Lonely Lion

After two weeks of other things getting in the way, I attended TechCoffee this morning. I didn’t stick to my plan to work on Maturin though, instead I worked on some new stuff for Tastebud. We’ve been including Amazon links in our articles when appropriate, so I started to work on a shop for the site. Nothing really fancy, just a collection of links. I wanted to use the new Amazon aStore, but the iframe isn’t cooperating with my site layout, so I think I’m going to whip up a quick database backend to collect Amazon links. The nice thing about Django is, I don’t feel any psychic weight from saying, “this really needs some database backing.”

I just checked in my work from this morning’s TechCoffee. I created a very minimal set of migration scripts for Captains, Ships, Locations, and added a bit to the migration to build 10k locations in a 100 x 100 grid. I started to adapt the user management recipe from Rails Recipes for logins, and then ran out of time. All in all, a productive first TC.

I also came up with a cool idea for building maps in the game. It’s based on the simple ASCII maps from the game Austerlitz. Something like:

**............**
***.........***
**...........p**

Could be parsed up and converted to a series of locations where the asterix’s are land, the dots are sea and the p’s are ports. It might be an easy way to build fancy maps quickly. Something like .[50]. could be parsed as “50 sea locations”.

http://techcoffee.infogami.com/Season_2

Switching from Monday’s to Friday’s, and bumping it up to 7am instead of 6am. Both are good things in my book. I’m looking forward to it. Go Tech Coffee!

The wheels are churning on the next round of TechCoffee. I’m not sure when, or where, but I have decided on a project to work on. Actually, sort of projects.

I set both of them up via Google Code. The first is a straight-up clone of Tradewars 2021 from the old BBS days, set in O’Brien’s world of fighting ships. I’m not sure I’ve said this before, but I love those O’Brien books. A ton. I’m on book 18, only three more to read. Kind of sad. Regardless, I used to love Tradewars, got briefly into Blacknova Traders (a PHP clone of the Tradewars game) and decided it would be a fun diversion for a bit.

The second project is writing an RSVP system / user group management “thingee” for ChiPy. We use a wiki currently, which is a great way to decentralize things, which I’m all for. For RSVP stuff, it would be nice to have a management interface. I put out a request on the ChiPy list to see if other folks would be interested. As I was writing this, a response came in to my request. I totally forgot there was an earlier effort along these lines. We’ll probably just finish that one up.

Anyway, I have some stuff to work on for TechCoffee that should be fun.

For this season’s last TechCoffee, I spent some more time toying with Perl6. I won’t be able to check the code in until tonight, but thought I’d summarize. There were more side conversations today than in the past, which was fun, but hit me in the productivity department.

I downshifted a bit, kicked in the turbo boosters, and quit namby pambing around with the little crap. I went straight for the junk and read up on subroutine argument passing, something that’s been lacking in Perl since 199*.

So long sub this { my $arg = shift; }, hello sub this ($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) {}.

In addition to purely positional arguments, you can also pass named arguments sub named (:$cats, :$dogs) {}, or lists sub lister(*@listofargs) {} and hashes sub hasher(*%hashofargs) {}

I’m 30!

So, expect a lot more mature blogging now, instead of all this hot open source stuff I’ve been tossing out at you. Now that I’m an old man, I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing Java or C#, kicking back with my enterprise friends, chatting about the power of waterfall.

So long 20’s, I barely knew you.

Went to my second TechCoffee this morning. I sort of completed Synopses 2. I sped through the last couple of pages. I want to jump into other stuff. Along the way, I spent some time moving some of the script I wrote last time into a Test.pm style test suite. It makes more sense to try and write this stuff as tests, at least it seems to right this minute. I spent some time hacking around with Test.pm. I tried to add a &eval_not_ok test function, but ended up breaking it. I also played around with the YAML compilation of P6 modules with PUGS, but didn’t have much luck. I think I used the wrong backend. I’m not totally firing on all cylinders this morning.

I went to my first TechCoffee this morning. I want to use that valuable, early morning, low stress, bleary eyed time to explore Perl 6. I’m working through the synopses one at a time, and keeping notes as I go. The notes are executable. I’m checking them into my public repository here http://lonelylion.com/mcavoy_public/perl6_play/

They’re pretty train of thought, so they’re probably confusing. I tried to backtrack occasionally to write a wee bit more for people that aren’t me. I may end up jumping around the synopses a bit, as I’m not entirely sure the order is important.

I worked through the first ten pages of synopses 2 today. That’s about 1/3rd of the way through. Notes are here. It’s jumping around to a lot of concepts (like OO) that haven’t been introduced yet, which leads me to believe the synopses aren’t meant to be read in order, the numbering is just a tie back to the apocalypses and exegesis.

At this velocity, I should be done with all the synopses in July 2007. Egads. I won’t be able to make TechCoffee every week. I’m shooting for alternating Mondays. So I should be able to cover a synopses a month. I’ll probably poke around on the train too, so July 2007 might be a bit of exageration. I don’t anticipate being through these things anytime soon though. I want to take my time. This is an interesting project for me, I’m used to living in the “Learning [insert language]” book from O’Reilly tier of learning. This is a big change.