use Perl

Just in case you've been trying to use that old blog url, my blog's now at http://www.bofh.org.uk/ as the good lord intended.

MovableType is rather lovely isn't it?

I appear to have done the awful thing and got myself a new movable type weblog, at the truly atrocious URL of http://pc1.bofhadsl.ftech.co.uk:8080/. There's something about being in control that I like...

So, when a member of the family says, "You must stay at the Biltmore when you come to Miami!", and arranges a family rate for you, I suggest you take their advice.

I'm typing this from an executive suite in the aforementioned hotel and it's lovely. Switching to dorms for a couple of nights during YAPC is going to be something of a comedown let me tell you.

Oh yes, the journey was horrible. Last time I believe the BA website and troll off to terminal 4 to be told that the Miami flight is the only BA flight to leave from Terminal 3. And it's a bloody good job I brought the 'useless' tickets along (we'd booked on e-tickets, so the bits of paper that showed up the day before we left home seemed somewhat extraneous...).

I appear to have acquired a livejournal account, where I'm now blogging nontechnical stuff, posting photos and that kind of thing. In other news I've failed to have any talks accepted for OSCON, and I've ordered a 17" G4 Powerbook.

So, I just went through the .com rite of passage and got downsized, but I'm not down about it. I'm hoping to get some freelance writing gigs and maybe the odd consulting day (but I'm so not banking on that consulting thing) and, what with one thing and another we should be okay.

But, it means Gill and I actually have some time on our hands. And Gill has her newly discovered big sister in Michigan. And YAPC's in Boca in June. And TPC is in Portland in July. And...

ROAD TRIP!

The only thing that's planned so far are the start and end dates (and places), at least one of the intermediate destinations, and a plan to spend some time in the Appalacians in search of some real(ish) mountain music.

If anyone can offer a bed for a night or two for a couple of Brits doing Boca->Michigan->Portland with laptop, view camera and rental car I'd be really pleased to hear about it.

I appear to be the proud owner of a Palm Tungsten|T. I only went looking for an adaptor so I could get my IIIx working with the TiBook.

Meanwhile I'm having bad thoughts about using some of Pixie's magic, allied with overloading bless type tricks to implement full on garbage collection for arbitrary objects in Perl 5. But that's for another day I think.

Pixie, the Object persistence system I've been working on for the past few months just got picked for the Perl Advent Calendar. Which means I should really pester James, who is Pixie's CPAN owner into releasing the latest code which fixes some DBI locking issues and finally adds Garbage Collection.

I note too that one of the classes that Mark uses as an example of a class that will Just Work with Pixie is 'URI', which doesn't quite work out of the box -- it uses a blessed scalar ref as its representation, which Pixie assumes is unstorable as it stands -- blessed scalars are the commonest placeholder for objects that store their state elsewhere via XS so Pixie assumes they're unstorable. In the case of URI, which doesn't store any extra data anywhere, the fix is simple, just do sub URI::px_is_storable { 1 } somewhere and your problem is solved. I wonder if there's a case for keeping a list of 'known good' classes like URI so people don't have to jump through even that small hoop...

I'm reasonably confident that I have mail working on the TiBook now. But for a while there, I didn't. In fact, for a while there I had a mailing loop that was causing bounce messages. Luckily, I didn't actually lose the messages, so the upcoming summary should still be reasonably complete, but I'm worried that so many bounces may have got me auto unsubbed from some mailing lists...

Ho hum.

Anyway, if you've tried to send me mail and got a bounce, you probably won't need to resend, but it's probably a good idea to don belt and braces and resend it.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

And it's lovely. I bought a 500MHz TiBook from a friend for a stupidly small amount of money and it's just lovely.

Now to make the unix environment a bit more habitable. Does anyone know if I'll suffer by just dropping perl 5.8 in as /usr/bin/perl?

I am about to become the proud owner of a 500MHz TiBook. A friend is upgrading and offered me his old one at a knock down price.

Shiny OS X goodness here I come.