1] for 128K Spectrum, though it since disappeard from his site.

More of this type of thing!

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20030629124143/http://maz.spork.d...

[1] http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0000746

That hasn't been my experience with CPAN, though cpantesters and cpanratings can serve as a guide to what works and what doesn't. This type of service does not exist for rubygems/pypi to my knowledge.

While Perl's unicode support is unparalleled, there are some things to be aware of:

http://www.perl.com/pub/2012/04/perlunicook-standard-preambl...

You could check out the weekly cpan ratings[0] for "popular" modules, though I find the best appraoch is to search cpan for modules as I need them.

CPAN Modules themselves often serve as a decent template for the form and structure of a Perl application and tests, see the App:: space for standalone applications (e.g. App::cpanminus).

If you're returning to Perl (or just starting out) you can do worse than check out Beginning Perl[1] and Modern Perl[2].

There are also Perl distributions such as DWIM Perl[3] which bundle Perl and the most commonly used modules.

[0] http://niceperl.blogspot.co.il/search/label/cpan

[1] http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781118013847/

[2] http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html

[3] http://dwimperl.com/

I guess somebody has to be buying licenses for mIRC.

Modern Perl is today's Perl.

http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html

I prefer FUSE[0], the Free Unix Spectrum Emulator.

Not to be confused with FUSE, Filesystem in USErspace. The author of FUSE knew the author of FUSE and is the creator of Spectemu[1].

[0] http://fuse-emulator.sourceforge.net/

[1] http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/fuse/index.php?title=F....

Is this a joke?

Perhaps this is the excuse to generate more critical updates, increasing the number of accidental Ask toolbar installs.

Oracle doesn't believe in "free".

Ah, seems I misread the info.

An artifact of commenting at 6am.

Aye, pretty much (9-5:30 with flexible start time). Thing is, I would probably work longer hours voluntarily if I could telework - give over half my usual commute time to a little extra.

But that's a different story...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092589

As am I. I just spend a lot of time working on my own projects. I value a regular (i.e. not too long) working day for being able to actually do this.

Fair point. I wonder if the increasing number of us tech firms setting up in .ie (for whatever reason, being an Irish graduate I know it's not for the skills pool) find the adjustment difficult - 20 days minimum, 25 not uncommon, with the ability to carry some leave across years generally accepted.

edit Anecdotally, even companies based in the UK have had trouble with the difference in employment law when setting up (or wrapping up) here, though I would put that down to lack of diligence rather than any cultural thing.