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.

I have a fairly complicated mutt configuration. It could probably do with more streamlining, but it’s pretty easy for me to update, because of the way I generate it.

I haven’t made up my mind that I want an iPhone yet, but it really has a lot of the features that I want. It even has the bonus feature of replacing my iPod. Sure, it won’t hold as much as my 40 gig (third generation) iPod, but it will be one less thing to put in my pocket, and I was pretty happy using my 1 gig shuffle for most things, before I lost it.

I was tasked with dealing with a bug, this week. Sometimes, people would look into registering a domain, and our site would tell them it was available. This was pretty bogglesome, and it was especially annoying because dealing with it meant dealing with OpenSRS. OpenSRS’s API is all kinds of goofy, but I had not noticed how goofy it can be until today.

Every day, I see another stupid, broken email generated by crappy software used by a company that I’d think would know better. Today, the perpetrator was Nintendo. They wanted me to take a survey. I took it, because they promised me some sort of Zelda-themed stylus. I almost didn’t know that, though, because when I opened the message, it was empty. Huh?

I’ve written too much already about Addex so I will only review for just a few paragraphs. Addex uses your address book to produce configuration for your various mailtools.

Rep. Samuelson:

The latest release of CPAN::Mini needs to be replaced, because it contains stupid OS X 10.5 resource fork crap. That’s not why I’m going to replace it, though.