Most versions of Perl (v5.38, v5.40, and so on) updates the Unicode Character Database (UCD), and each version of the UCD has new features, often new blocks, characters, or adjustments to property settings. But, which version do you have?

I tried this task a long time ago, in some place I don’t remember, looking at the presence of properties and other things, but I don’t want to create a long chain of things to query to rule out versions. That’s just too much work if I can cheat.

How do you determine if a Perl module is “alive”? This question from /r/perl, and I think it deserves a thoughtful answer. I did answer in that thread, but I thought I’d expand that.

I need a container for Perl v5.8, and I want it to be as small as I can make it. Starting with debian:bookworm-slim, I’d download the v5.8 source, modify it with patchperl, then compile it. But, there were problems.

I originally wrote this quickly to see about posting to my reddit profile: the post

Sometimes I need a simple web server to do something in a test. Most often this web server needs to simulate some error condition, such as a timeout or other server error.

Apple’s iTunes, a long time ago, had a ratings feature for albums from back in its SoundJam MP days, which turned into predictive album ratings. Where track ratings are shown as red stars, the album ratings are show as black stars (and predictive ratings as grey stars).