• I like having my GrandCentral Call Me button on my site - it’s fun talking to my readers every so often in person #
• @susanreynolds I’d say a couple times a month - I just got one, thought it was really cool. It’s kind of my personal tech support and s … #
• We’re Catholic broke the 30,000 mark on Facebook, with 31,000 users, and growing #
• @octalmage I’m Mormon, running a meta-network of religious applications on Facebook. On Facebook, I’m Christian. #
• @octalmage, I also run "We’re Baptist", and I also started an "LDS App", which I have since sold to an LDS Foundation #
• @octalmage I’m also hoping to work on a Jewish app, and maybe even an Islamic app. I’m studying up on those religions first. #
• @octalmage, as far as I’m concerned, each religious app belongs to that religion, and will maintain the culture and beliefs of those faiths #
• @newmediajim you should follow @trippfenderson who works for Media General down south of you #
• @guykawasaki is about to start following every person that follows him - just got him set up, and I think it’s working #
• No one tests their Twitter libs on more than 100 friends or followers - had to fix several bugs in Net::Twitter to get it to work with h … #
• @chrispirillo is also about to start following everyone that follows him - I’ll announce the site that is doing this here soon #
• @guykawasaki start watching your Following number -it’s slowly going up right now #
• @guykawasaki just wait until I add statistics, better blacklisting features in there (I"m thinking something like akismet) #
• @guykawasaki, btw, I got Twitter to remove their quota of 70 requests / hour for you so hopefully it should follow all within the next hour #
• @guykawasaki ha! I didn’t think of it that way - shows the spirit between the two networks. #
• @guykawasaki I just hope this doesn’t trigger some bot in Twitter’s system like it did in Facebook’s #
• You know, Twitter could build a business model just out of selling Twitter-branded schwag #
• If you use my Twitter auto_follow script, you’ll need to patch Net::Twitter if you have over 100 friends: http://snurl.com/1wjpx #
• Follow up to my previous post on the Zed comment, and why I think Rails users are proving Zed’s point: http://snurl.com/1wjrj #
• @armandoalves as long as I’m not a Decepticon! #
• @guykawasaki is now officially following more people than are following him Now that’s a great Twitter citizen! #
• @chrispirillo is soon to follow - my script should finish processing @guykawasaki here very shortly and move on to @chrispirillo #
• @scobleizer it follows those that are following you, but you aren’t following. #
• @scobleizer some people Twitter blacklists, which might be why they are in non-follow mode #
• I think my blog is getting slammed right now - might have to pull out another EC2 instance here to handle the traffic #
• @scobleizer: http://tinyurl.com/2xyjbs #
• @chrispirillo want something entertaining to do? Whatch your "Following" number on twitter go up as you refresh the page #
• @benoitcazenave welcome! #
• fading fast - if I get 8 hours of sleep, that means I wake up at 12pm! #
• Now I’ve got recruiters both contacting me to work for them, and to work for me - some of these guys need to do their research! #
• Happy that Twitter didn’t disable @guykawasaki’s account for the script I was running for him to follow all of his followers #
• @alexdc the script has a blacklist for that. Also, after you get above 1,000 followers how can you possibly have a life and manually follow #
• @alexdc every big name on Twitter with over 2,000 followers is using a script to auto-follow. At least they are listening to you now. #
• anyone know of a good tutorial on setting up a wireless router as just a range extender for an existing router? #
• @humancell perfect - thanks! Since there is no Wireless N extender I bought an extra N router and hope to use WDS to extend #
• Finalizing edits on the FB book before sending back to the publisher. Lee Lorenzen is Forewarding, followed by a Superstar Afterword TBA! #
• You can follow us on our Facebook Page for the book at http://tinyurl.com/2cqs9g #
• hehe - comment from our editor in the manuscript: "What does ‘pwn’ mean?" (it’s a quote from an app description we were showing) #

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It appears I’ve caused quite a stir in my post about asking Perl to step up. Joey DeVilla on Global Nerdy thinks I’m funny. Several Perl users, including Andy Lester (author of WWW::Mechanize) have corrected me on the fact that it does not require testing for modules to be submitted to CPAN - I stand corrected (I was writing this late at night when I wrote it, as I am now, so bear with me).

This still brings me back to my point that regardless of whether a module has to go through rigorous testing or not to be on CPAN, CPAN contains one of the strongest architectures to prevent bad code from being submitted available. When modules are submitted, they still have access to a large group of testers that will return test results to you and give you feedback. The Perl test suites included in the Perl packaging tools (Test::More, etc.) are some of the strongest unit testing tools I’ve seen.

Andy Lester himself is a great example of why I think Catalyst and other Perl tools and frameworks are much stronger than those of Rails, and have a much stronger and smarter group of developers maintaining them. He is the essence of a true “computer scientist” IMO. From his biography on O’Reilly:

“Andy Lester started with computers early by keypunching letters to Grandma on IBM 029 punchcards. Now into his third decade of professional software development, he’s the QA & Release Manager for Socialtext. Andy is also in charge of PR for The Perl Foundation and maintains over 25 modules on CPAN. Andy’s two latest book projects are Mac OS X Tiger In A Nutshell from O’Reilly, and Pro Perl Debugging from Apress.”

How many of the Rails programmers can say they keypunched letters into punchcards early on? Maybe a few, but I think Zed has a point. Andy himself isn’t a contributor to the Catalyst source code (that I’m aware of), but his skills and experience to me show the breadth of who a Perl programmer is, and the type of people maintaining the Perl Catalyst MVC Framework.

So I guess what I was saying in my previous article is that perhaps some of these programmers, such as John Rockway, Marcus Ramberg, and even Andy Lester or Larry Wall (whom everyone would take notice) should take this opportunity, now that it is in the public eye, to expose what Catalyst brings to the community - why should one use it over Rails? I’d like to see these guys show, through the experience and Computer Science backgrounds that they have, that Catalyst is one of the best options out there for building a scalable web architecture. I’d even suggest each address Zed himself, inviting him to give it a try!

As to the Rails supporters that were commenting, criticizing, and laughing at my “Perl Power” speech previously, perhaps you should step back and learn, rather than laugh at us. I know many of our own that are learning other languages, trying to learn from the Zed experience, trying to figure out how we can better apply principles that Rails brings into our own Frameworks, what works, what doesn’t - you get the point. Those criticizing what I have said, IMO, are simply further proving Zed’s point to an outsider like myself.

As I was testing my auto follow script for Twitter and helping Chris Pirillo (see the comments in the link above) get his set up, I realized it wasn’t working for him. After a ton of hacking around, going through all aspects of the auto follow script, and Net::Twitter, I realized there was an undocumented (it’s now partially documented) feature in the Twitter API which states that a page must be specified with a “friends” or a “followers” request. I noticed that Net::Twitter was not checking for paginated results on these requests, therefore I’ve created a patch to make that possible. You can download that patch here (after installing Net::Twitter):

http://www.jessestay.com/Net-Twitter-jessestay.patch.gz

Just patch Twitter.pm (usually in /usr/lib/perl/site_perl/5.8.8/Net/Twitter.pm) with the above file (after un-gzipping it), and you should be set.