Code Flux

After an embarrassingly long time, I finally fixed this blog’s software so the archived posts are accessible again. I continue to do nearly all of my writing on use.perl.org.

To subscribers to this site: Most of my commentary of late has been on Perl, so I’ve been posting on my use.perl.org journal. That is the dominant site for journalling for Perl authors, so I’ve found that I get more eyeballs when posting there. I’ll continue to post here sporadically on non-Perl topics.

Apple is currently having a contest counting down to 500,000,000 iTunes songs sold. To publicize the contest, they exposed an XML representation of the current count of songs sold. Just out of curiosity, I wrote a Perl program that uses that count information to extrapolate the next winning times. Not too hard […]

In general, caching is a good thing. Creating a temporary local copy of some data can dramatically speed up repeated access to that data, especially if it’s hard to recreate or slow to access. However, if the local copy falls out of sync with the real data it can sometimes be disastrous. […]

Then

About ten years ago, Yahoo appeared on the net. It was so very cool because it was a central place where you could find anything you were looking for. By being popular itself, Yahoo decided what on the web was cool and what was not. Aside from the original NCSA list of […]