Finance::Quote
Awright! Finance::Quote now does automatic currency conversion, and makes it dead-simple to use:

use Finance::Quote;
my $quoter = Finance::Quote->new;
$quoter->set_currency("AUD");
my %info = $quoter->fetch("nasdaq","LNUX");

%info will now contain information about VA Linux Systems, except all information will be in Australian dollars, rather than the US dollars which Yahoo supplies it in. This makes me very happy indeed, and means that it's now very very very easy to write stock tickers and the like which show information in your local currency.

Work
We have very sweet people at work, especially Tim from the Support team. Tim hasn't thrown any bugs my way in weeks, for which I'm very grateful.

Finance::Quote
Finance::Quote is in the top 100 active projects on SourceForge this week. That makes me feel good inside.

Banks and houses
Another day, another home loan approval. This is good. I'll be making a formal written offer for the house tomorrow, and will be trying to drive a hard bargin.

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.

Grinding
Ben showed me a short video of skateboarders who didn't quite make their tricks. I think councils who don't want skaters hanging around would do well to take a look at this video. Rather than putting up signs saying "No skating, fine $200", they could instead put up signs saying "Grinding a bar and failing could permanently separate you from your reproductive organs." Any desire I had to do skateboarding tricks completely drained away from me after watching Ben's short vid.

Quote of the Day
Humpy (to Scott): Well, you tell me. You're the one who's going to be writing the crappy code.

Food
One cannot live off wedding cake alone. I tried that today, and it didn't make me feel any better.

Banks
Looks like the banks approve me in principal, but want the paperwork and the actual house before signing on the line. This is pretty much what I expect, and that the banks tell me that I'm "very comfortably within my limits" is reassuring.

The Real Estate agents still need to send me a complete Section 32, the one they gave me was missing the rates notices. Interesting that the notice of rates also usually contains a valuation by the council. I wonder if they're trying to hide something?