Other debate coverage

Those missing my liveblogging (coz I didn't watch the debate) can read Defective Yeti's take on it, or Todd Alcott's thoughts if you'd like less snark.

I played Wiz-War last night, by gar. It was the shortest Wiz-War game ever. I want to play it again.

Going to a physical therapy session in a couple of hours. What's this? Well, after we moved I detected something strange, and rather than whine in LJ about how it's surely a tumor, I broke tradition and went to the doctor first. Turns out it's some benign condition with a long name that makes me feel a pop-pop in my hip when I walk around outside. I was told that if I ignore it, it may get less benign, so I'm gonna have it stretched out of me. Bought some running shorts yesterday, just for the occasion. Woo.

Some cool CPAN stats

daerr just posted some interesting graphs that measure changes in the CPAN's activity rates over the last decade or so. (CPAN being Perl's distributed, internet-based archive of code libraries and other stuff, and approximately 51 percent of what makes Perl my favorite programming language.)

I'm interested to see that the number of new users started to drop off a few years ago, but the activity of existing users has been increasing so much that the archive's overall activity continues to trend upwards.

If I had to guess a single reason for this, it'd involve the community getting better over the last several years at corralling many hackers together into large, frequently updated projects, which then get stored in the CPAN under a single username (as that's a limitation of the system). I think, for example, of DBIx::Class's recent ascendency, and clear community dominance, over the thousand SQL-abstraction modules that came before it. So you have fewer instances of people creating new CPAN author accounts just to upload their own wheel-reinventions.