Only a few weeks after reading in the Sunday Times that The Castle and the Trial were “Kafkaesque,” today, CNN has this headline:

Wow. I was looking at Wikipedia’s article on Goldfish crackers recently (don’t ask) and I saw an amazing fact. In “some regions of Canada” one can acquire salt and vinegar goldfish crackers.

I got to feeling like maybe JSON Schema was not yet firm enough to give up on, and that maybe I could help improve it in the areas where Rx’s design made more sense. I made one or two very minor suggestions that were accepted, but the most important area was not addressed. You can read more about it at the Google Groups thread.

For a few days now I’ve felt really unproductive, but also unenthused about any of the work I had in front of me. Today, I managed to get one thing done, though: I reconfigured Code Simply’s git setup to use gitosis.

Last night at ABE.pm, I was talking a little bit with The Gang about some of the things I came to believe while doing the same thing in multiple languages. In explaining some of the issues I have with Ruby, both the scope of variables and the resolution of methods, this example came to me:

There’s been a fresh outburst of acrimony about how CPAN testers just send unpleasant and useless email to people who don’t care and can’t benefit. Coincidentally, I got one of the most useful bug reports I’ve gotten in a long time from an automated tester.

Rx was a lot of fun to implement. It’s all about data in memory, not representation in files, so I got to design it that way, too. I spent a lot of time thinking about what the various kinds of in-memory structures were that I’d need to validate, and then I’d think about how to represent schemata to validate them.

Okay, the title might be a filthy lie, but it’s just a reference to my previous posting about the fact that I couldn’t find a single data validation system (read: schemata) for JSON-like data. I found plenty of schema languages for XML, one for YAML that was never going to be suitably cross-platform, and one for JSON (json-schema) that seemed over complicated and likely to become unmaintainable, and then some other things that don’t warrant much mention.

Today I spent a good while trying to figure out why I wasn’t seeing a runtime error from code that looked like this (grossly simplified):

…or at least the problem that came to light recently.