The most wonderful breakfast
Okay, I know what you're thinking. Paul has finally lost the last shreds of sanity: he's starting to post what he had for breakfast in his blog.

This morning I slept in, and then for breakfast I had my favourite breakfast: two soft-boiled eggs (from our own chickens, 4.5 minutes at a simmer), hot-buttered toast cut into strips, and a cafe latte.

What's important is what this breakfast signifies. For the last three days I've been waking at 6am and them travelling to spend the remainder of the day teaching Perl. In the evenings I'd been working on my talk. I've been missing sleep, and feeling very time poor.

My favourite breakfast takes a little time to prepare (I have to grind the coffee, the chickens have to lay the eggs), as well as coordination to ensure the eggs, toast, and coffee are all ready at the same time. A few weeks ago I would have a practically zero chance of completing this without interruption, especially during business hours after being away from my desk for three days. Today, I could practically rely upon having the time to cook.

The significance is not that I've run out of work; instead I have mountains to complete, and I'll teaching or on-site four out of five days next week. The significance is that finally I am the master of my work, and not the other way around. At least that's something I can pretend to myself until the phone begins to ring.

The most frustrating work
Running a small business exposes one to a wide range of hurdles. Work can range from the very good (presenting at conferences/user groups) to the downright awful (being recalled from holidays to fix critically dead machines at 2am). The main compenstation is that the bad work tends to pay extremely well.

Throw into that a whole lot of conflict resolution, government regulation, taxation requirements, travel, and plenty of human interaction, and you have a pretty good range of learning experiences. Some people hate their jobs, but I love mine. I just hate certain particular aspects of it.

Recently, one of our office desktops started developing bad sectors on the hard-drive. This isn't a big deal, all the important data is stored on a central server with RAID and tape backups. We also have a drawer full of hard-drives (somehow we keep winning these, or getting them back under warrantee), so replacing the failing drive should be easy, right?

Well, for Linux it is. Fire up Knoppix, and use parted to copy the old partitions across. A little bit of magic with your choice of bootloader, and you have a transferred Linux system onto a fresh, new, bigger hard-drive.

If you've got bad sectors involved, then parted may not be able to do the deeds, as it tries a block-for-block copy. However for an ext2/ext3 filesystem, you can simply partition, make a new filesystem (mke2fs), and use one of the hundreds of different ways of copying an ext2 filesystem, in my case cd /path/to/new/filesystem; dump -0 /dev/hdXX | restore -r. Easy

Now comes the most frustrating part of all. This machine also occasionally runs Windows 2000. We don't actually use Windows for anything except for games, but I'm very fond of my games, and unfortunately there are still a couple that only run under Windows. Unfortunately, transferring Windows across was not quite as easy.

Parted would happily copy and extend the partition, great! However upon trying to boot Windows, I get a whole lot of nothing. After going round-and-round with recovery consoles and boot records, it still won't boot. Hmmm...

I decide to see if I can get a fresh install of Windows to boot. If that fails, I know my other attempts are hopeless. If it succeeds, then I know as a worst-case I can simply re-install Windows and the games.

The fresh install, onto a freshly partitioned hard-drive, fails. It chugs along quite happily until it needs its first reboot, and then then issues the dreaded words "Error Loading Operating System".

A quick search reveals a fix from Microsoft for the problem. Upgrade your machine's BIOS — not quite what I had in mind. Given that Google reveals about 11,000 other pages which contain this exact phrase, and given most seem to recommend fiddling the disk geometery from CHS to LBA, I'm not going to try and flash a working BIOS just yet.

It looks like the problem is fundamentally with windows installing onto large partitions on big drives. This isn't unique to windows, due to some real legacy reasons most machines have troubles booting something that isn't close to the start of the disk. It's also been solved in a variety of ways, including itty-bitty boot partitions for Linux, and intermediate stages for grub. Those systems also give much more precise errors when something goes wrong.

So, for this machine I know the master boot record is fine, and because the Windows partition is right at the start of the disk, I know that its boot-sector can be reached, but things go wrong from there. Perhaps I can start with an installation onto a small partition, and then try growing things from there. Clearly I have an exciting time in repartitioning and re-installing ahead of me.

The ironic thing is isn't my workstation, and Windows is completely unrequired for our business. Fundamentally its costing only $0.50/day in opportunity costs in not being able to play a MMROPG, yet it's the most frustrating issue that I've encountered in the last month. Damn my strong beliefs that if you have a computer you should be using it to provide the maximum entertainment value.

On reflection, if I consider this to be my most troublesome problem, then I really don't have that much to complain about, do I?

Ariel Miyu Golembo born, 2pm, 6th July 2005
I'm very pleased to have received a phonecall from Daniel and Tomoko to say that Ariel Miyu Golembo was born without any complications at 2pm today. Ariel is 40cm long, weighs in at 2.4kg, and is apparently very loud when she's awake. Tomoko and Ariel will be returning home in four days time.

Congratulations Tomoko and Daniel!

Finance::Quote 1.10
After almost two years in the making, Finance::Quote 1.10 has finally been released, and is now available from a CPAN near you. All fame and praise should go to David Hampton, who's been leading the effort since I ran out of tuits. David has been doing a fantastic job of fixing, integrating, co-ordinating, and just making things work. Grand kudos to David.

The new code includes a number of contributions from the community. Since the last relesae, quotelets have been added for:

Perl Certifications
It seems there were a lot of hot debates on Perl certification a while back, but somehow I've missed them all. Part of that's because I didn't make it to OSCON, but mostly it's been because running Perl Training Australia is a lot of work, and at the time I was spending more time in depature lounges than my office.

Despite having missed all the good stuff, certification is a regular topic that comes up both in the office and the classroom. A number of our students would love to receive a formal qualification, and we've even been contacted by recruitment agencies who are looking for developers. So there certainly appears to be some interest from industry.

The other interesting development for us is the establishment of a contact in the Victorian Qualifications Authority. Anyone who's willing to unravel the knotted threads of the Australian education infrastructure, and bring us baked Chinese sweets, is definitely good news.

So the idea of any sort of globally recognised qualification aside, I'd love to be able to offer a nationally recognised Perl certification. However I'm a real stickler when it comes to giving someone a stamp of approval, and for qualifications this is probably a good thing.

I've worked with far too many programmers who while very talented, have large holes in their knowledge. There's a whole realm of people who don't know how to properly use Perl's Object Oriented features. There's an even larger group who don't know how to write test cases, or how to write documentation in POD. I even had one course attendee tell me that we should rename our Perl Security course, because so many businesses and government departments don't think that security is important; a rather telling remark when the person in question is from one of Australia's national security departments.

So if we do want to go through the time, effort, and the significant expense of producing a nationally certified course, then it's going to contain a strong focus on the things that so many developers currently do badly. That means a focus on testing, documentation, input validation, modular and object oriented design, security, and coding style.

Of course, there's a good possibility that despite the hints we keep getting from industry, nobody will actually be willing to pay the extra costs for certified training. We'll also need to have a goodly amount of discussion with other Perl trainers, the community, and Perl-focused businesses, to ensure as much relevancy and recognition as possible. It's clear that we've got quite a bit of work to be done before we even start opening negotiations with the certification authorities. That's probably okay if I keep getting Chinese sweets and baked goods.