Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

How (not) to write a Perl job ad

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By this time tomorrow I’ll be unemployed, and I’ve got no job lined up.

As it happens, I’m not in a rush to find another position. I’ve got some funds and some personal projects and travel to keep [...]

The MVC Colouring Book

Recently I’ve been working on MiniMVC, a very tiny MVC framework based on Mason. When I’ve mentioned it to people, I’ve had a surprisingly high number say that they’ve heard of MVC — the Model-View-Controller pattern — but aren’t quite sure what it means in practice.

So here’s a demonstration, in AMAZING TECHNICOLOR! [...]

Elaine’s Rule

What, Google doesn’t know Elaine’s Rule? Named for Elaine Ashton, who runs some of the vital perl.org servers and is generally an all-round worthwhile person in the Perl community:

Just fucking make it easy to install.

Or, as Adam pointed out, you can mix it up a bit:

Just make it fucking easy to install.

Just make [...]

CPAN and the Installability Crisis

How do you install a PHP web application?

Generally it goes like this:

Download zip file Unzip on your PC Edit a config file Upload to your web host Point your browser at install.php

How do you install a Perl web application?

Well, it depends, but a lot of them go like this:

Login to your shell account on your web host — [...]

Tyranny of Distance: Link roundup

A discussion else-blog in response to Part 1 of my series on why it sucks to be an Australian geek:

Mary provides further discussion of laptop price markups in Australia. Russell Coker describes (technically) illegal ways to import laptops if you really want to save some money. Mary points out that of course it’s possible to import [...]

The Tyranny of Distance: Part 2

Another couple of reasons why it sucks to be an Australian geek. The first article covered the high costs of bandwidth, hardware, technical books, and everything associated with domain registration and hosting. Now let’s talk geography.

1. What time is it, again?

Timezones are the first problem. When I’m at work, the US [...]

The Uncanny Valley

The subject of Second Life keeps coming up lately, and every time it does I think back to LambdaMOO, where I spent way too much time in the mid 90s, building fantastic worlds and learning to program in what — as it turned out — would be the first of many object oriented languages.

To [...]

The Tyranny of Distance: Why it sucks to be an Australian geek

I’ve had the draft of this article kicking around in Wordpress for weeks now, and not posted it. I guess I thought it sounded too whiny. Well, yes, it is whiny. What’s more, having just quit my job and decided to go job-hunting overseas again, I now realise that writing this [...]