A blogger gadget for Ironman

So, since my badge is now working, I thought it would be a good idea to add my badge to my blog. It turned out to be fairly simple, and if you are using blogger, you can just reuse my work. All you need to do is

1. Click "Customize"
2. Click "Add a Gadget"
3. Click "Add your own"
4. enter the URL http://wonkden.net/ironman_perl_gadget.xml
5. Click "ADD BY URL"
6. Set the background color
7. Set the name you registered with the Ironman competition
8. Set the sex of your badge
9. And, finally, click "Save"

Just for the record, here is the XML used to create the gadget:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
<Module>
 <ModulePrefs
  title        = "Ironman Perl Gadget"
  title_url    = "http://wonkden.net/ironman_perl_gadget.xml" 
  height       = "80" 
  author       = "Chas. Owens" 
  author_email = "chas.owens@gmail.com"
 /> 
 <UserPref
  name         = "bg"
  display_name = "Background Color"
  datatype     = "string"
  required     = "true"
 />
 <UserPref
  name         = "ironman-name"
  display_name = "Ironman Perl name"
  datatype     = "string"
  required     = "true"
 />
 <UserPref
  name         = "ironman-sex"
  display_name = "Sex"
  datatype     = "enum"
  required     = "true"
 >
  <EnumValue value="male"   display_value="Male"/>
  <EnumValue value="female" display_value="Female"/>
 </UserPref>

 <Content type="html">
  <![CDATA[
   <script type="text/javascript">
    var prefs = new _IG_Prefs();
    var name  = prefs.getString("ironman-name");
    var sex   = prefs.getString("ironman-sex"); 
    var color = prefs.getString("bg"); 
    var html  = '<div align="center" style="background-color: ' + color + '"><img src="http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/munger/mybadge/' + sex + '/' + name + '.png" alt="Ironman Perl badge for ' + name + '"></div>'

    document.write(html);
   </script>   
  ]]>
 </Content> 
</Module>

Yay! my badge works, Boo! no time for Perl

Yay! I am a bronze man. Also, all of my projects either on hold or are going to progress very slowly for the next few months. My wife has been in and out of the hospital for the last few months, the last time via an ambulance. I have been force to make lifestyle changes such as fixed times to go to bed at night (2200 ET versus somewhere between 2000 ET and 0600 ET) and get up in the morning (0630 ET vs somewhere between 0900 ET and 1100 ET) and the careful cooking of all of our meals (did you know there was a meal called breakfast that didn't entail just grabbing a soda on the way out the door?), so I don't have nearly as much discretionary time as I once did. Hopefully in a couple months she will be strong enough to start helping with things again and I will get some time back for Perl.

meta: no time to write what I want! badges! brokeness!

Well, it has been eight days and I am pushing the limit of staying in the competition (or at least not resetting the clock). There are a few things I want to write, but don't have the time to pay attention to right now. Quick list of posts I want to write so I don't forget them:

• simple parsing
• shared memory (IPC and persistence)
• dealing with Unicode combining characters (needs more research)

In other news, the Perl Ironman Badges are up finally, but sadly my name seems to be breaking it. I can find a Chas and an Owens badge, but not a Chas. Owens badge. Also, I am showing up as a paperman in both which is either a bug in its calculation or mine.

meta: how I am keeping myself motivated part 2

oylenshpeegul asked on my last meta post about whether or not Google Analytics tracks RSS feeds. It does not; however, another Google service does: FeedBurner.The data for clicks matches up pretty well against what Analytics is saying. I find the interface to Analytics nicer than FeedBurner, but FeedBurner has statistics about how the feed is being used. I will probably visit both now.

meta: how I am keeping myself motivated

So, I have had blogs in the past, but I have never managed to stay interested in them. This time is different and the reason is simple: data. I turned on Google Analytics and I visit the graphs once or twice a day:

Just this little reassurance that people are looking at what I am writing is keeping the blog in my mind. Because it is in my mind, when something happens (like, say, my next article about my stupidity using split and ord) I remember to start writing stuff down.

I am living in the future

I saw an interesting post today on the Perl Iron Man feed about the fact that /\Q foo \E/x turns into /\ foo\ / despite the /x option being set. This is not so remarkable because of the content (which was interesting and unexpected, although I am not sure what I would have expected to happen there), but rather because the post was in Japanese and I can't read Japanese. With machine translation I was able to understand what he/she was driving at. Truly, we are living in the future.

Perl Ironman

This blog is my entry in the Perl Ironman competition. I had been thinking about it for a while, but MST's lightning talk at YAPC NA pushed me over the edge.

So, what to expect from the content? Well, in addition to any good emails or answers I write, I am planning on a journey through Perl 5's standard library. There is a lot of stuff in there that I have never known about or have forgotten. The realization that I need to take this journey came when I wanted to know the current process's parent's PID. I hit Google and was shocked to find that getppid is a core function.

Perl 6 is also likely to come up from time to time as I play with Rakudo.