use Perl

Revision Control
Goodness, sponsoring a conference is an awful lot of work. There's brochures to print, presentation folders to make, advertisements to prepare to particular dimensons, speaking opportunities, and an awful lot of text to write for everything. On top of that add the regular conference things like your own presentations, and stir in a number of clients trying to spend their budgets before the end of the year, and you end up with a particularly busy week. There's a good chance that something can be overlooked.

As developers and writers we all know the golden rule of working together, or even just singularly. Revision control, revision control, revision control; and in my case a little coffee on the side. However during this hectic week of presentations, a mistake was made. I broke the golden rule. When submitting one of our advertisements, I submitted the wrong one.

Sure, there was a 30-minute deadline to get the advertisement to the relevant people, and sure there was a conversion process in there to get it into the preferred format, and yes this was at the end of the day with other deadlines looming. It's the perfect situation for a mistake to be made, and that's why the golden rule of revision control is all the more important.

In this particular case, I didn't know that the document had been filed into CVS. I knew that it should have been. Jacinta knew that too, and indeed had placed it into CVS into the most obvious location, and updated it to the revised version that we actually wanted to use. Everything was there, I just didn't bother to type cvs update to find out.

Remember this kids -- revision control is important. Don't snigger when Grandpa uses subversion to record his shopping list, you will too someday. Why, back in my day we didn't even have subversion...

As it was, the old document we submitted was perfectly good, it just wasn't as good as the newer version.

Wikipedia and chickens
I've discovered that wikipedia, while having a very large list of chicken breeds, has very little information on most, and no good index on which breeds are actually documented. As such, I spent a little time putting toegether a chicken breeds category, showing the breeds that contain at least some level of documentation. Unfortunately, there's not very many at all.