I'm busy hacking away in the evenings on AxKit demos (among other things, see below). My main focus is on XSP, because everything else is easy. Doing demos is fairly hard, because you have to find something compelling that people are going to think "ooh!" about. At the moment I'm stuck on ESQL - what do people want to see in a database demo? Will a simple insert/select type thing keep them interested? Well maybe. I guess I'll think about it some more.
In other Perlish news, my refactoring at work finally worked today (i.e. it caught all the viruses that the previous version caught). God that was horrible... I thought i was doing the author a favour by fixing things like:
$re_ct = $mime_type;
uc($re_ct);
...
to:
$re_ct = uc($mime_type);
...
But nooooooooo that broke stuff, didn't it! D'oh!... So this time I simply added comments to bits of code I thought were broken, like:
...
return if (SomeFunction() == 1);
} # end of sub here
Into:
...
# ALEX - you know this function returns anyway, right?
return if (SomeFunction() == 1);
}
Anyway, I'm going to have a break from it, before really going in there and breaking it. The whole thing needs re-architecting into small plugin modules that get to either do thier thing or not, and return a new heuristic score to add to the current score. That way makes it much easier to extend, IMHO. But it's a complete re-write. Non trivial when the author doesn't give two hoots about correctness or maintainability - just about it working and working fast (good thing he's using Perl I guess...)
Also I've got a new version of DBD::SQLite coming out, the only update being that it's now based on SQLite 2.4.0, which is apparently faster and smaller and supports views and a few other niceties. I'm amazed it's faster. My log processing now wizzes along, inserting over seven and a half THOUSAND rows per second. Awesome.
Finally someone has been writing AxPoint presentations for a class on C programming that he gives. He's using the new tables and SVG shapes. His presentations look really nice using the new code, and he's pleased with them, and he's been submitting bug reports left right and center, which is good. I'm also learning some C stuff I didn't really know very well along the way. I do need to work though on supporting this new AxPoint from AxKit (at the moment the version in AxKit is still hard-coded). No rest for the wicked, eh?
