Genetic Engineering
Dancer raised in his diary the question of how is genetic engineering different to what we've been doing to plants and animals for years? (Selective breeding and such.)

I feel that the main difference between GE and selective breeding is that GE can introduce genetic material into organisms which would never have evolved naturally, no matter how much selective breeding was used. An example would be introducing anti-freeze genes from arctic fish into strawberries.

Do I think that GE is bad? In many cases I do, because I feel that it's being used as quick-fix to many problems and hasn't been thought through properly. A few examples:

• GE "Round-up ready" herbicide resistant plants are engineered. These plants can withstand large dosages of herbicides without dying. The advantage is that you can spray your fields with herbicides and only kill the weeds, not the crop. The downside is that the resulting crop will have an increased amount of residual herbicides, and that any weeds that survive are probably naturally resistant, and will reproduce to give stronger, more resistant weeds next year.
• Plants are GE'ed to make them stronger, tougher, frost-resistant. If these plants inter-breed with wild plants, we can potentially end up with superweeds, which are also tougher and stronger. This is a real possibility with plants like brasicas (spel?) (cabbages, brocolli, mustards) which have a variety of domesticated and wild strains.

In many instances, GE is no different to inventing a new pesticide or herbicide. It works for a few years, but eventually resistant strains result.

If we're using GE to modify micro-organisms to produce useful substances, then that's fine, most of those things won't survive in the wild anyway. If we're using GE so we can spray even more chemicals on our crops, then that's just downright foolish.

DVDs
I noticed that Dancer is lamenting the region restrictions on DVD players. I've heard a rumour that the players in New Zealand do not come with region restrictions as the NZ government classifies such stupidities as a trade restriction, anti-competitive, or something else it believes is illegal. Yay NZ if this is true. Anyone care to confirm/deny the rumour?

Work
Pain. Deep pain. Working on a bug in some archaic code that seems to have been invented before anyone heard of encapsulation or local variables. It hurts.

Finance::Quote and GnuCash
Will be looking at tinkering GnuCash to use the new release of Finance::Quote. This should make people very happy.

I'm also thinking of writing a C interface to the library (yes, you can do this with perl).

Finance::Quote v1.00 at last!
At last Finance::Quote 1.00 has been released and is available for public consumption. Along with the new release I've also updated the Finance::Quote website so that it's not quite so content-poor.

Scotty is right that it takes a fair bit of time to release a project. I spent the better part of an hour or two uploading changelogs and writing announcements.

I guess now it's time for me to chase down Jon about that Perl Journal Article.

Roguelike games
Lost my extremely-good monk in ADOM because I wasn't thinking. If you ever come across a level filled with corpses, you should be thinking "why are all these monsters dead?" instead of thinking "buffet dinner" and waiting for a banshee to sneak up and wail at you.

Work
I've been most proud of young TIm, who's started the conversion to full geekdom. Tim's been staying back at work much too late so that he can hack with his Linux boxen. There's been some talk of moving him into systems to replace Ross. I'm hoping to throw Tim with a few programming texts before that happens. :)

Work
After a small discussion on slashdot I realised that if I were to take up contracting and work 1-2 days a week on average, I could happily maintain my current lifestyle (although I won't really be saving any money). This seems incredibly attractive, as a 5-day weekend every week would give me lots of time to do more fulfilling things than writing code for someone else. I'll need to sit down and figure out all the pros and cons of this scenario.

Finance::Quote
One, maybe two bits of documentation to go, and some easy code changes and testing. While the next release could be happily called version 0.19, I'm considering bumping it up to 1.00 because I now consider it stable, good, and flexible. A 0.xx number always seems to imply "under development", whereas the core of F::Q has matured quite a bit.

Finance::Quote
I suck. I've been playing ADOM instead of coding/documenting.

Work
Dan has (in theory) approved me working a nine-day fortnight, but we haven't put it into practice yet.