mst lost his ironman status

as said on his blog, mst lost the ironman competition. i wonder how many of the early joiners still retained their ironman status. i still should be in the competition (although really hard at some times), even if there's no way to tell since the ironman app isn't updated since quite some time.

anyway, i get to cast my vote. i don't really care the hair colour, but the talk bit is more interesting. before you guys start submitting ideas such as why php/ruby/python is far better than perl, remember that:

1. mst started the challenge to help perl get known. finishing by forcing him to praise another language seems to be against the rules. not even speaking of this not being very classy...
   
2. the talk will be heavily advertised (at least in the perl community). are you sure you want to offer such a gallery for another language?
   

so i'll cast my vote on a what i will do to advertise perl even more this year talk - hoping this will motivate mst to start another initiative to help promote perl^[0]. i'm open to any other talk subject in the same vein. and i'm ready to trade my colour voting^[1] for you to vote for such a topic. :-)

so here's my vote, mst!
in the meantime, this does not preclude you to continue blogging...

[0] of course, mst can game the talk by showing a single slide with "nothing" on it, but, that, again, would not be very classy. and mst would not settle on such an easy end, would he?
[1] for the pink or orange fans around there

ironman challenge status?

ironman blogging challenge is now running since quite some time, but it seems that there's no followup. personal status is not updated since october 3rd, so i guess having some stats on the number of bloggers managing to keep up with the pace is not available either...

too bad, since mst managed to gather the perl community to make some noise on the web. maybe an update could promote a second life to perl blogging?

retrospective 2009

2009's over, but the year was quite a busy one for me on the perl front:

• i finally took the time to investigate moose, and decided to port some of my code to use it.
• i discovered dist::zilla, and definitely plan to use it in all my dists.
• i discovered some other cool new perl modules (thanks guys).
  
• i uploaded some new dists on cpan, including games::pandemic (which i'm quite proud of, even if i need to continue hacking on it).
• i updated & released some of my existing dists.
  
• i contributed to other projects such as padre, dist-zilla, etc. sending patches is a good way to thank the author for their work.
• it's even easier to contribute with github, which i'm using more and more for my projects (and it's no more slow by now, woohoo!). of course, git is the master piece allowing this easy sharing.
  
• on mandriva's front, i resurrected parrot rpm, and finally shipped rakudo.
  
• 2009 was also the year of the great migration to %perl_convert_version
• ... with lots of new perl modules available as rpm (i am managing 450 of them).
  
• ... and finally i took ownership of perl rpm. (thank you perl5 porters btw for 5.10.1 and the push for next stable version!)

so, busy indeed 2009 was... i just hope that 2010 will be as fruitful on the perl front for me, and for the perl ecosystem by large.

we are iron man

beginning 2009, i started this blog to speak about perl, how nice a language it is, and how alive it remains despite what the nay-sayers write everywhere.

so when i read matt's rant, this definitely rang a bell. thus you won't be surprised that i volunteered to the iron man contest proposed by matt.

i don't know whether i'll manage to keep up with the contest. but at least i'll try - and that's the point.

WE ARE ALIVE. WE ARE LEGION. WE ARE IRON MAN.