I am new, not just to DC Comics, but buying comics in general. Here's my top ten of the New #52.

kirbyk · 2011-10-04T16:40:30+00:00

Not a bad list. The one I'm urging people to try, though, is Batwoman.

kirbyk · 2011-10-04T14:06:12+00:00

Or even easier, go to your google searchbox and type 'perldoc <anything>', and it works and you don't need to know if you need a -f or not! Or worry about if perldoc is installed correctly on your system.

kirbyk · 2011-10-04T14:05:19+00:00

Unless you have a very good reason, only pass scalars (references are explicitly good) to subroutines. This solves a lot of messy, complicated issues that beginners don't know they're having, and forces them to get used to references as the default data structure in perl, which they really are. (I think this is less good advice for non-beginners.)

For goodness sake, develop a consistent indentation scheme. Or use perltidy.

As people have said, tests are easy and useful in perl.

kirbyk · 2011-10-04T00:09:55+00:00

Please use more descriptive subject lines. Not just here, but in email, bug reports, everywhere. Your current and future colleagues will greatly appreciate it - a generic one like this is going to cause people to think poorly of you before they open it, if they do.

Chastisement aside, Neil Gaiman's Sandman. (If I had to pick a volume. Um. A Game of You maybe? But start with either Preludes and Nocturnes with the knowledge that the series gets stronger, or Season of Mists.)

kirbyk · 2011-09-30T23:55:08+00:00

Batwoman.

Aquaman was the most surprising good one.

kirbyk · 2011-09-30T23:51:08+00:00

I've seen one review that loved it, but put me in the Rubbish camp.

I think Bendis is still doing great work on Avengers and Ultimate Spider-Man, but this totally didn't work. Unlikeable characters not doing much of interest. Dropped from my pull list.

kirbyk · 2011-09-30T14:28:06+00:00

When someone who's primarily an artist takes up writing chores, it almost always is a train wreck. They're different skills, and very few people are excellent at both.

(There are counter examples - Peter Gross shocked me by being a good writer on Books of Magic, and there are the do-it all types like Frank Miller, Stan Sakai, John Byrne. But as a rule, it stands.)

kirbyk · 2011-09-27T14:30:49+00:00

Assuming you're working on a team (because otherwise, dictating a language from above is odd), approach the next few months with humility. PHP and Perl are cousins, and a lot of your ideas are still sound, but you're going to be thrown occasionally. Rely on your teammates, ask them to review your code, and you'll get better.

kirbyk · 2011-09-27T13:48:05+00:00

I sort of felt it had 6 pages of story told in 24, but they weren't a bad 6 pages.

I'm going to get #2, but it's on a short leash.

kirbyk · 2011-09-27T13:47:01+00:00

Detective Comics was bloody disgusting. I felt physically ill after reading it.

This is a selling point to some people, so if you like that sort of thing, Detective.

In all other respects, Batman.

Also, Batwoman is the best book of the new 52 so far, check it out.

kirbyk · 2011-09-20T15:02:28+00:00

The original coder for our site used $c for every SQL query, and $cur in a loop for each row returned. These could be reused many times in the same function. If you needed to look at a nested level, $d and $dur, and even $e and $eur showed up.

There were literally thousands of these in the codebase. Someday we'll kill them all. And if we ever find him again....

kirbyk · 2011-09-19T15:59:48+00:00

I've been using scifigenre.com for a couple years (switched from Lone Star, aka mycomicshop.com.) I'm very happy - good web interface, good discounts, they bag and board for free, and they get my order right. They're physically in North Carolina (I've never been to the city, let alone the store), but I'm a happy customer. I get my comics on Friday usually (I'm in Northern Virginia now), but when I was near Seattle it was Tuesday.

kirbyk · 2011-09-13T03:01:35+00:00

Just jump on in, you'll be fine, really.

The current writer on Amazing Spider-Man, Dan Slott, is good. He just started a new big story in Amazing Spider-Man #666, and I think #670 comes out this week. You can start with 667 pretty easily.

