Sensible Letter

I just contacted my House representative with the following letter. It is a more properly measured correspondence, filled with less ragespeak and more call-to-action words. I wait patiently with baited breath for my form letter response thanking me for contacting him about gun control laws. Sigh.


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Regarding TSA experience:

Mr. Joe Barton:

After refusing to be have my body irradiated and naked pictures shown to "highly trained security professionals", I was given an "enhanced pat down" which had no patting involved, only lots of unwanted rubbing and general molestation. This is not security. This is blatant violation of my person. Then when I voiced my dissent on this process using strong language (as any reasonable person would do under this circumstance), I was "invited" to have a conversation with a manager in a suit and a uniformed law enforcement officer. At this point, I asked if I was being detained or if I was free to go. My question was not answered until after the LEO and manager arrived where they attempted to intimidate me into surrendering my first amendment protected right to free speech. I was then accused of causing a "scene" and was given the threat of "not flying." I argued for my protected right to free speech, but then realized that this was not going to change anything. I reiterated my previous detainment questions and was told I was free to go so I left immediately.

After having such a terrible experience at the hands of these poorly trained "professionals," I urge you not to further support any bills that will increase funding to the TSA for any additional staff or equipment and to vote for any bills that limit the TSA's governance. Situations like mine are not increasing airport security, they are violating individuals rights and persons.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Perez
[contact information redacted]

Fuck you TSA

I refused to be irradiated, so instead I was molested. And because I had the unmitigated gall to speak my fuckin' mind about this I was then "invited" to have a conversation with a couple of fuckin' goons. Did you know that these assholes think they are protecting this country? And that because I said "Mother Fucker" to one of them that I was causing a "scene." Of course I am you baffoon in a blue shirt. Causing a "scene" is not against the law. MOTHER FUCKER is constitutionally protected speech. And to educate TSA a bit more, saying FUCK is not the same thing as shouting fire in a theater. Learn the difference before trotting out that tired old line to justify your horrible argument for censorship. A note to anyone else ever in a similar situation: take pictures and remember the magic words: "Am I being detained? Am I free to go?" if they answer no to the first or yes to the second, just walk away. These fucktwats are simply not worth the time.

Pittsburg Perl Workshop and Stuff

So this past weekend was neat. I love coming to workshops even if it is a very compressed time frame. My take away from this workshop is that I have wanted to do some hardware hacking for quite sometime, but never got around to purchasing an arduino board with some addons. So perhaps in the next few months I'll start working on something. Something network-enabled and practical. We'll see. Not that there is any direct Perl that is running on these boards (the code is some kind of C-derivative with a compiler/IDE), but you can use Perl to talk to it over a serial port or whatever.

And while I had set off to write a POE::Filter that spoke the Minecraft SMP protocol this weekend, it never materialized. Instead, I started working on modernizing yet another one of my modules: POE::Filter::XML::RPC. The problem is that I am subclassing XML::LibXML::Element and it doesn't play nice with subclassing. So I wanted to extend it, using Moose and advise all of the methods I could find that returned other Elements or Nodes. That was going to be a very very large copy/paste job. MooseX::Declare didn't support shortcut method modifiers (around [qw/foo bar baz/] {...}). So last night and this morning, I hacked that support into MooseX::Method::Signatures (and its use is transparent to MooseX::Declare). All so I could have a single line of copy paste instead of a lot more. I'm so god damn lazy sometimes.

And interesting side effect of adding this functionality into MXMS: you can have stringified array references as method names, heh. In MXD, the declarators are given specific meaning and functionality via callbacks so that the array references are absorbed and passed on to the meta munging methods that add the method modifications.

Anyhow, I've made the pull requests to rafl, and just waiting for him to incorporate and release.

If anyone is ever on the fence on whether or not to attend Perl workshops, let me settle that for you: GO. It is an awesome time. Everything from learning to networking opportunities await any avid Perl programmer. And this gave me ideas for next year's set of talks that I need to write (I didn't speak at this workshop, I was all tuckered out from speaking earlier in the year).

Hope to see new faces at OPW in January.

Of Modernizing My Own Modules

It is amazing how much bitrot accumulates over the course of a year and a half. And also amazing to see the state of the art move so rapidly.

Dist::Zilla has a break-neck pace of development. While my old dist.ini files still run without issue, so many new and awesomer features have crept into the core. This makes it worth while to revisit your dist.ini files even if changes are minor in your project. AutoPrereqs is smart enough now that only a few MooseX::Declare edge cases are missed. PodWeaver is just plain awesome and if you aren't using it to generate your POD something is wrong. The introduction of the Basic PluginBundle means you have even more fine grained control over your distributions. If you are looking for a basic template of a dist.ini that you can use in your own projects, take a gander at mine http://xrl.us/bh3y2k (Link to nickandperla.net). And if you've looked at my documentation for modules and like my POD style, here is my weaver.ini too: http://xrl.us/bh3y2x (Link to nickandperla.net)

And while I like modernizing my code, this latest push for several modules wasn't entirely voluntary. Newer perls have broken MooseX::Method::Signatures (and likely Devel::Declare itself). This affects a large chunk of my code as I have grown very accustomed to the idea of having constraints on my methods. The brokenness lies in the parsing itself. Seems it doesn't like there to be a newline between the method declaration and the opening brace. In other words, to avoid this problem you have to use ugly K&R-style braces. So that is what I have been doing for a lot of modules, moving the braces.

But, other modules, it was good-old-fashioned modernization. A new version of POE::Filter::XML was released last night that brings it into the modern era. It was an old module in the sense that the distribution still had distribution artifacts stored in source control. POD was all done by hand and at the bottom of the files. POE::Filter::XML::Handler didn't even have any documentation. I wrote my own god damn accessors. It was ugly.

So I put in the time to make things right. It should be backwards compatible (to an extent). Node was updated to be a proper Moose class (using MooseX::NonMoose::InsideOut) that extends XML::LibXML::Element. This lets us, among other things, override methods and call super() when appropriate (making sure that methods that return Elements actually return Nodes). All of the custom constructors went away. And the logic was greatly simplified by using attributes with native traits. The code simply /looks/ modern.

Next on the chopping block is POE::Component::Jabber. I plan on stripping the functionality down to a mere Role. Also, I am going to remove support for pre-XMPP connections, and server specific connection types for components. I want a mean, lean Role that can be composed cleanly and easily. I also want it to be easily extensible too, so if other enterprising developers /want/ those other connection features, they can implement them and use them without monkey-patching my code.

In other words, POE::Component::Jabber is disappearing and will be replaced with POEx::Role::XMPPClient in the not too distant future.

So don't be afraid of looking back on your modules and vomiting a little in your mouth. It doesn't take /that/ much time to modernize them. That way the next time you want to use something and find a bug in it, you won't cringe when you need to fix it and do a quick release.