Pythian Group

There is an universal rule that all applications almost, almost do what you want, but not quite. For regular users, it’s horripilating. For hackers, it’s a tantalizing torment as our breed usually have more hubris in stock than we have tuits.

The itch of today is RSS readers. For the last few years, I’ve been used Akregator, and I’m pretty satisfied with it. But there a few features I would like to have access to, but I don’t. Namely:

• Be able to access the feeds from any of my machines, not just the local one.
• Filter out the duplicate entries that I get from Perl Ironman, Perlsphere and the individual blogs I’m following.

So I thought: what if I found a way to get the blog entries, and plop them on mailboxes on my mail server? That would take care of ubiquitous access. And since I would have control on the software, I could probably manage to filter out dupes.

So yesterday I sat down and began to hack on this. The result is mailfeed (clever project name pending). I’m still not sure if it’s a good idea, but at least its execution showcase how much niftiness can be crammed within 144 lines of code.

But let me show you…

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The main presentation of the last tech meeting of Ottawa.pm, was given by Steve Purkis and was about TAP::Harness and its friends. After Steve properly awed us with the joy and wonders of TAP and its ecosystem, he exorted us to go forth and create new TAParific things.

Don’t people know by now how ill-advised it is to say such things when I’m around?

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This blog entry is light on technical content and heavy on “about me” stuff. So unless you’re interested in the hot spots where to dispatch ninja assassins to take me down this year (or perhaps just where we might cross paths and shake hands), feel free to close this tab.

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As previously reported, last week-end’s activities could be summarized as me going to town on a yak herd with a lawnmower. And although the rest of Saturday and this morning haven’t been as fast and furious as Saturday morning, there’s a few more things to report:
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Yup. Plucking the alpaca’s eyebrows again, I’m afraid…

You see, because of merciless peer pressure, I’ve revived Perl::Achievements. I thought that would keep the wolves at bay, but noooo… Not a hour after the announcement was sent, I got a new feature request. I really should not but… okay, I wanted to do it anyway and if somebody is actually asking for it, why the heck not? Plus, it’ll give me the opportunity to see if my Template::Caribou is up to snuff.

A few hours later, I have a bug report for MooseX::App::Cmd and (after some touch-ups) released the first version of Template::Caribou on CPAN.

And that’s roughly where things get silly…

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So there I was, leisurely perusing my twitter feed… Oh, an entry by brian d foy? Should be interesting. So I clickety clicked, and let my eyes wander and almost immediatly fall on

Yanick already has perl achievements (although it’s not on CPAN, wtf Yanick? :)

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This is going to be a short one, but potentially useful for anybody writing a Dancer template module, or just plain curious about Dancer‘s guts. So here goes:

A few weeks ago, it came to my attention that Dancer’s Dancer::Template::Abstract, the base class for its template modules, added a test to verify that the template it receives as an argument is really a file. Yay. Sanity tests are awesome. Except… what happens when a templating system is not file-based? A lot of exceptions and a very sad web application, that’s what happens.

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In this modern world, time is a rare commodity. It’s a well-known fact. It has to be carefully budgeted and thriftily spent. There is never enough time to do everything one wants to do, so we have to prioritize, pick what is important and cut our loses on the rest.

I so wish my brain had gotten the memo on that.

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I’m rather fond of Template::Declare. Its killer feature, for me, is how all tags are expressed via Perl-space syntax, which allows me to leverage perltidy to turn any great unreadable glob of HTML into nicely indented code (in comparison, my Mason templates always begin with the best of intention, and end up looking like the indentation fairy went berserk). But it also… irked me. In minimal ways. In ridiculous ways. In ways that I should overlook. But…

I would so love to ditch the global template inheritance that is defined via

Template::Declare->init( dispatch_to => ['MyApp::Templates'] );

and go for a per-object mechanism.

And talking of objects, those OO-like features like mixins and delegation are very cool, but they end up implementing a new OO system. These days, Moose is my hammer, and… wouldn’t it be nifty if the templating system was built using all that antlered magic?

Logic says that I should just learn to live with those small warts and resist the urge to write yet another template system. After all, armies of better hackers went that route, and between Template::Declare, Template, Mason and the many other systems out there, the chances that I’ll come with something better are infinitesimal leaning on the delusional. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Remember that game I have in the back-burner, the one I described as being a cross of ‘X-Com’ meets ‘Dwarf Fortress’?

No? Well, no big surprise. After all, is it way at the back of the back-burner stack. Anyway, as a quick recap: it’s a game about colonial marines blasting aliens in sinister caves to harvest their precious bodily fluids. Or something like that. Important part is: I had some tuits lately, and so I worked a little bit on one of the basics of that game.

Specifically, I checked out how I could dig myself some caves.

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