If you’ve eaten with me, you might be aware that I’m not a big one for chili heat. I don’t mind it, but you won’t find me chopping up the Scotch Bonnets for a mole or ladling out the chili oil in a Chinese restaurant.

I just got mail to let me know that my copies of Perl Best Practices and Perl Testing: A Developer’s Notebook are in the post. Yay!

Best Practices runs to 500+ pages, so there’s unlikely to be a review up here really quickly, but I just thought I’d give you a heads up. If it’s anywhere near as good as Damian’s last book[1] it’ll be essential.

I can’t remember when Adam Turoff pointed me at Ruby On Rails, but I’m still grateful. Blame Adam for the fact that this weblog is no longer running on Movable Type, but on Typo. My initial plan was to roll my own blogging software on top of Rails, but by the time I got my act together it just made sense to grab an existing package and extend it as required.

Ooh look. Google ads. The mercenary git. Next thing you know he’ll be doctoring the RSS feeds so they don’t carry whole articles.

So, I just read the latest phishing attempt. Someone purporting to be Paypal tells me that someone else has sent me £12. Which would be lovely, if true.

Remind me. How long has Nina Simone been dead?

Long enough for the advertisers to start dancing on her grave apparently. At the moment there’s a Muller Lite advert on heavy rotation that uses I Aint Got No - I Got Life. Except, as is the common operating practice of advertisers, they’ve taken a part of the song and farmed it out for a cover version with - god help us - whistling, and all the ‘crunchiness’ removed.

After much poring over The Truck Wheels pdf ¹ and the Pickaxe book, accompanied by a certain amount of waving of dead chickens, I’m pleased to direct your attention to the sidebar where you will find a selection of relevant links to Amazon. If your interest is piqued, maybe you’d like to toddle over there and spend your hard earned cash on these and other fine books, enabling me to live in the lap of luxury on kickbacks from everyone’s favourite book pimp.

So, in my quest to get Amazon links working I’ve been spending time hanging out on the #rubyonrails irc channel asking dumb questions and generally liking the place, when someone asked “Are you the famous Perl Programmer, Piers Cawley?”

So, typo, the tool this runs on is undergoing some major (and good) changes. The only catch is, my deployment script consists of ‘doing it by hand and forgetting stuff’, which isn’t ideal.

It’s two in the morning, I can’t sleep and someone’s attempting to commit an outrage upon my ears. According to the BBC’s website, I have been watching

Myth and Music

Open University. Composer Judith Weir explains why she wrote a series of works based on Scottish folktales about people who have disappeared mysteriously.

Which sounds like it might be interesting. And it is interesting — people slow down to look at traffic accidents don’t they?

I remember, from about the age of 9, setting out from our tall Georgian terraced house with the green door and the brass lion knocker to walk the mile or so to choir practice. Through the park in the middle of the square, past the Gaumont Cinema (the last of its chain to bear the name – it became the Odeon only when the headed paper ran out) and on down Hall Gate past Barker & Wigfall with its bewildering window display of bicycles, televisions and furniture. Past the godawful concrete arcade that still contained the Pilgrim Bookshop, Doncaster’s only specialist bookshop. Past the Odeon arcade and right into Silver Street passing the High Class Butchers and Dad’s tailor, then through Bowers Fold, the little pedestrianized snicket that leads through to the market place with a little toy shop in the middle.

There were many things I didn’t like about working in London: the long commute in, the bloody tube, the long commute home, the expense…

But then there are the things I miss. Here’s a small example.

Okay, you can all tell me how wrong I am, but didn’t anyone else feel the tiniest sense of relief that finally the other shoe had dropped on Thursday. I feel like we’ve been waiting for this to happen ever since 9/11.

Welcome to my shiny new weblog engine. I’ve ditched Movable Type and switched over to Typo, but I’ve also put stuff in place to make sure that all the old URLs will work. Which is nice.

Coo… it’s been a long time since I said anything here hasn’t it? The plan was I was going to write myself a weblog engine as a way of learning Ruby on Rails and have it up in no time flat. Then I got sidetracked by something, I can’t remember what. Then I started getting active on Flickr and… well. I rather neglected this place.