Computers: May 2001 Archives

I worked this weekend on my slides for YAPC/TPC (I am giving the same talk at both :-). I cleanup my "makeslides" program, which takes one file of input and creates the slides. It creates valid XHTML and uses CSS for prettiness. The slides are almost done, maybe finish today, need to be done by Friday for TPC.

As promised, I've done nothing with MacPerl lately. Now because of additional unforseen matters in my life, I might not get back to MacPerl until June. I won't promise that, though. Aside from personal matters, I have to get slides done for TPC in the next week or so, and that will be my priority.

However, once that is done ... I anticipate that aside from actual traveling in June/July/August (for two vacations and two conferences!), I will have plenty of time to work on MacPerl. And heck, my two vacations will be long day road trips, so I can code in the car (thanks to the wonders of laptop computers and auto adapters, and others who can take the wheel for hours on end) for some of it! :-) That's coming up in July and August.

So, no more wasting time. I'll finish up slides on Slash in the next week, and I'll report back later.

Just by adding this code to Slash, we can now embed code in any arbitrary post:

    $str =~ s|<foo>(.*?)</foo>|'<P>' . strip_code($1) . '</P>'|egis;

You just wrap your code in <literal> and you are all set. I put the tags in as "foo" above because, well, putting "<literal> ... </literal>" inside "<literal> ... </literal>" won't work.

This is experimental. Let me know how it works out for you.

I have two town meetings a week for three weeks (including this week), plus slides for a talk at TPC, so MacPerl stuff is taking a back seat for now. It has to be that way. In a couple of weeks I will pick it back up, with a vengeance. :-)

We finally got it released, and I am mostly pleased with it. Some of the docs suck, but most of the bugs are taken care of, I think. We've been working on Slash 2.2 for some time now, and will continue ...

I have a meeting tonight, and then I have two meetings in two weeks. Then I am pretty much done with this committee I am on, so I will have more time to relax. No hockey this week either (though I might play a pickup game on Sunday night). Hopefully I will be able to put more time into MacPerl this (and coming) months.

I plan to finish up a few loose ends and release Slash 2.0.0 tomorrow. Brian and Pat finished up what little they had left, so we're looking good. Slash 2.2 is full speed ahead, and we've already made a lot of changes. For my work, I completely ripped apart Slash and Slash::Utility and spread the functions out into other modules; I have a lot done on Slash::Messages (for sending messages to users, such as, "your comment was replied to" etc.); and Mozilla 0.9 was just released so I can work on ForumZilla support (which I want to make independent of Slash 2.2, so that it can be a plugin used by Slash 2.0 too, so I can run it on use Perl).

Brian said he would work on a Slash::RSS module of some sort; my hope is that we can make easier the process of producing RSS/XML content from Slash.

Lessee. I guess that is about it for now. Oh yeah, I need to finish registering for YAPC and TPC, and finish up the second phase of the talk on Slash that Brian and I are giving at TPC (which I will give at YAPC, hopefully).

I figured out the problem and stayed up late to get 5.6.1a2 out so I wouldn't have to do it tomorrow, and the week is going to be busy, so I wanted it done. So I lied, I got it done tonight.

At one point, I upgraded to CodeWarrior Pro 5.3 or whatever it was, and I must have discovered that something was wrong with MWLinkPPC from that distribution, because I had two versions installed, an old one, and the newer one. When I re-upgraded to 5.3 this week -- to get MetroNub 1.3.8, which had not been properly installed the first time I upgraded -- it re-upgraded the "flawed" MWLinkPPC. Sigh. All better now, but 5.6.1a2 is not being released tonight.

I went through and fixed some more tests and worked some more on File::Find (Thomas Wegner's port). It all looks good except for some problems with Unix on some of the new tests. I looked a little, but hopefully he can figure out what is wrong.

I did a work on the test reporting so it can differentiate different versions of MacPerl that are being tested, etc. I was all set to get a2 out, until I had a weird linking error. i was moving my MWC libraries around, that is the only thing I can think of. I'll try again later. :/

I've been a slug lately. OK, not really, but in regards to MacPerl, not getting a lot done. I hope to find time this weekend to put out a second alpha including better instructions for tests, etc. Monday and Tuesday I will be unavailable ... but Wednesday and Thursday I will have more time.

The good news is that as I hoped, more people are, and are able, to participate now. I hope my absences and delays don't diminish enthusiasm, but they are necessary. I finish up one time-consumer this month, but then I have two conferences to go to in June and July, plus vacations etc. Such is life.

Boston.pm was pretty cool. I saw people I haven't seen in awhile, and met some new people, like John Gruber from Bare Bones Software. I chatted a bit about MacPerl, and a bit more about Mac OS X.

After some discussion with people in various locations, including the meeting and on lists, and after some problems with building bleadperl (PerlIO stuff apparently having problems with sfio), I am convinced, for now, to just continue on with perl 5.6.1 for MacPerl, and to just test 5.7.x a lot more often, so there will be some essentially parallel development, with the emphasis on 5.6.x, not 5.7.x.

I am less clear about what to do about error reporting; hopefully, a consensus will be reached sometime soon.