use Perl

CPAN module of right now: Finance::Bank::HSBC.

WWW::Mechanize is gorgeous, and got the bulk of the screen-scraping done in under fifty lines of code. Much kudos to Petdance (and Skud, as I hear she started things off) for writing it.

Life otherwise fine. I'm working on the dissertation for my degree, which is modifying a Java compiler (Jikes, written in C++) to target That Evil .NET Thing, using a C# assembler (System.Reflection.Emit). I figure I can't be called on not having enough buzzwords on my CV ever again.

package Class::Bar; sub method {2};
package Nomatch::Foo; sub method {3};
package main;
use base::Glob qw(Class::*);
print main->method(); # prints 2

See what going to see Damian talk does to a geek?

I've spent all of this week at work in full-time lectures from Damian. He only started to hurt my brane at the end of today; however, he gave his "Life, the Universe and Everything" talk to London.pm last night - I haven't felt such a feeling of interconnectedness since first reading _Goedel Escher Bach_. He used DFA::Cellular, Quantum::Superpositions and, um, Klingon, to solve Maxwell's Demon. Yow.

Sleeptime now. base::Glob on the CPAN for the above. It's java-style adding of IS-As through globs on packages in the symbol table.

So, here's the scene. You turn up to OSCON. You're talking to Larry and Damian about your latest module, Acme::Jam, they're agreeing and telling you how cool you are. You can't put a foot wrong. You bounce down to the front of the auditorium to begin your talk, go full-screen and..

..it's too late. They've seen the Powerpoint window. Larry sighs, and you can see Mark-Jason Dominus mouth "re-tard-o" at you from the back.

I gave a talk on MagicPoint to london.pm tonight. I think it went okay. Slides and source available here.

void:chris~ % perl -e 'use IO::Timestamp::STDERR; print STDERR "pony!\n"'
[Sat Jun 29 20:08:58 2002]: pony!

void:chris~ % perl -e 'use IO::Timestamp; tie *FD, 'IO::Timestamp'; print FD "pony!\n"'
[Sat Jun 29 20:08:40 2002]: pony!

Well, I'm sure someone somewhere will find it useful, especially with PerlModule inside Apache. If this is you, let me know and I'll do the PAUSE thing. Maybe. I'd rather have hidden the ties and had 'use IO::Timestamp *FD;', but there's perl brokenness when throwing tied FDs around and I don't think it can be done. Living with richardc has its advantages, in that he offered to get Devel::Caller to be able to resolve the filehandles and allow the tie to go through to them. People who understand opcode mangling plus-plus.

I start at MSDW on Monday. I've less than two days of non-suitdom left.

So, I've finished ex**s for the year. I've got a month of relaxing before I start working for The Man.

I saw Nelson Goerner and the BBC Philharmonic play the Rach 3 recently, which was wonderful. I'm going to miss having piano access (the University has a lovely grand piano in one of the lecture theatres) over the Summer.

What to do with the next month? Two things:

• Get better at chess - I'm out of practice. Hopefully FICS will get me back in shape. I'd also like to try and research some midgames in the Modern; I've been playing (and winning, thankfully) with it lately, and my books don't cover many of the lines, though I've more on the way. Amazon is my co-pilot.
• Hack teh Regexps@$!! - I'd also like to sit alone in a dark room for a few days and come out with named backreferences for regexps for the perl5 re engine, as Python has - viz. /(?P<word>\b\w+)\s+(?P=word)/ and repeated words; Robin talked about these recently and made a lot of sense.

Congrats, of course, to Jarkko et al for 5.8.0-RC1. In other news, this cartoon (entirely worksafe) made me giggle.

Plan for the next few months:[1]

• 30th May: Finish the year at UMIST, preferably without failing it.
• ~15th June: Move to London, move in with richardc and mstevens. Attend many london.pm meets, drink beer, be merry.
• 1st July: Start an internship with Morgan Stanley, as an Analyst in the I.T. dept. Write shiny Perl code.
• 1st September: Head back to UMIST for the start of my final year..

There.

[1]: Also serving as a 'who-Elthek-is', since I have not the tuits to write a bio at the moment. See http://printf.net/ if you care.

I posted this to london.pm yesterday:

chris@lexis:~$ perl -le'@a=($^O eq 'darwin')?qw(100453 81289 9159):qw
(23152 19246 2040);while(<>){chomp;push @b,$_ if grep {$.==$_}@a}push
@b,$^X;print ucfirst join(" ",@b[2,0,3,1]).","'</usr/share/dict/words

It seems to be even less portable than I'd thought; it works on OS X and all versions of Redhat and Mandrake that I can find, but.. nothing else.

Oops. Next up, ripping the text straight from perlfaq1.. ;-)