use Perl

Well I didn't get a chance to read some of PP like I had hoped over the weekend. I usually read right before going to bed, but I've found out that if I read non-fiction I can't sleep as I lie there and ponder what I've just read. I'll have to make some time earlier in the night to get through the book. Probably right after I get home from work, because that's a good time to pause for the day.

I did complete most of the other tasks I had set for myself over the weekend. Subversion, Bugzilla and a "coming soon" web page are all in place. I setup the repository and even checked in a skeleton of the project code. Soon, I'll be able to flesh out the code and the project will be underway.

This morning at the office I found one small problem with Subversion. I'm able to use the repository from my home network, but I keep getting a password prompt when I try from my work system. I have a couple ideas of what the problem might be, which are:

• I have SSH working from work to hollyking.org and use it to read my email throughout the day. One problem might be that at work the user account is 'bleber' while at home it's 'brendan.' With SSH I just specify brendan@hollyking.org and it works, but with svn using the --username switch didn't help. I'll have to experiment a bit to see if the username is the problem.
• The other, more likely, possibility is that the port that 'svn checkout svn+ssh...' is blocked at the corporate firewall.

I wish that I was receiving some kind of error message from Subversion. Just asking for a password doesn't give me any idea where things might be breaking down. I guess that's where mailing list archives, IRC and turning up the verbosity settings help.

There is some Perl related content coming, I promise. I just have to get the pre-requisites out of the way. ;)

I sure haven't documented much of a journey here, have I? Let's just say I've been busy. Work has been really busy. I got married. (Thanks, Ovid!) I found out I'm going to be a father.

Last month I had an epiphany that showed me how far I had fallen from my goals. I've spent quite a bit of time examining how I spend my time and where changes are necessary. I'm going to cut out some of the time I spend gaming (but WoW is so shiny!) and use the time to read and work on a project to scratch a personal itch.

For reading my stack is going to start out with:

1. The Pragmatic Programmer
2. Perl for System Administration
3. Automating UNIX and Linux Administration

To get my project rolling I need to finish a few tasks, which are:

1. Setup Subversion on hollyking.org
2. Setup Bugzilla on hollyking.org
3. Setup a project page on hollyking.org
4. Examine Net::Daemon, Proc::Daemon & other CPAN modules to extract information about writing daemons in Perl.

I'm sure more books and tasks will come up, but this is a good list to get started.