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.

SAGE-AU 2005: So you want to start a business?

Paul Fenwick has always had an entrepreneurial bent. At the age of six he went into retail, setting up a street-side stall to sell four-leaf clovers from a mutant plant in the family garden. Two years later Paul's attempts to market mutant funnel-webs failed disastrously, and after returning from hospital he discovered that his all his Spiderman comics had been burnt. This was Paul's first lesson that the world of small business is not always an easy one.

That's my biography for my Small Business Talk to be held at SAGE-AU 2005 which runs from the 5th—9th September in Perth this year.

I've got oodles of other interesting news (interesting to me, anyway) which has to go through all the appropriate channels before I can write about it publicly. That's why I'm writing blatent advertisements for SAGE-AU 2005 instead.

End of financial year
It's the end of financial year, and everyone and everything is just a little more hectic because of it. I have a ton of deadlines: negotiations with our bank, taxation matters, a stupidly big pile of paperwork, and a number of conference and magazine-article related matters.

However my real task for the day is clearing my desk, and making sure that there isn't anything that we really want to take advantage of in the 2004-05 financial year. Any spare time will be spent catching up on accounting and tax matters.

The good news is that despite the busy time was year, I was still able to go out to dinner last night with about a dozen very good friends, and I was still able to sleep until the gloriously late time of 10am. One of the distinct advantages of running one's own business is flexibility of hours.

On the matter of running a business, I'll be presenting a short yet amusing talk on starting a business at the Open Source Developers Club on the 13th July, 2005. This will be a sneak-preview of my paper and presentation for the Australian System Administrators Conference in Perth later this year.

Nigel McFarlane, RIP
I was shocked to read this article. Nigel McFarlane was an active and vibrant member of the Australian open source community. Our first real encounter with Nigel was when he called wanting to interview Jacinta for a newspaper feature-article on Melbourne's successful open source businesses. The interview resulted in a discussion of Perl Training Australia in one of Australia's most widely-read newspapers. After that it seemed that I was bumping into Nigel everywhere — industry functions, user groups, conferences, and an almost endless number of mailing lists.

Nigel was an author of numerous books, a strong supporter and active member of the Mozilla/Firefox project, a regular speaker at conferences, and even drew crowds for 2600 meetings.

Nigel's insight, talent, and enthusiasm will be sorely missed.