A friend pointed me to ActiveState's Mail Archive's "Leader" feature to show me that I was third on the list. Yeah, well, I honestly don't care that much but I quickly noticed that it wasn't true.
Indeed, the archive is keyed on email address (which is rather logical) so that people that post from several different addresses get listed twice and their mail count isn't correct (it's spread over their different addresses).
That's rather unfair you'll have to admit. And even though I wasn't personally penalised, I couldn't live with the idea that those poor people were being deprived of what would naturally be theirs: a fair listing on ASPN's Leaders list.
So what did I do ? Well, given that you're reading this site I guess that you have a fair idea which technology I used.
Here are the results for a few lists of interest:
perl-xml
01. Matt Sergeant 527
02. Ken MacLeod 140
03. Michel Rodriguez 128
04. Robin Berjon 126
05. Ilya Sterin 123
06. Eric Bohlman 82
07. Barrie Slaymaker 59
08. Grant McLean 38
09. Bjoern Hoehrmann 36
10. Kip Hampton 34
modperl
01. Stas Bekman 1051
02. Doug MacEachern 994
03. Matt Sergeant 830
04. Geoffrey Young 594
05. Perrin Harkins 561
06. Joshua Chamas 432
07. G.W. Haywood 422
08. Gunther Birznieks 356
09. Vivek Khera 291
10. Ken Williams 290
p5p
01. Jarkko Hietaniemi 4451
02. Gurusamy Sarathy 1327
03. Nick Ing-Simmons 1090
04. Simon Cozens 1025
05. (no name) 1000
06. Tom Christiansen 997
07. H.Merijn Brand 870
08. Nicholas Clark 865
09. Ilya Zakharevich 757
10. Michael G Schwern 721
xml-dev
01. Simon St.Laurent 1383
02. David Megginson 1300
03. Bullard, Claude L (Len) 1184
04. John Cowan 1068
05. Tim Bray 799
06. Paul Prescod 673
07. Peter Murray-Rust 673
08. David Brownell 633
09. Rick Jelliffe 598
10. Don Park 517
A number of interesting things can be noticed here. First, as I thought would be the case, I'm not third but fourth and our good mirod is moved up to his legitimate place. Second, adding up the scores for modperl and perl-xml tends to confirm the theory according to which Matt is not a human being, or at least not a single human being.
And in case you're wondering, no I don't have too much time on my hands. I simply guess that all this XML stuff has given me the nostalgia of good old HTML scraping (ASPN isn't using XHTML, shame on them). Go figure...
Oh, and despite what it may sound like, I still haven't got the hang of format. I think it's the last area in Perl that I can't wrap my brain around.
