use Perl

It's palindrome day today, so where will you all be at 20:02 20/02/2002?

This spooky arrangement of numbers won't happen again this century, and will be the second to last one ever using this calendar system. The next, and final one will be 21:12 21/12/2112.

It looks like Francois Perrad has got there first with the wbxml decoder. I noticed on yesterdays uploads to CPAN, WAP-SAXDriver-wbxml had appeared. I've had a quick go at downloading and evalutating it, but i can't get it to work out of the box, so I'll have to go back and look again when I have more time. It will be interesting to see how he was dealing with some of the things I was stumbling with, namely coping with the all the different unicodes the document could of been encoded with.

I breathe a sigh of relief as I have found out that I am no longer being made redundant.

All our websites are currently being redeveloped into Java, but there is still room for a budding Perl programmer to do all the little things that spring up from time to time. For example we do a lot of microsites for sponsors, and these are generally very specific. It would take quite a while to build these in Java, but as they are only running for a short period of time, our old friend Perl comes into its element. As it's so quick and easy to build a custom site using Perl, so it makes it the ideal language for these small little projects.

CPAN also helps a great deal. I've tried to rewrite some of the "in house" Perl modules I have written and use into Java. These can depend quite heavily on modules donated to CPAN by the Perl community. Now try finding a decent Java resource like CPAN... It's impossible. There are so many little libraries out there. Many of them are binary only or charge a fee for their use. Coming from a Perl background I find this incredibly frustrating. CPAN must be one of the greatest assets that Perl possesses. Never forget how lucky we are to have it!

Health and Safety people will love our office. It's becoming more like a Dilbert cartoon everyday.

We were all happily working away yesterday when one of the supports holding a TV just opposite where I sit snapped, dropping a TV almost onto the head of the person beneath it. Naturally she is a more than a little distressed to see it swinging by the mains power cord next to her. I've still not seen anyone check any of the other TVs and their stands to make sure they are safe.

When I got back from having my lunch an hour or two after this, I was told the building was being evacutated and all non essential staff had to leave. I was informed I couldn't go home early as I was essential. It's nice to be loved and wanted like this, but I can't help but think that the building was being evacuated for a good reason. It turns out that the mains water supply had burst and was pooring onto the electrical equipment in the basement. For obvious reasons the water had to be cut off, so those of us remaining were treated to bottled water for drinking and a trip to McDonalds if our bladders were full. I couldn't help but notice that it was the sales and marketing people who all vanished really quickly while the design, technical and editorial people were all deemed essential. I wonder why they are making me redundant at the end of the month if I am so essential? Maybe it's an attempt to get out of paying redundancy money by killing me?

I wonder what the rest of the week will bring???

Martin Thurn is a star, he's updated I18N::Charset already with the suggested patch I submitted. Now I have to get on with my module and use it.

Thanks Martin!

Work is progressing slowly due to the brilliant idea someone here had of having a boy band called 3SL (warning takes over your screen) play in the office and setup their equipment right behind us. We have been informed that they are the brothers of Lisa from Steps, so they must be good.

The reality is at the moment we have 3 rather dodgy young men mouthing along to their songs and bouncing around while we are all deafened. Fantastic!

Only another 30 minutes before they are due to start proper...

At least they are only playing a 15 minute set (probably all their songs now I think of it).

Shame their sister hasn't come along to support them.

Hurrah, to celebrate getting my new PAUSE id (it's RPRICE folks), I thought I'd start a journal.

The module I have been working on lately is one that can decode binary encoded XML (wbxml) back into a format that the XML parsers on CPAN can work with.

The current version I have works fine on ASCII systems, but the spec supports various other character sets. A quick search on CPAN led me to look at the I18N::Charset module. This basically does what I need internally, but doesn't expose an external method. So after a quick bit of hacking I've emailed off a patch to the author, Martin Thurn. Hopefully he'll add it in, else I'll have to look at another way of getting the information I need when I release it.