I've been pretty busy since my last update, so he's a run down of what's happened since then...
The fear I was feeling last time was clearly very productive. I'm now through to three second round interview stages, at least two of which are with organisations for which I'd like to work. My second favourite option will be taking place over Sunday and Monday, so I'm already worrying a bit about that, but not too much, as there's intermediate things to worry about (see below). The first option is then a week on Wednesday, with the final and probably worst one in about three weeks' time. I think I quite like these assessment rounds, they're sort of fun, and I get to meet a load of people I wouldn't otherwise, and as the companies are hoping I'll want to work for them afterwards (assuming I can convince them of my brilliance) they put on really good food. They do distract me from my degree though, which is slightly bad, as I quite enjoy doing it.
The intermediate worry is the big fight of the year. Varsity Games. You've probably heard of the Oxford v Cambridge Boat race, but might not be aware that almost every other sporting club has their own match, with most of them being held next weekend. My contribution to our (hopefully) shoeing some tabs is as part of the lifesaving competition squad, although this year I don't get to compete as I'm charged with making sure the event runs smoothly -- one of the dangers of being an elder statesman of a club. Anyway, this promises to be fun, and will be followed by a good natured meal and drunken revelling with our opponents afterwards. Thankfully they're all a really good bunch, so I doubt anyone will care too much which side wins or loses.
On the perl front, I've released my physically strong typing module as Data::Dimensions, complete with a nice test suite. One interesting thing I learnt was that:
sub set :lvalue {
my $honk;
tie $honk, SickTie, $_[0];
$honk;
}
set $foo = $bar * $baz;
eventually calls the appropriate STORE method on $honk which contains the details of $foo as well as receiving the result of the calculation on the right. See inside the module for all the gory details.
On the parrot front I've been making great leaps forwards with a bignumber library, although that's not finished quite yet.