So, happy new year. :) I watched many 30c3 talks via the streams over Christmas - they were awesome. I especially enjoyed finding out (in the Tor talk) that the Internet Watch Foundation need to use Tor when checking out particularly dodgy links online, else people just serve them up pictures of kittens. Today's fail: deciding to set up OpenVPN, then realising the OpenVZ VPS I was planning to use would not support /dev/net/tun. ...

While I remember, I have uploaded the slides from my talk about Solr and Perl at the London Perl Workshop. This talk was inspired by having seen and contributed to at least five different sets of Solr search code at my current job, all of which (I now believe) were doing it wrong. I distilled this hard-won knowledge into a 20 minute talk, which - funny story - I actually delivered twice to work around a cock-up in the printed schedule. I don't believe any video was successfully taken, but I may be proved wrong later. ...

At the London Perl Workshop last Saturday, one of the lightning talks was about Questhub.io, formerly known as "play-perl.org". It's social gamification for your task list, or something like that. Buzzword-tastic! But most importantly, there seems to be a nice community of programming types to procrastinate with you on your quests. This means I can finally get to work refuting lamby's prediction about gamification of Debian development! Tasks are referred to as "Quests", and are pursued in themed "Realms", for that World of Warcraft feeling. For example, there's a "Perl" realm, and a "Lisp" realm, and a "Haskell" realm, but also non-programming realms like "Fitness" and "Japanese". ...

It's my first Father's Day! Sophie was born 2 months ago (3345g or 7lb 6oz), and I've been on a blogging hiatus for quite a bit longer than that. She's very cute. I am getting into the swing of fatherhood - lots of nappy changing. :) I took my two weeks of paternity leave, but spread the second "week" over two weeks by working just afternoons, which gave me lots of time with mummy and baby. We watched a DVD called "The Happiest Baby on the Block", and mastered the techniques therein (mainly swaddling and white noise). So all things considered, we're getting quite a bit of sleep. ...

Another year. 2012 was busy - I got moved house twice, changed jobs, and got married. In 2013, I should become a father, fingers crossed (due mid-April). Change is a familiar friend now. I just listened to Tom Armitage speaking about coding on Radio 4 - I /think/ the podcast mp3 link will work for people outside the UK, but the iPlayer probably won't. If you can get hold of it, it's worth the 20 minutes of your time. ...

I have been dealing with an interesting forking issue at work. It happens to involve Perl, but don't let that put you off. So, suppose you need to perform an I/O-bound task that is eminently parallelizable (in our case, generating and sending lots of emails). You have learnt from previous such attempts, and broken out Parallel::Iterator from CPAN to give you easy fork()ing goodness. Forking can be very memory-efficient, at least under the Linux kernel, because pages are shared between the parent and the children via a copy-on-write system. ...

On Monday, I need to start hiring a Perl programmer - or, at least, a programmer willing to write Perl. I work for a website where people post their CVs, which tends to help - although this will mean that my boss wants me to do it without going through recruiters. Which is fine. I just have to use the search interface that recruiters normally use. And looking through all these CVs, it dawned on me that I don't have a clue whether any of the people are suitable for the job. I have to search for keywords that we think might be relevant - "Perl", I guess - and then sort through the hundreds of people who come back from the search. It's very painful, because you can't really judge a CV without reading it - and even that won't necessarily tell you the important things about that person. Do they actually write good code? Do they work well in a team? ...

Today, Kate and I got married! Thank you to everyone who sent best wishes. A big wedding party will follow in the next 18 months or so (when we've saved some money!), to which many more people will be invited. This was the minimum viable subset of wedding - we got the product to market early, and both stakeholders are very satisfied. We had dinner at the Caribbean restaurant in town which is always busy - turns out there's a reason for that. They do these one-pot meals in enamel dishes, which tasted amazing. ...

I visited my local library at the weekend, on a whim. (The weekend before, I'd been to the British Library for the first time, so I guess this inspired me.) The computing sections at public libraries do not tend to inspire me, on the whole. Southampton's is actually relatively good - there are four tall bookcases assigned to computing, although one is introductory IT (Word and Excel), and another seems to be assigned to graphic design (Photoshop). Still, the two in the middle do have some programming texts - you just have to work around "Red Hat Linux 7 for Dummies" and the like. ...

The other day, I released GNU Enscript 1.6.6. You should all go and send me bug reports. It's basically the same as the 1.6.5.90 release, but more official. (I'm bored of the long version numbers - maybe I ought to knock a decimal point off.)