Older blog entries for pjf (starting at number 24)

Advogato
Still an observer, despite the Journeyer status before. I guess I'll have to make new friends and influence people.

Finance::Quote
Had a slew of mail regarding Finance::Quote recently, including another potential developer. Brent has joined the project at SourceForge and looks like he'll stick with us for a while. Our second developer is interested in doing an OO-rewrite (which I'd also like to see), although he has a few hesitations. Hopefully he'll like us enough to join

Money transfers
Had a very long and problematic time getting my money transfer. Every overseas traveller this side of Adelaide seemed to be at the Western Union office, and I had to wait a considerable time in the queue. When I finally got served I had to prove who I was. I don't drive, I don't have a passport, and they didn't seem interested in any other form of ID. After much searching I found my old expired learner's permit which they accepted.

In the future I might accept payment in other forms, like Perl Journal subscriptions or books.

Holidays!
Holidays! Holidays! Hooray! Hooray! I have no work until Thursday. A whole week off. Yay!

There's no money in...
Considering all the areas which "there's no money in", I seem to be doing particularly well from them all. I work for a company which supplies education-targetted services (and there's no money in education), and very recently I've been offered the filthy lucre for hacking and extending Finance::Quote (and there's no money in open source).

Skirmish
Benni and Dan have organised a Skirmish (paint-ball) game next week. Everyone I've spoken to who's played it before has said that it's the best fun you'll ever have, and you'll get more bruises than you've ever had too. It should be interesting.

Advogato
Like ajv, I've been dumped back to Observer status again. I'm getting a little used to this funny certification thing now -- it seems to come in waves.

Rockclimbing
Went with Ian, Benni and Dan (not Dan from work) to The Mill. The people were very nice, some of the walls were fun, but I'll admit that Hardrock remains my favourite. Still, The Mill is an easy bike-ride from where I live (as is VicRanges), whereas Hardrock is yonks away.

In what appears to be a common occurance, I met up with some old people I knew while Rockclimbing and got talking. One of them happened to do a study of one of Schoolsnet's products as part of his thesis, and has promised to pass his research on to me. I look forward to reading it.

Work
It was a weekend, but nobody seems to have told Scotty that. I received two phone-calls from Scott about some data conversion scripts I had written.

Finance::Quote
The ASX seems to have broken their on-line share prices, which explains why some of my regression tests were failing. I've been doing a lot of thinking about the module, but not a lot of coding. The code needs more ways to signal that something has gone wrong, and what that wrongness is.

Played a little with Perl/Tk, but not seriously. I'd like to have a nice stock-ticker, but I don't want to write it myself. The tickers which I've played with didn't support Australian stocks very well.

Catch-up
This is mainly a catch-up diary. I've been very busy recently and haven't had much chance to write in my diary as much as I'd like.

Work
Just call me bug-boy. If it's a bug, then give it to me. I don't have enough of them already. If it's a hard-to-reproduce bug, then that's even better.

In seriousness it looks like Dancer and myself have a hold on bug #2. This is a very good thing. Clemo has offered to name his firstborn children after us.

Dan and Tiff are leaving today to get married. I wish them all the very best. I'm glad they're getting a break from work at last.

Rock-climbing
Clemo, Ian and Sam went rockclimbing with me last night. Lots of fun, it's so nice to be back on the walls again. I was very pleased with some the climbs I achieved, and Sam showed himself to be a natural climber starting with some of the walls it took me weeks to work up to.

We should get another Schoolsnet crowd at rockclimbing next week, too. Should be good.

Dinner
Had dinner with an old friend and watched lots of cute anime. Brought back memories of the good ol' days when I was a poor student and couldn't afford a life.

Games
Ian's given me HomeWorld to play. It's a very pretty game, although I've never been good at real-time strategy games. I more prefer the hours of thought and consideration that turn-based games afford. In that vein, I've been thinking of starting a Diplomacy game here at work, depending upon how interested people are.

