One of the earliest libraries I wrote for Pobox is ICG::CLI. It makes it easy to write CLI programs by tying together Getopt::Long::Descriptive with some common options (like help and verbose) and a few bits of code to make them work. So, you got three routines, whisper, say, and yell, which were like printf, but respected the verbose and quiet flags. (This got refactored into Log::Speak, which I don’t think was ever released. Oh well.)

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):