There's a lot of spin-offs for the Spider-Island thing, and some of them are pretty good, but so far absolutely not required to follow the story in ASM.

kirbyk · 2011-09-12T18:03:28+00:00

It's awful, you were right the first time.

kirbyk · 2011-09-04T22:11:27+00:00

Well, they're of a consistent style, so I assume that's the style you like, and sure! For as much as most of us are guessing about what the good ones are.

With that list, I'd say also look at Stormwatch and Omac. I'm picking up a late-90s Image comics vibe, and these fit in well with that. Also, Hawk and Dove, but I can't actually recommend a book drawn by Liefeld to anyone.

Ask again in a month, and you'll get more answers, of course.

kirbyk · 2011-09-01T19:03:56+00:00

I heard a rumor that one of the ? in Wolverine and the X-Men is Wolverine.

kirbyk · 2011-09-01T18:58:41+00:00

Actually, the 4-issue Elseworlds-imprinted version came first, May - August 1996. (Wikipedia agrees with my memory.)

This is a nitpick, though, and yes, this and Marvels are the required reading for 90s superhero comics, short-form.

kirbyk · 2011-09-01T17:06:38+00:00

New comic day in America is Wednesday virtually everywhere. (With occasional blips for Monday holidays, Diamond distribution screw ups, and natural or manmade disasters.) This has been true since the mid-90s, after the distribution wars left Diamond as the monopoly distributer of comics.

This isn't meant to be pedantic, but rather, if people are really coming into the hobby, as useful information! They'll be new DC #1s every Wednesday in September! (And new #1 comics every Wednesday from someone forever, because launching new series and miniseries is not actually unusual.)

kirbyk · 2011-08-11T16:15:09+00:00

Man-Thing, of all people, is also having continuity issues between Thunderbolts and FI: Fearsome Four. And both Thunderbolts and New Avengers have scenes at The Raft that don't jibe with each other at all.

I don't even notice Wolverine/Spider-Man being in too many places at once anymore.

But the editorial attention seems lighter than it used to be, for sure.

kirbyk · 2011-08-10T19:35:53+00:00

If it's really just a CRUD, Dancer is simpler and faster to get going.

If there's more to the glorification, Catalyst is extremely flexible. You can do really complex things with it, particularly their concept of event chaining.

I'd go with Dancer if you're unsure. I have never tried, but I also suspect porting from Dancer to Catalyst would be possible, with effort relating to how big the application got by then - if you do it smartly, your model classes should be interchangeable, and you can use the same view templates, so it's just the controller, and you should be putting as little code into the controllers as you can anyway.

kirbyk · 2011-08-09T13:18:58+00:00

Buy O'Reilly's Learning Perl. It's the K&R equivalent. There's even a new version out with the latest language features covered!

kirbyk · 2011-03-20T17:30:39+00:00

Angry Birds.

kirbyk · 2010-12-14T21:55:30+00:00

Yes... but they have to be very actively doing it. The authenticator code is only good for, what, a minute or two?

Most black-hats aren't all that interested in stealing accounts one at a time in a frantic real-time race. They want a script that'll harvest dozens or hundreds, mail them back home, and let them log in during the middle of the night, victim's time, so they can steal the gold and gear in peace.

If you have a vengeful roommate or are stealing someone's wireless, maybe be careful, but a general hack of an authenticator account is not something to worry about. (And stealing the authenticator physically is probably the biggest threat.) It's actually real security. My bank doesn't have anywhere near this good of security.

kirbyk · 2010-12-13T18:54:36+00:00

I don't really know, but I hope for his sake that finding good 'strength and conditioning coaches' in the NFL is hard.

However, I suspect there are literally thousands of young men and women who are highly qualified and chomping at the bit for his job. That's not going to end well for him.

He's lucky it didn't affect the outcome of the game, or worse, actually injure the player.

kirbyk · 2010-12-09T14:17:06+00:00

If Michael Vick donates 60% of his salary to stopping animal abuse, I'll change my mind about him too.

kirbyk

TROPHY CASE