Finance::Quote/GnuCash
A question came up on the GnuCash mailing list asking how difficult it would be to convert stocks listed on foreign exchanges into local currency when the stock-prices are updated. I thought it was an excellent question and an issue well worth addressing.

After a bit of hacking, I managed to clobber out a very rough (but working) currency converter for Finance::Quote. It's going to be changed to make it nicer, but I managed to write a trivial application which can convert between two currencies on the command-line.

Did lots of tidy-up work on Finance::Quote. Added testing scripts and fixed the documentation and made a few code optimisations. I'll probably release a new version shortly, with currency-conversion support due for the version after that.

The joy of coding has kept me up past midnight. I must be getting to sleep.

Work
The bug is still dead. Testing says it's dead. Everybody's happy.

Now that I've fixed a problem (with Dancer's help) on this particular product, I've now been forwarded the other bugs with it. I don't want the other bugs. I don't know the code. I have other bugs outstanding in my main line of work. I've even gained a new nickname based upon a typo of the product's name -- I'm now being called 'Lover Boy'.

People with competing bugs are trying to get me off the project. I hope they succeed.

Work - The bug is dead. Hurrah! Hurrah!
The final bug in a project that had been repeatedly coming back to bite me has died at last. The bug has been causing many people (including myself) grief for many months -- and would only show itself at the most inappropriate times. I think the bug is gone for good, and hopefully exhaustive testing should back me up there.

Finance::Quote
Cooper Vertz submitted a patch to extend the Yahoo! quote facilities somewhat. Patches always make me happy, and I've integrated Cooper's change into the CVS source.

Ben's also been bugging me to spiff-up one of my example programs so he can easily see how his share portfolio is going. It was an easy request that I made while waiting for the world's slowest toaster, one of the quality pieces of kitchen equipment we have here at work.

Finance::Quote
Looks like my playing with PAUSE this morning worked. Finance::Quote is now available on CPAN.
Advogato
Well, I've gone from Apprentice, down to Observer, and now I'm up to Journeyer. At least I can post comments now, and that makes me happy. Thanks to everyone who's been taking the time to certify me.

Rockclimbing
Went rockclimbing today with Ian, Ben and Daniel. It's good to be well enough to go climbing again, as I haven't been for some time. I climbed a few new walls until my tummy started hurting whenever I used upper-body strength. I hope this isn't the first sign of a herina (spel?).

Sofie (Ian's SO) has had her operation and is now allowed to drink alochol again. She's planning on getting pished next week. It should be fun. She has a little jar of what the doctors pulled from her when she was under the knife. The results look like little green teeth. I'm sure this will be a great conversation piece for her in the years to come.

We had mexican afterwards (the traditional food of rockclimbers everywhere), and I brought some back for Jacinta, who's caught my cold. She seems a lot better now, although I worry that she's read too many Larry Wall quotes for her own good.

Work
None, because it's been a weekend. However, my work account does get my e-mail, and I don't seem to have been getting many recently in my mailbox. I have been getting errors from fetchmail about POP3 failing. I'm not happy. My outgoing e-mail seems to be fine.

Finance::Quote/GnuCash
Brent's patch for Finance::Quote has found it's way into GnuCash. I should probably e-mail him and let him know.

Mojotoad has also released a perl module to fetch historical quotes and looks like he's thinking of adding it to GnuCash. This is a Good Thing.

Played with PAUSE (Perl Author's Upload Server) a little, although I'm still not used to it yet. I'm sure I'll manuver Finance::Quote onto CPAN soon. :)

Finance::Quote
Brent's TIAA-CREF patches have been merged into the Finance::Quote source and a new version released. It can be found on the Finance::Quote webpage as version 0.17.

I'll integrate the changes into GnuCash shortly.

Advogato
Advogato's trust metric seems a little weird. Previously I was certified as an Apprentice. Now more people have certified me (all at either Apprentice or Journeyer) but my rating has dropped down to Observer.

I guess I'm going to have to read the document on trust metrics to figure out why a single Certification from Dancer can make me an apprentice, but 5 Journeyer/Apprentice certifications can drop me back to Observer... It all seems very bizzare.

15 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!