http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/tamlyn

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/the-blackbird

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/composed-in-august

https://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/the-wayworn-traveller

While I was at OSCON I found myself chatting with various non-perl and ex-perl folks and many of them had the same impression of Perl as a great language for hacking out short scripts to get stuff done, right now and possibly under severe time pressure. For these people, those scripts would very rapidly become unmaintainable. And it’s easy to see why they came to that conclusion. Perl was originally designed and implemented by a systems administrator as a tool to make his every day tasks easier so there are a bunch of shortcuts and defaults that do exactly that - make Larry’s life in 1987 easier. Which is great when you’re whipping up a script to meet an immediate demand, but horrendously cryptic when you look at it later.

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/little-musgrave

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/come-write-me-down

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/false-true-love

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/how-can-i-keep-from-singing

If you’re interested in the repertoire project, here’s my current rules of engagement for recording for it:

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/the-grey-cock

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/the-pretty-ploughboy

Right, I've about had it up to here with the Xkb documentation, and with the layout of my shiny new Kinesis Advantage Keyboard. The cursor keys on the kinesis are horribly situated. What I'd like to do is hit a key (AltGr, say) and have it put the keyboard into a navigation mode, with the arrow keys mapped onto WASD and possibly HKJL and, ideally with Home/End, PgUp, PgDn in sensible places as well, then, once I've done, hit the mode switch key again and I can carry on programming. Adding a chording key as well would be good, or, better, arranging things so that if I use the mode switch key as if it were a non-locking key then it'll Do The Right Thing.

If you saw me at YAPC::NA or you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that I've been waylaid by Repetitive Strain Injury, so I'm going to be cutting back even more savagely on the blogging I do here.

Over on Twitter, Allison Randal said: