Backwards Books
As jarich pointed out to me, it wasn't the Template Toolkit (Badger) book that required 6-8 weeks to arrive, it was Data Munging with Perl that needs to be ordered in specially every time -- just as davorg had expected.

The universe is how it should be.

I had become confused since we had previously shipped a number of Data Munging with Perl books to our clients, whereas this was the first time I recall us shipping badger books.

Is Your Flag HOT or NOT
A few more improvements to Is Your Flag HOT or NOT. I added a brief history of the Oklahoma flag, and more amusingly, the history of the Thai National Flag. Other improvements include better navigation on the HOTTEST and NOTTEST pages, allowing visitors to see more than just the top 10 in each category.

Tax and Food Poisoning
Had a lovely day gardening, and a less lovely time working on my tax return. In the evening I made a delicious meal of turnips, potato, wild garlic, dandelion and sunroot (aka jerusalem artichoke) that we had harvested, or had left over from planting. The meal tasted great, and promptly gave Jacinta and myself food poisoning.

We're not exactly sure what in the food caused the classic gastrointestinal symptoms we experienced. The potatoes are the biggest suspect, as some had been in storage and may have accumulated significant levels of solanine. I'm not aware of the other ingredients (turnips, wild garlic, dandelion, and sunroot) containing any poisons in their raw or cooked states, however the sunroot had been in storage under potted soil over the winter, and may have accumulated microbial or fungal derived toxins.

In any case, symptoms were quick on their onset, and quick to recede, with no after-effects. During the time that I wasn't feeling very well I took the opportunity to write a short piece on solanine for wikipedia. It could do with some significant expanding, but it contains some interesting references to an overview of published solanine-related literature.

We're sponsoring a conference!
Perl Training Australia is now the first Gold Sponsor of the Open Source Developers Conference, to be held in Melbourne, Australia this year. We'll be plastering big news items up on our site shortly.

Not all books are equal
Perl Training Australia has a fantastic deal whereby if you register for a course early, and pay on time, you get free Perl books of your choice. We also offer Perl books at a 20% discount off recommended retail price for anyone booking a course.

This is proving to be very popular, and some people are getting quite a few books through this scheme. Send three people on our Introduction to Perl and Intermediate Perl courses the special can provide you with six free books, plus any you may wish to purchase. We're moving big boxes of dead trees around now.

However, when it comes to the distributor of these books, who imports them into Australia, not all books are created equal. Let's take some of the writings of popular author Dave Cross, who wrote both Data Munging with Perl and the Perl Template Toolkit. They're both good books, and they both have the same price. But one's much more difficult to obtain than the other.

Data Munging is a popular book, it's got a trendy name, and so it's usually in stock. Template Toolkit on the other hand, is never in stock. The distributors have a policy that they never keep any copies in their inventory. So if you want to purchase the book, that's a 6-8 week wait for the order to go out, and the book to be shipped and processed. If you want to purchase a second book at a later date, it's another 6-8 weeks.

Normally, if you're a book-store (and we're not, we're a training organisation), you'd just buy up extra copies of the book, and return them back to the distributor for a credit if some don't sell. However if the book is on the "don't hold in stock" list, then the bookstores can't return it for credit, either. It's only sold as a firm sale. This means that as a bookstore, you don't want to be buying these books unless you already have a customer lined up.

The end result is that there are certain books that you'll never find in the stores, and which will take 6-8 weeks to reach you should you want one, and you'll have to pay in advance. Changing your bookstore won't help, since these are due to changes are the distributor level.

This is a real chicken-and-egg problem. High-turnover books (like the camel and cookbook) are easy to obtain, but low-turnover books are much harder to obtain. By being hard to obtain, they don't get exposure in stores, and hence are unlikely to reach high-turnover levels, and remain hard to obtain.

We're currently in the process of quizzing the distributors as to which Perl books are on this list, so we can warn our students in advance that these will take some time to reach them. I'd rather not have to do this, but I really don't like telling our customers that some of their books will take two months after they've placed and paid for their order.

Homebrew
In an effort to put my vanity-domain to good use, I've created brew.pjf.id.au to track my homebrewing efforts.

Nothing too exciting, but a lot more useful than a logbook I keep losing, and I can get HTML::Mason to do all the difficult calculations for me.

The navigation on the site needs to be improved.