A few months ago, Salve Nilsen was asking #perl-qa about interest in a QA and testing hackathon in Oslo. I thought this sounded like a great idea and volunteered a bunch of names of people who I thought would be interested (or at least interesting). I humbly humbly put my own name in that list, and as it turned out, I got connected with a sponsor and I’ll be headed to the Oslo QA Hackathon this week. I’m on ABC Startsiden’s dime. If you haven’t heard of them, you’re not Norwegian. They’re (from my understanding) the most popular site in Norway.

After having this task languish in my todo for years, at least, I have finally reduced my goal to the important 90% and applied some JFDI.

Lately, every time I’m done with work and have some time in which I could be getting things done, I find myself staring at my terminal doing nothing, or at least nothing productive. I’ve barely gotten anything off of my to do list for a few weeks, especially a number of code-related things that I really wanted to have finished weeks or months ago.

The Time Capsule from Apple has been a source of grumbling from me ever since it was announced. I was annoyed that I couldn’t use my existing Airport (even though I have an ancient model that doesn’t do drive sharing). I was annoyed that if I got a Time Capsule, Gloria couldn’t benefit from it because her iBook can’t run Leopard. I was annoyed because I can’t even really benefit from the 802.11n networking on my first-rev MacBook. My TiVo prevents me from using WPA. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Meteos is a “puzzle” game for the DS. I really don’t like the use of the word “puzzle” to describe the genre of games like Puzzle Quest and Tetris and Meteos, because they’re not so much puzzles, to me, as just games. That’s not the point, though.

I picked up Animal Crossing for the DS pretty soon after getting a DS. It was pretty good, but there were just too many things going against me enjoying it. It wasn’t on a shared system that was sitting around the house (read: the GameCube), so Gloria and I didn’t share a village, which had been one of the fun things of the GCN version. It was just too much a rehash of the GameCube version, really, to enjoy it much more. Also, Animal Crossing is a great game to sit down and play for an hour or three, sort of zoning out and running erands or reorganizing furniture. The DS is much better for games you can play for short bursts. You can do that with Animal Crossing, but it feels weird to close the DS while in the middle of playing a game that takes place in real time.

My “Perl 5.10 for People Who Aren’t (totally) Insane” talk has been accepted for OSCON. I’m looking forward to fleshing it out a bit more and spreading the word about how great 5.10 is.

One of our current projects at work involves streamlining the way we deploy software to our hosts. The solution in hand is sort of like a much improved CPAN::Mini::Inject. It allows us to declare what CPAN modules we use, and to index our own internal projects as if they were CPAN modules. It will also let us automatically run our test suite to see how updates of CPAN modules would affect our code, and to hard-pin distribution versions so that we never try testing new versions that we know can’t work.

Jott is a really neat service that lets you Do Stuff via your cell phone. The default Stuff you can do is “send email and SMS” and “setup a reminder.” There’s also a very simple API for writing your own applications (called Jott Links). It works something like this:

Today, Best Practical announced IMAP access to Hiveminder. It’s way cool, and I’m sure I’ll end up making a lot of improvement to my mutt configuration tools to make the most of it. You can check out their blog post or documentation for more information, but basically you point your IMAP client at Hiveminder and you can see your todo list. You can drop new tasks (in the form of email from elsewhere) into inbound folders and you can move existing tasks into other folders to cause them to become hidden or complete. There’s a bit more to it, but that’s the gist.