The last 24 hours or so have been really busy. Today was Martha’s third birthday (wow, can you believe it?) and I’ve had a number of incredibly annoying bugs at work. I won’t get into the details right now but one of them was an MSIE bug that I solved by \uXXXX-only double-JSON-encoding a structure. The other was fixed by disabling Etag headers. Blaaaagh!

I feel like I’m making enough progress, right now, to make a grant update every day. I don’t know how long this will last, but I’m glad that it’s going so well, so far.

I’ve been continuing to work on adding improved logging capabilities to Dist::Zilla. They’re not going to be terribly complex, but I’m trying to make sure that they’re easy to use, and that they lend themselves to sane default output and useful debugging output. Yesterday, I realized that these lines were really annoying:

I proposed a grant for Dist::Zilla improvements to The Perl Foundation, and a notice of its approval was posted yesterday. I’ve gotten to work.

We recently got a new HDTV. Our old TV was a standard definition 34” (or so) CRT. It was about 12 years old, but still worked perfectly. The issue was just that having been forced to get an HT TiVo and upgrade to digital TV, I started to resent all the HD programming that I was watching in SD. Also, I saw my buddy Pez’s Xbox on an HDTV and that was pretty cool.

I haven’t written anything about programming in a long time, now. I stopped when I was work on my Advent calendar and never really got back to writing in my journal. I’m still doing plenty of coding, I’m just not writing about it here much.

In January, I ordered an Xbox 360 Play & Charge Kit from Amazon. It’s a NiMH battery pack with a USB cable to connect the controller (also a charger) to the Xbox. It arrived a few days later. While the cable would power the controller, its “charging” light wouldn’t come on and it didn’t seem to be charging the controller. The kit came with a piece of paper that said, “In case of problems, do not return! Contact Microsoft!”

And you don’t suppose that I went into it headlong like a fool? I went into it like a wise man, and that was just my destruction. And you mustn’t suppose that I didn’t know, for instance, that if I began to question myself whether I had the right to gain power – I certainly hadn’t the right – or that if I asked myself whether a human being is a louse it proved that it wasn’t so for me, though it might be for a man who would go straight to his goal without asking questions…. If I worried myself all those days, wondering whether Napoleon would have done it or not, I felt clearly of course that I wasn’t Napoleon.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Back when I first started learning Perl 5, I was excited to find the Perl Advent Calendar. It was a series of 24 or so short articles about useful Perl modules or techniques, with one new entry each day leading up to Christmas. A few years later, the Catalyst crew started the Catalyst Advent Calendar. I always liked the Perl Advent Calendars, and kept meaning to contribute. Every time, though there were too many things I’d want to write about – and mostly they were my own code, so I felt sort of smarmy and self-promoting and never did it.

I’ve been working on a library for writing sprintf-like routines. This has led me to learn quite a lot about sprintf. If you’re ever looking to be amazed at how complex one routine can be, look at perldoc -f sprintf. It’s not the most complex builtin in Perl 5 (I think), but it’s up there. I think open wins.