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Iron Man, embracing women

Sat Apr 25 16:22:00 2009

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Iron Man - Update One

Well ... wow. Over forty contenders so far, and that doesn't even include me. The planet is now available here, many thanks to Jess Robinson and her partner James Mastros (aka theorbtwo). I'm scared now, I think there's actually a reasonable chance I'm going to lose (see the original post to understand why that's scary :)

The "official" announcement is on the main Enlightened Perl site if you want something to link people to that isn't an mst rant.

I'm also happy to say that the styling of this blog is significantly improved, thanks largely to constructive bitching by Eric TF Bat on LiveJournal - if anybody has further suggestions, please do send 'em in.

Iron Man - Embracing Women

Well, apparently we aren't obviously inclusive enough. This didn't really occur to me because the Marvel character's called Iron Man and so was the webcomic competition that gave me the idea in the first place. So, yes, obviously signups are open to either gender, and yes, there will be female versions of the badges - a draft of the Paper Woman badge is here. And, no, there is absolutely no reason you have to use it if you're female and prefer the Paper Man badge. Use whichever one makes you happy, it'll be an argument to the script that serves the badges. And anybody who doesn't think I consider the fairer sex at least the equals of my own[0] should try being genuinely sexist in front of my mother, who used to get on rather well with Germaine Greer and with whom I have never yet won an argument. Nor, indeed has anybody else I can think of, and I'm about the only one who can claim to get more than one score draw in ten ...

Oh, and no, we don't give a crap what language you blog in. Our common language is perl, and you almost certainly speak both perl and English better than I speak whatever your native tongue is, so I wouldn't have a leg to stand on to complain and I try to avoid hypocrisy to spend more time on sarcasm, arrogance and condescension :)

Finally, since this is now my second meta post in a row, I'm going to include some bonus perl content to try and reassure myself I'm still a programmer rather than a marketer:

< psychoslave> ok, I wrote $c->model('DB::Author')->get_names->($work_search_by_author)->search_related('work_authors')->search_related('fkid_work')
< psychoslave> and I get "Not a CODE reference"
<@mst> ->get_names->(
<@mst> $coderef->(
< psychoslave> ?
< psychoslave> Sorry I dont' understand
<@mst> you know how you can invoke a code refernece
<@mst> by doing $code_ref->(
<@mst> ?
<@mst> your code does
<@mst> $c->model('DB::Author')->get_names->($work_search_by_author)
< psychoslave> no, I don't know
<@mst> let me break it up for you
<@mst> my $value = $c->model('DB::Author')->get_names;
<@mst> $value->($work_search_by_author)
<@mst> you didn't want the -> after get_names
< psychoslave> oh yeah
<@mst> do you mind if I use your mistake as an example for a blog entry at some point?
<@mst> I keep seeing people do it, so I should write it up
< psychoslave> well of course you can take this as an example
< psychoslave> It's not like I could say no anyway, is it ? :)

[0] If you didn't like the subtitle on this section, it was suggested by Gerda Shank. Feel free to go tell her it was sexist towards women, I just thought it was funny and so did Jess.