Via Hack the Planet, a post from Lauren Weinstein about people who use Google (web, images, etc.) to harass and humiliate.

Of course, Google's "just" the transport mechanism, the messenger service. But as I wrote about before, the fact that they provide no human support contact, or support number or address, can add a tremendous amount of frustration, worry and pain to an already painful situation. Google need a mechanism that resolves these issues in a transparent way. I like Google but this is a real concern.

I'm not a gourmet sausage eater by any stretch, but I thought I'd skip the usual sausage fare at the supermarket this morning and try some from Borough Market instead.

The market's got a lot of choice in sausages. In fact, a lot of choice in everything. But I settled on some Boston Sausages - a few "boston", and a few "farmhouse" style from the same place. Having just tried some with my lunch I can say they were wonderful. You can really notice how much better they are than my normal ones.

I'll definitely make a habit of buying these again.

Jacinta Richardson did a Perl best practices talk at Linux Conf Au in Brisbane Australia recently.

It was a pretty good talk and overview of some of the more recent Perl functionality. The emphasis is on writing decent and maintainable code. There has been a lot of work done on pushing a Modern Perl in the last couple of years and I'd like to come back to this and discuss further. For now, Jacinta's talk advertised some modern Perl I was unfamiliar with (as well as some I am).

This is a rough list of particular interest - those in bold I know or use. The rest is new :

state declaration (static var)
given
~~ smart match
Smart::Comments
perlbrew
local::lib
cpanm
module-starter
test::most
use 5.10.1
perltidy
perlcritic --harsh code.pl
Scalar::Util, List::Util etc. - built in
ORM not SQL
use Method::Signatures
Path::Class
\A - match abs. start of string e.g. /\Amatch/
\Z - match abs. end .. /match\Z/
Change delim i.e. m{//}
use qr{} e.g. $lhs = qr{(\w+);(\w+)} --> ? - where we might then use $1
Regex::Common