Let's see, I spent today getting caught up on several thousand emails and doing some random code cleanup work on Debconf. Nothing much to report; it's a Monday.

There should be a way to allow email submissions to the diary; that's how I keep my real diary up-to-date, and I could just cc this if I wanted something to be public.

I've been trying to find a good in depth book on xml, particularly DTD's. No luck thus far. Inside XML DTDs (McGraw-Hill) is worthless. I hope O'Reilly publishes something soon.

I did some good work on perlmoo late last night; simplified a lot of the API and cleared up some of the failing regression tests. After waking up way too late, I stayed home and got DWN out the door, then fixed random bugs in packages I maintain. My inbox fits on one screen now for the first time in months!

Looks like boot-floppies 2.2.8 will be ready soonish. We have fixed the pcmcia purge problem, and base-config got cleaner in the process. That makes me optimistic; it started out very messy and crufty and has been getting cleaner over time, which is a very good thing.

I spent most of today trawling CPAN looking for a curses or slang UI library for perl that doesn't suck. Newt is ok (though the documentation is incomplete), but the perl interface is braindead and has really rotten docs. And anyway newt isn't complete enough for my purposes. Perlvision is cute, until you see what the calling convention for dialogs looks like (1 function. Dozens of non-named parameters to keep straight). It's also not flexable enough. Nothing else seemed worthwhile at all.

So now I'm faced with writing my own widget set. Joy. At least Term::Slang is alright.

We released boot-floppies 2.2.8 today, although I had rather little to do with it besides building the final release.

Work on the new widget set goes well; I already have the framework and some basic widgets. I quickly decided to break it out of Debconf and if i have time will be turning it into a full-fledged widget set instead of a niche application. I'm thinking about calling it Stool unless someone talks me out of it...

I just noticed I'm certifed as a master now. Though I meet a few of the requirements, (full-time work, principle author of some important stuff, some mentoring), I don't consider myself to be an "excellent" coder. Nor am I much good at even thinking about the broader contexts of things, let alone writing about them. So, if that list of things is inclusive, I don't really think I qualify.

But it is flattering, Garrett :-)

Several of us Debian folk got together on Friday night at a Standford dive. That was fun. It's so nice to have such a large linux community here in the Bay Area that sub-communitites like a group of Debian developers are viable.

I spent the rest of the weekend sleeping and coding. The widget set is far enough along that it's usable and now I just add one widget after another until it's done. (Though I'm dreading the scrollable panel container widget.)

I spend today working on DWN and updating Debian's nextaw package. I'm very glad to see a new release of nextaw, I was beginning to wonder if the project was stalled.

Now back to work on my widget set..

It's so wonderful when everything comes together. I've been detoured for a week, writing a widget set. It's far enough done now so I can start to use it, and I immediatly went back to doing a custom UI for debconf. After just a couple of hours, I have a working basic UI, that looks ust how I envisioned it 2 weeks ago when I began this project. And the implementation is so much cleaner than the fumblings I was doing last week. So the detour paid off!

Still loads of work to do; there's nothing like a real life program that uses it to bring to light all kinds of deficiencies and bugs in a widget set, even one designed expressly to get along very well with the program.

I spent today away from the computer for a change (well, mostly -- I suspect some heavy hacking is going to happen tonight). It's nice and spring-like here in CA, a good time of year to go to a park.

Woo! Debconf 0.3.0 is released. Of course, the new frontend is not done yet, but it sure looks purdy. The one gaping hole is the lack of multiselect list boxes. If anyone knows of a multiselect, dropdown list box that actually worked ok, please tell me about it.

I'm thinking about taking the weekend off and going up to Berkeley or something.

My sister just received a scolarship to let her travel around the world for a full year. I'm jealous and very glad.

One of these days I am going to finish woking on this GUI and get back to something interesting.

Not this week, though. Polish, polish, polish...

I spent the weekend in Berkeley, which forced me to run some of my recent code on a slow laptop. Of course, much grinding of teeth and optimization resulted.

While I was out in the world, I kept noticing linux ads everywhere -- on the sides of buses, and on billboards in subway stations. This is weird. Someone has also creativly defaced a Microsoft adversitsement in the SF Muni station at Embarcadero. s/S/$/ with some strategic peices of white tape.

The first half of this week was been spent working on Debian Weekly News and Term::Stool.

I spent all day today documenting stuff. Had some interesting discussions with bod (who needs an advogato account) about how perl classes should be documented. Just using POD to document methods isn't enough, because you have to dig to see inherited methods. Perl needs a class browser.

Oof. I've spent nearly two full days doing nothing but editing documentation. About ready to fall over.

I did also get some worthwhile code cleanups and packaging reorganizations done in debconf today, as a break from documenting.

Like Deirdre, I've been working lately on reorganzing my website; getting it into CVS, and simplifying it (and rewriting the first perl program I ever wrote, which is a very amusing experience). But there's no way I'm going to work on that tonight -- that's just more doc editing.

Maybe I'll break with tradition and play a video game or something.