Silver's Simple Site - Weblog - 2006 - June

So it's that time of year again, when I disappear for an entire week to spend it in a room full of 55 other computer 'freaks' and generally have a good time (that's play games and socialise, before anyone gets any weird ideas!).

PPM and CPAN

The past few days I've been building up my own PPM (ActiveState Perl Package Manager) repository, which basically involves downloading CPAN packages, building them, testing, then packaging up the built code. It's really not fun, as plenty of CPAN packages fail to build, or fail tests, and generally cause problems. Still, it's getting there. The aim, what there is of one, is to have all the packages needed for Task::Catalyst and the new CompSoc website project. I think the website will be finished before my repo. is. :(

There's some good fun work out on in bug 341764 allowing you to just smack "Debug" on the ultimate in annoying dialogs. I'm going to love that when it's done.

(Only two days to go!)

It is coming, eventually. The plan for last Sunday didn't quite work out, but we're now ready to go and should be rolling it out this coming weekend instead. To come in this version:

• /who now accepts multiple parameters (useful for some of the more extended syntaxes some servers support).
• A small leak for plugins has been fixed.
• Sending files with DCC closes the file handle in more cases so it shouldn't stay locked after.
• When midnight happens, the messages about the logs changing have been suppressed.
• If your connection to a server drops, ChatZilla will now try to reconnect to the same server first, before moving on to the next one in the list.

I ordered some books from Amazon last Sunday and, much to my surprise, they turned up on Tuesday morning (despite being scheduled for dispatch on Wednesday). The result is that I've been reading book one in Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy, "Assassin's Apprentice".

Assassin's Apprentice, and I suspect the others in the trilogy, are written in a slightly odd 1st person recollection of events. Took a little while to get used to it, but it actually works very well for the most part - once you actually get to know the main character who is doing all the reciting of events. I'm wondering if there will be any significance to this way of telling the story, but for now it's just different.

It's a good read (so far), though some bits brought back some rather painful memories and regretted times for me. Not that that stops me reading a good book! I'm currently about three quarters through book one, so we'll see what happens over the weekend - hopefully I wont finish the entire trilogy in 3 days, like I did with some previous books (it's not that I don't want to read more - quite the opposite - but reading them all in one go both uses up a lot of free time and leaves you suddenly with a huge void when you finish).