I’ve been hearing such awesome things about Selenium for so long that I finally decided I had to get into the game. It helped that we had some code that seemed like it would greatly benefit from testing with Selenium Remote Control.

I found this in my ~/www directory, and I thought I’d file it somewhere that I’m more likely to find it when needed, like in Rubric. This is a little out of date, as I’d probably use something more versatile than lynx, and I’d probably be using a custom-generated mailcap. That said, this is still useful information.

As I continue to putter about (mostly in my head as I walk to and from the bus) on the fantasty RPG that I plan to run in 2009 or so, I’ve been trying to decide what set of mechanics to use. I had initially thought I’d use Dungeons and Dragons (the “d20 system”) with a highly modified magic system. I was intrigued, though, by True20. It’s a d20-derived system that attempts to simplify a lot of mechanics. There are three basic classes. The only die you ever need is a single d20. It replaces D&D’s bookloads of spells with a small catalog of powers, which is likely to be great for what I want to do.

Mastering Perl is a toolbox full of very sharp tools. I can imagine myself presenting it to a junior co-worker, very somberly informing him, “It is time.”

I was very, very excited to receive Super Paper Mario for my birthday. I’ve been a big fan of the series (of Mario RPGs) since the first Paper Mario, and the gimmicks in Super Paper Mario looked really clever.

I was doing some maintenance on E’Mail::Acme, today. It was failing tests on perl 5.6.2, and it turned out that I had found a number of weird changes in behavior between 5.6 and 5.8, most of which will never affect well-behaved programmers. Here are some of them.

Since roughly forever ago, I’ve meant to give String::Truncate the ability to try to truncate a string at word boundary. Done! That is, instead of turning “This is your brain on drugs.” into “This is your br…” it can now return “This is your…”.

I thought I’d posted these already, but it was brought to my attention that I only sent them to the YAPC list.

It’s pretty rare that my three siblings and I all get together in one place at one time. Even the last few Christmases haven’t been very successful reunions. Strangely enough, though, everyone was in town this weekend. Steve was down for a friend’s wedding, Heide and Pete were in town just to visit, and Carmita lives here now. We all went to Kip and Carmita’s for some food from the grill, some beer from the fridge, and some strife from the kids. The kids numbered six: Martha, Martha’s cousins Jacob, Anika, and Matthias, and Steve’s girlfriend Connie’s kids Peter and Francesca. There was some pushing, yelling, and fighting amongst the kids (except for Martha and Matthias), but for the most part everything was just fine.

Email::Simple is, I think, a pretty popular module. Quite a few other Perl software distributions require it or its subclass Email::MIME. I think its popularity is due in no small part to the very simple interface it provides. There’s no need to remember that sometimes you need the “bodyhandle” method and that sometimes you need “open.” There’s no need to keep track of encodings or parts or much of anything. It’s just a header and a body and that’s about it.