Tonight, still in a bad mood about my laptop’s poor state, I came home from class and put in Republic Commando, determined to relax. The Xbox kept giving me the damned “disk dirty” error, often found on the early models. Their DVD drives lose alignment easily. As I ejected and reinserted the disk, over and over, I got more and more frustrated and forceful.

My laptop is dead. I am not happy about it.

Something got me thinking about the gopher protocol last week, and I thought it would be fun to implement something like Net::Gopher::Server. It’s given me an excuse to read Network Programming with Perl, which has (so far) been quite good. I’ve been reading the gopher RFC and a lot of old USENET threads about Gopher+ and other extensions, too.

I’m not getting much reading done at all, lately, which is no good, since I really need to finish and return the library book I have out. It’s due on Monday! I hope I can get another renewal.

I just finished writing some short, so-so reviews on the ABE.pm page. Dave Cross mentioned that someone at O’Reilly felt that the UG program was underused, so I’m going to try to use it. I’ll see if I can’t get some of the other guys to express some opinions on the books, and see if there aren’t any nice books coming out for review soon. (This summer, at least, I can try to get a review copy of Simon’s new Advanced Perl Programming.)

	minicpan162.52s user 17.89s system 70% cpu 4:17.36  total
	minicpan229.35s user  1.74s system 62% cpu   50.064 total

Today was Jay’s last day here. He finished his Math::Calculator implementation on Thursday, so I gave him something simpler. I asked him to reimplement one of my first-ever Perl programs, an Esperanto dictionary. It just took some text file I’d found (or maybe generated) of Esperanto and English words. Every line is one Esperanto word and an English meaning for it, tab-delimited. I wrote a little interactive lookup tool with regexps and a decent interface in about 55 lines. Jay didn’t do too much worse, which was nice to see. He had a few fewer features, but it was fine.

Ok, I’ll seriously try to lay off the guinea pig news after this update! Snoozer and Wookie seem pretty happy. We took them out for a joint game of “sit on Rik’s chest,” and Wookie won. They both seem happy to let us reach into the cage and pet them, although they still run for the pipes when we walk into view.

Gloria and I had been worrying about how to find a playmate for Snoozer. Snoozer seemed pretty despondent. She just hung out in her pipe and if she came out at all it was while we weren’t looking.

The CPAN mirror on my laptop now has an index that starts like this:

	File:       02packages.details.txt
	Description:Package names found in directory $CPAN/authors/id/
	Columns:    package name, version, path
	Intended-For: Automated fetch routines, namespace documentation.
	Written-By: CPAN::Mini
	Line-Count: 28162
	Last-Updated: Tue Mar8 03:08:06 2005