Yesterday at work, I tried to configure the soundcard again, this time using the Windows "Add New Hardware" wizard, and it still rebooted the machine. Then my supervisor came and told me I can just use Linux for what I need to do. So I did. So I was able to finally write some code. At the end of the work day it compiled. Yay! I'm going to test it next week.

I left work early in order to go to the Israeli Perl Mongers meeting. Since I arrived at home early, I did some work on my old "Graham's Function" Perl code. Then I went to the meeting.

The meeting was very nice. Shmuel Fomberg gave an interesting talk about Perl/Tk. It didn't renew too much to me, but it was still fun. Then Gabor Szabo gave a talk about Perl 6, which from what I understood was a port of his Perl 5 course to Perl 6. Several things there sparked a lot of discussion, especially the junctions. For example, it turns out that in Perl 6 "if ((3|4) == 3) { ... }" will execute the condition, but so will "if ((3|4) != 3) { ... }". That's because the "|" means "any", and so it tests whether any of the operands is equal to 3 or whether any of them is not. Another interesting feature is the chained conditionals: "if (3 < 7 == 7 < 10 > 8)" will evaluate to true in Perl 6.

I left the meeting prematurely along with my ride (Shmuel), so I may have missed some more interesting stuff. The slides are online, however. I spent the rest of the evening reading the 2006 Perl Advent Calendar, which while I took part in preparing, did not have a chance of fully reading until then.

The whole work week was sunny and bright, but the weekend was and is going to be stormy, so I cannot go out a lot. In any case, today I woke up relatively early (before 9 AM), and decided to perform many outstanding tasks on the computer. As it turned out, I performed quite a lot of them, and felt I was very productive. Among the things I did were:

1. Schedule two upcoming Tel Aviv Linux Club lectures, after talking with the future presenters.
2. Wrote 4 blog entries (in three different blogs) and decided against writing on one topic I kept in my todo list.
3. Researched how to get QClam to connect to clamd instead of using clamscan, which is very resource intensive - just tell it to use clamdscan instead of clamscan. I also hacked on QClam a bit in the process.
4. Added a new link to my "Stop Using Internet Explorer" page.
5. Read the latest "People behind KDE" feature"
6. Added some books to my Amazon.com wishlist.
7. Reported two bugs in perl-5.8.x.
8. Continued porting my Graham's Function program (see above) to Common Lisp. This time I also dabbled a bit with creating new Lisp classes and methods.
9. Right now, I've started the upgrade process to upgrade my system to Mandriva 2007.1 Alpha.

So I think I can give myself a positive mental feedback for all this. Some days I feel like I'm not doing anything, but that was certainly not the case for these last two days.

Yesterday (Saturday, 19-August-2006) was a very productive day for me.

During the morning, I was able to fix the "Website Meta Language" (WML) site. This gave me enough time to package wml-2.0.11 and announce it on Freshmeat and on my use.perl.org weblog.

A little after midday, Sagiv dropped by my house, and we both downloaded Joomla! and played with it. Despite a few glitches that were easily resolved, we were able to achieve everything we've tried and we were very impressed. The only fly in the ointment was the fact that the stable version does not support UTF-8 yet, and as such all the Hebrew characters we entered were automagically converted to Unicode SGML entities. Sagiv also ate lunch at our house, and while they were eating he and my mother exchanged some cooking tips.

I also started working on Test::Count and was able to get release 0.01 on CPAN. Test::Count is a module to extract meta-comments like # TEST:$num_iters=5 and # TEST*$num_iters*3 out of a test script and update the test counter, so one can always make sure he has an accurate count of the tests.

After all that, I became a bit hungover (which implied I wasn't very productive), but eventually found something good to do with my time: learn XSLT (from the tutorials at w3schools and zvon.org), and start working on an XML grammar for home-site syndication of various products (such as books, CDs, movies, etc.). At the moment, I only have a work-in-progress DTD as well as several XML files as test cases for it. So I'm in a lame but hopeful condition.

Well, enough blogging for now. Either gvim or my bed (or both) await me…