=pod Hello! Long time, no blog update. Recently, the whole book thing has been killing me. I've been so worried about the book not being done that I've wasted all my time worrying about the book not being done. Not efficient. (I've also spendt way too much time on reddit, a rather crappy site actually :) So, about the book... it's in the technical review stage now. Most of the writing and coding is done, and that's the hard part. So I think I can relax a bit for now, but I won't really be relaxed until I have a paper copy in my hand. What's interesting is that the book hasn't I taken up that much of my time. But thinking about it has distracted me from other coding tasks, which is annoying. My brain has stopped me from doing anything mentally involved, because it makes me feel bad about the book. So I've wasted a lot of time reading reddit because I can "do it for one more minute and then stop". Months later... But, with the book mostly out of the way (although Apress has indicated interest in a longer one, ugh), my brain is coming back to a reality where it can spend days coding... or blogging. So What's on my backlog? =head1 Blogging People don't blog enough about Perl. I will try to blog about something every three days now. It will be Catalyst heavy, but hey, Catlyst rules, and people actually read Planet Catalyst. =head1 Angerwhale Angerwhale is nice, but there are still things that bug me about it. =head2 Dependencies Crypt::OpenPGP tends to be flaky, as evidenced by L. (BTW, thanks to David Cantrell for writing this and mentioning Angerwhale on the front page of use.perl. Everyone should be using Angerwhale so they can find the bugs for me :) C was nice enough to write a new interface to GPG, L so I need to switch over to that. Unfortunately the user/auth code is the last really messy part of Angerwhale, and I've been putting off the conversion for a while. It will be fixed soon, though. Yay. =head2 Memory Leak Yeah, it leaks memory. I see it on my machine, and I see C complaining about it to the point of switching away from Angerwhale. So tracking this down is my top-ish priority right now. I think it's cache related, but I don't know for sure. =head2 New Theme The current theme is too heavy. I want a white page with text, so I'm working on that now. I've played with MT4 recently, and want to steal their themes for Angerwhale. This is a somewhat lower priority. =head1 Catalyst There's always lots to do with Catalyst. We need to get 5.8 out. We need to write some tests for C's excellent proxy patches. I need to write C as promised. (I've been delaying this because I want to do an InstancePerContext, but I'm worried that you lose TT caching when you do that. I should actually try it and see though.) I need to blog more about Catalyst so we can win some more mindshare (and so newbies can write good code). I am jealous of the japanese language resources available for Catalyst -- lots of bloggers are writing very good articles. I'll use some of those as a model for my future articles; the best was an annotated walkthrough of C. That sort of thing isn't all that useful for users of Catalyst but it is a good way to become a better programmer. Programming is all about reading (writing is easy), so code with detailed explanations is a great way to learn. That reminds me, I need to add more people to Planet Catalyst JP. I occassionally see blogs in random google searches, but I'm bad at following up. (I also need to improve my Japanese; I noticed at YAPC::Asia that my speaking ability is ... much lower than it used to be.) As for Catalyst Book 2.0, I don't want to think about that right now. Hopefully I can get other people to do most of the work, but I'm not optimistic. Writing a book is B. We'll see (I have some ideas for other Catalyst books; but right now Apress seemed interested in a Definitive Guide to go along with their Rails and Django books. Defintiely a good idea.) =head1 CPAN Modules I told C that I would help with L. I want to put it into git, apply patches, and release, but he seems to be wating for C to put it into svn. I think I am going to JFDI git and see what happens. Git is I than svn anyway. I'm also tired of HTML::Tidy. C is great at what it does, but it's really fucking hard to compile. I am going to steal their algorithms and implement them in pure perl, so that the perl community can finally have a reliable HTML tidier. (People are still using HTML::Lint, apparently, even though C deprecated it in favor of Tidy. Maybe I will just revive that.) Finally, Catalyst::View::Template::Declare needs a bit of attention. The C<< c->blah >> hack I've been using is really really ugly, and it's time to fix it for good. I think I will stick with the virtual Catalyst package C<< c >>, so it works like Jifty. But, when someone calls into it, I'll walk the call stack up to C, and steal C<$c> from there. Then it will be nice-n-threadsafe, which is always good. Speaking of C, I've dumped TT in favor of TD. It's much nicer. C. =head1 Ircxory Ircxory is my irc karma web interface. It needs OpenID support so you can login and combine nicks, karma stuff, etc. It also needs a lot more "reports", because that IRC data is super interesting. I could spend all my time looking for (and finding) cool patterns, but it's probably not worth it. I need to get other people interested in it so that they can do the hard work. It is finally running on a real machine, so you can always get to it from L. If you want the bot in your channel, just msg me on IRC. C :) =head1 DoQueue DoQueue is my newest app. I really need a todo list, and all of the currently available ones suck. The basic idea is this: you type something in, and it gets added to your queue. You can move things around, and tag them with arbitrary C pairs. Then you can export them via a REST interface, and use the data however you like. You can also make things public, add your friends to a group and share to that group, etc. It's all about making todos really simple, but making sure that you have infinite flexibility. Since I really need this for myself, you should see it up soon. The code is already in my git repo, but it doesn't do anything yet. =head1 YAPC Oh yeah, I'm organizing YAPC::NA::2008 in Chicago. If the bid is accepted, that is. Overall, I'm super-excited about this. It's going to be at DePaul instead of IIT, so attendees will be surrounded by the nicest neighborhood in Chicago. There will be lots to do, it will be easy to get to from anywhere in the world (45 minutes by a $2 train from O'Hare), and of course there will be lots of Perl. I can't imagine anything nicer than a Chicago summer evening, lots of the world's best Perl mongers, and beer... can you? I was disappointed this year that very few "big names" made it to YAPC::Houston. I will try to bug people personally to show up, so they don't have to worry about the hastle of submitting a talk and not knowing if it makes the cut. It's important to let new people speak, but it's also important to make sure MJD, obra, ingy, etc. are there :) Making speakers that are speaking for free fill out paperwork is a pain, and I want to make it as easy as possible for them to come to YAPC. (And maybe C can cover their dorms or something... every YAPC in recent memory has B, so it seems silly to not use that money to make YAPC better.) Anyway, this isn't finalized (Ohio.pm could still win; ugh). Details when it is. =head1 MojoMojo + Catalyst Site MojoMojo needs some love so it can be released. We need to clean it up, release it, and convert the Trac wiki to it for the Catalyst site. C should be doing this, but I said I'd help. So that is on my list. Where, I don't know until DoQueue starts working :) =head1 Bed. Prew. I'm tired of writing now. See you in less than three days :) =cut