Yesterday, Kip (and the rest of his clan) came over and we finished Phase II of Project Better Back Yard. I’d already dug up quite a bit of the earth around the two posts. I was “thrilled” to find that just beside the post nearer the house, there was another post! It had probably been cut off before the still-there post was planted, but I was still gobsmacked. It had a much more reasonable base, only a few inches across, and the concrete was awful. I broke out most of it with a hand sledge.

After my last set of poking at making Addex do 7-bitization of funny characters, I did some more poking around and learned some things that helped me get everything working just fine. I’ve made a new release of Addex and the Apple address book plugin, so now anyone can have his friend José show up with an alias of jose by updating his Addex config to include:

As threatened, I have written and uploaded an improved replacement for Module::Install::AuthorTests. It’s Module::Install::ExtraTests. It’s scary and probably somewhat ill-advised, but it seems to work just fine. It takes away some of the configurability of AuthorTests, but it’s way more useful, I think.

This is a pretty reasonable HTTP request (please forgive any stupid mistakes and focus on the point):

Look, I respect the diversity of foreign cultures and everything. I try to pronounce silly foreign names correctly, and I have learned to stop referring to Holland as “the Netheregions.” In turn, could everybody please officially transliterate their languages to 7-bit? Honestly, it would make everything a lot easier… at least for Addex, which is the top world priority, right?

For fun, I patched a copy of Test::Builder to do YAML diagnostics, which were discussed quite a bit at the Oslo QA Hackathon. It uses a mechanism that Schwern said would be unsuitable for real use, presumably due to threading or some other case that I don’t care about. (Or, at least, that I don’t care about for playing around with.)

This is not a coherent, reflective look back. This is a braindump.

Today was draining, but I think it was also good and productive.

Today was the first day of work on the Oslo QA Hackathon. Lots of stuff went on, and the small fraction I was able to witness was very exciting. TAP seems to be getting a lot of great discussion, and not only are great feature ideas being fleshed out, many of them are then being put aside for thought before being blindly implemented. This is nothing but good.

I haven’t been to OSCON since 2005. It kept getting less interesting without getting less expensive. This year, though, OSCON looks really good – and I’m not just saying that because I’ll be giving my Perl 5.10 talk. There are a lot of talks, both Perl and otherwise, that look really interesting. I’m glad to see that Perl is so well represented this year, with talks about new Perl systems that I know can really improve Perl software development.