Just A Summary

Welcome to the first of my self-hosted Perl 6 Summaries.

Loads of stuff's been happening this week. The perl6-internals crew have been making everything work properly with Parrot 0.3.0 and generally doing housekeeping prior to the next big push. The perl6-language people have been continuing their ongoing task of nailing bits of Perl 6 down, except for the bits where they're suggesting new features. And the perl6-compiler people seem to have been rather too busy discussing stuff on IRC and then implementing it to post much to the mailing list.

Look, I know that the US is a strange, God-ridden country, but surely God told me to do it is still the last refuge of the serial killer and not a sound basis for foreign policy.

Joss Whedon’s Firefly was a sf series that was never given time; episodes were jumbled by the network and the show got cancelled just when it was starting to build a serious fanbase. And that’s all she wrote.

Except, as fans of Buffy and Angel know, Joss Whedon doesn’t tell the same stories as everyone else. He managed to hold his cast together and found the funding to make Serenity. It isn’t quite the film of series they didn’t have time to make, but it comes close.

Capsule review: I liked it. I liked it a lot. You should see it.

For a slightly longer, and possibly spoilery review, kindly step behind this curtain…

Browsing through my logs, as you do, I’ve noticed that the essay I wrote over two years ago on The Fine Art of Complexity Management is still showing up in the top 10 hits. In fact, at the moment, it’s the second most popular non-feed, none front-page article on the site. What’s weird is that, most of the links to it that I can find on Google point to a no-longer accessible version of the site.

I was thinking about the power of the Just Story as I read this thread on Alex Bunardzic’s excellent lesscode blog. In the article, Alex takes 37signals to task for, essentially, choosing the wrong Just Story for Writeboard, their new, free, collaborative writing environment.

If you’ve hung out with extreme programmers, the Perl 6 crew, a large subsection of the Perl community, or, well, almost anyone who’s given it any thought, you’ll know that having a good test suite is essential.

But how good is good enough?

Not content with inflicting my reading of Tamlyn on you all, I’ve recorded a couple more songs

Always, always read a post aloud to yourself before you hit the publish button.

On Monday, we watched part of No Direction Home, Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan. The part that struck me most strongly was an anecdote about the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis. One interviewee walked into the Gaslight Coffee Shop and found Dylan playing. They ended up singing You’re Going to Miss Me When I’m Gone together. About half way through the song, he realised that there was a good chance that there’d be nobody around to miss him.

It occurred to me as I watched, and again last night, that I could think of no better way to spend my last night on Earth than singing and playing with friends. And last night I did exactly that.

Unless you’re interested in the internals of the Typo blogging engine and a possible rejigging of it, don’t bother reading the rest of this.

I’ve been unemployed (apart from the aborted teacher training course and the Perl 6 Summaries) for far too long now.

I’m starting to get used to it.

Today I interviewed with Sunderland University for a Systems Manager job. The money was decent, the work looked interesting, the interview was enjoyable.

I didn’t get the job. No real surprise there I think—they interviewed at least one other person who had more current experience with their specific hardware than me.

I have to confess that a small part of me is delighted. The rest of me is running around like a headless chicken and screaming “I need a job! I need a job! I need a job!” (No, I don’t know how a headless chicken is supposed to scream. If you know a better simile I’d be happy to give it a good home in this entry.)

If you’re in a position to offer a job to an experienced Perl programmer, fledgling Ruby programmer, part time summary writer, half-decent photographer and inveterate Java hater who doesn’t want to move back to London, thank you very much then I’d be delighted to hear from you at pdcawley@bofh.org.uk. Our operators are standing by.