The Quality Without A Name is a phrase coined by Christopher Alexander in The Timeless Way of Building to describe the feeling of satisfaction and contentment engendered by good building. He later went on to call it ’life’, but a friend of mine described it as ‘The Tao of Building’, which seems rather appropriate too. The Timeless Way of Building is a fantastic, if somewhat overwritten book, introducing Alexander’s themes and ideas about how modern architects and builders can recapture the qualities inherent in great (usually old) buildings.

Somewhat to my own surprise, I’m at YAPC::Europe in Paris. I pitched up to the early birds session and offered a talk if they’d had any people pull out and it turned out that they had – Ronan Oger was due to give a half day tutorial on SVG-based GUIs on the first afternoon of the conference, but he wasn’t going to make it in time, so the organizers swapped his talk with Dave Cross’s talk on Tieing and Overloading Objects in Perl.

Bah! The only trouble with being in full control of a website is that you’ve got nobody to blame when you screw up.

I was talking to Gavin Estey on iChat about the problems inherent in interviewing a new programmer. The cost of screwing up can be enormous. How do you find out whether the candidate is for real? How do you do it quickly? Well, those are sticky questions, and there’s a discussion of Perl certification and standards coming up once I’ve marshalled my thoughts properly. Anyway, Gavin showed me one of the quiz questions they used in his organization:

A good time was had by all This was my first OSCON, I’ve usually been unable to make it over, due either to lack of time, finances, or both. This time there was a lack of finances and plenty of time, so we threw caution to the wind and headed off to sunny Portland. And boy, was it sunny—I thought the Pacific Northwest was supposed to be rainy. PONIE announced The conference proper opened with Larry’s State of the Onion speech where he announced Fotango’s sponsorship of PONIE, Arthur Bergman’s attempt to port Perl 5’s underlying data structures to Parrot.