There's no money in...
Considering all the areas which "there's no money in", I
seem to be doing particularly well from them all. I work
for a company which supplies education-targetted services
(and there's no money in education), and very recently I've
been offered the filthy lucre for hacking and extending
Finance::Quote (and there's no money in open source).
Skirmish
Benni and Dan have organised a Skirmish (paint-ball) game
next week. Everyone I've spoken to who's played it before
has said that it's the best fun you'll ever have, and you'll
get more bruises than you've ever had too. It should be
interesting.
(read more...)
Advogato
Like
ajv,
I've been dumped back to Observer status again. I'm getting
a little used to this funny certification thing now -- it
seems to come in waves.
Rockclimbing
Went with Ian, Benni and Dan (not Dan from work) to The Mill. The people
were very nice, some of the walls were fun, but I'll admit
that Hardrock remains
my favourite. Still, The Mill is an easy bike-ride from
where I live (as is VicRanges), whereas
Hardrock is yonks away.
In what appears to be a common occurance, I met up with some
old people I knew while Rockclimbing and got talking. One
of them happened to do a study of one of Schoolsnet's
products as part of his thesis, and has promised to pass his
research on to me. I look forward to reading it.
Work
It was a weekend, but nobody seems to have told Scotty
that. I received two phone-calls from Scott about some data
conversion scripts I had written.
Finance::Quote
The ASX seems to have
broken their on-line share prices, which explains why some
of my regression tests were failing. I've been doing a lot
of thinking about the module, but not a lot of coding. The
code needs more ways to signal that something has gone
wrong, and what that wrongness is.
Played a little with Perl/Tk, but not seriously. I'd like
to have a nice stock-ticker, but I don't want to write it
myself. The tickers which I've played with didn't support
Australian stocks very well.
(read more...)
Catch-up
This is mainly a catch-up diary. I've been very busy
recently and haven't had much chance to write in my diary as
much as I'd like.
Work
Just call me bug-boy. If it's a bug, then give it to me. I
don't have enough of them already. If it's a
hard-to-reproduce bug, then that's even better.
In seriousness it looks like Dancer and myself have a hold
on bug #2. This is a very good thing. Clemo has offered to
name his firstborn children after us.
Dan and Tiff are leaving today to get married. I wish them
all the very best. I'm glad they're getting a break from
work at last.
Rock-climbing
Clemo, Ian and Sam went rockclimbing with me last night.
Lots of fun, it's so nice to be back on the walls again. I
was very pleased with some the climbs I achieved, and Sam
showed himself to be a natural climber starting with some of
the walls it took me weeks to work up to.
We should get another Schoolsnet crowd at rockclimbing next
week, too. Should be good.
Dinner
Had dinner with an old friend and watched lots of cute
anime. Brought back memories of the good ol' days when I
was a poor student and couldn't afford a life.
Games
Ian's given me HomeWorld to play. It's a very pretty game,
although I've never been good at real-time strategy games.
I more prefer the hours of thought and consideration that
turn-based games afford. In that vein, I've been thinking
of starting a Diplomacy game here at work, depending upon
how interested people are.
(read more...)
Finance::Quote/GnuCash
A question came up on the GnuCash mailing list asking how
difficult it would be to convert stocks listed on foreign
exchanges into local currency when the stock-prices are
updated. I thought it was an excellent question and an
issue well worth addressing.
After a bit of hacking, I managed to clobber out a very
rough (but working) currency converter for Finance::Quote.
It's going to be changed to make it nicer, but I managed to
write a trivial application which can convert between two
currencies on the command-line.
Did lots of tidy-up work on Finance::Quote. Added testing
scripts and fixed the documentation and made a few code
optimisations. I'll probably release a new version shortly,
with currency-conversion support due for the version after
that.
The joy of coding has kept me up past midnight. I must be
getting to sleep.
(read more...)
Work
The bug is still dead. Testing says it's dead. Everybody's
happy.
Now that I've fixed a problem (with Dancer's help) on this
particular product, I've now been forwarded the other bugs
with it. I don't want the other bugs. I don't know the
code. I have other bugs outstanding in my main line of
work. I've even gained a new nickname based upon a typo of
the product's name -- I'm now being called 'Lover Boy'.
People with competing bugs are trying to get me off the
project. I hope they succeed.
(read more...)
