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Toby Inkster

Andy’s Dinosaur Adventures

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At the moment my son is really loving Andy’s Dinosaur Adventures, which I must admit is pretty well-made (even though we all miss Kip).

The premise of the show is that Andy is now working in “the National Museum” (most of the interior shots seem to be from the Natural History Museum in London; some of […]

Towards Type::Tiny 1.000000

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Type::Tiny has been knocking around in some shape or another for almost a year now. It’s certainly grown a lot since its first commit. The distribution probably no longer merits the “Tiny” name, though the lead module itself is…

Horizontal Reuse: An Alternative to Inheritance

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In class-based object-oriented programming, when there are classes that appear to share some functionality, this is often a time when people will refactor them into two subclasses of a common base class, avoiding repetition.

For example, in my farm model the Horse class and the Tractor class each implement a pull_plough method. (American readers might prefer pull_plow.) So this method is a candidate to split out into a Hitchable class for Horse and Tractor to each inherit from.

This would have nice benefits for polymorphism. I’ll be able to pass an object to my Farmer which will only need to check that the object inherits from Hitchable rather than having a hard-coded list of classes like Horse and Tractor that it knows are acceptable.

Old Jack’s Boat Christmas Special

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I’m a big fan of Old Jack’s Boat in general — great actors; good stories; charming animation — but the Christmas episode is something special.
Death is rarely mentioned on CBeebies. There’s a Woolly & Tig episode where a horse Tig is fond of dies. Peter Rabbit lives under threat from Mr Todd, Tommy Brock, and […]

Christmas Eve Obfu

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use v5.14; use strict; use warnings FATAL => ‘all’; our $days_until_christmas = 1 * map s([+] )( )gix &&printf( ‘%5s’ .’%-4s’ .’%s’,$_, substr(~~~~ reverse,!$^C) =~y[/(] [\\)]r,$/ ),my@ xmas= qw 1 +.- _(+” (_++: /+’ +(_/^ 1;1 ;1;…

Introducing Kavorka

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Kavorka is a function signatures module, along the lines of Function::Parameters, Method::Signatures, and MooseX::Method::Signatures. Its features include: Named, positional and slurpy parameters Required and optional parameters Defaults for optional parameters Type constraints and value constraints Type coercions Return types Method…

Katie Morag; and Topsy and Tim

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This Sunday a new series based on the Katie Morag books will be starting. It looks like it should be good.
The Beeb will also be bringing us Topsy and Tim. Some of the books are fairly dull, but the kids seem to like them, so we’ll see how the TV show pans out.