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Warning: This MooseX::Declare program, which my server was calling as a cron job, stopped working. I'm not sure what caused the program to fail suddenly and I didn't have the time to investigate the issue thoroughly. I did, however, rewrite the program in classic Perl, which solved the problem for now. I plan to make the "classic" version available to everyone and I also plan to investigate why the MooseX::Declare program stopped working.

Mark Logic server is, unbelievably, not supported on Ubuntu 8.10. However, the server runs just fine on that distribution. The following installation instructions might save you some time.

1. Create a temporary mark-logic directory somewhere and cd into that directory
2. sudo apt-get install rpm
3. sudo apt-get install alien
4. wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/lsb/lsb-base_3.2-23_all.deb

I'm at the point where my body stops functioning well if I don't run 3.8 miles at least a few times a week. That seems like a lot, but I actually walk about 0.5 files of that, so the run is really more like 3.3 miles. Still a fair bit. But I'm wearing expensive earphones ($30) connected to an inexpensive MP3 player ($12) and I'm listening to female vocal trance, mostly. I'm also furiously processing random thoughts, much like when one dreams. So the time goes by quickly for me when I'm running.

When I haven't been too busy with my real job, which is actually pretty interesting and consuming, I've been spending weekends working with some other people on a project that until tonight was called Momentum. Despite how much I like the word, however, "Momentum" is a bad name for the project because it is vague (it's relevance to our project requires an explanation) and because it is taken, in common use, hard to work into a domain name, and so on.

Falicon told me about people that were posting programs of less than 140 characters to Twitter. I found this fascinating for some reason and I've created my own such program, a Prime Number Finder, in Perl. This program will spit out all the prime numbers in a given range. Plus, it's rather efficient for such a small Perl program.

I can't remember where I read this. But it works! If you know where this came from, please help me provide proper attribution in the comments.

To avoid jet lag, follow these steps:

1. Determine your wake-up time in the remote location (example: 7am, London)
2. Convert that time to your local time (example: 2pm, New Providence)
3. Calculate your fast-start time by subtracting 14 hours from the local time (example: midnight, New Providence)

I am made of organs, which are made of tissue, which is made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of neutrons and protons, which are made of hadrons, which are made of quarks held together by gluons. Atoms also have electrons, which are supposedly elementary particles that have no substructure, like quarks. But we've all heard that story before and I suspect that electrons are made up of something else. At some point, the smallest constituents of matter are always energy.

KISS: Use REST always, never SOAP.

I've implemented many Web services using both standards and I can tell you categorically that in hindsight I should have used REST always.

Some time ago, I started to develop programs using tiny, super general, higher-order functions and I began to borrow a little from functional programming. I noticed interesting things about these new programs. They called for special language features that I had until then heard of but never really needed. I'm referring to language features like support for first-class functions, closures, and lexical binding. The programs I produced were smaller and easier to debug than programs written in a traditional procedural style.

The big problem with Perl is that it’s easy to learn, but difficult to learn right. It has a tough learning curve and it can take years to master, even if you already know many other programming languages.

However, I’ve never met a person that uses the advanced features of Perl (closures in an OO context, hash dispatchers, higher-order methods, super general functions, and so on) that didn’t write beautiful, concise, fast, and bug-free code. People that really grok Perl (and there are precious few of those because of the learning curve) don’t bash Perl.