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.

I stopped by the local gun (and coin and antique) store on Thursday and asked them to see if they could acquire a Yugo SKS for me. They said it might be a pain, as recent “scares” have created a rush, not to mention “the Democrats getting back in power.” This is funny both because it was said out loud and because it is probably true. Ha ha only depressing.

A few months ago, Dieter and I played around a bit with git. He used it more than I did, but we both agreed that it was way cool. It came up again at YAPC, and I gave it another look. It’s come a long way in those few months! The need for a friendlier user-oriented command apart from git is basically gone, and the tools for interoperation with other VCS finally exist and seem to work well.

I acquired a license to Acqualia’s “Soulver” application from a MacZOT bundle a few months ago. The idea is that you can do math in “plain English.” As any programmer can predict, this is a total joke.

Well, I got home last night after a day full of travel. We left the University of Houston around nine o’clock in the morning and I got in my front door around eleven thirty at night, almost ready to collapse into sleep.

I just finished watching the first season of Jericho, this week. It has made me think that I should turn my cistern into a shelter and stock up on weapons. I thought, “maybe it’s time to get that Yugo SKS that I’ve been thinking about.”

I know that there’s a MySQL 5 out. I do. It’s just that upgrading a big system takes time, and there usually has to be some pressing reason. I’ve just found one more reason to upgrade sooner: as far as I can tell, MySQL 4 can’t have fields that are not null and have no default.

I’ve got a bunch of documents that I want to organize, and I didn’t want to use some database system, or rely on Spotlight (which I loathe) or anything annoying like that. I wanted a different set of annoyances. I wrote a little module (File::LinkTree::Builder) to build a tree of directories based on file metadata leading back to files in a storage area. So, given (say) my iTunes library, it could build a tree in which I could look up /Rock/80s/Island and find every rock track from Island Records in the 80’s. The module is very simple and it lets you define how to find metadata.