As has been the tradition for several years now, on Yom Kippur I've gone over my weblogs' entries since last Yom Kippur and today I'll write a summary of them.

Well, I've continued to write open-source code this year, mainly CPAN modules, but also this kernel patch. I also isolated and reported a few bugs and prepared some source RPMs. A lot of my work was on Test-Run, which I'm no longer sure is the right approach, and that perhaps I'll need to work on direct enhancements for TAP::Parser and TAP::Harness instead.

I've started publishing a series of Vim tips on my blog, and span off a technical blog to concentrate the Technical articles there.

I worked in one job this year, starting in January, and ending in March, when I got fired. Getting fired from there has proved to be the worst event of the year for me, but I got over it eventually. Close to that were some discussions on use.perl.org and on Perl mailing lists that I started.

This year I worked a lot on the Perl XML::RSS module and also successfully completed a Perl Foundation grant for cleaning it up. I also received another grant for working on a Perl-based MediaWiki parser, but I've seem to have little motivation to work on it since I've received it (part of my general lethargy lately), and it seems to me to be more difficult to get right than I first expected it to be, and less interesting. I still have some working code in the repository, but I don't feel very motivated to work on it.

I noticed that the amount of blogging, and activity in general has considerably slowed down since March. I hope to regain my interest in blogging and FOSS hacking, but I don't want to feel too bad about being somewhat lethargic now.

In any case, that's it for this summary. Happy Sukkoth, everyone, and enjoy the new Jewish Year.

So yesterday's evening and today, I went over the past year entries (since last Yom Kippur) of my blogs and trying to present some conclusions.

Well this year, I wrote one relatively large patch for the GIMP but it wasn't accepted yet because of some issues the developers had with its philosophy. I also made many releases to CPAN, contributed several patches to other people's CPAN modules, and worked on Latemp, Website Meta Language itself, and other projects of mine. Except for all that, there was the usual slew of bugs I found and reported (sometimes with a testcase or fix). All in all, a productive year. </div>

This year, I worked on several new essays and articles, which are placed or linked on my homesite.

I bought several music CDs and liked most tracks out of all of them. I've also spent a lot of time (too much) talking on the IRC, and some of the conversation excerpts were funny enough to end up as fortune cookies.

On the Wiki-front, I spent some time populating the English wikiquote's "Hebraic Proverbs" page and also helped translate the English Wikipedia entries about Perl and BASIC to Hebrew. I also contributed to other smaller wikis.

On the negative side, I did get involve in several flamatory discussions. One of them involved the licensing of Test::Run, which some people claimed was "incompatible" with Perl. However, I believe their effect was considerably not as bad as the ones in the previous years.

On the employment front, I quit a job this year, and joined another one only to quit later because I'm trying to become a freelancer. I already gave several private lessons in Perl and I hope there will be other employment prospects.

This year, I finally almost completely abandoned the joe editor. Now it's vim all the way down for me, even in console.

This year, I finally learned XSLT, and started learning Smalltalk (which I kind-of gave up on), J (which I didn't get very far with, either) and Common Lisp.

Finally, I helped organise several open-source activities in Israel this year: the Welcome to Linux series, OSDC::Israel::2006 (albeit with this I played a minor part), and August Penguin. I started the August Penguin organisations, but eventually quit as the hear organiser because I did not want to be responsible for monetary matters. In my partaway message, I said I'm willing to take care of anything except that, but the guy who took the baton, did not keep me and other people involved too much in that, and instead took it all on himself.

There were the usual slew of good and bad global news this year, the most important for us was probably the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Crisis, but I won't cover it here.

All in all, a productive year for me. I hope I'll continue this trend the next year, and I hope my attempt to become a freelancer will be successful. And I hope there won't be anything like the 2006 Lebanon Crisis.

A Happy New Jewish Year to everyone who's reading this entry. See the date for Rosh Hashanah, and read more about it.

A certain Jewish American friend had told me that on Rosh Hashanah they did not have a feast like Israelis do, but rather just went to the synagogue to pray. However, an Observant American Jew told me that they do have a feast, because a feast is an inseparable part of any Jewish "Yom Tov" (I.e: "good day"). So even if you're not observant, make sure to eat to your heart's content.

Shanah Tovah! שנה טובה.

As promised here is my report and feedback from the OSDC::Israel::2006 conference, as posted to the osdc-discuss mailing list.