The concept of having your "real identity" associated with comments is very similar to the recent issue with the gaming company Blizzard. There was an announcement a few months ago stating that a poster's full name would be displayed on the battle net forums (this was prior to the release of WoW Cataclysm and SC2).

There was an online petition and a massive cry of dissent from the users. There was even a moderator who tried to justify Blizzard's position by posting his real name and saying he "didn't care". Much of his personal life information was displayed and if I remember correctly he had to change his FaceBook account due to all the trolls.

Blizzard did not put this idea into effect.

Associating identities with views online can have massive repercussions regardless of how much "integrity" that person has. Trolls and stalkers would have an absolute field day due to the loss of anonymity.

And now, for some humor to wash down the pessimism, s/fb/blizzard or vice versa:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NgAkWxcPBE

Taken from "Time Management for System Administrators", however I feel this particular principle applies towards your situation:

Figure out if you're a "morning/mid-day/late-afternoon/night" person when it comes to your brain activity. Some people, for the life of them, can't get their brain functioning when they get up. Others can't seem to concentrate until they've gotten lunch and feel "established" in the day.

Figure out your natural cycle and make sure you attempt to get good quality coding time in during your best times. If this is not possible, then apply the other response suggestions and hopefully you can increase the range of your concentration time.

I want to add that this book has a lot of good advice for all sorts of jobs, if you look at how to apply it. Two advices I like are to list your next day's activities before leaving your work for the day, and to work out a blocking system with coworkers so they handle incoming questions for you so you can spend the time focused. The blocking would be handled in an alternating fashion every-other day. It is a really quick read and written in a conversational tone - check it out.

I can't find the link, but I remember reading an article a while back about utilizing the opening/closing of the CD drive to manually push the reset button on a server.

It was a sysadmin's story of how one of the servers needed a manual reboot every so often and it could only be done with someone physically being there to push the reset button. He set an old computer up with the CD drive directly facing the server's reset button. From there, he set up a cron job to send the "eject/close" command remotely whenever something went wrong with the other server.

Story ends saying that they no longer use that server, however that other computer just sits in the corner, faithfully ejecting/closing its CD drive to this day. Hopefully someone here can provide the link :)

That was a lesson from The Daily WTF:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/ITAPPMONROBOT.aspx

Cypher: ...I...I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head. Hey, you uh... want a drink?

-The Matrix 1999

I enjoy explaining technical things to my girlfriend. She has a habit (and poker tell) of furrowing her brow whenever she has trouble grokking something - this serves as a sign to me that I didn't explain a concept clear enough, either through my communication or me just not knowing enough about a subject. That's when I know I've got more learning to do!

Kingdom Hearts X will be insane:

Form a party of Sora, Donald, Wall-E, and Wolverine and watch as Wolverine guts Ursula while Silver Surfer sings 'Under The Sea' with Ariel.

I'm not sure why this was downvoted. Kingdom Hearts is the only easy place that Disney can exploit Marvel characters before 2017, given their outstanding deals with Activision and other publishers.

The ability to bring out the very best in their student(s) through whatever means. This goes for any mentor, coach, sifu, guru, etc.

The OP sparked a story that Teddy Atlas (boxing trainer for Mike Tyson, Michael Moore, Golden Gloves champ) once told at a book signing.

While training Michael Moore, he had to gain a certain amount of trust / respect from him. One particular instance that stood out in his memory was Michael's fondness of going to the shooting range and firing guns. Teddy never fired a gun in his life but accompanied him to the range.

At the range, Moore and some of his friends shot at the targets and eventually started to egg Teddy on. Teddy finally gave in, took the gun, walked right up to the target, and shot at the bulls-eye at point blank range.

He then turned to Moore and said "THAT's how I fire a gun".

Teddy told the audience he could remember a shift in Moore's behavior and demeanor when he later trained him - looser, more accepting of Atlas's advice. Teddy did what he had to do to bring the better boxer out of Moore.

Moral of the story - go shoot guns with your students :)

It looks as though the "pressure" field is created from the bottom - notice in the video he repeatedly taps the piece of paper from above and no other angles.

Once they show that same demo but being able to tap from above, side, bottom, and even "poke" the ball and watch the paper crumble under the resistance - well then that would just wreak of awesomeness!

Back when I first started programming, a peer highly recommended to me to take a martial art. It didn't matter which one - the only requirement was that it had to require discipline and focus. Training in a martial art is a wonderful way to induce "flow" - get distracted during a sparring session, and the consequences can "hurt" a bit more than just time wasted.

The start of this thread is some FUD raised not by the actual thread starter, but a customer expressing concerns about web development and web frameworks here:

Hi and sorry for the provocative title of my post :)

One of our customers is doing a detailed review of a mason/modperl ERP app we've built for them since 2001. Prodded by some buzzword-compliant consultants they are expressing concerns that the app's underlying technologies - perl, modperl and mason - are becoming obsolete. They feel that a web application framework must have 'rails' or some other buzzword in its name.

But their main argument is that perl is declining as a web developement language. Also they rightly feel that competent perl developers are becoming harder to find.

What arguements could I use to address these concerns and convince them that their initial investement in perl is still safe and won't be obsolete in 10 years?

The client's local developers (who maintain the app we've built) feel that mason gives too much freedom to write messy code and badly structure a web app.

Indeed mason has very little constraints, maybe just slightly more than straight modperl. So it requires experienced, self-disciplined devs, which are few and far between.

So my second question is, what perl web development framework should we recommend to our client? Catalyst looks like a winner, but maybe there are others?

Thanks for your insights,

--

This is not really about Perl in the "jobmarket" - just in web development and how it seems to "be behind" against all the cool buzzwordy frameworks out there.

I have some ten years learning and experience invested in perl, and at the moment I'd basically agree with your consultants. I haven't been hired solely for perl since 2003 (it was a web development gig) and I was musing just yesterday that I probably never would be again. I'm just a dinosaur in a world of fleet-footed MVC-wielding agile mammals ;) So I agree with your consultants: although perl is far from finished, it's not ideal for web dev work.

Having looked at Catalyst I'm not impressed - just look at their documentation (which seems to be a series of PODs) and compare it with Django, which has tutorials, detailed docs, etc. I'm no fan of Rails, so maybe Django is a better way to go? Django is very structured, very MVC (almost) and plays nicely with your HTML coders.

Whenever I have worked on a perl project which someone else has started, it's always been a hideous mess. Rather than fight to keep things as they are, if I were in your position I'd agree wholeheartedly with the consultants, except their conclusion - just name another successor product apart from Rails and make a strong case for it. (Although I'm sure there are plenty of people here who would defend Rails and I'm not looking for an argument with them.)

You should try CGI::Application (Titanium) - it's simple. For Perl code cleaning try Perl::Critic and perltidy.