Today we honor Laika (Лайка) who 51 years ago today was shot into space. In the words of Wikipedia, she "became the first living mammal to orbit the Earth and the first orbital casualty."

Although Laika did not survive the trip, the experiment proved that a living passenger could survive being launched into orbit and endure weightlessness. It paved the way for human spaceflight and provided scientists with some of the first data on how living organisms react to spaceflight environments.

❦

I've decided to create one new thematic skin for November each Monday. This month has four Mondays, so that's four skins. I'd be happy with three skins, so maybe I'll spend the fourth Monday reskinning use.perl.org instead...

Creating a skin turned out (surprise!) to be bigger than a half-hour task, though. This was despite the fact that I'd thought about the idea the whole day. I'm about half done, so unless I find something much more important to do tomorrow, I'll have something to show by then.

Oh by the way. Yesterday's regression bug in Rakudo turned out to be two or more bugs conspiring, it seems. Things are still in motion and I'm unable to analyze it all, so I will have to refer interested people to the #perl6 logs. This will all result in the test suite being more comprehensive, and Rakudo containing less bugs. Which is all good.