I spend a lot of time in #python and #perl. Far more than is healthy, probably. And I’ve noticed some patterns in the kinds of questions people ask.

There are plenty of people who have trouble expressing themselves well enough to get answers in the first place, but those are just communication problems. (That’s a good read if you ever ask nerds for help, by the way.) More subtle, more insidious, and more common are people who just ask questions that shouldn’t be asked in the first place.

These are architectural fallacies: logical flaws in the very process of building or designing something. They lead programmers towards solutions that are hard to understand, are inefficient, or just don’t work. And they confuse the heck out of the people trying to help.

I hate to rank my own skill at anything, but if you forced me to, I’d say I’m pretty good at Perl. I get paid for it, at the very least. I’ve been around it a long time, and I know it well enough to tell you in intricate detail why I now use Python, instead.

But this is not that post. This post is about a particular wart of Perl: that it has a lot of warts. Large chunks of Perl are antequated, bug-prone, or outright obsolete. The trouble is that there are no warnings in the interpreter or documentation for many of these things, so a newcomer—or even an old-timer—won’t know to avoid such pitfalls until told by someone else.

Such secret knowledge has been documented in bits and pieces in many places, but none of them are complete, and some of them are similarly antequated. So, here’s my list.

Just as I sit down to actually blog something, I see the first gigantic spider of the summer on my wall, and have to run away screaming like a little girl. The universe doesn’t want me to write! (Let’s pretend every other week for the past six was stalled by way more spiders.)

Hey, remember these things?

This was the future, man. A gadget that displays anything in the universe you want to know, at your fingertips. One of the coolest things in Star Trek. “Hey, Bob, you have those simulation results?” “Yeah, right here—on my magical tiny touch computer.” And nerds everywhere cheered; paper was for norms, man.

Now we actually have these devices: smartphones, tablets with their own custom-tailored OSes, ebook readers. But what are we using them for?

Ebook readers actually get a pass here; I expect them to do exactly one thing, and anything else is just noise. I know Sony and Barnes & Noble are embroiled in an arms race over this, but the results on both sides are worse at the one thing I want an ebook reader to do. (The Nook Color has an LCD screen. Why would you do this?) I do welcome the merger of tablets and readers, should the screens somehow become as easy on the eyes as e-ink.

But a significant chunk of smartphone applications are just “Our Website: The App”, built by developers who forget that every phone platform has a fully-featured Web browser on it. Many of the rest are desktop applications jammed into the alien form factor and made worse—either in UI or functionality—by the transition. Tablets aren’t much better off; last I heard, many tablet applications were those same shrunken-down smartphone applications, scaled back up again.

Look at the top Android apps and this Time list of alleged top iPhone apps. YouTube, a website. Gmail, a website-slash-email-app. Twitter, a website. Best Buy? Cut the Rope?

Smartphones are incredible pieces of hardware, and by all appearances, we’re barely using them for anything. Crappy versions of desktop software, crappy versions of websites, and perhaps an MP3 player so we have one more free pocket each. This is a sad state of affairs.

I am now, officially, as literate as a native Japanese two-year-old. Almost. Maybe.

I actually meant to condense all the grammar I know down to bullet points that make sense to me, and post it before I took the test. I kinda never did that. Oops! Maybe some other time.

I haven’t really studied in the past two months, either; time to get back into that. I picked up a surprising number of phrases from watching FMA, so that’s a good sign.

Long, long ago, in the ancient forgotten year of 2005, I watched an anime series called Fullmetal Alchemist, and it was good. Well… it was okay. I won’t speak to whether the plot was really as confusing and contrived as my foggy memory tells me, but I know I was disappointed with the ending, and the subsequent movie didn’t add much closure.

I didn’t know at the time, but the source manga was still running—and continued to do so for another six years. Almost half of the anime series (most of episodes 29–51, I believe?) was fabricated to explain and conclude the first half of the manga’s story. It’s the rough equivalent (in quality, as well) of a fanfiction author finishing up the Harry Potter series right after Goblet of Fire.

