Perl.org now has a stylised camel emblem

CPAN.org doesn’t use a camel

You clearly were not a perl programmer 20 years ago

Yep. It has no logo of its own, so it sometimes gets identified by the animal on the O’Reilly book

You do have a backup, don’t you? /s

GmailFS was a thing

Browse your own machine as if it’s under alt.film.binaries but more so

Brains fail catastrophically and unrecoverably pretty quickly after being starved of oxygen. I don’t like the chances of the frozen people who hope to be reanimated in the future

Better now, maybe. The people in palliative care are drugged heavily if their condition is painful. I suppose it’s different in different places.

The best selfish reason to be good to your children is that they might put you in care. It’s better if you can age and die at home unless you have a really nasty death.

If you made it to five you’d be fine

It’s pretty much a rule for funerals: wear black clothes and if you wear a tie, use a black one, if you wear a ribbon, make it a black one

If you want the joke decoded:

-e return immediately for some failed commands

-u throw an error for unset variables

-s non functional

-a everything is marked for export

I have experience from old internet services like IRC where ASCII art was popular, and sometimes you’d need to widen your IRC window to see a thing.

Landscape is analogous to that

Be Gay Do Crimes licence - seems to be good for gay people who live where being gay is a crime, unless one wishes not to out themselves by their choice of licence

Works fine on boost for me, in landscape

I asked gpt for code to aim a heliostat

It needed a module to get the sun’s position, it used sun::alt:: azimuth which doesn’t exist rather than Astro::Coord::ECI::Sun

It needed a module to calculate mirror angle between the Sun’s altitude and azimuth and the target altitude and azimuth. It left that commented out rather than selecting the altitude halfway between Sun and target and azimuth between Sun and azimuth

It turns out there’s precious little on the internet on how to aim a mirror, partly because it’s not popular, partly because it’s dead simple

I’m a systems analyst, or in agile terminology “a designer” as I’m responsible for “design artifacts”

Our designs are usually unambiguous

They worked well for us, we were updating a big system or adding functionality to it and a lot of the features were similar enough that we could reliably break the work down to sub-single sprint chunks and assign consistent story points to them

Though I have only been in one team that lasted more than 3 sprints relatively intact, and it’s only that team that got good at story pointing work

I try really hard when I’m in a scrum master position (my position is pretty chaotic, 20k person organisation, scaled agile, “we need your x skills this program increment, please would you?”) to hide my team’s individual performance from management. Mostly because your can’t compare a system analysts numbers to a mainframe programmer to a mid-range programmer, but also if someone’s not pulling their weight I want to solve the problem within the team where we can approach it as equals before resorting to management “performance review” systems.

The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.

One team might deliver 30 points in a sprint while another delivers 25 and they deliver the same amount of work

Of course management want to be able to use story points for tracking, they want to compare teams using them, so you end up with formulas for how many points to assign

Of course if they score you on points, they get more points, not more work and story points become useless

The estimate is not a promise, it’s a guess. I prefer to estimate in sprints because that’s about the resolution we can have confidence in, but management want hours so my process is to estimate the number of hours in a sprint (73.5 for us) plus one sprint

200% overruns are common, especially when requirements change significantly