I haven't posted for a while, not because I haven't got anything to say (ha!), but because I've been surprisingly busy.
Workwise, one of my projects went into testing and raised several design issues. To be fair many were planned for the next phase, but a few were of the kind that could be put down to niceities to make life easier. They are the kind that you generally don't think of, until someone else uses your application and feels they could really do with ... like a copy button. After the headache of getting the installer working, this round of testing has been remarkably pain free. After a comment that the application was running slower than ASP, a challenge if ever there was one, I discovered ActiveState have PerlIS to make my life even better.
I've now included a way for me to automate CGI testing with Devel::DProf, but unfortunately the slowest thing is Template Toolkit, and that's not doing a hellva lot really. There are areas on memory usage that could be improved and more use of Storable, but that's for next year.
The other project has just been submitted to testing, just before my Christmas deadline :) Now I await the repsonse in the new year.
The Labyrinth project I started a year ago, is getting a lot closer to completion. The kick start of a website for the Birmingham.pm bid for YAPC::Europe::2006 has helped considerably. Once it is finished, there are 3 websites waiting in the wings to have it installed on. I'm hoping I'll get a chance to try out DanDan's website with it over Christmas. Nicole will be pleased, as I've spent the last few months hacking away on the laptop most evenings.
The movie that we're planning to make had a bit of a setback as Steve was rather ill at the beginning of the month. However, through the rest and recuperation of the next few weeks, he's hoping to get down some more ideas. We've decided to get organised a bit and have a meeting in January to see what needs doing and draw up some timescales. But so far it's looking good.
I've had the pleasure of being a part of the CPAN Testers collective this year. I generally run the automated testing overnight and look through the reports in the morning to ensure things went well. Unfortunately there appears to be a problem with IPC::Run and CPANPLUS on Windows, in that the test results are being printed out to screen, but not passed to Test::Reporter. I've tried to dig deeper and find the problem, but have yet to find an answer. As a consequence I have to fix all the FAIL and UNKNOWN reports by hand. Thankfully, these are getting fewer and fewer as module authors take on the reports and fix the bugs and warnings. I've even had a few personal emails asking for additional testing seeing as I seem to be doing a good job of testing on Windows. My only disappointment is that I don't have a 5.8.x machine, so all the distributions requiring a perl greater than 5.6.1 have to be put to one side :( However, my second (home) Windows box died recently (or rather the harddisk crashed) so I plan to look at that next week and will look at installing ActivePerl 5.8.x and see what happens.
I'm now starting to write my talk for the next Birmingham.pm technical meeting, which will be about CPAN Testing. It'll be just an introduction as to what, why and how with a few facts and figures thrown in for good measure. There will be a few thoughts as to my experiences over the last year of testing with a few future enhancement suggestions. I'll post the suggestions once I've had a chance to write them more fully, but I think they might make for better testing and metadata (gotta love that metadata :) ).
Although I haven't posted, I have been reading many of the journals and mailing lists. There have been a few times I was tempted to add my piece, but knowing it was going to take a while, refrained. I plan to mull over a few thoughts next week and hopefully post a couple here.
Until then, enjoy the next week or so with family, friends and loved ones and have fun :)
