Best of TPJ

This week, rather unexpectedly, the ORA book fairy visited us via DHL with a big box [ Thanks, again, Gnat :) ]. One of the new titles that was released just about the time we left the US, Games, Diversions and Perl Culture: Best of the Perl Journal is a real treasure. All of the hardcore TPJ subscribers who think that they can just read their old issues should really reconsider getting a copy.

As the self-appointed Perl Historian the article titled TPJ Cover Art: From Camels to Spam is priceless as each cover is explained by the photographer with anecdotes and stories. I'll never forget bumping into Jon in the lobby of the hotel at YAPC19100 when I was hungover, wearing sunglasses and trying to get the valet to fetch my car without being noticed. Jon rather brightly handed me the new issue of TPJ, Issue #14 - sending mail from perl, which featured a Magic 8 ball on the cover. He looked at me rather expectantly and asked, "Do you get it?". Now, see, I was looking pretty mangled but even I got the 8 ball fortune "Outlook not so good" reference on the cover of a magazine about sending mail early in the morning with a vicious hangover. I vaguely remember giving him a tired look and nodded in the affirmative since I'm not much of a conversationalist before coffee. Jon had already consumed about 2 pots of coffee by that point as far as I could tell and I think I cheered him up since he mentioned noone else appeared to be getting his clever joke. :)

My favourite cover of all was Issue #16, Poetic Justice, which featured a photo of e.e. cummings gravestone with his name in all capital letters. I miss TPJ even though I know the reasons why it's now owned by CMP, it doesn't have Jon as the editor or the clever covers which leaves it to be just another run of the mill deadly boring tech rag.

The book even has each of the Quiz Show questions and answers from all of the conferences and Tom's Perl Wizard's Quiz although, it is suspiciously missing the original Perl Purity Test. Just Another Perl Haiku, Damian's unleashing of Coy.pm upon the world, is also featured. I've often lamented that Acme:: found a following but few appear to have written up and shared their own Coy.pm vocabulary/.coyrc as I had envisioned. Some day, I will have to collect all the anecdotes and all the dirt on everyone and write the Perl clerihew generator.

It's the best book [ and index ] evah! Thanks Jon! :)

Wayback when isn't so way back

Wired News today has an article about a web archive called the Wayback Machine which is a 'digital library tool' to search for and view archived versions of web sites from 1996 onward. I wish this would have been available a few years ago when I was working on the Perl history as google was only in beta at the time and much of the early years of Perl-ish stuff on the web had already long since vanished. They say the average lifespan of a web site/page is 100 days and, considering how much URL maintainence I have to give to the over 500 URLs on the Perl Timeline alone, I don't doubt it.

When I went looking for perl.org and perl.com on the wayback machine, I only got as far back as a month ago. Well, I guess it's something. However, in between the 'come back later due to higher than expected load' messages, python.org has pages all the way back to 14 April 1997. I wonder if this is a python conspiracy :) I wonder if anyone actually saved some of the original pages from perl.org, pm.org, etc. since the wayback machine doesn't have them it might be nice to archive them ourselves for grins.

n.b. Well, I knew as soon as I wrote that I'd find everything....note to self, the trailing slash on the base URL in the wayback machine is important. However, I must admit it is a treat to compare the old CPAN FAQ to the new CPAN FAQ :) I guess I'll have to go snarf the older stuff and make .pdfs out of them for the Perl history archive since the wayback machine could use way more power. Way.