Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

Elaine’s Rule

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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 [...]

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 — [...]

Open Source Developers’ Conference: Last day week (or so) to submit papers!

I just submitted my paper proposals for the Open Source Developers’ Conference, an annual event held here in Australia which brings together developers from a range of different open source communities and languages, including PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, Mono, and I don’t even know what else. Even though I usually spend most [...]

CPAN meets Web 2.0: Tag clouds and Flickr

I’m meant to be writing an article for O’Reilly on the topic of CPAN modules for Web 2.0, so I thought I’d mention a couple that I’ve used in my recent website redesign.

If you check out my homepage you’ll see there’s a tag cloud for this blog, as well as a set of photos [...]