Finance::Quote
Had a good night of hacking, and fixed a number of items I had outstanding on my list of jobs.

One thing that had me stumped for a while was with the Yahoo::Europe module. Xose had provided me with a working set of code which rolls all the hard parts of Yahoo lookups into a common base, and even squeezes out a bunch of complexity to boot. However, the code Xose provided me with, and the code that Yahoo::Europe used, didn't make use of all the data available from Yahoo. I was pretty certain there wasn't much difference between the European Yahoo stock scripts and those from Yahoo USA, so I figured that it should be easy to have them both fetch the same data.

Unfortunately, while the idea was simple in theory, it proved to be a bit more of a challenge in practice. The data I got back on the European stocks had field mismatches and data corruption. Very odd, especially considering I was getting the same information fine through the webpage.

I eventually found the problem. F::Q was fetching the information from Yahoo's French site, and the French apparently use commas rather than periods as their decimal point. This is fine, except when exporting decimal information into a comma-delimited file. Fetching the information from Yahoo UK fixed the problem immediately.

Diplomacy
The third game has started, and I've been watching some of the politics going on as the impartial arbitrator. I'm having a ball watching how everyone's trying to make things work for them.

The game I'm playing in has just got very interesting. Junwei got stabbed by Phil, so the next year or so should be very interesting. I have to admit, Phil has guts. He wasn't happy just to stab the largest power in the game, he also sent out an attack force against the second largest power as well. It will be interesting to see how this all turns out.