If you’ve been following typo development on the trac you’ll have seen that I’ve been niggling away at the Typo sidebar system and I haven’t finished with it yet. The changes waiting in my current SVK repository are rather substantial so I’m going to give you a preview of them here. Why mess with sidebars? Well, in the past, developing a sidebar required you to sling a bunch of boilerplate code in with the code that actually did stuff, which violates the DRY principle in all sorts of horrible ways.

Some time ago, around the time of the Typo themes contest, someone, I think it may have been Scott Laird, wrote a nifty little sparklines textfilter. It’s a really cunning piece of code, the problem is that, to make it work, Scott had to make some dramatic changes to the way textfilters work which, in turn, meant we had to change the way we got at the htmlized versions of our content.

Rails 1.1 got released on Sunday. Lots of hosting services upgraded. Typo, both the ‘stable but old’ and the bleading edge versions, didn’t get on with Rails 1.1. For quite spectacular values of ’not getting on’. So, we ran around like headless chickens for a bit, gradually refining the incantations needed to get your existing typo installation working again - rake freeze_edge VERSION=3303 does the trick if you’re still having problems - and then Scott, Kevin and I spent the best part of a day nailing down the issues.

I’ve been working on Typo this weekend, mostly going through open tickets and deciding whether to apply patches. There’s plenty of potentially good patches in the queue, but too many of them give me The Fear. They don’t have tests! I’m the first to admit that I’ve added untested code to my projects (and I’ve been bitten by it too), but I’m more sanguine about that risk because, when it goes wrong, I can often rack my brains and pull back some memory of what my intent was.

I really didn’t expect to be reading Linda Smith’s Obituary in this morning’s Guardian. We were only talking a couple of days ago about how effortlessly funny she was. Now I’m going to have to hunt down all those old News Quiz recordings to remind myself how funny she was.

Remember the new camera I ordered back in December? It finally arrived last Friday, about a month after I expected it. It’s lovely. Nikon seem to have addressed almost all the things that were really starting to piss me off about my D100. Most importantly (for me) I’ve not yet run out of image buffer while taking real photos; something I used to do all the time when I was shooting with the old one.

2 days a week? Hah! Lots of working from home and generally trying to meet a deadline. Hopefully we’re getting there. This ‘working’ malarkey is awfully time consuming isn’t it?

So, I’m now working 2 days a week as a Ruby on Rails programmer for Bluefountain and, whilst it’s great fun to be back working again, it doesn’t half eat into my free time. I had intended to get a Perl 6 Summary written on Monday or Tuesday, but I spent most of Monday in bed with a stinking cold and most of Tuesday doing a bunch of House Stuff, and before I know it I’m off to Liverpool…

This week marks Matt Fowles’s first Summary posted on Just A Summary (here’s hoping it won’t be the last). We have been writing the Perl 6 Summary on alternate weeks since early last year when Piers returned from attempting to be a Maths teacher and had the time to write summaries again. So, here’s Matt’s take on the week, complete with props to a troll. Now we know why the summary was late.

Don’t you think he looks tired?

Another year, another summary. You might think I’m going to summarize the events of the whole year, but it turns out that chromatic’s already done it. So in the spirit of laziness, I’ll just point you at his year end summary. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8894 Sadly for us all, he doesn’t go into enough detail on the events of the last week for me to go straight into the coda. I shall have to talk to him about next year.

I’m back on the road after a six month ban for accumulating 12 points. Mum and Dad brought my Mini Cooper up with them when they came for our New Year/housewarming party (which went fabulously well, thanks for asking – there’s still not much to touch making music with friends) and, as the clock struck midnight, the fireworks boomed and the last note of Old lang syne made way to the first note of Happy Birthday, I became a legal driver again.

Oh, I know programming language advocacy is a bad thing. But sometimes a chap can’t resist. Chad Fowler commented on an article by Joel Spolsky in which Joel laments the passing of Scheme as a language of CS instruction in favour of Java or some dumbed down subset of it.

My D200 didn’t arrive on the 15th of December. Jacobs are blaming Nikon, Nikon are probably blaming Jacobs. To compound my error, I took the D100 down to the Mill for Christmas, but forgot to take the battery charger. So, no Christmas photos from me. Which is a good thing. The problem with taking a camera to parties is that the camera turns me from a participant into an observer. Sometimes, being an observer is great; other times, not so much.

I just had a moment of clarity. Martin Fowler had a few more things to say about the spat that grew out of his post about Humane Interfaces and I suddenly realised why java types favour a ‘small interfaces and static utility methods on helper classes’. It’s because of the way Java interfaces work.

[Edited to correct an accidental misrepresentation, and again to correct an attribution, and again to correct some code] Martin Fowler is talking about interfaces again and, as usual, he’s mostly talking sense. This time he’s talking about what he’s christened ‘fluent interfaces’ – essentially interfaces that do a good job of removing hoopage (James Duncan’s handy term for all the jumping through hoops you have to do in order to achieve something that ought to be a lot simpler) from the client side of the interface.

Welcome to another Perl 6 summary. This has been a week of shootouts, cleanups, relationships and cunning translations. Read on for the details (or, this being a summary, pointers to the details).

A friend just popped up on IRC and pointed me to one of Elliote Rusty Harold’s contributions to the humane interfaces debate that was sparked by Martin Fowler’s post on the subject. I didn’t recognize the URL and ended up rereading it. As I did so, I suddenly realised that yes, Harold does have a point, but that he’s missing another one that seems rather more important to me.

2 days the move took and we’ve not started opening boxes. They just kept coming; the kitchen appears to be completely full of boxes claiming to contain china. Maybe they mean the country because I’m sure we don’t have that much crockery.

Today is the first day of our move. We’re only going down the road, but we’ve got a flatload of stuff and a self-store unitload of stuff to amalgamate into one house load of stuff, which means it’s going to be a two day process. With any luck I’ll be back online and reading mail on Wednesday morning, but that’s subject to BT doing what they’re supposed to do. So who knows when I’ll be back on the air.