journal for 2004-04-29

work

Work finally picked up today, both in demand and output. I worked with one of our engineers, who has recently been learning Perl to parse data from our characterization equipment. I wrote a simple interface for him to use to log measurements to our main database, and today I tweaked some installation problems. The biggest one was prerequisites. I hadn’t declared them in the Makefile.PL, which led to an error during testing that was, if not silent, at least obtuse.

So, I spent some time declaring prerequisites in that distribution and others. Unfortunately some of those modules must be installed from PPM’s, since installing a compiler on so many machines isn’t going to go over well. So, I need to set up a local repository, I think. I’m just thrilled.

A similar problem has been getting my goat, as regards Games::Goban. I get reports from cpantesters saying that tests fail for Games-Goban (board.t) because the base package for Games::Goban::Board is empty. It seems empty because it’s not installed. Shouldn’t cpansmoke be noticing that there is a prerequisite and that it isn’t installed? It would be nice, too, if C<use base> didn’t fail silently when the module couldn’t be required. I imagine there’s some reason for that. I should look into it.

Oh, and finally, I installed Squid on the lone Slackware box at work. While most things under Panther will go through the MS ISA box at work, NetNewsWire won’t use proxy auth, for some unknown reason. Someone suggested Authoxy, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for such a stupid feature. So, I set up a proxy to proxy to the proxy, and everything’s proxying just fine now.

home

Gloria and I decided to stay home, tonight, which was nice. We relaxed and watched Love Actually and Big Fish. They were both very enjoyable, although I think I preferred Love Actually, actually. We had some tasty tuna salad, which really hit the spot, and didn’t do much of anything else at all. We have one more movie waiting to be watched before being returned: The Pianist. Maybe tomorrow!

My copy of the Objective-C pocket reference arrived today, and I think I’ll go read it now. I’m sad that the pocket books from ORA never seem to have colophons. I’m not quite sure what the animal, here, is. Some kind of fox, I think.

Written on April 29, 2004