I've worked on three or four things over the last few days, most of which were nice to get out of the way, because it's what's on the horizon that I'm finding more interesting!
I pushed a new release of Net::Appliance::Session and didn't hear much back about it, which was a little dissappointing to be honest. Earlier releases brought up five or six emails from around the world, with feature requests which were honoured in this release, so I'm anxious to hear what they think. I do now have a small group of users of the module though, which is more than I was ever expecting to know about, and I'm absolutely chuffed to bits with that.
The Net::MAC module is shaping up to be something really cool. Earlier in the year I sent Karl, the author, a small patch bomb which he kindly incorporated, and over the weekend he got another which nukes two more items on his TODO list. I've not heard back, but fingers crossed they'll make the next release. I'd urge you to wait until 1.2 is released, as it's got tons more features than the version that's on CPAN right now. If you look at NetAddr::IP and Net::Netmask, then Net::MAC is on its way to joining those two in my network hacker's Perl toolkit.
With those two things out of the way, my attention turns to YAML::RPC. This is a complete module which is as-yet unreleased, and I'm hoping to get my employer's permission to do that before long. Another time, I'll talk about their open source policy, which is a very cool thing to have, IMO. Anyway, YAML::RPC is also very cool, as it's a full RPC mechanism with a low overhead and human-readable (and writeable!) data stream. This makes testing a breeze! We hook it into something like ucspi-tcp and immediately your MVC Model layer becomes a paper-thin RPC client and your business logic or DB work is nicely (and safely) abstracted away from your webserver.
Right now, however, I'm just reviewing my slides for tomorrow's session of the Introduction to Perl course that I teach for my employer. It's great fun, although massively stressful, because I've taken the course over from Stephen Quinney, and previously Simon Cozens, so there's a lot to live up to! I've made some heavy changes to the format though, and I think they're working out well. Perhaps more on this next week when the course is over.
