All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Quick Takes

chromatic on 2003-07-31T06:42:36

It's been a while.

  • OSCON came and went, taking one timesink off my hands. Next year will be easier.
  • Simon's returned to Perl.com, so I'm no longer guest editor. That's another, albeit pleasant, timesink gone.
  • Text::WikiFormat 0.70 is out, with much thanks to Kake for working with me to find bugs and add missing features and Andy H. for an excellent suggestion that took me a long time to understand but a short time to implement.
  • Exegesis 6 is up on Perl.com, which required a lot of editing work on my part (not to touch the prose, just to get it prepped for publishing). I also defended Perl 6 and Parrot on Slashdot today. It's someone else's turn.
  • My house is substantially cleaner, though I desperately need to go through Gnucash's tutorials and get my finances in better order.
  • I created a "preload dynamic content" branch on Everything the other day. The idea is to speed up the site by precompiling all of the dynamic content necessary. It's taking a lot less trickery than you'd think, and it seems to be paying off. The real test will be cleaning things up after I'm satisfied that it's working.
  • While tracking down odd errors in my branch, I realized that my installation was quite a bit out of date. The installer annoyed me (as nearly everything using the DOM does), so I refactored the installer and made it use XML::SimpleObject::LibXML instead. It's much nicer, but there's still room for improvement.
  • Day-job-wise, it looks like the barrage of tasks will lighten up around the first week of September, giving me, perhaps, a little more time to do some development. On the other hand, I seem to have found myself editing two books, so it might just be a different type of busy!
  • Schwern and I are meeting tomorrow to discuss an outline for the book we should have written last year. He's a first time author, but this is my fourth (or fifth, if you're really charitable), so it makes sense to me.
  • I seem to have found myself putting together a TV show. It's a one-shot, full-hour local show. Excellent.

gnucash is good, wasting time on slashdot bad

jjohn on 2003-07-31T11:48:30

I've been using it for more 16 months or so. The tutorials are good enough, but it's more like a real accounting program than Quicken (gnucash use the double entry account model where Quicken uses its own thing). I keep my invoices listed in gnumeric. So for all my develop and office work, I use Linux/Open Source apps. For screwing around, I use Windows.

As for defending perl on slashdot, I think you hardly need to do that. Trying to raise the quality of debate on slashdot is like trying to empty the ocean with a siv. I used to try to do that once upon a time, than I had a burst of Zen-like acceptence about the whole affair. Ignorance and biggotry abounds, but that has nothing to do with me -- other fish to fry. :-)

Re:gnucash is good, wasting time on slashdot bad

chaoticset on 2003-07-31T12:29:23

The tutorials are good enough, but it's more like a real accounting program than Quicken (gnucash use the double entry account model where Quicken uses its own thing).
I have this little hope squirreled away that somehow, someday, somewhere, someone makes a set of drop-in replacements for Quicken and QuickBooks. From what I've seen, the people using these programs are small business folk, and it would be a no-brainer for most of them. "They do the same thing and this one's free? Um, yeah, I'll take the free one."

Books!

rooneg on 2003-07-31T12:09:47

So what's the book (the one you and Schwern are planning to write, not the ones you're editing) about?

Oh, and let me just say that I never appreciated how much time and effort went into these things until I started work on mine. I seem to remember this time, long ago, when I had free time, but I'm not sure, I might just be hallucinating.

Re:Books!

jhorwitz on 2003-07-31T13:35:27

Yes, the cycle of "wake up, work, eat, write, sleep, wake up, work, eat, write, sleep" got a little tedious after six months. I threw in some bitching and moaning to keep things interesting. :)

Re:Books!

chromatic on 2003-07-31T16:57:11

It's about 250 pages, about the one thing Schwern and I both do well. Procrastinate! No, wait. Annoy pumpkings! Hmm, that's still not it.

I don't like talking about deals that aren't quite done, but the astute reader will already have an idea.

Re:Books!

pdcawley on 2003-07-31T18:06:18

Why do I get the feeling that agility and testing come into the mix somewhere?

What was that again?

wnodom on 2003-07-31T19:33:57

Eek. That last one got away. Sorry.

So, as I was saying...

I can't believe no one's asked about this yet:

I seem to have found myself putting together a TV show. It's a one-shot, full-hour local show. Excellent.

Eh?

Re:What was that again?

chromatic on 2003-07-31T20:06:02

A local TV production company has some studio time and wants to do an hour show on open source software and development in the Portland area. I'm rounding up a handful of other people to talk about various facets for a few minutes apiece. We'll have a discussion for the other half.

It's public access TV, so it won't be seen all that much in the area, but there's a non-zero possibility we'll be able to tape it and use it later, if it turns out well.

Don't worry, it's not Shoggoth's Dance Party, as everyone immediately feared. (More about that in my next journal.)