Probation

barbie on 2003-07-04T09:02:08

After 3 months, I'm now a fully fledged paid up member of MessageLabs. It's good to have some job security again.

In other news, I've been fiddling with my Kwiki wiki and noticed a bit of a problem with config files. Unfortunately Brian only allowed for backup files with a ~ on the end. Here on Windows .bak seems to be the convention with most editors. A quick patch later and all is well. Brian says he'll be applying it shortly.

Still having fun trying to figure out a good way to get the latest comments for WWW::UsePerl::Journal. I should really sort out the patch for the sorting and send that off soon too. But seeing as I haven't touched my laptop this week, I'm a bit behind. Does anyone know of a good way of creating a patch file on Windows? The diff app I have is a GUI, which isn't much help. A-ha! Text::Diff looks to like it'll do the trick. It's amazing what you can find on CPAN these days.

After promising myself, that I wasn't going to over stretch myself with talks at the next Birmingham.pm tech meet, aside from my now traditional YAPC::Europe debrief, I'm thinking about doing something about Cool File & Directory Modules. So far this year I have tried to highlight some great modules on CPAN and the File IO side of things is something I haven't touched on. Recently on a help forum I noticed the complete lack of knowledge of some great modules, and found people reinventing the wheel. Currently planned for the talk are:

A kind of short Perl Advent Calendar. Any others that people think I ought to include? I'm not covering File::Spec as it breaks too often for me.


Congratualtions!

Dom2 on 2003-07-04T09:33:03

It doesn't seem like that long ago you first mentioned you were moving to message labs. I'm glad you seem happy there.

As to the module list, I have only one thing to say: spread the love for File::Temp. I've fixed so many tests locally that used hard coded file names. Of course they broke as soon as the somebody other than the original author ran them... Of course, tell people to ignore most of the functions in there and concentrate on tempfile() and tempdir(). It's too confusing otherwise.

-Dom