This weekend I happened to be in Paris, so of course I met up with a small part of Paris.pm, which was excellent. I think we solved all of Perl's problems in the pub. I don't quite remember the solutions though...
Then someone pointed out to me that my WWW::Gazetteer::Calle module no longer worked, as the website it was scraping had lost all its data. I managed to find the data again and after a bit more hacking (change the paging system, grumble grumble) I now present WWW:::Gazettee::FallingRain. What's a gazetteer, you ask? A geographical dictionary: given a name, you can find out where it is. There are quite a few Gazetteer modules, so WWW::Gazetteer provides a simple interface to them all. It was a bit of a hack before, but now it uses Simon Wistow's excellent Module::Pluggable module. I always knew that I should have a look at that module, and I'm glad I did, it does one thing and does it well.
I've spent a few hours on the Eurostar this weekend, which of course means that I hacked on my website. I now mention related searches for when people give a vague search term. I use Google Web APIs to do spell checking, leveraging their spelling correction technology to make silly searches like basil chiiiiiickeen work. I finally got around to putting recent photos up. And a few other little bugfixes.
In future-of-acme news, I spent Friday afternoon at an open day at INSEAD, a business school based near Paris (and also Singapore). It was quite interesting, and I bumped into an old friend there. Also, I'll be talking with Google this week too. But far more important news is that tomorrow I get to go see Mary Poppins The Musical! Oh, oh, oh! Let's go fly a kite, Up to the highest height! Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring, Up through the atmosphere, Up where the air is clear, Let's go fly a kite!
