Today has been humbling. I had made some changes to the Typo database schema with the goal of making the code easier to follow and because, dammit, it’s the Right Thing to do. First, I updated the published flag, and everything went well. Then, I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and update allow_pings and allow_comments at once. So, I copied the migration and simply called the method that I’d written to change a column type to boolean a couple of times in one migration.

Sometimes you have to laugh. Or cry, I suppose. Martin Fowler has somehow sparked off a wide ranging argument that appears to be heading rapidly Hitlerwards. And all he did was write about the tension between Humane and Minimal interfaces and then confess that he tended to the humane side.

Have you ever bought hardware from Apple? Lovely wasn’t it? I don’t mean the kit was necessarily lovely – Apple have build their fair share of clunkers in the past. I’m talking about the experience of getting your iPod, PowerBook, PowerMac or whatever out of its box for the first time. It’s obvious that Apple have spent a good deal of time on making that out of box experience as satisfying as possible.

I heard a rumour on the London.pm mailing list week. Apparently the Perl 6 Summaries are no longer being ublished. As I’m sure you can imagine, it came as something of a surprise to me. This week has been all about Parrot, Leo’s got the new lexical scheme, calling conventions and exception handlers working and made Parrot stricter about arguments. The end of the week saw the release of ‘Luthor’, version 0.

Welcome one and all. Things are getting switched over. There’s been a few teething troubles with getting fcgi working (it was fine when I tested it, of course) so we’ve fallen back to the old, slow CGI version so everthing will be a little slow until the caches fill. [later: Hands up if you hate timezones? For a short while there this article showed up as the second most recent on the homepage.

I’m just about to freeze the database here and turn off comments until DNS changes propagate and Just A Summary returns shiny and new on its new host at site5. Hopefully the changes will have propagated before I have to turn the ADSL off here and move everything a quarter of a mile down the road to our new home, but one never knows ones bad luck. Here’s hoping it won’t take too long.

As I write, Typo Themes Contest is in that nervous interlude that comes between the last day for entries and the judges’ announcement of fabulous prizes (I haven’t totted up the value of the prize fund, but there’s a Powerbook and an iBook for first and second place) for the winners. So, if you’re one of the entrants busily chewing your fingernails down to the quick as you anxiously await the news of your shiny new powerbook, I have a request:

I wonder if the ground state of the photographer is ‘dissatisfied’. When I bought a D100 two years ago I loved it. But it didn’t take long for disenchantment to set in; the frame buffer was too small, I couldn’t use old (and wonderful) manual focus lenses on it, digital noise was horrid at high speeds, white balance was dodgy and it didn’t feel as good in the hand as my F100.

This evening, I acquired a commit bit for the Typo project. I’ve been chucking the occasional big patch and ideas at Scott Laird, the most active of the current maintainers, but he’s been busy doing all sorts of stuff, and he just started working at Google (go Scott!) so he doesn’t have quite as much copious free time as before. So, this evening I asked for, and received, my very own commit bit.

One of the joys of writing applications using Ruby on Rails is the way the framework is constantly evolving better ways of doing stuff. It’s one of the dangers too. Each release of Rails brings new and groovy features to the table, so it’s nice to stay close to the edge. However, when you do that, a change in the framework can bring your whole app crashing down because a key assumption you made turns out not to be true any more.

My brother’s company, Longstone Tyres, sells classic and vintage tyres for old cars. Or, as Dougal describes it “Specialist rubber equipment for the discerning gentleman”. This month they’ve finally started to use something like that slogan in their press advertising. Below the fold is a picture of their latest advert:

I find myself thinking of the old joke about Sheepshagger John: A man goes into a pub in a small town and, for whatever reason, gets introduced to the clientele. There’s Farmer Jack, Barman Jim, Maurice “Dancer” and Sheepshagger John. After a few pints, the visitor’s curiosity gets the better of him and he asks John what’s with the nickname. “See this pub?” asks John, “I built it, but they don’t call me Pubbuilder John?

Photos by Piers Cawley. CC Licenced, though I bet he didn’t think I was going to do this with them. – Photo Credit at Love Perl Too right I didn’t expect anyone to do that with them. I’m awfully flattered though. I look forward to St. Valentine’s day. It’s a shame there’s no Perl Advent Calendar this year though.

Another week passes. Another summary is written. Another sentence is written in the passive voice.

Welcome to another fortnight’s worth of summary. We’ll get back to a weekly schedule one of these fine days, you see if we don’t.

Further to my post about Women in Open Source, I recommend you all go and read ampersand’s Male Privilege Checklist

Hmm… Thursday afternoon and I’ve only just started writing the summary… What happened to professionalism? What happened to rigid, albeit self-imposed deadlines? Um… I’ve had a cold. The cats ate my homework.

On the last day of EuroOSCON there was a panel discussing why there were so few women in the open source community. It turns out that the predictable claim that “It’s the same throughout the industry, it’s not an Open Source only problem!” doesn’t really stand up. Danese Cooper pointed to a study that found that 12% of all developers were women, but only 2% of Open Source developers are.

At EuroOSCON, Cory Doctorow talked about plans for a European Broadcast Flag – a ‘rights management’ system which is to be built into future digiboxes. He talked about the implications of Digital Rights Management for the consumer (there are no good implications). What he didn’t discuss were its implications for media makers.

O’Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest believes that we’ve trained ourselves to accept disappointment from web applications. He maintains that Web 2.0 is about apps that meet our real expectations.