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).

I had this task to count IPv4 addresses, but the typical way of counting with a hash has problems. With Perl, you might think to just use each item as the hash key and increment its value each time you find one. However, when you are looking at most of the IPv4 space, or even half of it, that’s a couple billion keys that might not fit into memory. Remember, each of those values are a scalar value (SV) that take up several bytes merely by existing, and that SV takes up several octets.

I ran across some unexpected output from Data::Dumper, and it turns out that this is already an issue in Perl/perl5#19449. I don’t think Data::Dumper will change, but if you realize that the Useqq setting has unintended side effects, you don’t have to worry about seeing those unintended side effects.

There are several things to consider when people show you data. Although outright lies are a concern, I’m more worried that they don’t understand their own data. With machine learning and big data analytics being a Thing, it’s more common to find people who know how the turn the crank who don’t understand what they are putting in the sausage.

I originally wrote this as a reply to something on the internet about a study that claims to have measured the energy efficiency of programming languages, but decided it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t think that anyone would really disagree, but I also didn’t think anyone would read the whole thing.

This concerns Ranking Programming Languages by Energy Efficiency, a paper that thinks it is interesting to think about the energy a program uses based on the programming language it used.