Everybody else has probably known about this for ages, but I’ve just seen it in a link from boingboing. Flickr, one of the online photo album people supports feeds for search queries. What this means is that any newly tagged photos uploaded to flickr that might interest you instantly pop up in your feed reader.
For example, I’ve just subscribed to all photos of brighton. So any new shots of Brighton should get delivered straight to me. Lovely!
I’m pleased to see that microsoft have made available Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003. It’s just the C compiler, include files and libraries. Just what I’d expect as standard under Linux. This finally means that I should be able to test XML::Genx under win32.
Oh. According to these instructions, I also need the Platform SDK and bits of .net too. Darn. I’ll have to download them and try again.
Hmm, there are further instructions. This is beginning to look like a hassle.
I’ve been updating all my FreeBSD ports recently and one continuing pain is the gerenation fo the plist file. Looking the Porters Handbook gave me the answer though. There’s a script you can use to make a plist. It needs a bit of editing afterwards, but it’s a good start.
The only problem is that you have to install the port to a temporary area first. This appears to be the best way to do it as an ordinary user instead of root.
% make install PREFIX=/tmp/myport INSTALL_AS_USER=yes NO_PKG_REGISTER=yes
After that, just run the magic script.
/usr/ports/Tools/scripts/plist -Md -m /etc/mtree/BSD.local.dist /tmp/myport > pkg-plist
I’m just back in from a nice long walk in the snow. Thankfully, the cold weather has stayed, painting the land around a gentle white. So we went walking in the south downs. After a day in the office it’s a real treat to get out and have some fresh air.
A light dusting of snow provided a beautiful end to the day. Watching it dance around the street from my office window was highly entertaining. Snow is something of a rarity in these southerly, coastal climes so it’s a rare treat.
After picking up XML::Genx again, I reorganised my SVN repository and noticed all the other old projects in there. So I’ve started playing around with Config::Setting again. It was originally written to attempt to provide a “better solution” than a hard coded global hash for work. But it turned out that people liked having a hard coded global hash. Oh well. It may well yet turn out to be useful for some other purpose.
Regardless, it’s interesting to look inside it and see how my code has changed in the last few years. And looking back, I have this itch to change things, just make it a little better. So I’ve started working on it again. There’s no clear purpose in mind, I’m really just playing. But it’s fun! Hopefully, I’ll end up with something I can throw on CPAN.
For reference, this is how to override things on the Module::Build command line.
perl Build.PL --config optimize='-g -pipe'
I seem to recall discussion on the list that it’s going to be better documented in future releases (more end user specific). This will be greatly appreciated.
After months of neglect, I’ve picked up on XML::Genx again. One “A. Pagaltzis” wrote to me and made two suggestions. Firstly, why didn’t I wrap genxScrubText() and secondly why didn’t have a method for automatically creating XML output as a string since that’s such a common use case.
Well, I tried the first one and got very frustrated by XS and its little foibles. So I left the whole project alone for a while.
But last night, I started working on the string appender. And it was actually much easier than I thought. Not only that, it gave me the idea for making the internals much better and cleaner. At the moment I have an internal global hash, because I can’t store things in $self like normal Perl OO code (because $self is a blessed scalar point at a genxWriter instead. But genxWriter takes a user pointer, so I can just stick the hash in there. I shoulda thought of that ages ago.
So, one new release today and a cleanup release RSN to rework the internals around user data a bit better. And then I’ll get back to genxScrubText().
I tried running subclipse a little while ago when I first started looking at Eclipse. I couldn’t make it work. It would just hang on commit. However, this morning, I ran the automatic update in Eclipse and noticed that a new version of subclipse was available (0.9.27). I upgraded, and tried it out.
And it works, beautifully! Full subversion integration inside Eclipse. It’s lovely! Although by now I’ve gotten used to ow the CVS integration works, so it feels a little clunky to have to use the SVN Browsing perspective instead of simply saying “new project; checkout from cvs.” But that’s a minor quibble.
Yummy. Today I was surprised by pancakes upon my return home. Thanks to the good old BBC, we even knew how to make the batter. 🙂
Surprisingly, I even noticed that they had Delia recipes in there.
Jabbering Giraffe 