Two and a half weeks on from YAPC and still no code to release, mainly due to well documented excursions like ingy's reappearance in London and going to see the camel London Zoo (another cat-herding expedition I was foolish enough to take a role in). Work's been busy with, erm, what I'm paid to do, too, so not much chance to do stuff there either.
On the other foot, I have been messing about a bit in between these excursions. I've learnt enough XPath to use XML::XPath to reimport an XML data structure to a Perl one; I've started to understand Python as a language (well, to read it, anyway) and hence to realise how badly my first version of this code is (but then, always plan to throw one away, right?), and I'm trying to read Mastering Algorithms In Perl at bedtime because dave told us to.
I've also installed OS X, and played around in it a bit more than I had for ages. Those of you who know me will realise I'm an OS X refusnik- the combination of an OS 9 laptop and Unix box is fine for me most of the time- but I did play a bit with the developer tools today, at least to the point of installing- well, see below- all the modules I need to run this new code (and no, I'm not going to say what it is until it's ready, although the IRCers in the audience know I've been banging on about it Far Too Much already).
I was a bit taken aback by how many modules I needed to install just to get this code to run. I suppose this happens a lot- you chuck in a module, then realise another would be nice here, and suddenly you have three dependencies, each of which of those has three dependencies, and suddenly you're running cpan shell for an hour downloading them (over a modem). Then I realised one of these was the aforementioned XML::XPath. Which requires XML::Parser. Which requires Expat. Which didn't build.
I don't do C, so that was the point (after about 3 hours in OS X, complete with a some Finder crashes, IE pegging out rendering sourceforge, and a couple of kernel panics) that I decided to go back to safe homely OS 9, even if I did have to do everything over AFP.
Ah well. I might (if I'm terrible enthuasiastic) ask someone about expat and OS X tomorrow. More likely I'll just try and get the core code done one evening. Unless, of course, beer intrudes.
