use Perl

As can be seen, I don't tend to do things regularly. I have a habit of not doing so. Doesn't help that I have trouble writing things like journals while my gf is in the room and she's in the room while I do most of my computing. An intriguing concept since other people, complete strangers, read this (well, I assume so - not sure why, boring stuff here).

She's on a brief holiday at the moment, so here's an update.

• From Hell (the book) is quite nice. Particularly Mary Kelly's murder. The presentation of all the material is quite good. You have a clear (and fairly quick) setup of why the murders are happening and who is doing them. You get an idea of how deranged the murderer is (no names mentioned here because I haven't seen the film and don't want to spoil someone who hasn't either). And a wonderful freemason conspiracy to boot. And Eddie's illustrations are very apposite.
• By downgrading one of my servers from bleadperl to 5.6.1 stable I've managed to get Mason working. Which is good in some respects and bad in others. I had a fair amount of code in hlfork that used 5.7.1 tricks (use constant \%hash; amongst others). So that's all been downgraded. The website's been fully changed from Embperl to Mason though. Which is a good thing, imho. Embperl is lovely, yes. I don't have a word to say against it. Mason just suits me more.
• While doing the above, I found a bug in Apache 1.3.22 (not present in 1.3.19). It relates to query_strings and multiviews and how query_strings get cleared if multiviews resolves a filename. Hopefully the Apache guys will get back to me at some point. In the meantime I'm faking how I like things by telling Apache that any file without a period in its name is a Mason file.
• My usual chat room thing is inaccessible from my usual host. So I'm on IRC more (openprojects.net; #vim, #mason, #perl, #apache).
• Since I know barely anything about IRC, I'm writing some doco for myself with docbook and jade. Given the initial structure of it so far, I could probably sell it to ORA if they ever want an IRC book and it suits their purposes. First, however, I have to write it and end up knowing IRC backwards, along with clients and servers and common libraries in assorted languages for accessing it (including POE::Component::IRC, my personal favourite). When it gets to a certain point (i.e. where it has some actual content), I'll stick it on my webpages.
• Tea is nice. I have about 15 different types of tea on my shelf for comparison. At present, I recommend Lapsang Souchong, Strawberry and Mango, and Yunnan teas. Recommendations for experimentation are gratefully accepted.
• Uni is almost over for the year. 2 exams to go. Algorithms and "Structure of English". I imagine only one of those will actually be of an interest.
• I'm being employed by the Hall to redo their behind-the-scenes computing facilities over the summer break, which is good. It gives me accommodation while I look for accommodation and employment. It will involve upgrading 3 servers to the latest doodads and cleaning up any bits and pieces that were set up "as needed" (i.e. not necessarily cleanly). A redesign of the internal site (and updating some of the mirroring stuff that's broken as other sites have updated themselves). And rewriting any Embperl to Mason (there's only one bit, but it's a reasonable size). Mason suits out purposes slightly better. I've already migrated the databases to PostgreSQL from MySQL. So I'll be able to rip out PHP and Embperl and cut down Apache's footprint a fair bit hopefully. The two web machines only have 128Mb of RAM so things need to be slim where possible.
• The other machine is our Jabber/dhcp/opennap/spoonnet server. 64Mb P120. Great stuff. It works, generally. It'll be upgraded just so it's on a comparable OS level as the other two, to make backups easier. (We should be able to turn it off and one of the other two will kick in as a replacement; ditto for either of the other two. Our problem happens when two machines go down.)
• Hmm. Is there a pod2docbook converter? Of course there is. I may investigate that. I'm not too fond of writing SGML, but don't mind POD (I'm yet to find a form of logical markup that I've enjoyed, but POD is relatively painless). (a few moments later) Not quite to my purposes. I need to be able to do <part> due to the desired structure of the book. Maybe I should write it in TeX or LaTeX =) At least with LaTeX the only thing that's really annoying is that \begin{x} must end with \end{x}, even for lengthy values of x
• In the meantime, I've undoubtedly forgotten something. I should maintain this more regularly. =)

So that's the status quo.