My current client project is not going well, sadly, due to sociological problems rather than technical ones. I hate to say it, but it's my impression that people around the client organization are starting to lose faith in the goal.
The silver lining is that reduced stress at the client is giving me more energy and more time to get back to my own development. I spent most of yesterday working on a little system to track my receivables. (I know I can buy a package, but what's the fun in that? ;-)
Up to now, I've been using a series of OpenOffice Calc spreadsheets (ported from Excel) to keep track of invoices and receivables, but year-end has always been a problem with my little system. So yesterday I started working on a LAMP replacement (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl). After a short while I realized how much functionality I've put into those spreadsheets over the years! Just finding a way to figure out the number of business days between dates took me on a wild trip through CPAN. (By the way, Date::Calendar, which gets installed with Date::Calc, appears to be the only one that implements the function.)
There's another neat thing about this. I've seen clients manage conversion projects like this both well and poorly, so now it's time to see if I can practice what I preach.
