Back from oop north

2shortplanks on 2001-06-16T23:29:26

Well, I guess the main thing to say here is that I’ve made it back to my parents’ house in one bit and I’m getting my nose back onto the perl grindstone ;-)

This weekend I’ve been up in the fields surrounding Birmingham for a friend’s wedding. The bride was beautiful, the groom respectable (once the beard and eye-ring had been removed,) the setting picturesque, and yes, yes, the drink was free flowing. Pints of green drink bad….

On the train on the way to the wedding I listened to Damian’s keynote speech from YAPC::NA (aren’t laptops great?) Damian’s a really good speaker and it was pretty easy to follow even though I didn’t have any of the visual aids. A year ago at YAPC::Europe 19100 I remember feeling a great sense of trepidation about Perl 6; Change is risky and I wasn’t sure what we were going to end up with. Almost a year on and I’m *still* not sure what we’re going to end up with – but now I’ve got confidence in the way things are going and I’m pretty sure I’m going to love the end result.

Whilst returning to my parents’ place, I chose to break my journey in Bath and see a couple of Bath perl moungers. Bath is Bath and not a lot has changed.

While waiting for the train to leave Bath I had a odd London.pm perl monger moment. Tapping away at my keyboard at some perl I look up to see Anthony Stewart Head and Alyson Hannigan waiting for the train (along with a rapidly growing throng of fans.) Since I had no particular reason to harass people simply trying to use public transport I left them alone (though it’s a shame I didn’t have my copy of programming perl on me, a signed copy would have had made an excellent auction at YAPC::Europe.) Public transport of course chose to repay me by rerouting the train via another line that doesn’t have my home town on it, forcing me to take a bus replacement – but that’s another (much more boring) story.

On the NMS front, this weekend I’ve been going over the code and think there’s a few things I need to change to the dev site before it becomes useful. For example, I’ve got a RSS editor of sorts, but it’s all a bit slap-dash at the moment and needs to be one module rather than lots of pithy cgi scripts. Time to look at CGI::Application I think. The trouble with the large number of small scripts is the lack of documentation and testing that the structure leads to, and as I’m a documentation, then tests, then code kind of programmer I’m not happy with the situation. So, that, along with the task of getting my Linux laptop to talk to the parent’s computer and via that the net, is the main task for tomorrow. Not forgetting to watch Hollioaks of course.