And then, redemption! A new series was made from scratch, following the manga more closely now that it’s over. We spent the last two weeks watching this masterpiece: myself, Marl, and Mel (who hasn’t seen the old series). While the correct story is still fresh in my head, I want to collect some impressions. Beware, spoilers, obviously.

Mel lives here now, and I want to spend time with her whenever I can, naturally. This is something I’ve never had in my life before, and it presents something of a complication.

Weeknights consist of an eight-hour solid block of free time. I’d usually spend half of that doing absolutely nothing, another hour or two trying to pick up my last-known-state for whatever I wanted to work on, and then finally get a couple hours of actual “work” done. It was hardly efficient, but it kinda worked. And this was all a single workflow, to me; the hours of time-passing made for some irrational mental preparation for sitting down and doing something.

Now, though, I don’t have solid eight-hour blocks; I’m instead affected by a regular human being’s schedule, which includes going out or talking or eating or what-have-you in the middle of the evening. That free time is now carved into multiple smaller chunks of a few hours each. For most people, that wouldn’t make any difference, but for me those chunks are almost entirely consumed by the time-wasting that would lead up to a context switch.

So, I’m having to learn very quickly to knock this crap off, or I just won’t get any work done on anything. Frustrating in the short term, but certainly beats the… system I had going before.

It’s been a while since I’ve really sat down and thought about where my pet projects are and where they’re going, either publicly or privately. Part of this is just because I haven’t really done a lot in the past month and a half or so; between Christmas interruptions, having Mel move in, a brief and disasterous switch of medications, and restless nights due to cats wandering around on my bed, I’ve been varyingly exhausted or distracted or some other excuse.

Lately magical has ever-so-subtly hinted that roadmaps are a good thing, so in the interest of project management, here’s a rough outline of what I’m up to. With any luck, this will make it into a bug tracker and actually get done!

I’d still like to do these weekly, and I think being able to dump a splat-delimited list into a text file will help considerably. Here’s hoping.

Do you remember LiveJournal in its heyday? It was glorious. Built like a hacker’s hobby project, with all manner of little hidden treasures. Multiple avatars that use keywords so you can swap them out retroactively. A threaded comment system that still defies most competition. Site-wide banning, originally available only via a text-only admin console. A DSL for styling your blog thing however you want! It introduced OpenID; it was probably one of the first sites to really embrace RSS.

Now, though, none of this is particularly impressive. LiveJournal is far from being the only kid in town, and since it was sold to an already increasingly-irrelevant Six Apart and then some obscure Russian media company, it’s fairly well stagnated. More effort is spent on micro-promotions than actual functionality. LiveJournal is now optionally a client for Twitter and Facebook, rather than standing on equal footing as with OpenID or (gasp!) being the server. LJ’s own OpenID server support is some of the weakest I can name. LJ ran out of good ideas long ago, and now it’s just running on inertia.

A sad tale, sure. But on a more personal note, LJ is just not fun for me to use any more. I’m a hacker, and I like fiddling with things, and LJ just feels like a huge wall between my content and the world. I really just want to write some text and broadcast it to all who wish to read it.

And so, I depart LJ to do exactly that. This blog is stored in git, formatted as Markdown, and built into mere static pages by a few small Python scripts.

The comments, alas, are powered by Disqus. I apologize profusely for this, to those of you who would actually care. I thought long and hard about this, but ultimately I came to the realization that my blog is about things I want to say, not so much what others say in response, and so it shouldn’t really matter what the commenting mechanism looks like. If you don’t want to allow the necessary JavaScript but you really have something to say, you can always be old-school and email me.

Now, then. I’ve spent far too long just nitpicking the design of this thing (which I intend to finish up and apply to veekun proper, eventually). Let’s see if this legitimately makes me more interested in blogging.