Well, I’m back from EuroOSCON, which was a pile of fun. I spent most of my time on the ‘hallway track’, occasionally dropping in on interesting talks and keynotes, but mostly just hanging around with interesting people. I took a pile of photos and still have a couple of rolls of film left to develop now I’m back home. If you’re in Amsterdam and need a professional lab, allow me to recommend Kleurgamma.

Listen to this. You’ll not regret it. Whee! John Spiers and Jon Boden have finally made an album (Songs) that sounds as good as they do live. Not that Through and Through and Bellow are bad albums, it’s just that their playing has improved somewhat since they were recorded. On stage, Jon and John play with an almost telepathic level of communication. Songs captures that magic.

Just in case you didn’t know, BOFH stands for “Bastard Operator From Hell”, a character invented by Simon Travaglia and patron saint of cynical systems administrators everywhere. The original BOFH articles were a lightning rod, used by stressed admins as a way of dealing with idiot lusers. Even if you never acted like the BOFH, you could think “What’s your username? … clickety-click” and all would be well for a couple of moments.

A few of points, I wonder if we can make them join up. The BBC has been making noises about allowing license payers to download a big package of episodes and watch them at their leisure. A month or so ago, having previously said they had no intention of doing so, Elgato released an API for their EyeTV tuners. Yesterday, Apple announced a new, slimmer, iMac. Said new iMac comes with a shiny new Media Centre app called Front Row and a remote control.

My new combined laptop and camera bag arrived yesterday, a Crumpler December Quarter. It’s a little snug for my 17" Powerbook, but it’ll serve. The question now is, what cameras do I pack?

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.

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.

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.

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 just got word from O’Reilly, I’ve got press accreditation for European Open Source Conference in Amsterdam next month. So I’ll be interviewing various Perl 6 luminaries and hopefully summarizing any Perl 6 hackathon activities, doing photojournalistic stuff and generally enjoying the ‘hallway track’. I expect I’ll also try and have a word with the Ruby people as well. The last OSCON I went to was a couple of years ago in Portland Oregon.

I’m 38. How did that happen?

It looks like the iPod Shuffle I bought in a fit of exuberance and silliness not long after it was launched is finally proving its mettle. Because it’s so tiny, it happily fits in my waistcoat pocket and supplies me with interesting listening on a boring trip to the place where I’m temping at the moment. Once I get to work, it gets plugged into a USB socket and I’ve got a small programming environment with Ruby on Rails and a reasonably competent editor (it’s not Emacs, but Emacs is huge.

The trouble with version control systems is that, if you’re not careful, it’s almost as bad as having no version control at all. I’m currently juggling about 4 active branches of typo: the local development branch, the production branch and a couple of branches that isolate some of the local changes so I can make clean patches for the typo developers. So far, I’ve managed to upload about 5 patches, and I’m still not sure if the patches that are up on the Typo tracker are sane.

So, I’m temping now, just another admin worker bee for the council. I can’t say that I’ve found my vocation, but it’s certainly an eye opener.