It must be a Monday
October 31, 2005
Gravity was fierce in Stanmore this morning; getting out of bed was a real chore. It was a grey and gloomy morning. The realisation, just before I arrived at Stanmore Station, that I had forgotten my Oyster card didn’t do much to improve matters. Adding insult to injury, however, was arriving at work and realising that I’d forgotten my company laptop at home. I was using it to check email while eating breakfast, but I still somehow managed to unplug and pack the power supply, keyboard and mouse, but not the laptop.
SL 0.3.3 released
October 29, 2005
I just got round to releasing a new version of sl. There is some new functionality, but otherwise no changes. From the Freshmeat announce:
Added the
sl_filter()function. With it you can extract all (or the first N)
nodes matching a certain criteria from any list. Also some minor rework of the
build process, abolishing recursive make.
Thanks to Richard Spindler for providing tests and the original implementation of this function.
Stricter spam filtering
October 27, 2005
I’ve just tightened the Anti-spam measures on my mailserver. I’ve been blocking mail at DATA time with Spamassassin for a long while, but I’ve now lowered the limit at which spam will be will denied. I’ve also increased the size of mails passed on to Spamassassin, so more spam should be caught because of this.
Songs that give me goosebumps
October 25, 2005
Some songs give me goosebumps when I listen to them. I can feel the skin on the back of my neck tighten, and a tingle spread up the back of my head and down my back. Here’s a list of such songs (in no particular order):
- The Heart Asks Pleasure First / The Sacrifice - Michael Nyman (from The Piano)
- Missing - Everything But the Girl
- Images - Bel Canto
- A Thousand Miles - Vanessa Carlton
- White Houses - Vanessa Carlton
- Half A Week Before The Winter - Vanessa Carlton
- Behind Blue Eyes - The Who
- I’m with you - Avril Lavigne
- Nobody’s Wife - Anouk
- High - Amber Filter (from a University of Westminster promotional CD called this cd is shite)
- Gonna Get Close To You - Dalbello (from Womanfoursays)
- All I Know - Anneli Drecker (from Tundra)
- The Dam at Otter Creek - Live (from Throwing Copper)
- Jackie - Sinead O’Connor (from The Lion and the Cobra)
- Troy - Sinead O’Connor (from The Lion and the Cobra)
- Jóga - Björk (from Homogenic)
- Play Dead - Björk (from Debut)
- Stinkfist - Tool (from Ænima)
- Schism - Tool (from Lateralus)
- Laterlaus - Tool l (from Lateralus)
- The Grudge - Tool (from Lateralus)
- The Patient - Tool (from Lateralus)
- The Hollow - A Perfect Circle (from Mer de Noms)
- The Noose - A Perfect Circle (from Thirteenth Step)
- Weak and Powerless - A Perfect Circle (from Thirteenth Step)
- Pet - A Perfect Circle (from Thirteenth Step)
I filed this post under “Reviews”, though it really isn’t. It’s just a list of songs that I really like.
Nordic Perl Workshop Photos
October 25, 2005
My photos from the Nordic Perl Workshop in Stockholm are now available.
What CPANPLUS Can Do for You
October 23, 2005
Jos Boumans’ talk What CPANPLUS Can Do for You revealed a very cool project: debian.pkgs.cpan.org. He also ranted quite convincingly about other projects.
Module::Build for Build, Test, Configuration and Deployment
October 23, 2005
Jonas Nielsen’s Module::Build talk touched on a few things I didn’t know about Module::Build. For example, I was not aware that it kept state in the _build directory and that tests could get access to this state. You can do that by doing (from Module::Build manpage):
# In t/colortest.t:
use Module::Build;
my $build = Module::Build‐>current;
my $color = $build‐>notes(’color’);
Learning Haskell
October 23, 2005
Autrijus’ Learning Haskell talk was very interesting. Haskell is a declarative programming language and smells a lot like Prolog; instead of telling the computer how to do something, you tell it what to do, and the computer figures out the rest. Haskell is a compiled, statically typed, dynamic language.
Nordic Perl Workshop
October 22, 2005
I’m at the Nordic Perl Workshop in Stockholm. I shall be giving a talk later today. I’ve also signed up for a couple of lightning talks tomorrow. I’ve yet to see if those are accepted.
Toothache finally subsiding
October 19, 2005
It is now over a month since I pulled a wisdom tooth, and the pains from the unfortunate complications are finally starting to subside. I took the last of my Co-Amoxiclav tablets yesterday, and last night I finally had a full night’s sleep without being woken up by pains in my jaw. I can see light at the end of the tunnel.
